Be it resolved.

My resolution for this year is pretty simple: "No more eating thirds helpings"

I feel like most people don't need this rule in their lives. Either they mentally stop themselves from eating an unnecessary amount of food, their body gives them subtle clues that they unconsciously obey or maybe they just physically cannot just keep eating well past the point of any nutritional justification.

I, however, am the rare type of champion that can power through all of these obstacles and more! My mindless super consumption cannot be stopped by normal means. A lot of the times I just don't think about it. More than often I have found myself, seemingly a passenger in a body car that is rolling into the kitchen.

"What the hell am I doing in here?" I'll say outloud, hoping to establish out some sort of communication with whoever is actually controlling my actions.

"Why are we opening that cabinet that we logically know hasn't had snacks in it for weeks?"

"Why are we continuing to eat these tasteless, stale crumbs of 6 month old Pita Chips?"

Clearly, no logical barrier or physical one can withstand the Kool-Aid man bursting force of my gluttony. So I am hoping that, as has worked in the past, that the velvet rope of resolution will present a symbolic barrier where all others have failed.

Otherwise, I think I might just have to get accustomed to the fact that I am a gigantic fucking pig. (Don't worry, I don't mean this in a strange body image way, I am honestly horrified by my zombie like food trances.)

Revulsion

In preparation for making a New Years Resolution, I took mental stock of my feelings towards eating animals.

I was somewhat surprised to find that they had shifted, not just in my willing to eat them, but also in my desire to eat them.

In short, I feel better about eating cows, but have almost no longing or desire to do so. Still feel bad about pig unless I know where it came from, which is too bad since I really crave them.

Chicken is grossing me out more than last year as the lingering taint of some of the things I've read haven't fallen off, but this is largely counter-balanced by the fact that I have the habit of eating a lot of chicken. So as long as I don't think about it to much, chicken is just fine...

Which is again, a maddening mishmash of nonsensical rules.

For some reason, the lingering revulsion of chicken processing methods reminded me of this study a few years ago about how conservatives' brains have a higher "disgust sensitivity".

The scientists helpfully point out that maybe this is why conservatives are against gay marriage. Since it is a well-known scientific fact that male gay marriage involves twice the number of male butts than "normal" marriage, or as Rick Santorum recently pointed out, that it was impossible to think about the issue without also considering the hypothetical case of upwards of three or four male butts all rhythmically eroding the ability of those of opposite genders to love.

In the case of the grossed-out conservative, it would seem that the hypothesis is that anything over the disgust threshold simply short-circuits the ability to empathize on the nuances of the issue. You can talk about medical visitation, estate transfer rights, tax benefits all day long, and all they'll presumably hear is expermiental jazz comprised of three notes: "penis", "poop" and "butthole".

I kid them, but I can't help wonder if I am entraped in a similar net of moral short-circuits that make normal meat eaters scoff at me. Is my concern that pigs are too intellectual to be confined and subjected to factory farming conditions sound a bit odd? I mean are the farmers supposed to give them sudoku puzzles or something?

It is clearly an odd objection, but with the similar difficulty that it seems an impassable barrier to me getting past it to the utopia on the otherside where the biggest quandry is to mesquite or not mesquite?

The answer seems easy enough, that in this case, my car is just pointed the wrong way. These matters of disgust all seem like the frosted glass across the doors of our messy primal instincts. You enter the room, you do a thing, and then you leave without over analyzing what just happened. This is the way things were meant to be.

It is like going to a cocktail party to discover the home owner has set up his dog with a tophat and monocle, as if he were the host. The next step at that party is to relax and enjoy it, and not point and wonder at how the dog could have possibly folded thin layers of ham around pickles.

In the end, we're all the dogs in the top hats, and the most polite thing to do is to not point this out to one another, because, for one, we all secretly know it and two we very much want to be invited back to these sorts of parties again.

What is it good for?

Last night I attended a small retirement party acknowledging the end of my father's twenty year tenure on the local school board.

Among the attendees were school board members past and present, and their stories of how they got "recruited" to run.

Nearly every time it was the exact same story, X slots were open, Y people were running, Z of those people were nutjobs. It was at this point that almost everyone in the room got brought in. Chosen largely for their reasonableness.

Taken one way, it was almost as if it was a cabal of people secretly determining the outcome of each school board election, but after listening to them, and meeting them, it was much clearer that they took it as their social responsibility. Their sacrifice for the community of plugging a warm bodied hole before vermin invade it.

I'm kind of down on representative democracy right now. The definition instilled in my in junior high of it being a mechanism for selecting the greatest among us to inspire us to do more than ourselves is quickly dissolving.

But seeing these people, a vocal mix of Democrats and Republicans come together under the common banner of keeping "the crazies out", I found particularly inspiring.

This, this is one thing that maybe representative democracy as currently structured can be good at.

And by "crazy" let's refine that down to "Idealistic", that is, someone who is more concerned with the purity of their personal view of the world than reality.

If I had a hammer

While Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog may have tainted the association forever, I often find it useful to think of the logical portion of my brain as a tool. A hammer specifically.

The simile is particularly obvious at night, when it's incessant presence first annoys me and eventually makes me feel like the helpless neighbor of a prolific nocturnal carpenter.

The comparison also helps to separate the "A+B=C" automatic sequencing I perform all day from who I am. It used to be that the mere thought of someone "smarter" than me would drive me to existential crisis. But when you think of reasoning as just another wielded skill that humans makes use of, I find the remainder a much more comfortable living room for a self.

My brief, but frequent dabblings in meditation also helped with this insight. If you totaled how I've spent my life so far, my guess is I've probably spent more time literally vomiting from sickness than spent in a comfortable state of having my calculating mind "off".

Soda Politics

An oft hollered question on this blog these last dozen years has been regarding how such a fundamental difference in viewing reality has come about in American politics.

Today My Friend Chuck whose blog is better than mine shared an article by David Frum entitled "When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?"

Frum is a staunch Conservative, and was one of loudest voices for the invasion of Iraq. So rather than tearing down Conservative values he is more providing insight into what has happened to the GOP in the last ten years.

I think his most interesting point is his observation that the Republican Party these past years has transformed into something altogether different from the standard political party of 80's that it used to be.

Having a nation wide network of TV ,radio shows and book authors willing to parrot your talking points is useful. The problem being, that ratings often rewards the exaggerators (see also, Glen Beck), eventually after many years there has been the subtle shift of politics driving news content, to news show antics driving politics.

Republicanism is now no different than a brand, and currently it is the Coke of the market. Both in economic success, and in the fact that it has essentially refined itself over the years tto have the maximal appeal to its target audience, even if that means becoming a sickly sweet secret concoction with questionable value to the well being of its consumers.

Queen's Knight to Who-Gives-A-Shit 9

I have come to a realization. I don't like Chess.

I was going to right "hate" there, but that would be overstating it.

Chess and I go way back. I remember playing it in third grade with Jason my friend who doesn't have a blog, sometimes we'd stay in from recess to finish a game. We even played it at Festival of Nations where I ended up tying a game to one of those Ukrainian guys who plays like a million games at a time.

At the time I think I played it for the same reason a 5th grader insists on sipping coffee, or a 7th grader tries to smoke, to clumsily show off to everyone how grown up I was.

In 5th grade I carried around a hand held chess set and played it quite a bit. I organized a chess tournament and would play against teachers. In 6th grade I went to chess day camp where I was pretty much humiliated over and over again.

Seriously, I wept openly after one particular game.

Bugaboo

For as long as I've had this blog a common question I often raise seems to be why we live in such a divided world.

It isn't just political lines, I see it developing along essentially every line: religion, child rearing, what game console you prefer, what type of character you prefer to play in a particular game.

As a lad I witnessed honest discussions on many of these topics, which these days would end in shouting or stiff silence.

Last night while reading "Influence: the psychology of persuasion" (Thanks GS!), I think I finally found a hypothesis to explain why.

Our minds value consistency, and in fact often strive to create it. On the surface this sounds like a useful, laudable mental goal.

The problem is, is that this "consistency enforcement", doesn't simply function on the cognitive level, and can influence us in ways we don't expect.

Monetary Interest

The first thing I was told when I got my first salaried job out of college was that I should sign up for the company's 401k plan, since they did up to a 5% match, that it was essentially like giving yourself a raise.

So I did that, and I pretty much continued doing that for the past 12 years.

Mostly my 401k allocation languished in whatever I stuck it in, like a forgotten gerbil that begins gnawing on its urine soaked wood chips for sustenance, and whose dried up husk is discovered by surprise under a forgotten stack of newspapers.

That is until recently when I took the advice of my in-laws and started using their financial planner.

One thing I dislike about fiddling with investments is that it seems to have no honor to it. Every time I've brought up the idea of investing in sustainable, green or socially responsible things I am met with the same guarded pause that I imagine I would give to someone if they asked me for a "female computer". Apparently such requests are equal parts naive, ridiculous and impossible.

I feel like if UFC used the same social norms as investing it would be a show about guys who deliver suprise kicks to their opponent's heads while they are picking out cereal with their family at the grocery store.

In any case, my money has someone to hang out with now, and it still feels strange, like my 12 years of play money has taken on a life of its own.

I'm the type of person who doesn't shop at Walmart and is quietly smug about this. My investment portfolio on the other hand invests heavily in the real estate trust that rents strip mall space to big box stores such as Walmart.

Why does it do that? Because 7% is better than 5%.

I follow the statements like a parent watches his college freshman's facebook page, with equal parts confusion and dismay.

If I'm reading the statements correctly this month, I believe I am strongly leveraged towards shorting the S&P 500. Which bothers me, since to me it seems a fundamentally dishonest act and also an unfair advantage since it is essentially never an option for the standard retirement investor..

In my mind I imagine a big circle where sometimes it rains money, and everyone clambers into the circle for the free money, but then big alarm bells go off that only some people can hear, and all the people who are in the know can leave the circle and start taking side bets on how many people are going to be knifed to death. Even worse, it is essentially impossible for the people with standard 401ks to ever truly leave the circle. The best they can do for themselves is find the least "knifey" spot.

In the end, I think the least appealing thing about investment planning for me are that it seems laughable to attempt to predict what is going to be useful when I am 60. What will the world be like? How much will cybernetic fingers cost? Will the underwater dome city I live in have an ATM that deposits nanocrystals in USD?

But it is good someone else is doing it. The calculus of my mind so often equates planning for the future with post-apocolyptic hellscapes, that were I still the steward of that money I probably would have squandered it on a rental space full of 10 yr old MRE rations, water jugs and AK-47s.

Although it seems very depressing to me that the most optimistic expression of my hope for the future still resides on betting on the reliable permanence of large corporations.

I have been hard on corporations through out the years, so let me officially take the time to state that they are definitely a preferable and more likely distopian future than a nuclear scarred zombie infested hell-scape.

With the exception that Christmas shopping is a far simpler affair in the latter scenario: "Water purification tablets! I love them! Thank you so much! I will totally use these."

Spawn Pawn

So there are sort of two parts to parenting.

The first is just the day to day tactical stuff of getting through the day without your kid dying and as a secondary goal, containing their bodily fluids from getting everywhere.

With the first kid we spent most of our time running around like Lucy in the chocolate factory just struggling to accomplish those two goals.

With the second kid who seems "easier" either due to our experience or her temperment, I find that I have time to contemplate the higher responsibilities of being a parent.

Whether I like it or not one of my tasks above and beyond keeping a life alive is being an active part of shaping a future person.

As is common I find this day to day thing that most other parents likely never fuss over a paralyzing computational and existential question.

Foremost, the idea of trying to actively steer a sentient being towards a certain outcome seems like the definition of a NP-complete (a.k.a. impossible to solve) complexity problem. Secondarily there seems the fundamental idea of "Do I want to make my kid come out like me?", that requires an uncomfortable amount of self-examination. Even if I had the self-esteem to say "You know I'm pretty OK", from there seems a vast leap from there to crowing "I am awesome enough that there should be another one of me!"

Of course, some might argue that I already made that decision when I made two things comprised of half my DNA, and there seems little point chickening out now.

Still, there is the fundamental question of "Do I steer my child toward what I know, or toward what looked better?" At least with my life I know the basics that I didn't end up curled in an alley with track marks on my eyelids.

To complicate matters, I've been reading suggested passages from the book "Outliers", which presents research that the key to being extraordinary involves putting 10k hours of work into something before the age of 20.

I've often wondered what would happened if I had choosen the path of more resistance, rather than mathematically deriving how much I could slack off and still receive a degree. If I had actually worked to get good grades to get into MIT and study cutting edge technology.

I have expressed strong opinions about parents working out there fantasies through their children. So I feel some pretty strong cognitive dissonance even contemplating it, but once I did I could clearly see the path before me if I wanted to take it.

Kelvin loves robots. It would be a simple matter to take the measure of his interest, start off building some lower level kid's kits. One weekend a month showing him how it works, having him help put it together. If there was any spark of interest it would seem easy enough to build a bed of dry tinder for it to flourish in.

He'd love it (it would likely putter out and fail if he didn't).

But I can't help keeping a worrisome eye on the destination. There is pretty much a 100% liklihood of my son needing strong glasses. Do I also want to make him the kid who programs robots by himself at age 10?

There is little value for such competence at that level. I might as well teach him to pound nails into his soft pallet, in fact in middle school that talent would probably serve him better.

I envision the law of unintended consequences hanging above me like the sword of some dead greek guy. It almost seems easier to just punt, take it day by day and to not have a grand plan. Just avoid trying to "tiger mom" my child into something hyper-competent and consign all predistnation into the line "as long as you're happy".

Especially since once he's a teenage I can virtually guarantee he will begin to actively reject anything and everything. What plans could possibly survive that sort of willful riot?

In the end it is difficult, if not impossible to subjectively sort out my own motivations. How can I tell the difference between an attempt to be a good parent and ego-based self-indulgence? The best I can come up with is that if it my plans ever verge into the creation of a matching mecha suits and the layout of nearby banks that perhaps it might be the latter.

Pax 2011 Day 2

PAX day 2 was largely more of the same. Played a lot more board games, talked to a lot more indie game developers. I even attended a panel on how to make an indie game.

Game Design

Attending the panel made me remember why I rarely goto panels. Essentially every amazing Independent game developer attends PAX, and none of them were present as speakers at this panel.

However, rather than insight into how to successfully make an indie game, the panel selection gave me a different type of insight.

A lot of the panel was talking about how making your own indie game was a labor of love, one that might not be financially successful, and the pitfalls of signing on with a publisher vs self-publishing. It was that comparison that made me look around at the crowd of eager game designers and make me wonder if the dream of "finally writing my dream game" isn't just our generation's longing to "write the great American novel".

When you think about it, a secluded novel writer, betting it all that on nothing but his keyboard and will to finish could just as easily be replaced with a programmer at a keyboard. The allure of willing a creation into the world, one that is essentially useless unless 100% finished. It put a lot of things into stark relief for me.

I bugged the guy who made "Atom Zombie Smasher" again, who was giving away copies of his game for free at his booth, and who also threw his game into the "Humble Bundle 3" for a pittance. I asked him why he was essentially giving out his game, and he told me that he just wanted people to play it.

I think this drive that me and everyone else who attended that panel to "someday" create a game is really the same yearning artists have to create something that people enjoy. To leave something behind that is unique. And just like artists, I have to think that the potential for the great works to also become financially successful severely muddies the waters...

Live Dungeons And Dragons

I think the best image you can have of PAX is that it is a place and time where 2500 people will line up in a street that has been closed to traffic for this purpose, hours in advance, to completely fill up one of Seattle's largest theaters all to watch four grown men play Dungeons and Dragons.

We got there an hour and a half early, and ended up in the highest "nose bleed seat" section.

A strange purpose and image for some of you I imagine. The closest comparison I can make is that of 2500 kindergartners patiently waiting for an amazing story to be told to them. A new story, one that nobody has ever heard before. Told by a teacher who physically cannot stop himself from making dick jokes at each and every opportunity.

The miracle of it all was that even though the four players were on a stage, in front of an astonishingly large audience the entire thing still felt like a casual session in your basement. Which I think is its greatest gift, of silently acknowledging the importance and meaning that can be summoned up with nothing more than imagination, friendship and snack food.

It is a snarky world, culture has advanced to the point where it is difficult to do anything without some flavor of irony attached to it. Games provide an excuse to unironically do that which we all crave constantly, to feel the thrill of the unknown, to engage in cooperation and competition with fellow human beings without anyone being slapped with a glove, to free our minds of the burden of the far more complicated game that modern society requires and play one far closer to the primal one we were built for.

(Edit: Link to pictures)

PAX 2011 Day 1

Had a really great first day of PAX. The greatest of which seemed to my seeming miraculous non-contraction of "hand-foot and mouth" that the rest of my household contracted.

It is a cliche that parenthood changes you, one I don't find particularly interesting, but I think there is a certain alienness to a non-parent of the concept of me being ecstatic that I went a week without accidentally ingesting infected feces.

Here's some stuff I looked at yesterday:

Nintendo 3DS

The 3d effect is cool for a few moments, but quickly game me a headache. Maybe it's my eye prescription. The game lineup for the 3DS on display was compelling: Super Mario 3dland, Mario Kart 7, Kid Icarus. That crap is must have. I could see myself buying a 3DS, gluing the 3d switch to *off* and buying all three of those.

The Indie Ghetto

The rest of the expo hall had some neat stuff, but it was honestly so packed that I quickly fled it up to the "Indie Game Ghetto" expo hall hidden in the upper reaches of the convention center. This is where I really enjoyed myself, I was able to freely walk up to lonely looking Indie game developers, try their wares, talk to them about their development process, their sales strategy, etc. I was able to talk one on one to developers of indie games I own and enjoy such as "Universe Sandbox" and "Atom Zombie Smasher". The excitement in their voice that I had heard of their game, let alone purchased it and played it created a strange mutual exchange of pleasant awe.

Seattle

The nice thing about PAX is that when you want to go eat, it forces you to go outside and take in downtown Seattle, which really is just a fun place. I had lunch at conveyer belt sushi place with suprisingly reasonable prices, and had fresh prawns for dinner at a bar meters from the wharf.

Cookie Brigade

After lunch I helped my friend Irene hawk her free cookies with the Cookie Brigade. Her smore cookies are just delicious, and I just couldn't stand by watching her walk down the lines meekly asking if anyone wanted a cookie. Whereas my method involved loud barking enumerating the wonders of her cookies, waiting for a nerd in line to make a snide comment, and then directly engaging in close-combat banter until they give in and take a free cookie.

She told me later that her strategy is largely reliant on looking for subtle signs of eye contact and then engaging interested parties. Which given that she essentially has a Phd in the social mechanics of human interaction made me feel a like a stupid stomping idiot, but she assured me that all she really cares about is getting rid of cookies so she doesn't have to take any home.

Board Games

The most fun part of PAX is getting to try out their massive catalog of board games with friends. I spent the bulk of my day doing that, trying out "Ticket to Ride", "War of the Rings", "Dominion Intrigue" and in the waning hours of the night, "Race for the Galaxy".

Those were all great fun, except for "War of the Rings", which can best be described as having all the fun of setting up "Axis and Allies" and then being told it is actually 1938 and there are several repercussions of the Marshall Plan to sort out before any fighting can begin.

Photos

Here are some photos if you care. (Edit: Link Fixed)

Things I Enjoy

So I originally sat down and wrote a big long piece about being a father of two. It had some decent bits in it, but overall it came off really whiny, and in the end failed the "would anybody really care about this?" test pretty spectacularly.

So instead, while I'm here, here are some bits of popular culture I've been enjoying quite a lot:

• Louis C.K.'s Show "Louie" on FX - Lighthearted yet brutally honest comedy.
• The Dresden Files Book Series - Addictive fantasy pulp
• Being Human (UK Version) - A ghost, a werewolf and a vampire try to be human. Delightfully creative narratives with memorable characters, a smattering of genuine moments to anchor it and sparing use of some truly nail biting moments of tension.
• SpaceChem the Game - Uncompromising hardcore puzzler.

Self Defeating

So I'm tired.

I almost didn't include that bit, since it can seem like the hollow whining of a man hurtling through the air after having spent 9 months sitting in a ever tensing catapult basket.

Also, in general, few people in our modern age can make claims to complete and total rest. In terms of engaging interest, sleep complaints generally rank lower than the weather musings of 60 degree days.

Even so, with the knowledge that my audience is entirely unsympathetic and generally uninterested in this point, at the moment the cumulative lack of sleep seems so elemental right now that I can't, simply for posterity's sake, omit it's mention.

So, new job, new baby. Between these two variables being altered, essentially every facet of my daily life changed. For instance, I am now the sort of person who takes showers and wears shirts that have buttons instead of painfully obscure internet references.

Change is a terrifying proposition given that my previous job was one where I was allowed to essentially dictate the circumstances of completely. Walking to work, to sit next to two long-time friends, my largest responsibility to oversee work I had largely automated or engineered to the point of triviality.

The designer of the ground breaking MMO game "Everquest" once complained "Players will inevitably find the most boring way to play a game".

You'd think players would naturally invent ways to have fun in games, but in practice, reducing risk and variability is what they tend to look for. Left to their own devices, in a game world with tens of thousands of creatures, and several real-sized continents to explore, most players will inevitably seek out an isolated creature, in an unlit and unremarkable square room, who they can slay over and over again by pressing the same button, until it no longer gives any amount of reward.

Currently I am working harder than I ever have at both work and home. The amount of free time at both places hovers near non-existent.

Despite having lost, nearly 99% of my freedom from three weeks ago, I actually feel great.

I spend my days surrounded by people who actually need my help as opposed to those who just think they do. My home is now a place of less work than my work, as opposed to before.

Previously, going home meant "Stop browsing reddit to go be a parent", but now it means "Get to stop working and instead be a parent". The distinction seems petty and moot, I know. But so much of happiness seems to bob upon the relative ups and downs of the day, that even small perspective adjustments like this are capable of shifting long-stagnant water into clear, babbling brooks.

So in case you are wondering how I am: I am tired, I am working harder than I ever have at by both work and home and I wonder how much longer I can keep it up. A more difficult game to be sure, but far more fun to play.

Quantum Administration

The New Yorker had an interesting article on Quantum Computing this month.

I've tried many times to wrap my head around Quantum Mechanics, and every time the unseemly truth of it seems to slide off my mind. I may nod politely and pretend to grok it fully if it ever comes up in polite conversation, but to be honest Mortality and Quantum Behavior are just two of the uncomfortable facts of the world that I seem predisposed towards ignoring indefinitely.

At least that's normally the case, however in this article the focus on the computing aspects of it made it stick more than it normally does. In particular, a paragraph from David Deutsch's "The Fabric of Reality" stuck in my craw.

But before I get into that, I suppose I should give a quick primer about the two "camps" of Quantum theory. The "Copenhagen" camp says that entangled quantum events stay vague and undefined until they are observed. That the act of peering at them causes them to coalesce into something specific (a dead cat for instance).

Whereas the Multiple Worlds (MWI) camp says that reality splits each time a quantum "decision" is to be made, and it isn't until you open the box that you find out if you are in the universe with the living cat or the dead one.

David Deutsch is a strong proponent of the Multiple Worlds Theory, and he's using the enormous potential computing power of Quantum Computers as an example. A modest sized quantum computer is capable of solving problems that would flummox computers made out of every known atom in the universe. So David rightfully asks the question "where did all that computing take place?". He thinks MWI best explains where "the math" comes from.

Now that we've got that down, I should introduce Quantum Computing.. Basically, it involves creating isolated "qubits", that are both one and zero at the same time, in an array, and then "posing" them a question with one specific answer. This is the standard head-on explaination that often leaves me bored.

Personally, I like this explanation via extended metaphor more:

Imagine you are a math professor working on a particularly nasty problem when one day, over breakfast, inspiration strikes and you reach out and grab the nearest piece of paper you can find, your 1st grade son's math homework. You jot down a three variable equation on his homework next to the question "What is 3+1?", and then goto let in the cat. When you come back you forget about the paper, and little Timmy grabs it and runs off to school. Later that day Timmy comes back, leaves the paper on the same table, you glance at it, and to your suprise, it appears that someone solved your equation to see if equaled four or not.

You visit his school the next day, attempt to figure out who did it and congratulate them for their effort but nobody fesses up, and everybody claims confusion.

So to test them further the next day you write down an equation with *ten* variables as the answer to "What is 2-1?". That night it comes back with a correct answer.

Pride stinging, you then put down an equation with so many variables it could not be solved by a universe filled with only computers working from the big bang to the heat death of the universe, and Timmy walks back in, the question answered...

That's kind of what Quantum computing is doing.

As someone who tends computing resources for a living, I find this a fascinating question on many levels. More specifically, it reminds me very strongly of something I heard at a guest lecture in college, namely, that the first rule of writing a video game was "to cheat when they aren't looking".

For instance when you are in a racing game, and have passed 8 of the 12 cars. The computer isn't actually having the 8x cars behind you jockey each other for position. Sure it might fiddle with their placements a little, but it certainly isn't bothering simulating them bumping each other and vying for position.

Similarly when you are playing a first-person shooter, and you are walking down simulated nazi cobblestone streets, surrounded by simulated buildings full of simulated nazis. The computer only bothers animating and displaying the ones you can see. Maybe it'll take the time to figure out if the ones near you are going to walk towards you, but it definitely draws a distance of things to 'bother about", and only "does the math" on those things.

The way Quantum Mechanics resolve strongly remind me of an efficiency "hack" to reality to not have to bother with calculations that are meaningless. Most of the time the dances internal to atoms just aren't relevant to the world, evident by the extreme lack of baseballs that decide to stop existing mid-flight, so why bother calculating them?

The idea that we are all constructs inside a gigantic computer is not a new one. Although one of my favorite "proofs" of it is the marked *lack* of time travelers coming back to visit us from the future. Time travel is clearly impossible in a strictly iterated simulated environment.

If reality is a computer, the entire quantum computing method of building a cascade of entangled bits who results are all chained together to spit out the only acceptable permutation strikes me as an evident "hack" of the system. A way to fool it into demanding resources from outside of our own universe in order to properly display the results of the puzzle we constructed.

Right now, quantum computers are small, with barely a dozen bits, but as they start to grow, and reach the point where they will be asking math questions that require equivalent or greater calculations than it takes to simulate our actual universe, I can't help but think a grumpy man with an unkempt beard is going to show up, with a penchant for acting out in spiteful irritation.

Lord save us from the Great and Almighty Sysadmin who was woken at 2am to investigate the mess we have wrought on his systems!

Macro Economics

I read an article the other day that I neglected to save, and which I can't, for the life of me find anymore.

Normally that'd stop me from blogging about it, but I found that their economic theories so convincing that I'm going to try to muddle on through without it.

In a nutshell, the article talked about how "large amounts of available capital" distorts market prices.

Some Examples:

Reading through this, it smack of reductive thinking that I normally try to stay away from. Afterall, these are all very disparate examples spanning different markets and customers, could there really be anything to be gained by comparing them?

Odder still, is that I agree with half the obvious solutions and pale at the other half. What snarky thing would I have said about someone holding a sign saying "Make Universities More Affordable, Restrict Student Loans!" as well as a "Universal Healthcare for all" sign.

I guess that is why I'm saying all this out loud. It makes sense, but I am wary of it's logic and am constantly snuffling at it to see if it has any hint of turning sour.

I think one interesting exclusion from the list is 401ks. I know a lot of people who have them, and very few who actually know what and where that money is invested in. That seems like a massive amount of money that is *somewhere* being controlled by the whim of whoever administers the 401k plans for the companies. I've tried to think hard on applying the above logic to identify where this money might be going and what, if any, item it might be inflating.

All I could come up with is "The price of all stocks", which is an interesting proposition. Can that economic slight of hand continue indefinitely? If not... What does *that* bubble popping resemble?

Or maybe it is the perfect marriage, the exception to the rule. In real life there is a limit on how "pink" an elephant can be made. But a unicorn's pinkness can increase indefinitely.