Eve Online: The Most Thrilling Boring Game in the Universe
The massive engineering challenge of building a fusion reactor
Some strange history of the very alien Asmat people in New Guinea

Few games have such a conflicting outward image. Eve Online is famously exciting, but also notoriously dull. Eve Online will lure in players with its stories of spying, trust and betrayal, but even long-time players will say that most people tune out before they even get past the tutorial. Eve Online is the most fun you’ll ever have in a game. Eve Online will put you into a coma.

via Eve: The most thrilling boring game in the universe | Polygon.

No one knows iter’s true cost, which may be incalculable, but estimates have been rising steadily, and a conservative figure rests at twenty billion dollars—a sum that makes iter the most expensive scientific instrument on Earth. But if it is truly possible to bottle up a star, and to do so economically, the technology could solve the world’s energy problems for the next thirty million years, and help save the planet from environmental catastrophe. Hydrogen, a primordial element, is the most abundant atom in the universe, a potential fuel that poses little risk of scarcity. Eventually, physicists hope, commercial reactors modelled on iter will be built, too—generating terawatts of power with no carbon, virtually no pollution, and scant radioactive waste. The reactor would run on no more than seawater and lithium. It would never melt down. It would realize a yearning, as old as the story of Prometheus, to bring the light of the heavens to Earth, and bend it to humanity’s will. iter, in Latin, means “the way.”

via Raffi Khatchadourian: Can an Audacious Plan to Create a New Energy Resource Help Save the Planet? : The New Yorker.

Michael made a scouting trip there during a mid-May break in filming. Only in the mid-1950s had a few Dutch missionaries and government officials begun pacifying the Asmat, but even by 1961 many had never seen a Westerner, and inter-village warfare and headhunting remained common. “Now this is wild and somehow more remote country than what I have ever seen before,” Michael wrote. In many ways, the Asmat world at the time was a mirror image of every taboo of the West. In some areas, men had sex with each other. They occasionally shared wives. In bonding rituals, they sometimes drank one another’s urine. They killed their neighbors, and they hunted human heads and ate human flesh.

via What Really Happened to Michael Rockefeller | History | Smithsonian.

[Slightly facile but interesting. -egg]

While I am far from a Luddite who fetishizes a life without tech, we need to consider the consequences of this latest batch of apps and tools that remind us to contact significant others, boost our willpower, provide us with moral guidance, and encourage us to be civil. Taken together, we’re observing the emergence of tech that doesn’t just augment our intellect and lives — but is now beginning to automate and outsource our humanity.

But let’s take a concrete example. Instead of doing the professorial pontification thing we tech philosophers are sometimes wont to do, I talked to the makers of BroApp, a “clever relationship wingman” their words that sends “automated daily text messages” to your significant other. It offers the promise of “maximizing” romantic connection through “seamless relationship outsourcing.”

via Today’s Apps Are Turning Us Into Sociopaths | Wired Opinion | Wired.com.

[Thoughtful essay by Ramez Naam. -egg]

Yes. Yes we can. The last year has brought with it the revelations of massive government-run domestic spying machineries in the US and UK. On the horizon is more technology that will make it even easier for governments to monitor and track everything that citizens do. Yet I’m convinced that, if we’re sufficiently motivated and sufficiently clever, the future can be one of more freedom rather than less.

via Can We Avoid a Surveillance State Dystopia? – Charlie’s Diary.

[Cool, simple art project. -egg]

Recently my grandmother found out I’m queer. Her response was to tell me that she disapproves of me living with my “friend” i.e. my girlfriend and that I should give up my vile queer ways and become a Christian Lol. She even sent me a bible.  Here are its remains, which I made into black-out poetry.

Poem 1: Bisexual from Leviticus 19:9— “Have sexual relations with her.  Have sexual relations with him.  Have sexual relations with both a woman and a man.  Have sexual relations with yourself. Vomit on everyone who does not respect you.”

Poem 2: Fisting from Judges 8:5— “water/ lap the water/ drink/go down to drink/your hands/go down/I give into your hands/go down/encouraged/down/on the seashore/the whole hand/your hand/inside/I get to the edge/and shout/grasping/crying out/Beth/Beth/Beth/Beth/Beth/God/I came”

Poem 3: A Letter to the Exiles from Jeremiah 28:13 — “Ze said: ‘Do not let lies name you, nor harm your heart. Gather. Raise the sword against them. They scorn and reproach, for they have not listened— again and again have not listened.’ “

Poem 4: Child from Ezekiel 16:22 — “Your father and your mother rubbed salt in. No one looked on you with pity or had compassion enough for you, for on the day you were born you were despised. Live! Grow.  I looked at you and saw you were enough.”

Poem 5: Father from Ezekiel 16:22 — “You never adored us. You became very angry. You took some out on us. Your sons and daughters were not enough? You slaughtered— in all your detestable practices— our youth.”

Poem 6: Misandry from Acts 27:41 — “Dangerous men should be broken.”

via Recently my grandmother found out I’m queer. Her… – Ankle-deep in the river..

If you have any interest in programming at all, or in how software could change the world, I *highly* recommend that you watch this intriguing 12-minute video about the language that Stephen Wolfram is debuting. The guy does not think small.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P9HqHVPeik

[I don’t listen to that much ska, but this is just a stunning piece of music journalism. Highly recommended. -egg]

When I got back home and was trying to write about Jah B., doing my best to stake out some understanding of what was going on musically in Kingston in the late Fifties and early Sixties, I ran into the riddle that bedevils every person who gets lost in this particular cultural maze, namely, where did ska come from? That strange rhythm, that chop on the upbeat or offbeat, ump-ska, ump-ska, ump-ska, exemplified quintessentially in “Simmer Down” or in parts of Bruno Mars’s “Locked Out of Heaven,” if there’s doubt of its relevance. Did someone think that up? Can it be traced to a particular song or band, or accident, or earlier Caribbean style mento, calypso? Maybe its evolution should be followed out of the island’s deeper past, from African and Afro-Caribbean sources, and Indian influences—both kinds of Indian, in Jamaica’s case. There were a disproportionate number of Chinese-Jamaicans helping to shape Kingston’s music scene—did that have any effect?

As with almost all cases of musicological origin-hunting, the answer is something tedious like, “Yes and no to all of the above.” Multiple streams converged to prepare the ground for that rhythm, for it to become a rhythmic move that would make sense to the Jamaican ear and body, or to the fingers of a Jamaican guitarist.

Nevertheless there are moments that can be pointed to, when you hear the insistent uptick venturing forth…

[…]

…if you listen to these songs or even listen to thirty seconds of each, you can hear the rhythm we’re talking about begin to change in flip-book fashion. You hear it persist, you hear it move from song to song, but you hear it changing. You hear the emphasis on the upbeat getting stronger, hear an essential garishness creep in, feel the tempo getting faster, everything sort of sliding forward in the measure. African drumming, calypso and mento and Cuban counterpoint, Rastafarian groundations, the sound systems, and something quintessential but indefinable that is Jamaican, all of these had readied the people, certain people, for this change, to receive this rhythm from the States and just crank it a little, then send it back. In those eight songs you can hear ska unfurl as another tendril out of the blues, the great mother root. It’s as tidy a demonstration as I know of the fact—deeper than ska, deeper than Rosco, deeper than the South—that black popular music in the twentieth century can’t be comprehended except as a phenomenon of what Bernard Bailyn calls the Atlantic world. In this case the old West Indian world, of which Tennessee lay at the northern fringe. It’s the shatter-zone of the slave diaspora. Circulating currents. We gave Jamaica blues. Jamaica gave us ska. Jamaica gave us dub, we gave back hip-hop. It’s been happening for four hundred years.

via ISSUE 83: That Chop on the Upbeat :: Oxford American – The Southern Magazine of Good Writing.

Discovering new music was always an act of revolution for me. When I was 5, it was in my parents’ house, sitting near a stack of records I wasn’t allowed to touch, waiting for whatever was next on the turntable, whether it was Stevie Wonder’s Music of My Mind or the O’Jays’ Ship Ahoy. The record went around; that was a revolution. When I was 15, it was sneaking Prince songs onto my Walkman as I practiced drums in the basement, pretending that I was listening to something less scandalous. The cassette reels spun around; that was a revolution. When I was 25, it was walking back to the van after opening for the Pharcyde but getting drawn back to the club by a woozy, witchy beat that turned out to be J Dilla. I turned around; that was another revolution.

There were, of course, less dramatic ways of finding music. Digging in the crates. Staying up all night with a transistor radio. Eavesdropping on conversations in high school. Those were offline revolutions, unwired; it’s just the way the old world worked. Then digital music arrived and again turned everything around. The iPod happened. Playlists happened. Pandora happened. YouTube happened. Spotify happened. SoundCloud happened. Shazam happened. I couldn’t believe them when I saw them. I couldn’t believe them when I heard them. But they are here, and they are changing everything about our relationship with music.

via Questlove on How to Find Music You’ll Fall in Love With | Underwire | Wired.com.

[Really, really interesting. It’s so damn hard to see our own blind spots. Anyone have thoughts about this? -egg]

It seems to me that many nonbelievers have forgotten—or never knew—what it is like to suffer an unhappy collision with scientific rationality. We are open to good evidence and sound argument as a matter of principle, and are generally willing to follow wherever they may lead. Certain of us have made careers out of bemoaning the failure of religious people to adopt this same attitude.

However, I recently stumbled upon an example of secular intransigence that may give readers a sense of how religious people feel when their beliefs are criticized. It’s not a perfect analogy, as you will see, but the rigorous research I’ve conducted at dinner parties suggests that it is worth thinking about. We can call the phenomenon “the fireplace delusion.”

via The Fireplace Delusion : : Sam Harris.

[Really thoughtful critique by Ramez Naam, author of a couple of really fantastic recent sci fi novels (_Nexus_ and _Crux_). I think he misses some stuff — notably that a digital intelligence may have some important abilities that wetware brains lack, like the ability to instantly recall all of human knowledge — but he’s got some solid arguments, and the claim that intelligence design has a non-linear difficulty slope is really thought-provoking. I do think he puts too much emphasis on the mathematical/etymological metaphor; I don’t think most serious thinkers have ever actually thought that the Singularity would be a true mathematical singularity, ie would achieve an infinite slope. -egg]

Are we headed for a Singularity? Is it imminent?

I write relatively near-future science fiction that features neural implants, brain-to-brain communication, and uploaded brains. I also teach at a place called Singularity University. So people naturally assume that I believe in the notion of a Singularity and that one is on the horizon, perhaps in my lifetime.

I think it’s more complex than that, however, and depends in part on one’s definition of the word. The word Singularity has gone through something of a shift in definition over the last few years, weakening its meaning. But regardless of which definition you use, there are good reasons to think that it’s not on the immediate horizon.

via The Singularity Is Further Than It Appears – Charlie’s Diary.

[I’ve gotten behind on my blogging, but these are some of the most interesting articles I’ve read in the last week or two. -egg]

A Journey to the End of the World (of Minecraft) : The New Yorker

On March 28, 2011, a man who calls himself Kurt J. Mac loaded a new game of Minecraft. As the landscape filled in around his character, Mac surveyed the blocky,…

The Champion Barack Obama: How Black America talks to the White House (Ta-Nehisi Coates)

Last week The New Yorker ran a lengthy profile of Barack Obama, by David Remnick, in which you can hear the president’s opinions on everything from marijuana legalization to war to racism. Obama is as thoughtful as ever, and I expect that admiration for his thoughtfulness will grow as the ages pile upon us. I have tried to get my head around what he represents. Two years ago, I would have said that whatever America’s roots in white supremacy, the election of a black president is a real thing, worthy of celebration, a sign of actual progress. I would have pointed out that you should not expect a black head of state in any other Western country any time soon, and that this stands as singular accolade in the long American democratic tradition. Today, I’m less certain about national accolades. I’m not really sure that a writer—whose whole task is the attempt to see clearly—can afford such attachments.

Far From Home (National Geographic)

In today’s hyperconnected world, many developing countries find that their most lucrative export is people. The foreign workers and their families must grapple with an inevitable trade-off: emotional loss for material gain.

Robert Henke on Lasers, Structure, and Musical Choices; Intuition and Limitations

Give Robert Henke [Monolake, Ableton cofounder] a computer, some lasers, and some time to make his own tools as well as his own music, and wonderful things result. In a new video [linked and excerpted here], he gives a master class not so much in technology as the philosophy of using that technology.

Our Dangerous Budget and What to Do About It

The budget battles have never been quite what they’ve seemed, and the new bipartisan agreement is not a victory of bipartisan reason. Despite all of the budget turmoil over the past five years, the long-term trajectory of the US budget has remained remarkably and dangerously unaltered. With this new agreement, the US takes another step toward a diminished future.

GOING THE DISTANCE: On and off the road with Barack Obama.

[Excellent profile by the New Yorker’s David Remnick of where Barack Obama is now, and what his priorities for the remainder of the term are likely to be.]