Month: December 2010

30% Future Shock

My working hypothesis to explain the 21st century is that the Tofflers underestimated how pervasive future shock would be. I think somewhere in the range from 15-30% of our fellow hairless primates are currently in the grip of future shock, to some degree. Symptoms include despair, anxiety, depression, disorientation, paranoia, and a desperate search for certainty in lives that are experiencing unpleasant and uninvited change. It’s no surprise that anyone who can offer dogmatic absolute answers is popular, or that the paranoid style is again ascendant in American politics, or that religious certainty is more attractive to many than the nuanced complexities of scientific debate. Climate change is an exceptionally potent trigger for future shock insofar as it promises an unpleasant and unpredictable dose of upcoming instability in the years ahead; denial is an emotionally satisfying response to the threat, if not a sustainable one in the longer term.

all the hysteria and religious nonsense means we are in profound future shock.

Regulations

eliminate 1 existing regulation for each new regulation

a compelling idea to keep the regulatory jungle trimmed.

Canada is now the first country in the world to require that for every new regulation introduced one of equivalent burden must be removed

a tiny step in the right direction.
2013-11-17: regulations are still treated like they will be around forever. an approach that takes their expected life span into account would do much good. perhaps for each new regulation an old one needs to go?

Zuck Fooled 60 Minutes

Leave it to 60 Minutes to pass off Facebook’s utterly meaningless redesign of the site’s profile pages as some kind of “exclusive” worth leading a segment on the company’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg. It’s not just that correspondent Lesley Stahl didn’t understand what’s meaningful about his story; it’s that Zuckerberg essentially reduced the venerable newsmagazine to an unwitting shill.

a great example of the disconnect between the old guard and what is really going on in the world.

Conformal cyclic cosmology

Our cosmos was “bruised” in collisions with other universes. Now astronomers have found the first evidence of these impacts in the cosmic microwave background. Conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) posits the existence of an aeon preceding our Big Bang ‘B’, whose conformal infinity ‘I’ is identified, conformally, with ‘B’, now regarded as a spacelike 3-surface. Black-hole encounters, within bound galactic clusters in that previous aeon, would have the observable effect, in our CMB sky, of families of concentric circles over which the temperature variance is anomalously low, the center of each such family representing the point of ‘I’ at which the cluster converges.

or perhaps it was a 4D star?

The Universe formed from the debris ejected when a 4-dimensional star collapsed into a black hole — a scenario that would help to explain why the cosmos seems to be so uniform in all directions.

2022-02-26: Sabine Hossenfelder offers comments:

If the previous eon leaves information imprinted in the next one, then it isn’t obvious that the cycles repeat in the same way. Instead, I would think, they will generally end up with larger and larger fluctuations that will pass on larger and larger fluctuations to the next eon because that’s a positive feedback. If that was so, then Penrose would have to explain why we are in a universe that’s special for not having these huge fluctuations.

20 Minutes in Manhattan

From the social gathering place of the city stoop to Washington Square Park, Sorkin’s walk takes the reader on a wry, humorous journey past local characters, neighborhood stores and bodegas, landmark buildings, and overlooked streets. His perambulations offer him—and the reader—opportunities to not only engage with his surroundings but to consider a wide range of issues that fascinate Sorkin as an architect, urbanist, and New Yorker. Whether he is despairing at street garbage or marveling at elevator etiquette, 20 Minutes in Manhattan offers a testing ground for his ideas of how the city can be newly imagined and designed, addressing such issues as the crisis of the environment, free expression and public space, historic preservation, and the future of the neighborhood as a concept.

the new jane jacobs

Bufferbloat

very detailed and troubling discussion about the scalability problems of the internet.

You see various behavior going on as TCP tries to find out how much bandwidth is available, and (maybe) different kinds of packet drop (e.g. head drop, or tail drop; you can choose which end of the queue to drop from when it fills). Note that any packet drop, whether due to congestion or random packet loss (e.g. to wireless interference) is interpreted as possible congestion, and TCP will then back off how fast to will transmit data.