Sometimes it seems like McCain is pandering harder than a speed-crazed pimp with a stable of twenty-dollar hookers. His latest? He feels Michigan's pain...

No-one who has seen downtown Detroit can doubt that Michigan is going through hard times. But I dare any committed Republican to show me the real doctrinal difference between what McCain just said there and what Obama has said recently.

And then there is his flaccid response to Phil Gramm's statement that, economically, "We have sort of become a nation of whiners." After disavowing Gramm, McCain either pandered harder or misinterpreted Gramm, take your pick, by saying "I don't agree with Senator Gramm. I believe that the person here in Michigan that just lost his job isn't suffering from a mental recession."

Uh... John, Phil wasn't talking about the people who just lost their jobs. He was talking about the people with money who run companies and who took the other guy's job away because they believe we are in a recession and are therefore making cuts. The one is certainly dealing with a real recession, but Gramm was saying that the other isn't. (Although maybe he will make a real one by, for example, cutting other people's jobs.)

Oh, and John? Phil has a degree in economics. (Making him as likely to be right as any other economist.) What you got?

Oh! Yeah...

Some people are wondering what happened to the Obama they supported during the primaries? Meanwhile John Scalzi demonstrates why he gets all the link love with a little rant about who gets to call who an elitist.

As always, I'm the guy who hates the leading politicians on both sides. That means I get to say "I told you so." when people complain about Obama acting like a politician. I should point out that this doesn't mean you shouldn't vote for him in the general elections. It just means you have to be a realist. He obviously is and, quite honestly, that raises his credit with me...

Kirk vs. Picard. Are there parallels in religious doctrinal debates?

In an attempt to show how capable the open source Blender 3D animation application is, the Blender community has created a short subject and distributed it with a Creative Commons license.



Complete video here.

I'd say this is pretty convincing proof that Blender is up to the task of creating animations as good as any from the commercial competition. To me this raises another question: By lowering the cost of entry, will this mean we get more animated works from outside the established production houses?

Mind you the real cost of an animated video isn't the 3D modeling tools or even the render farms. The single biggest expense is the time of the many creative individuals you need to drive those tools. That factor doesn't change. But it does mean that these creatives now have access to a free alternative toolset and therefore we may have more artists and animators learning how to use them.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Of course someone could really change the game by coming up with an animation tool simple enough to use that it lowers the total hours required for a minute of animation by a full order of magnitude. If that happens, all bets are off.

Phil Bowermaster has a Declaration of Singularity.

Going to the Worldcon?

I have reserved a room at the Denver Hyatt (one of the convention hotels) for five nights from August 5th to 10th. It is relatively expensive with tax and all, so I am looking to share. Currently we have myself (I sleep in a chair, so I don't use a bed) and my nephew in a double-bed room. It should be easy to add one or two more.

If you don't have a room yet, and have suddenly realized you actually do want to sleep during Denvention, please respond with a comment here!

All the writer types I know do some kind of gossipy updatery when they go out to commit words so I felt I should do the same.

( Click here for the neepery. Feel free to ignore instead. )

Jay Lake's 'Escapement'. Seen at Bellevue Crossroads Barnes & Noble.
One of only two copies left. (I reminded them to order some more.)




Sent from my iPhone

Well, my last minute idea for a Writer's Retreat flew like a lead balloon. No surprise. But it does mean that I must retreat from, ahem, my idea for a retreat...

However several people did indicate they would be interested if I arranged something of the kind with adequate lead time. How does some weekend in September work? I have found two possibilities for relatively isolated cabins near a beach which are currently not booked for the entire month of September, meaning that we could pick our writer's weekend. Size limit would be four writers (or other creatives), including myself. Cost would be around $50 a night or less (depending on several factors.) We would be talking three nights, either Thursday through Sunday or Friday through Monday.

If you are interested, please respond here with which weekends work for you. If there is enough interest I will handle booking the cabin and other arrangements.

A limited number of spouses would be welcome (and would bring individual costs down), but one wonders if having loved ones underfoot would be conducive to the writing process. (We have to suffer for our art, don't we?)

In any case I am still going on a personal writing retreat this coming week. My parents have offered to locate their motorhome in an isolated camping area near their place (they live near Newport OR) and I will be using that for my home base while I attempt to commit as many bits to disk as possible.

I'm seriously thinking of renting a nice cabin near Sekiu Sunday through Wednesday next week to do some writing. I can afford the full cost, but it would help if two or three others wanted to come along and contribute a little (I'm thinking $50 a night.) The problem is short notice and bad timing (right before the 4th.)

Is anyone reading this post interested or do you know someone who would be? If there is minimal interest I (even one person) am going to reserve the cabin and hope that I can get a few others to sign up. If not, I am going with a cheaper option.

Note: This is just about writing or some other creative endeavor. No 'how to' sessions or fancy cheese lunches unless someone else wants to organize it. Meals can be co-operative or not. (There is a full kitchen.)

Me? I plan on walking on the beach and thinking a lot. Interspersed with frantic typing sessions and some scotch in the evenings.

Please respond soon if you would like to join me. I have to make up my mind what I am going to do within 24 hours or so...

I have been working on a secret project for a while now and it is nearing the time when I will let the first select few into the know. What follows is a snippet (previous snippet 1 and previous snippet 2):

Once there was a small rocky planet orbiting close to its primary; baked and dessicated by fires of that sun until it was more dry and dead than any bone could ever be. The planet is gone now, chewed up and re-formed by marvelous machinery both great and small; along with vastly more materials contributed by asteroids, moons, and the rings of a gas giant; hauled in from a billion kilometers away. The end result? An enormous device, much closer to the sun than that planet had been. Outside the photosphere, but near enough to be licked by prominences of flame thrown up from the occasional great storm on the star's surface.

As transcendent technologies go the thing is a bit underwhelming. Yet, from a non-transcendent point of view, the sheer scale of the device is stupefying, almost beyond comprehension.

Seen in context with the sun the device dwindles into invisibility. Move towards the star until it becomes a great fiery wall and you begin to see a slender silver thread, arcing around to gird the massive stellar body. Move close enough and the device becomes an enormous cylinder, seeming to stretch for infinity in either direction. Four kilometers in circumference, it is ribbed and scaled, with 500 meter black radiators sprouting from the shaded side like leaves from a bush and other, less easily comprehensible, equipment attached almost randomly about it like warts and growths on a living thing. Every few thousand kilometers along its length the shaded side sprouts a large, humped, protrusion a kilometer tall and twenty kilometers long.

The sun-side of the thing is very different; there the cylinder is slightly concave instead of convex, with a mirror finish to provide a reflector for the solar energies. At the focal point is a smaller black cylinder held to the main device by widely spaced pillars and circling around the sun ever so slightly closer than the main ring.

At this moment the device is quiescent. In a sense it is active already, of course. Without steadying from enormous magnetic fields and occasional jets of superheated gases it would quickly go unstable and crash into the sun. Not to mention the subtle adjustments required to keep it from flying apart or crumpling: No material, no matter how advanced, can enable a rigid structure of that size, much less hold the device together when it is actually in operation and unleashing the cyclopean energies it is designed for.

But until this moment the device has not begun to fill its purpose. Until this second, when it is turned on for the first time...

If you imagine electricity sparking from the sharp edges and a deep humming you would not be far wrong. You would, however, be quite unimaginative: Massive lightning bolts and great balls of plasma appear around the device anywhere there is enough gas to glow. If you were in a spacecraft nearby you would hear a ponderous thrumming even though you were separated from the device by a vacuum, as vast magnetic fields shake the frame of your ship. Gouts of gas spray along the length of the device as it adjusts into its running configuration.

The time has come. The switch is thrown. The gauntlet is cast. The device is in operation.

It is a time for beginnings and endings. A time for lost things to be found and found things to be lost. A time for monumental feats of ingenuity beyond the ken of mortal man. But, most importantly, it is a time for change...

Coke-spray inducing sentences like this: What is well past a joke is the need for creative market-based solutions to the problems of the farther left.

Quite a while ago I talked about short-run manufacturing and 'de-industrialization'. Later I followed that up with a post about feeding the long tail with hardware and one on producing 'sui generis' goods with rapid prototyping technology.

I mention these older posts because I want to establish my bonifides as an 'amateur futurist' in this area. To clarify: I have been closely watching the development of rapid prototyping and short-run manufacturing technologies for some time now because I think these are true disruptive technologies capable of causing large-scale changes in the world's economic landscape. Exactly how those changes will play out are unknown right now, but I point out some possibilities in my de-industrialization post.

Over the next few months I am going to delve into this subject more deeply. I intend to produce a series of essays about different aspects of this kind of rapid manufacturing technology. Moreover, I intend to personalize the impact of rapid manufacturing technology by showing you how it might play out in your and my own lives, in our own homes.

Why this? Why now? As I said, this is an area I have followed for a while and can claim some expertise in. Plus it has suddenly become a hot subject with the RepRap project recently announcing they have achieved replication. (Just look at the Technorati results for 'RepRap Replication' if you don't think this is a hot topic.)

In actual fact the 'replication' achieved by the RepRap is a bit underwhelming if you are thinking in terms of a true self-replicating machine. What they really did was to build a simple thermoplastic deposition cartesian robot capable of re-creating the plastic brackets which hold itself together. All the other parts (circuit boards, stepper motors, metal rods, heating elements, and so on) must be created separately from the machine, not to mention their component parts (like microchips and copper wire).

But you have to start somewhere. The long-term goal of the RepRap project is the creation of a device which can completely replicate itself from mostly base materials like plastic and metal. This sounds like the stuff of Science Fiction, and it is, but it is also something entirely possible with extensions to known technology! It is something that could be done without requiring nanotechnology or some other magic we don't know how to create yet.

I call this kind of device an 'Omnifacture': A machine capable of creating nearly anything, including copies of itself. (I first used that term in an SF story written about 1988.) Step by step the RepRap guys are walking the path towards creating a non-fictional Omnifacture. And they are doing it Open Source all the way; sharing their designs and software with the world as they go.

Time now to get to the point and clearly explain the 'why this' and 'why now' for this post: Quite simply, I've decided to join the revolution...

Today I ordered the full electronics kit for a RepRap Darwin. (Yes, I need another project like I need a hole in my head. So sue me.) I expect it will take me way too long to turn it into operating hardware, but I intend to bring all of you along for the ride. In fact, should anyone reading this want to get their hands dirty I encourage you to join me in a more physical way; in my garage or your own. I will be starting a Seattle RepRap Users Group (RUG) as soon as possible, but you don't have to live nearby. All you need is a little money and some basic skills and a willingness to step outside your comfort zone.

Things are going to change in a big way. I want to be part of it when it happens. How about you?

OK, this is probably just an image artifact, but look at this:


(Crop from image.)

This image was acquired at the Phoenix landing site on day 1 of the mission on the surface of Mars, or Sol 0, after the May 25, 2008, landing. The surface stereo imager right acquired this image at 17:15:35 local solar time. The camera pointing was elevation -1.33297 degrees and azimuth 356.278 degrees.


(Full image, click on it for larger and keep clicking for even larger)

The Phoenix Mars lander has landed safe and healthy. Here's wishing it success in its mission!

(Note: I am still in Austria. The ten day trip has turned into a two-week plus one. In all that time I have had one day off, yesterday, and one slack day, today. Thus why it took so long to write this follow-up.)

Nearly a week ago I wrote a post about how John Shirley made sense, pointing to a couple of his recent rants where he explained why he wasn't a Libertarian and then deconstructed his own argument. I found his opinion well thought out and well presented. I also thought that he was mostly right on the issue.

But I think he was wrong on the substance...

What do I mean by that? As recent events in China show, there is good reason for many of the things governments do. Building standards are only one example! (I will leave other examples as exercises for commenters, instead simply stipulating that governments do good things which are difficult or impossible for private enterprise to duplicate.)

Thus where I agree with John Shirley. Where I think he goes off the rails is by making a generalization leading to a fallacy of accident. Specifically he puts forward the strawman Libertarian question of “In the end it comes down to this, is more government a problem or a solution?“ and responds:

In the end it comes down to this--thinking the government is either a problem or a solution.

Government itself is neither. Good government, intelligently organized and democratically refined, provides more solutions than problems; bad government provides more problems than solutions. No government provides no solutions at all. Just an opportunity for thugs.

Good government is complex; libertarianism is simplistic. It sweeps all before it; it throws out the baby with the bathwater.

Now those who know me or read this journal a lot know that I am not a big 'L' Libertarian and, quite honestly, I am a bit squishy on principle when it comes to being small 'L'. But even I can recognize the problem with John's opinion: He assumes we can have 'good' government. Moreover he, himself, is guilty of over-simplifying the problem.

And from this arises the title of this post. While I agree we can have 'good' government I disagree that such can be a permanent state. In fact I would argue that it is the most unlikely state for government. To explain this further I would like to coin Jack's Law of Governmental Entropy: Over time, and no matter what the starting conditions, all governments tend towards a base state of tyranny.

This entropy is a process and it can be interrupted by a revolution, resetting the starting conditions, or by other factors which inject energy (freedom) into the system. (Thus the famous Jefferson quote "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.") But as a process it is unidirectional: From more personal freedom to less.

So we are in a quandary are we not? We need government to do the good things that John Shirley describes for the very reasons he gives. But, by its nature, government tends to get into a state where it does bad things, often using the very tools given it to do the good things. Thus we have the reason constitutional democracies were invented: To mix things up on a regular basis by injecting a little 'will of the people'.

Yet, as recent events have shown, even strong constitutional democracies like the USA can be subverted towards tyranny via a combination of luck and malice. I truly doubt John would argue this point! Certainly we aren't living in a dictatorship, but there is little doubt that many of the tools required by a dictatorship are in place should the people become willing to accept just a little more repression in return for perceived safety. (Ah yes, another quote from a 'founding father' comes to mind, does it not?) All we need is a good 'emergency' to kickstart the process and suddenly we would find the next elections are being 'postponed' until the crisis can be 'resolved'.

So John Shirley is wrong on the substance because, while governments can do good things they are dangerous tools and, like fire, are not to be trusted. We must watch them constantly. We must leash them closely. We must always be wary of what they can do. Otherwise we risk the other side of government's coin.

That is the reason why Libertarians (big or small 'L') say "The best government is the one that governs least." John says government is neither solution nor problem. But I say it is a solution which can also be a problem. In this case we have an entity which we allow to arm itself in order to enforce laws upon the people becoming a problem. In this case we have a problem becoming entirely out of control until we take up arms and die in order to resist it.

In my mind this isn't about blanket statements of principle, as John reads it or as many big 'L' types mean it. It is instead about the way human systems work. And it is about reducing the harm when those systems turn malignant.