Reenigne blog

It occurred to me recently that no country on Earth currently has a law against killing any sentient alien life forms that might come to visit us.

Now, call me overcautious but I wouldn't want to visit a place where it would be perfectly legal for anyone to kill me.

Perhaps the reason that we have not been visited by extra-terrestrials is simply that they think Earth would be a dangerous place for them.

Perhaps all we need to do to join the interstellar community is to pass a law affording the same rights that humans have to any aliens that might visit us.

I've read a number of things lately (particularly on Motl's blog) suggesting that maybe anthro-centric climate change doesn't exist, or that if it does the effects are small in comparison with natural variations caused by things like natural disasters and long-term solar cycles. This is certainly not a mainstream point of view amongst climate scientists, but Motl does make some interesting points that I have yet to see refuted.

However, even if Motl is right that still doesn't exuse us from having to invest in alternative energy sources, because fossil fuels are still running out. They've been getting more and more expensive for years and it's not because of the price of the dollar or the greed of oil companies - it's simply that we've already used up the oil that is cheap to extract, and what remains is more labour-intensive and therefore more expensive. This trend will continue until it becomes more cost-effective to use renewable energy sources.

It's in the interests of everyone (except the oil companies) that this happens sooner rather than later. The reason for this is that fossil fuel energy becomes more expensive the more money you spend on it (like diamonds, and for exactly the same reasons), and renewable energy gets cheaper the more money you spend on it (like computers, and for exactly the same reasons). Once all the money we're currently spending on oil goes into research into renewable energy sources rather than research into oil extraction methods, energy will get much cheaper very very quickly, and our transportation, heating and electricity costs will all go way down. Also, we will stop pouring so much money into the pockets of unpleasant middle-eastern regimes.

There are also environmental problems caused by fossil fuels that are not disputed at all, such as the damage caused by oil spills or the pollution caused by coal mining operations. However, we don't yet know what similar environmental problems will be caused by the renewable replacements (perhaps our solar panels will require elements for manufacturing that are also messy to mine, or poisonous chemicals). But given the amount of energy that will be generated by a solar panel (say) over its entire lifetime, it seems unlikely that the environmental problems of using renewable energy will be worse.

Since I lost my old digital camera I used a disposable camera and my old compact 35mm camera. This meant that I had a couple of old fashioned printed photos to scan in. It's been so long since I last scanned a batch of photos that I had forgotten what an annoying process it is.

Prints tend to be slightly convex, so when placed on the scanner glass they tend to be in contact with it at only one point. This means that they will rotate about that point at the slightest provocation (like a gentle breeze in the room, or another photo being placed on the glass next to it, or removing one's finger from the photo once one finished placed it just so).

My scanner is just the right size to scan three photos at once, which is great apart from the fact that the sensor area of the scanner is slightly smaller than the glass, and the bottom of the third photo gets cut off. Fortunately it's only a small strip so I decided not to bother rescanning them all.

Then after scanning most of the photos I'll notice that there is a smudge or some dust on the glass which will of course appear in all the photos that I've scanned so far. Hopefully it won't be too noticable.

I am quite impressed at how well the photos came out given that the film in my old camera had been sitting there for the best part of 7 years (I guess it helped that it had been in dark cupboards and drawers for most of that time). I'm also quite impressed at the picture quality you can get from a disposable camera these days - comparable to my old compact 35mm. I guess that even with the rise of digital, 35mm technology has continued to improve. Digital is still so much better though.

I'll post the results of the scanning session here soon.

I'm a big user of TODO lists. I generally keep a text editor open with at least one todo.txt file (either general or project-specific).

It would be nice to have a website to manage these lists of tasks and use them to help manage time and generate schedules. The schedules should be quite informal - each item should fall into one of three categories - tasks that should take less than a day, tasks that will probably take more than a day (and should be further broken down to get an accurate schedule) and tasks that have not yet been placed into one of the previous two buckets (more details on this costing algorithm).

The site should also have the ability to suggest the next task and allow the user to create dependencies between tasks (e.g. A must be completed before B can be started).

The way we measure time is very complicated and difficult to get right, with all those time zones each with different daylight savings time rules. Perhaps we should rethink the whole thing.

The root of the problem is that there are two contradictory things we use time for - one is coordinating between people and the other is telling us when it will be dark. Timezones worked fine until we started collaborating globally, across time-zones. And daylight savings time is a hack to avoid sunrise being too early or too late in the day.

Perhaps instead all our clocks should show two times, "global time" (i.e. UTC) and "local time" (i.e. the time such that the sun will rise at 6am in place where the clock is). GPS could be used to make the local time clock adjust itself so that this was always true. One could also get something like our current timezones by having "standard time points" on the Earth's surface - one would tell one's clock to pretend it was at one of these points in order that all the clocks in a particular region agree (useful for things like television broadcasts).

"Global time" would be used for things like coordinating international teleconferences and "Local time" would be used to tell the farmer when to get up and milk the cows.

I think having days that were a couple of minutes shorter in the spring and a couple of minutes longer in the autumn would not be particularly confusing (we probably wouldn't even notice apart from the fact that the difference between global time and local time goes up and down with the passing of the seasons).

Over on alt.games.mornington.cresent, a game has been running for a very long time. Many years ago (so the legend goes) the newgroup received a spam with the subject line "10,000 celebrity CDs". People started replying to the thread, decrementing the number and adding (vaguely) related text each time. Here is an example:

>> >>>> >>>>>>> 4840 Film scores that include 'Suspicious minds'
>> >>>> >>>>>>4839 Jukeboxes playing 'Suspicion'
>> >>>> >>>>> 4838 Suspicious boxes leading to evacuated buildings
>> >>>> >>>>4837 Other excuses for time of work
>> >>>> >>> 4836 hours to retirement
>> >>>> >>4835 hours to many
>> >>>> > 4834 second rate customer services
>> >>>> 4833 Vodaphone helpdeskers
>> >>>4832 Desk Tidies (A real help)
>> >> 4831 Deck reshuffles
>> >4830 Aces up my sleeve
>> 4829 dead rabbits
>4828 1.5v cells
4827 years before Red got his redemption

At some point, the subject line got changed to celerity and it stuck (or maybe it was misspelled in the original spam, I'm not sure).

I first learnt of this at university, some 10 years ago. I check back on this thread every once in a while to see where it's got to. It seems to have slowed down a bit in recent years - I think when I looked at it a few years ago I calculated that it should be over by now.

It would be an interesting task (maybe for a Googler?) to run a program over the history of this thread and plot a scattergraph showing how the number has changed over time. This would show the various rival threads as they fork off, skip ahead (or backwards) and sometimes die, and show how interest in the thread has waxed and waned over time.

I seem to have developed opinions about a lot of political things over the past few years. Here is a rundown of some of them. This is rather US-centric but much of it applies anywhere. In alphabetical order:

Copyright & patents

• Put the copyright term back to 14 years with an option for another 14.
• Eliminate work for hire - copyright remains with creators. For a large project like a movie, this won't make much difference since it would be difficult for someone else to come along and obtain licences from all the people involved. Recording studios will work for musicians, not the other way around.
• Only work which is available to the general public in the preferred form for making modifications to it is considered to be copyrighted.
• Introduce compulsory licensing - copyright should not give you a say about how your work is used, just that you get reimbursed for it. Yes, this would break the GPL but I think these reforms would also make it unnecessary.
• Abolish software patents.
• Disband the RIAA, MPAA and BSA for racketeering.

Defense & foreign policy

• Reduce military spending. Investigate abusive recruitment tactics - allow people to opt out of being contacted by military recruiters.
• Get out of Iraq as soon as possible - civil war seems to be inevitable there anyway. Get out of Afghanistan. Stop picking sides in conflicts between other countries. Stop supporting regimes with abusive human rights records. Adopt a general policy of non-interference with foreign governments except by UN resolution. Promote mediation between conflicting parties rather than invasion and occuption as a way to reduce conflict.

Drugs

• Reduce the drinking age to 18.
• Make all currently illegal drugs legal for people 18 and over. Tax them. Stop interfering with drug-producing countries. Ensure anybody who is addicted to drugs and does not which to be has access to rehabilitation facilities. Make rehabilitation mandatory for convicted criminals before their prison sentence can start.
• Pardon anyone convicted for non-violent drug crimes not involving under-18s (i.e. anyone who would have done nothing wrong under these new rules).

Education

• Empower teachers to give students the guidance they need. Education is critical for avoiding hereditary poverty and making the society work - you can't have real democracy without an informed electorate, or a working free market without informed consumers. Education is also critical for a country to be competitive in the global market, and for progressing science and technology as rapidly as possible.
• Teenagers must be taught how various contraceptives work and how to use them, what STDs are and how to avoid them, how the human reproductive system works and that they should never feel obliged to have sex with anyone that they don't want to have sex with. Parents should not get to opt their children out of this, but are welcome to tell children that abstinence is best outside of school.
• Certain other life skills like how to do household budgeting and how to raise children should also be taught in school.

Healthcare

• There is a big problem with ever having someone that is uninsured - if they become ill while uninsured, they can't get insurance "because you don't insure a house that's on fire". Nobody should ever get bankrupted as a result of illness or injury. To fix this, ensure everyone has free-at-point-of-use access to a basic level of healthcare including preventative care and life-saving care.
• Keep abortion legal up to a certain gestational point as it is today, but do what we can to make it as rare as possible. Provide free contraception. Provide more help for mothers who choose not to abort. Promote adoption as an alternative, including removing roadblocks preventing gay couples adopting. These things will reduce abortion more than banning it.
• Ban circumcising children. This might be rather controversial, especially in the US but there is no medical reason for it. People might object on religious grounds, but we don't allow mutilation of girls for religious reasons - why should boys be any different? Adults can still be circumcised if they want to be.

Homeland Security & Immigration

• Get rid of US-VISIT. Expand the visa waiver program. Stop mandating RFIDs in passports. Be more welcoming to tourists.
• Make it quicker and easier for people to become permanent residents and citizens.
• Scrap security theater in favor of actual security. Affirm the right of people to take photographs in public places (even of police officers, infrastructure and government buildings).
• Scrap the no fly list - it's racist and ineffective. If anyone on it is actually too dangerous to be let onto an aeroplane, prosecute them.
• Shut down Guantanamo Bay.

Justice & crime

• Repeal the death penalty - it has no place in a civilized society.
• Start a program to allow early parole of some prisoners into the military for rehabilitation purposes.
• Nationalize the prisons - they never should have been privatized in the first place.
• Get rid of the PATRIOT act. No searches, taps or seizures without a warrant.
• Any seized property that is legal to possess must be returned within a week (enough time to copy the hard disks of seized computers).
• Investigate unconstitutional restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly (e.g. at the GOP convention in 2008). Put safeguards in place to stop such abuses happening again.
• Make it easier to impeach government officials for condoning torture or suspension of Habeas Corpus.
• Many injustices seem to be caused by pleading guilty in exchange for a reduced sentence. This practice should be prohibited - the purpose of the court system is to find the truth, not to make it easy for prosecutors to find somebody to blame.
• I don't think it's practical to ban guns in the US, but close loopholes allowing people to obtain guns without licences and background checks. Investigate introducing technologies that prevent guns from being fired by people other than their legal owners, and eventually phase out guns that don't have such a mechanism.
• Decouple police funding from traffic fines so that speeding tickets etc. are handed out to improve safety rather than raise money.

Religion & culture

• Repeal the tax exemption for religious entities. If churches want to do charitable work they can fork off a charitable arm which must not promote religious beliefs, and donate money to these organizations tax-free as corporations can do.
• Allow creationism/intelligent design to be taught in schools but not in science lessons - schools should have religious education lessons which teach what people believe, why they believe it, what they practice etc. This should include a discussion about what creationism/ID is and why it exists.
• Provide help for people who want to leave a church or cult but who fear retribution.
• The Archbishop of Canterbury was involved in some controversy a while back for saying something to the effect that aspects of Sharia law in the UK were unavoidable. If you read what he says, it's actually quite sensible - if Muslims (or any other group) wish to have their own courts for dispute resolution they should be welcome to do so (but can fall back to the state courts if they do not wish to abide by the private court's findings.)
• Ensure homosexuals have the same civil rights as heterosexuals. Don't care whether you call it civil unions vs marriages or marriages vs church marriages or get rid of all marriage-based civil rights altogether - that's just semantics. But make it fair. Churches should not be forced to perform or recognize any unions they don't like (not that anybody is suggesting that they should as far as I can tell.

Tax & economics

• Tax as little as possible, but recognize that some taxation is necessary to ensure a decent standard of living for the most vulnerable members of society.
• Taxes should generally be fair, progressive and cheap to collect. Simplify the tax code. Allow everyone to file taxes online for free.
• Taxation policy can be used to encourage behavior that benefits society. Taxing luxuries (especially unhealthy ones like tobacco, alcohol and recreational drugs) is a good idea, as are tax breaks for entrepreneurial enterprises.
• Eliminate the deficit and put safeguards in place to prevent future deficits.
• Most things can be handled by the market with some regulation to ensure the market is diverse and well-informed - the recent financial crisis was caused by deregulation.
• Companies that get "too big to fail" should be broken up into smaller companies before they fail rather than get bailed out at taxpayer expense when they inevitably do.
• Unsecured loans are a bad idea - discourage them by making bankruptcy easier. Ultimately it would be great if this would lead to the demise of the credit reporting agencies.
• Overhaul zoning laws to make it easier for people to run businesses from their homes and to make cities more livable/walkable by mixing commercial/residential areas more.

Science, technology & the environment

• Progress is good. Promote cheap bandwidth.
• Much research can be done in the private sector, but there is a place for government funding research whose payoff is too small financially or too far off in the future for the private sector to be concerned about it.
• Environments are good. We should have one. Sign the Kyoto protocol. Amory Lovins has some good ideas about how to reduce and ultimately eliminate use of fossil fuels.
• Public transport is good. So is investment in infrastructure.

Unemployment & poverty

• Provide training and job-seeking help for the employed in return for unemployment benefits. Help families escape the cycle of poverty by giving them the resources they need to raise children to become successful and productive adults.

Voting & politics

• Everyone over the age of majority should be allowed to vote, even prison inmates. Disenfranchising people is wrong.
• Only a vote on a paper ballot is a true vote (though machines can be used to fill out the ballots and generate exit polls). Wanting the results on election day is not a good excuse for making voting easy to tamper with.
• Severly limit campaign spending and lobbyist influence. Reduce the amount of money in politics.
• Switch to approval voting or similar to improve the diversity of views in government beyond the two party system.

It bothers me a bit when people say they have no interest in politics. Almost everyone has some things that they are passionate about, and most of those things can be helped by the right government policies or hindered by the wrong ones. Everyone who has the right to vote should exercise it to help shape the world into the place they most want it to be.

But I don't think that everyone should just get out and vote for some random candidate, or vote based on (for example) which candidate you'd most like to have dinner with - that's as bad as (if not worse than) not voting at all. Ideally you should have an informed opinion on every issue. If there is an issue on your ballot that you don't know or genuinely don't care about, don't vote on that issue.

I am guilty of not following my own advice here by not maintaining my right to vote in UK elections (my excuse is that it's an annoying amount of paperwork which has to be done every year, and I'm ill-informed about UK politics these days anyway).

When I was looking for something my parents would often quip "it'll be in the last place you look". Brilliant. And not at all helpful. In order to prove them wrong, I now make a habit of looking in some more places after I've found something that I was looking for. This isn't as pointless as it sounds - sometimes I find things I wasn't looking for.