World Engineer

Capitalism

2010-10-03T22:05:00.000+08:00

The thought struck me that today, we have gone back to feudalism and looking around, found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_capitalism#Enclosures_and_the_transition_from_feudalism

I don't think we have transitioned from feudalism at all. Instead of pandering to the nobles, it's pandering to "business interests". Business interests has always been the occupation of nobility. We've just switched castles and fiefdoms and serfs with corporations and markets and consumers. The method of enforcement switched from the knights to intellectual property.

How did we ever fall for "trickle down theory"? Trickle down was always how feudalism worked. Now we've somehow convinced ourselves that all the rights we wrestled from the nobility is detrimental to us. That we should keep the new nobility happy in order for economic wealth to trickle back down to us?

Read this, or else

2010-07-21T22:04:00.000+08:00

http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/index.html

Whales are fish

2010-07-17T09:02:00.002+08:00

It's true. And so are we.

Whales evolved from land mammals related to cows and such. All mammals (eg, us) evolved from mammal-like reptiles. Which in turn evolved from reptiles. We're all tetrapods and tetrapods evolved from lobe-finned fish.

So next time you are corrected when you say whales are fish, tell them this and they won't feel so smug :)

Speaking of lobe-finned fish - they're awesome. Forget finding the "missing link"*. We have living examples of fish which have adaptations for living on land. And they are obviously fish, but they are also obviously able to move about on land. Some even have lungs. How the creationists can ignore that not only is it possible, but completely factual that we have fish today straddling the line between fish and land animal, is beyond me.**

* Which has been found many times over, by the way.
** Actually, it's not, as intellectual honesty is never a creationist strong point.

Requirements Gathering - Part 1

2010-07-14T21:32:00.005+08:00

Okay, so enough bull shitting. Time to stop procrastination. Less talk more walk. Knuckle down.

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The first step in the waterfall model of development is requirements gathering. Of course, the waterfall development model is like this big, bureaucratic model of government, whereas Agile is like the libertarian model of government where everything takes care of itself if you just let it. You have to let the pig run wild and free so that it may fly.

Okay, that maybe a long shot.

Maybe the first step of any development model is to choose how you're actually going to develop something. It's almost like a meta-step. Deciding your development model before you understand you and your team's capabilities and the kind of project is like a President telling an army to fight two completely different wars before figuring out that they're separate enemies who'd probably have antagonized each other more if they didn't have a common enemy to deal with.

So, let's try to tease out our development model by some kind of socratic method -

Q: What is the project?
A: To save the world

Q: What is the world made of?
A: People, animals, plants, natural resources, ecologies, societies and other memetic lifeforms

Q: What is the current system?
A: [This one's a long one]

Humans are at the top of most chains - food, resource, space
Humans depend more on the environment than the environment depends on us
Living things need to eat, breathe, drink, move, hide, rest, reproduce
Humans mainly live in groups - some small, some large, and interconnected by long distance communication
We have a mixture of systems that have different ranges of freedoms

Q: What are the current limitations of the system?
A:

We are running out of resources
There is inertia against change and change is exponential
There's, at the same time, both too much and too little information about the system
There are conflicting goals - want more and to save, want transparency and privacy, want freedom and security, want efficiency but consensus, we want comfort and children

The next part is to make sense of all this and see a path through this. That way, we'll develop the methodology requirements an effort to save to world must meet.

TV show idea

2010-07-14T21:00:00.002+08:00

I have a brilliant idea for a TV drama. It's going to be highly original and... dramatic.

I call it:

"Quirky guy solves all problems with quirkiness and quirky abilities".

It's going to take place in a hospital. It's highly original - because it's in a different hospital. House that different from other hospital dramas? Well, the guy is quirky. And not your average misanthropic quirky. It's a DIFFERENT kind of quirky. Because not only does he not like anthrops, he also dislikes LAMP SHADES.

Oh yes. Now all I need to do is sit back and wait for offers from the TV stations.

Tracking my downfall

2010-07-13T21:11:00.002+08:00

Don't know exactly where I'll go with this. Ostensibly, this blog is about applying my understanding of Software Engineering, and the amalgam of engineering and science and philosophy in general to fix the world. In reality, this is no more than a glorified note taker.

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I recently had a crack at writing dictionary definitions in the style of the Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce:

"WAR, n. A sickness of the bald eagle caused by an irritation of the right wing."

An extended version:

"WAR, n. A sickness of the bald eagle caused by an irritation of the right wing. Symptoms include a temporary inflammation of the economy followed by tight clenching of its claws, rendering it incapable of catching even the smallest of fish, resulting in its starvation "

Also these:

"VALUES, n. A declaration that children are the most importance resource of the nation. And like that other important resource, requires preparation in a sealed chamber under extremely high pressure. At the end of that process, it is mined by drilling a hole, extracting the pure, burning the dross, and letting the waste seep into the environment"

"AMERICA, n. The shining beacon of freedom. A star flaring so bright, outshining those in its galaxy, in much the same way a supernova does."

"GOVERNMENT, n. In its modern form, a sacrificial animal in the religion of liberty. A black cat on the path to freedom, liable to spook a nation more than the leopard running towards it."

"FREEDOM, n. Finders keepers, losers weepers."

And one for the road:

"ECONOMICS, n. An agricultural science dating back the the farmers of ancient China with which it was found crops can be made to grow faster by pulling them an inch upwards everyday. The modern form has improved by allowing farmers to move to other farms to spread their technique, preferably before the crop fails."