Hopefully Interesting

So, for a long time I didn't really get H.P.Lovecraft , the author of a bunch of books and short stories set in a mythos  that has been used by many authors since.  Even if you've never read anything by him, I hope you've at least heard the name  Cthulhu  at some point.  The problem is that the sense of cosmic dread that he sought to convey in his works didn't really work with me.  I've grown up knowing of the vast voids between the stars.  I've always, for as long as I've known about history, known that history began long before mankind was around and that the time between the first campfire and the present day is just a small slice of all the time that came before.  All this familiarity means that I can't really appreciate his works the way that maybe people at the time could, familiarity breeds contempt. The first time I really got a taste of real cosmic dread was when I ran into the concept of Boltzman brain's .  To explain it simply, i...

Way back in 2011 I wrote a  fairly optomistic blog post  about the prospects of resistive RAM (RRAM), a new storage technology that could end up replacing both the RAM and main hard drives in computers.  Well, things haven't progressed as fast since then as I might have hoped they would, but there has been one interesting development lately.  Apparently HP (who owns most of the patents for the most promising take on RRAM) has been poring a huge amount of resources into building a machine to take advantage of it, as well as exploring a few other interesting technologies. The news reports I've seen have tended to exaggerate how radical this is a bit, and it's also been an interesting illustration of Paul Graham's  essay  on how corporate PR works.  But it looks like HP is doing serious systems level research into how new technologies can change computing.  As far as I can tell there hasn't been a lot of work done by people looking at changing bot...

I was talking with someone a while ago about political anarchy, the idea of people living without any government.  There are certainly anarchists around, though my sense is that the heyday of political Anarchism was in the late 19th and early 20th century, being just as much a specter as Communism in the US's  First Red Scare .  Societies without government aren't anything we expect to see anywhere in the developed world or in recent history, possibly barring Somalia, but over the course of human history it might very well be the case that societies we'd call anarchic outnumber societies with a government. A government is basically an organization that can force you to do things through the threat of violence.  This is practical with settled farmers, but it's a much more difficult thing to implement in a  Band Society  of hunter gatherers.  If you and your friends don't like what you're told to do, you can just go off and hunt elsewhere.  And if...

In decision theory there's a thought experiment called  Newcomb's Problem  or Newcomb's Paradox that goes something like this.  Some entity with very good judgement is offering a deal.  It has two boxes, and you are free to take both or either.  One box is transparent, and you can see that it contains $1,000.  The other box can't be seen into, and the entity might or might not have put $1,000,000 into that box. It's figured out what you are going to do and as put the million dollars in the box only if you are going to take the opaque box of unknown value and leave the transparent thousand dollar box alone. So, since we are assuming the entity's judgement is perfect one of two things is going to happen.  You might grab both boxes and find the second one is empty, receiving $1,000.  Or you might just grab the one mystery box and get $1,000,000. But the reason that people call this a paradox is that at the moment you make your choice the contents...

I don't really follow foreign policy as much as I could.  I mean, I think I know more about the larger world than most people and a fair amount about economics and the military, but I know that I don't really understand international diplomacy.  Thankfully there are people I know who are much better at this than I am. When looking at the Ukraine situation, amateur that I am, my inclination was to view the matter exclusively as a contest involving the leaderships of the Ukraine, Russia, and the US.  But there are other countries nearby that might have both opinions and capabilities to express those opinions, and as Erik Fogg points out that NATO's eastern members are very interested in the matter and have their own capabilities to intervene and potentially drag the rest of NATO in.  Which presumably plays into the calculations being made in Kiev and Moscow and Washington.

Enough public policy, time for more shiny technology.  For a while now I've been following some presentations Ivan Goddard has been putting on a series of lectures for this group called Out Of The Box Computing which has some seriously ambitious plans to totally re-think how computers work.  I'm afraid those videos (and the rest of this post) are going to get a bit technical, so fair warning. It's sort of interesting to see how little the base abstractions governing how we interact with computers have changed over the last 50 years.  Back then instructions executed one by one, taking however many clock cycles they took before the processor passed on to the next instruction.  First people pipelined computers so that though instructions were only started one at a time you could start a new instruction before a previous instruction had finished.  Then people created computers that could issue more than one instruction with each cycle of the clock.  Finall...

This is the result of a comment I left on Hacker News a while ago, which I thought might be worth expanding into a blog post.  We all know about the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant , and probably heard about all the many things that have gone wrong there.  I've often seen people use Fukushima as an example of why nuclear power is too dangerous for us to use, and that we have to move to other methods of generating electricity.  Some people have claimed that Germany is replacing their nuclear power generation with Coal after Fukushima, while others says that that's wrong and Germany is merely replacing Nuclear with renewables when it would otherwise have replaced coal with the growth in it's use of coal being merely incidental. But at the same time, how things get talked about by the media is often a poor guide to how dangerous things really are in practice.  So bad was the Fukushima disaster, really?  The Tsunami that hit Japan was a humongous disas...