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The Most Awesome Thing Ever
Posted in Personal Miscellany
on January 29th, 2010 by
Stephen DeGrace
YESSSSS! Hahahahaha! Take that, you PETA bastards!
Man In Space: The New Great Power Test
Posted in Unfounded Speculation
on January 28th, 2010 by
Stephen DeGrace
According to the CBC, India plans to send a man into space by 2016. It seems like manned space travel is a new symbol distingushing who is a Great Power, or destined to become one - and who isn't.
Name for the Past Decade
Posted in Unfounded Speculation
on January 13th, 2010 by
Stephen DeGrace
We have developed a cultural habit of chopping up time into decades and referring to general trends and events, such as music, fashion and changing social and political beliefs, by decades or parts of decades. How valid this particular device is is a whole separate question, but it's a deeply ingrained habit for practically everyone and it is virtually certain that we will continue to do it. So what are we going to call the decade we have just left behind (by most common measures - according to pedants, the new decade doesn't start until next year, but the pedants enjoy only very weak cultural influence). In this post, I make my guess 
.
Human Evolution Today
Posted in Unfounded Speculation
on December 29th, 2009 by
Stephen DeGrace
Topics:
Crystal Ball
There are those who claim that all human evolution is in the past, and that today, human beings exist outside the forces of evolution. Another viewpoint envisions evolution as a striving, creative force and human beings evolving to possess a god-like level of intelligence. My position is that both of these views are utter nonsense. A simple appeal to first principles can show that we must be evolving, but that there is no grounds to believe that the results of present-day human evolution is anything like what rational people would consider "improvement."
Finding A Way Through
Posted in Unfounded Speculation
on December 29th, 2009 by
Stephen DeGrace
Topics:
Crystal Ball
There is simply no way to avoid a massive human die-off in the coming century without maintaining a high-energy technological civilization. In the long run, of course, human survival with any semblance of a decent standard of living depends on there being a lot less humans. Nine billion human beings is simply too great a strain on the earth's carrying capacity for us to get away with it for very long (and that's making the possibly unfounded assumption that we can get away with it at all). But we would like to get to a sustainable place the painless way, by having less babies and waiting for the old folks to die off on their own. Since that is likely a tall order, we need to be thinking very seriously about how we're going to manage the relatively short term of the next fifty or a hundred years or so.
Hundred Year Survival
Posted in Unfounded Speculation
on December 24th, 2009 by
Stephen DeGrace
Topics:
Crystal Ball
If our civilization makes it to Christmas, 2109 in basically one piece, it will be a true miracle. Between here and there we have to get through food supplies which are flattening out while the world population is projected to continue to grow to nine billion people before declining, and on top of that, dangerous political instability caused by climate change in an environment of food scarcity, peak oil, and Great Power reorganization. The path to survival requires effective supernational institutions and active government involvement, loathed by the right, and robust free markets and heavy investment in science and technology (with nuclear firmly on the table and interference with the climate seriously under consideration), loathed by the left.
Technological Progress
Posted in Unfounded Speculation
on December 20th, 2009 by
Stephen DeGrace
Topics:
Crystal Ball
One's view of scientific and technological progress depends on the time in which one lives. In the ancient world, progress plainly occurred, but the way in which a person lived in general tended to differ very little from the way their grandparents lived or the way their grandchildren would end up living, so the state of human knowledge and skill must have seemed very static. As we progressed towards the end of the second millennium, the advance of science and technology was obvious and changing lives in real time, and people conceived progress as a linear process. Finally, as science and technology exploded in the 20th century, people could actually see the rate of progress itself increase in real time, and progress was conceived of by many science fiction authors as an exponential process leading to God-like and unimaginable powers for those who command it.
Global Warming, Oil, and American Supremacy
Posted in Unfounded Speculation
on December 15th, 2009 by
Stephen DeGrace
Topics:
Crystal Ball
I recently read a couple of very interesting books. Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization by Jeff Rubin (blog) is about our rapidly diminishing capacity to keep up with demand for oil and its consequences for the world economy. The other, Climate Wars by Gwynne Dyer, is a frank and realistic assessment of the global strategic challenges posed by global warming. The topics of these books are heavily interrelated, but each has its particular concentration. I believe that a synthesis of the arguments presented by these authors leads to some interesting and disturbing conclusions about our future.
reCAPTCHA Works Really Well
Posted in Tech
on December 12th, 2009 by
Stephen DeGrace
Just a quick note... recently I installed AWStats via Webfaction (which by the way is really awesome hosting, especially for Python) for my infiniterecursion.ca domain. One interesting observation coming from this (aside from the fact that the majority of my visitors use Firefox, and I seem to have a surprising number of visitors using Macs), is that the top page viewed on my site is the guestbook, and the top visitor is an IP registered in Russia. The second most popular hit, with over 350 hits in less than a week, is the URL to post a comment.
Refactoring Infinite with Link Trees
Posted in Django
on November 30th, 2009 by
Stephen DeGrace
There are three new goals I have in terms of where I'm going with this Infinite application (the suite of Django applications that runs this site). One is simple - to add an app for linking to eclectic outside sites, including for use as a blogroll. Another is to create a graphical tree app as an extension of the Django admin which simplifies the process of building menus and adding local content. Going along with that is a way for applications to conveniently list off what links they have available in such a way as to easily interface with the graphical menu tree app. Finally, I want to leverage the capabilities developed to list content for the menu tree to build an extension to TinyMCE to easily link to local content while blogging.