dan posts a nice point about radio stations giving gifts on 9/11. namely that if WTC was a symbol of capitalism, we shouldn't give stuff away in its memory.

UPDATE: Gil commented on Dan's blog that giving stuff away is promotion and *makes money* or they wouldn't be doing it. He's right.

So my friend and I go to the park a bit after midnight and play frisbee for a bit, but it's kinda too dark, so we get tired of it. But then some cops come and shine a really bright light on us (the park was closed, but the gate was open, so *shrug*). So my friend is like, "Hey, we have light now, lets play frisbee more!" I think that's one of the most brilliant ideas I've ever heard. So we did play more frisbee....for about 30 seconds. Then the cops used a loudspeaker to tell us to leave. So then we start leaving, and the cops drive over to us and want to ask us for ID and stuff. Then one asks why we started playing frisbee in the light. So we told them because we could see the frisbee! Then they looked at us funny. Cops are amusing.

ok so me and toad would go to the park to play frisbee. and come from a certain side, cause that's where the water fountain is. and man, water rocks when you just biked a few miles and ur about to play frisbee, and you know the bottles of water you carried will run out and you'll have to make trips back to the water fountain, and yeah....

ok, but anyway, when ur both hella thirsty, it takes a while to drink enough water. and also, it's good to like drink a bunch, wait a few seconds, and drink more. so what you do is one person drinks some, then takes a break, and you take multiple turns on one visit. ok, still so far, so good.

now, one day we made a discovery. there's *two* water fountains! joy of joys! when we arrive there's like a closer one. now we can drink water sooner! w00t!

but not only that, we do it like this: first person drinks from first water fountain while other waits. then bikes to the second water fountain while second person drinks from first fountain. then second person follows and arrives at the second fountain as the first person is finishing up there. and, boom, less waiting, more drinking, and some waiting becomes biking to the next fountain, which is like on the way. w00t! we're all efficient.

but the thing is. say i wasn't with toad. someone else. pretty much anyone else. if they're fairly good, we'll probably alternate drinking in a single visit instead of just waiting for the other to completely finish. but if i tried to bike off to the second fountain? they'd be like "hey, why are you ditching me?" and I'd be like "d00d, I'm going to the other fountain" and they'd be like "Why? There's water right here!" and I'd be like "umm, yeah, but you're using it" and they'd be like "umm, so are you coming back after? isn't that kinda far to go? just wait!" and I'd be like "no, look, you follow me after you're done drinking here, and it's more efficient" and they'll be like "umm, this is sure a lot of work for such a tiny improvement. almost seems *inefficient* to me!" and I'll just get bored and wander off to the next fountain, and yeah......

ok, so why does it matter that the organisational costs would be way higher with most people? and why does it matter that most people would resist such a small improvement? isn't it negligible?

Well, the thing is, the way we improve stuff is piecemeal. Bit by bit. We don't improve our lives by making one giant step forward every couple months. No no. We inch forward day by day. It's small, gradual improvement over time that gets somewhere. Improvement is not negligible. It's improvement. It's better. resisting small improvements is exactly the wrong thing to do.

and there's more. having a worldview where the cost of implementing a small improvement is high, is a very very bad thing. having one where the cost is small, is a very very good thing. if someone says "eh, we shouldn't bother with that, cause it's too much work for the benefit," even if they're right, well why's it so damn much work to *improve* things? only cause people have perverse WVs in the first place!

IMAO is back and posting again. Including this gem of an In My World entry.

I heard about this philosophy called Dynamic Living. It sure sounds better than not moving...

Part of it is supposed to be about balancing the different parts of your life. I figure to work towards that, I'll try to watch anime as much as I sleep.

This new security system called Watchdog is super sweet. it says dogs have 50,000 times better smelling and 20,000 times better hearing than people, and better night vision, and so they're pretty good at noticing intruders and stuff. and it uses some computer algorithm to moniter dogs for security purposes. coolness.

i thought i should post. then i wondered what. i thought maybe a rant would be good. i haven't really been reading enough blogs lately to post about those. a rant about what? well, prolly whatever pisses me off a lot would work well. so lessee how this goes.

the idea that sex should be taboo for young people pisses me off. there's just no god damn reason young people cannot or should not learn about sex. in fact, there's the opposite: lots of good reasons they should. sex is important to our culture, so everyone will want to learn a fair bit about it, and many people will want extensive knowledge. why try to make people wait years and years and years to start learning? it's stupid. and the result is people do learn younger, but get embarrassed about it, and learn from worse sources than they might otherwise. like, my god, i hear some girls really think you can't get pregnant your first time. and many people worry masturbation is unhealthy or immoral. *sigh*

the anti-cussing taboos are annoying too. i don't see what the big fucking deal is. curse words are just words. sheesh.

anti-racists piss me off too. i just don't care about race. fuck it. whatever. they, on the other hand, paint all sorts of stuff on racial lines. isn't that racism? sure seems like it to me. god, some of them are so "anti"-racist they ban white people from their seminars. no joke. or, my god, support affirmative action (which means, however you slice it, discriminating college admissions on the basis of race).

there's a cool southpark ep where the southpark flag is 4 white ppl hanging a nigger (*ahem* black d00d). (btw did u notice the black guy on the show is named Token? he's such a token effort at racial balance that it's funny) anyway, the anti-racists wanna change the flag. and some ppl say the flag is tradition. the kids have to debate the issue. stan and kyle take the side of keeping it the same and get called racists a lot. anyway, they give their debate speech, and it goes something like "killing has been around forever. it's natural. animals kill each other all the time. we don't see what the big deal is with depicting killing on the flag." and the anti-racists are like "but it's white people killing a black guy" and the kids are like "OHHHHHH!". they never noticed. i hate anti-racists :) btw in the ep they fixed the flag by making it a white guy, and black guy, a yellow guy, and a red (mebbe, not sure) guy hanging a black guy. heh heh

speaking of animals, they're really ridiculous. they don't even speak English. what kind of dipshit can't speak english? heheh

umm, good enuf, i spose. *wanders off*

oh wait, i thought of something, i thought of something! yay me!

at low-precision the NAP and non-coercion are not misleading. they are right-leading. it's generally a good idea not to attack people outside self defense, and generally not a good idea to coerce your children. duh. they hold at low precision easy.

what about at high precision? well, at high precision I think they're true (well non-coercion moreso, the NAP has to be reworded and stuff). high precision defense of the truth of the statements, involves various points that one might think misleading, and involves so many catches and subtle little stuff, that one might wonder how they can be useful things to say. well, i deny that misleading is a meanful criticism at high-precision. i think at high precision the claim "how can the truth be misleading?" holds. am not purporting to be saying more than the truth; am not purporting to lead ya anywhere.

btw it's possible to use truisms misleadingly, if you answer a question with a truism about one side of the issue and scorn the other. but that misleadingness is not inherent in the truism.

everyone organises their room. just some people use different organisational schemes. it's a travesty that one particular type of scheme (empty floor, stuff in rows where it's nice to look at and hard to use, not much dust, etc) has a monopoly on being called organised or orderly. esp when it's not even all that great a setup. it's pretty impractical.

on the flipside of the coin, a lot of children could have better-organised rooms, and would enjoy it that way. but the solution isn't to go in there and move stuff around (mess it up even more), it's to not instill cleaning hangups in your kids.

In armies, it used to be that almost the entire army was fighters, with only a few support people like dedicated cooks, squires, medics, hunters or whores. Soldiers could cook and hunt themselves, and there barely were any medics. And only a few people got squires. I suppose horse troops got some servants to take care of horses and stuff, and leaders got some, but the vast majority of footmen had like no support. Oh I forgot supply lines, which are support. But still a small number of people compared to the army.

Over the years, this has changed. A smaller and smaller proportion of armies does the fighting, and a larger and larger proportion does support work. Now we have supply lines, medics, coordinator people in headquarters with radios (or maybe satellite communicators or whatever), trainers (used to be the trainers were all fighters too), advisors, mechanics, translators, etc etc etc

Anyway, the point is combat troops down, support troops up, and this makes the combat troops way more effective, makes them take lower casualty rates, and works better.

OK, this morning I was lying in bed, thinking about stuff, fairly randomly, and it occurred to me that I have a relatively (very) high amount of time into structure, support, and organisational stuff of my WV, and (relatively) low amount into doing actual content. And I believe this is a really, really good thing.

A few random examples, besides time relaxing/thinking, are that I've spent way more time reading war3 strategy and watching replays than playing the game. Spent more time reading Magic strategy than playing magic. spend very high amounts of time planning how to make my character/party in computer games. and if the game is dull, i'll quit and not consider it time wasted. I even start over if I mess up, often, to get it right. not because I think I can't win with an imperfect party (most games are designed so someone not very good can win eventually, and someone really good could win with a large handicap). but because it's important to test my conjectures of what the right party is by actually using it. and it's boring to play with a refuted party. (though if you get too far, re-doing stuff too often is boring, so it can be better to press on, for the sake of seeing the later parts of the game, which can be cool).

another example is i'll often spend a bunch of time deciding what to do, instead of doing something. other people might say, "you have three good-enough ideas, roll some dice and do one". and if I took their approach, a while later I'd have done something ok, or maybe even the right thing for a while. my way, what'll I have to show for my time? well, I'll have learned about how to decided what to do, and every time in the future i'll be better able to decide. there's less point doing an activity before you have a conjecture about which to do to test. and the activity will be richer when it has the two-fold meaning of the activity, and of testing the conjecture about what to do.