So yesterday I was…
Oh, no, wait, that wasn’t me, it was my World of Warcraft character. Never mind.
Random Update
14
Author Archives: tacit
In which Franklin learns what it is to be overwhelmed
“Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.”
–Henry Miller
This post is likely to seem a bit disjointed and chaotic. (And long; deal with it!) This is as it should be; life these days has been a bit disjointed and chaotic. This is not necessarily a bad thing, mind; normally, I thrive on chaos. But every now and then, it’s kinda nice to have a break, y’know?
My mother has this saying that she used to use to irritate me with. Any time I complained about any element of my life, she’d look at me and say “It’s a consequence of your chosen lifestyle.”
She’s right, too.
On the nature of work
The company I work with (and I’m a minority partner in) has been, for lack of a better phrase, on the verge for many years now. The company makes a hand-held storm and lightning detector and tracker; it’s actually a pretty slick little gadget, which can detect lightning storms from about 75 miles away by the extremely characteristic EMP profile produced by cloud-to-ground lightning, and by virtue of a great deal of mathematical wizardry involving fast Fourier transformations and other big words, calculate the distance, speed and direction of travel, and ETA of the storm. It then tracks the storm right to the device.
The company has been desperately underfunded and desperately short of cash for the entire time I’ve worked with them; in fact, for about a year they couldn’t pay me regularly at all. They recently got some venture capital (not enough) and relocated to Atlanta, where they’ve been paying me more or less regularly a quantity that’s more or less sufficient to keep a roof overhead and food on the table.
Recently, they’ve encountered a problem that many startups face without being aware that it’s a problem: they’ve suddenly become too successful. We’re now selling gizmos faster than we can build them, in part because of a significant change in marketing strategy. In the past, these gizmos have sold to military, government, and commercial users; after all, these are the people likely to be left with their ass on the line in a sudden thunderstorm. You don’t want to be climbing telephone poles or cell phone towers with a storm on the way.
But now the gizmo has been picked up by retail resellers–something that we never thought would be significant, because focusing on home consumers never really seemed like much of a business opportunity.
And it’s going bonkers. We’re signing deals with retail chains left and right. Hammacher Schlemmer just bought an entire production run. And this is a problem, because producing more gizmos on very short notice is very expensive, and the fact that we’re selling these things so fast doesn’t mean we’re making money as fast; we don’t see the cash for 30, 60, or even 90 days. But we still gotta pay to build ’em up front.
Interesting times indeed.
On the nature of opportunity
When opportunity knocks, it’s always at the most inopportune of times.
For months, I’ve been working on a major revision to my sex game Onyx, which has been going quite slowly for a number of reasons, not the least of which are that this isn’t my day job, the new revision involves a total rewrite of very large sections of code, and the beta testers keep pointing out playability issues which I believe are valid.
Concurrently with this, I’ve also been working on an enormous revision to the Symtoys itself, which will see it become roughly ten times the size it is now and will also sport an entirely new look, as the current site is, to be blunt, appallingly ugly. The new site will have all kinds of kinky sex how-tos, tutorials on everything from rope bondage to improvised sex toys, and even a sex toy store.
Last week, I got an email from the editors of Playgirl magazine. They have a “do it yourself” how-to column, apparently, and in October they want to feature the Symtoys Web site in the column. Which is good, but the timing sucks, since I’m still depressingly far from having the site revision completed. Or if not “completed,” at least in a state where it can be uploaded and made live.
And on top of that, an interested party has offered me an advance on the book on polyamory I’ve been working on (but mostly not working on) for a while now. I really want to finish this book, and now I have a strong incentive to move it to the top of the List Of Things To Do.
I have a pile of proposed changes to the outline suggested by the editor I’d been working with; I need to dust off the files, make the changes, and get back into that again.
On automobile license tags
I’ve finally got ’round to doing things like registering my car in Georgia and stuff. I got some personalized license tags, for the first time ever:
The tag reads “H PLUS,” which only a small number of transhumanists is likely to get. It’s okay, though; the people who do get it are cool. 🙂
I love my little car…
On Links and Stuff
slouchinphysics, you’ll appreciate this one; it relates to the conversation we had last weekend about China surpassing the US as a center for research and technology. It’s an excerpt from a paper published in the 60s about particle physics in China, the prequel to which is a great example of what happens when science and political doctrine collide. But lest we think that the same sort of nonsense doesn’t happen over here: the Creationsits, unable to get their bullshit rubbish published in respected peer-reviewed journals, are trying to create a ‘peer reviewed’ journal of their own. (Props to 6-bleen-7 for the links.)
phoenixgeisha has proposed a challenge: create a CD of songs which, when heard by another listener, give the listener a sense of who you are as a person. I think this sounds like great fun.
Some other folks have created a programming language based on lolcats. Here’s Hello World written in lolcode:
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE “HAI WORLD!”
KTHXBYEAnd finally, satellite view of contrail clutter left by passenger airline flights. This is an amazing picture.
On cats
Shelly was up over the weekend, and took the kitty Molly with her when she returned to Florida. Now figment_j‘s kitty liam is all I have left.
Liam and Molly didn’t much get along (or rather, Liam was madly, frantically in love with Molly, and Molly didn’t care much for Liam–its a good thing cats don’t feel heartbreak as acutely as people!), so the relocation of Molly was necessary.
I like having Liam. He reminds me of figment_j. The fact that all my relationships are long-distance now sux0rz.
Visions of Chicago
Last month, dayo flew me out to Chicago for about five days. I didn’t take as many pictures as I’d planned to, because we were to busy having fun, but I did get a few, which I resent (edit: Present! Present!) for your viewing pleasure.
Chicago from the top of the ferris wheel at the pier on a particularly gorgeous day. The first day we’d planned to run around exploring the city turned out to be rainy and yucky, but subsequent days more than made up for it.
Nothing to see here, move along…
Annatar, The Black Hand, The Ring-maker, The Red Eye — Sauron went by many names over the generations of his dark and twisted rule. For thousands of years, he terrified the inhabitants of the land. His knowledge was vast, his ability to control was unmatched. Originally the servant of a greater evil, he took command when his master was banished from the world, never to return. He had an intimate knowledge of craftworks and various magics, which he employed to great effect to build one of the greatest, darkest of lairs in a region so twisted and corrupt, life itself simply gave up upon entering. He also went on to create what may possibly be the smallest, simplest of super weapons known, that granted him near complete control over the lands. The one crucial mistake he made, however, was to bind his very existence to that super weapon, and when it was destroyed in the very fires that created it, Sauron found his essence shattered and destroyed. Sauron is identified as being extremely evil, possessing incredibly high intelligence and great amounts of common sense. For all intents and purposes, Sauron is quite possibly the greatest of Overlords to have ever reigned. Quote:
Of old there was Sauron the Maia, whom the Sindar in Beleriand named Gorthaur. In the beginning of Arda Melkor seduced him to his allegiance, and he became the greatest and most trusted of the servants of the Enemy, and the most perilous, for he could assume many forms, and for long if he willed he could still appear noble and beautiful, so as to deceive all but the most wary. Source of Overlord: Lord of the RingsYour Score: Sauron
70% Evil, 90% Intelligence, 80% Common Sense
| Link: The Evil Overlord Test written by veqhturi on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test |
The truth, painful as it is to admit, is that I’m far too much of an optimist to make a proper evil overlord. While I can appreciate the value of post-apocalyptic nuclear devastation as much as the next guy, and God knows that I could scarcely do a worse job of ruling the world than those who’re doing it right now, I think at the end of the day I’m basically too happy to do it properly.
J.R.R. Tolkein, who invented the avatar of evil which this quiz says is closest to my own personal style, didn’t believe in divine punishment for evil after death. He felt, and with some cause, that evil is punished now. All the characters in his books who might reasonably be called “evil,” including Sauron himself, were miserable.
There’s a connection between unhappiness and evil. It’s not positive, happy people with plenty to live for who strap bombs to themselves or fly airplanes into buildings. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, which I’m too sleepy to dig out at the moment.
I iz back from Chicago
Actually, I iz back from Chicago two days ago, and playing merry hell at work trying to catch up.
Fun things in Chicago. dayo, sailing on a tall ship, Ferris wheels, kinky sex, three floors of dealers at IML(!), more kinky sex, and I missed all the drama drama of LiveJournal’s abuse team melting down.
More, including pictures and kinky sex, later. First, just a few quick notes:
1. Fair warning to anyone contemplating letting me near them with an implement of destruction in my hands: I am fucking surgical with a crop or a dragon’s tail. If I keep hitting the same spot again and again, it’s not an accident; it’s because I’m a great big meanie. dayo seems to think this is a feature, not a bug.
2. The LJ abuse debacle thing? It’s not a violation of your rights, or the rights of anyone else. Freedom of speech is irrelevant here. Six Apart is free to make any rules they want; their servers, their game. If they want to ban any journal that mentions wombats, nobody’s rights are being violated. You’re still free to talk about wombats somewhere else.
Yes, it’s ridiculous. Yes, LiveJournal and Six Apart got played by a white supremacist Christian Dominion group, which I will not mention by name (a) because they’ve had enough publicity–which was, after all, their goal–already and (b) because it appears their Web site is infected with a drive-by-downloading virus. (If you know what site I’m talking about and you’ve visited it using Internet Explorer for Windows, might want to check your system.) Yes, said Christian Dominionists gamed Six Apart but good, and it’s Six Apart who ended up with egg on face. No, it’s not the end of the world–just the natural and predictable result of living in a litigious and Puritanical society.
3. Red leather drop collar: $25.
Pyrex dildo: $180
Dragon’s tail: $15
Making your partner squirm and scream “Yes! Yes!” when you grab her by the hair and whisper “Are you a slut?” Priceless.4. Ferris wheels are cool.
5. Funnel cake is good. Funnel cake with strawberry topping is an orgy for the mouth. It’s like a choir of angels singing with the voice of Heaven, only on a plate. All right-thinking people know this.
6. Airport security? A joke, but nobody’s laughing.
I’ve decided on my first two body mods.
No, I don’t mean tattoos or piercings or anything like that; I already have those. I mean real body mods. Functional body mods.
icedrake pointed me to this link, which in turn points to a larger article here, about researchers who are creating new senses by piggybacking onto existing senses.
It’s neat stuff. For example, researchers have taken a camera, connected its output to a device that you wear on your tongue (which has a very large number of sensory nerves crowded very close together), which “draws” a “picture” of what the camera sees onto your tongue using subtle electrical currents. Now hold on to your hat, Dorothy, ’cause this is the part where Kansas goes bye-bye…not only does this allow people to navigate blindfolded, but afterward, their memories of the experience aren’t memories of feelings on their tongue, but visual memories. This suggests, though it has not yet been confirmed by fMRI scans, that the visual cortex of the brain quickly and seamlessly takes over processing the information being presented to the tongue. And that suggests that our brain’s ability to interpret data from new senses actually outstrips our sensory system, meaning that adding new senses to human beings should be a pretty straightforward matter.
I already know the first two I want.
First, I want tiny neodymium magnets surgically implanted in my fingertips so that I can feel magnetic fields. (This is no surprise; I’ve talked about this before.)
Next, I want a series of tiny holes drilled all the way around the edge of my hip bone. Why, you ask? Why, for the piezo transducers, of course! I want a row of tiny piezo transducers implanted all along the edge of my pelvic girdle, all the way around, connected to a device (which I figure can be tucked in beneath one of my kidneys) which can detect which way is magnetic north and vibrate the transducer that faces north. Tat way, I will always have an immediate, unerring, and flawless sense of direction.
Dammit, this stuff should be easy. In fact, I’m even willing to forego having the flying car I was promised in kindergarten if I can get this instead.
Temperature play in BDSM: How to Make an Ice Dildo
Note: This is part 4 of an occasional ongoing "how to" series on BDSM.
Part 1 of the series, How to Tie a Rope Harness Part I, is here.
Part 2 of the series, How to Tie a Frog Tie, is here.
Part 3 of the series, How to Tie a Shinju, is here.
As you might well imagine, none of these posts is even remotely work-safe.
One fun aspect of sensation play that can spice up your sex life is temperature play. Many people have experimented with using ice cubes on their lovers in bed, and I’ve met many women who really, really enjoy the sensation of cold. But there’s more you cn do than just take an ice cube out of the freezer and stroke a bare nipple with it! Presented here is something to take that basic idea to the next level: instructions for making a customized dildo out of ice.
Polyamory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma…
…or, how to quit worrying and love your partner’s other partners.
Right now, I’m about midway through reading the book How We Know what Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life, by Thomas Gilovich. As the title suggests, it’s essentially a catalog of the various cognitive traps, reasoning errors, and other fallibilities that lead to people to “knowing” things that aren’t true. (sarahmichigan, if you haven’t read this book yet, I suspect you’d quite like it.)
The book talks about a lot of reasoning problems that you might expect: confirmational bias, for example, and intuitive problems with randomness (the human brain is so highly optimized for seeking patterns that it’ll find patterns even in random data, and on top of that, random data do not necessarily “look” the way we expect them to, and in particular aren’t fractal in nature; it’s perfectly reasonable to flip a coin a bunch of times and see heads come up five or six times in a row…but I digress).
It also discusses people’s tendency to make evaluations based on missing or absent data; if, for example, you believe that people who have less than a certain GPA should not be admitted to college, because they would tend to do poorly, so you admit only people with a high GPA and you notice everyone doing well, you might be tempted to believe smugly that your decisions are good and your impulses correct, but you are missing the very data that would confirm or deny your hypothesis. because you refuse to let people with a low GPA in, you have no way to know if their performance would be poor or not.
And it discusses self-fulfilling prophesies, in the context of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
A quick recap for anyone who may be unfamiliar with the Prisoner’s Dilemma: a Prisoner’s Dilemma problem is any situation where two people can choose to cooperate with one another or to work against one another, such that if they both cooperate they both gain something, if they both defect they both lose something, but if one cooperates and one defects, the one who cooperates loses catastrophically and the one who defects gains tremendously.
It got its name from the way it was originally couched: Suppose you and a complete stranger, who you’ve never had any contact with before, get together to commit a crime. You are caught in the middle of committing the crime and whisked away by police to separate cells, with no opportunity to speak to one another. The police interrogate you separately, and tell you that each of you is being given the following choice: you can keep quiet, or you can testify against the other.
If you both keep quiet, there is only circumstantial evidence against you, and you’ll both likely be convicted of lesser charges and go to prison for two years each.
If you both testify against each other, each of you can expect a ten-year prison sentence.
If one of you keeps quiet and the other testifies, the person who keeps quiet will be imprisoned for twenty years, and the person who testifies will get off scott-free. What do you do?
The best possible outcome is for both of you to shut up. However, if you have any doubt whatsoever about your partner’s willingness to shut up, then you better testify, because if he testifies and you don’t, you’re in big trouble! Since he is using the same reasoning as you are, then if he doubts you, his best course of action is to testify. Since both of you can’t predict the action of the other, what will probably happen is that both of you will testify (and spend the next decade behind bars) rather than both keeping your mouth shut (in which case oyu’d both be freed in one-fifth the time).
Things change a bit if you play this game iteratively. Suppose that you have money and you wish to buy something from someone else, but because of the nature of what you want to buy (maybe it’s illegal, maybe selling it exposes the other person to risk), you can not simply hand him the money and have him hand you the goods. So you set up an arrangement: the two of you will never meet or speak, but every week at the same time you will leave a bag under the old stone bridge with money in it, and he will leave a bag behind the mill with the goods in it.
Again, you have a choice. You can leave the money or you can leave an empty bag. He can leave the goods, or he can leave an empty bag. If you leave and empty bag and he leaves the goods, bonanza! That week you got the goods for free. If you leave money and he leaves an empty bag, suck! You lose the money. If you both leave empty bags, well, you still have your money, but what you really wanted was the goods. And so on.
Knowing that you will be repeating this transaction every week changes the situation a bit. Do you always leave the money? Sometimes leave money and sometimes leave an empty bag?
Gilovich, who is a psychology researcher, has run Prisoner’s Dilemma problems on a large number of volunteers, and writes about the trends he’s noticed. People who naturally tend to be cooperative spot that tendency toward cooperation in others, especially during iterative Prisoner’s Dilemma problems, and quickly adopt an all-cooperation policy. Every week they leave the bag of money, every week the other player leaves the bag of goods, and everyone is happy.
On the other hand, people who tend to defect–to turn against the other player–will force cooperative players to start to defect themselves, out of self-preservation. If the other person leaves you an empty sack two weeks in a row, you’re likely to stop leaving money in your sack, simply because you no longer trust the other person. In other words, his actions have made you begin playing a defecting strategy, even though your desire was to play a cooperative strategy.
This is actually a post about polyamory. Hang on, I’m getting to that.
Gilovich writes that people who start off adopting defecting strategies tend to have a world view that says other people are basically bad, the world is basically an evil place, others are motivated by selfishness and greed, and people on the whole generally suck. This world view is then confirmed by the fact that all the partners they play the game with defect, and start leaving empty bags. In other words, he says, a Prisoner’s Dilemma strategy of defecting against the other player is rooted in a self-fulfilling prophesy. You go into the game believing that the other player will defect, so you start out by defecting, and then–surprise!–the other player starts to defect. Even if his impulse was to cooperate. Your actions created the situation you expected, and thus, your view that the world is a hostile place is confirmed.
The connection between a hostile Prisoner’s Dilemma strategy and self-fulfilling prophesies was new to me, and naturally, it instantly created a new connection between Prisoner’s Dilemma problems and polyamory in my head.
I tend to see a lot of people in poly relationships who are very uncomfortable with the idea of meeting a lover’s other lovers. This is among the single most common source of angst I’ve noticed for people who are polyamorous, especially if they’re fairly new to polyamory.
Meeting a lover’s other lover presents a host of opportunity for cooperation or defection. You can reach out to the other person and try to make that person feel welcome; you can be closed up and defensive to that person; you can even be actively hostile to that person. And, of course, your lover’s lover has similar choices.
Reaching out to someone makes you vulnerable. If two people both reach out to one another, then things will tend to go more smoothly; but if one person reaches out and the other is defensive or hostile, the consequences for the person who reaches out can be pretty dire. A strictly rationalistic approach might suggest that the best strategy is to be defensive, because if you’re defensive, you have nothing to gain but nothing to lose either, whereas if you reach out, you might gain something–but you might lose a great deal, as well.
And there’s no question that your expectations about the other person, and your behavior upon meeting that other person, can easily become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Suppose you start out, prior to the meeting, by believing that your partner’s new love is a conniving, self-centered bitch (or bastard), determined to undermine your relationship and to take your partner away from you. If you go into your first meeting with this belief, I guarantee it’s going to show. Your partner’s other partner is going to be able to tell that you don’t trust him (or her), that you’re looking for reasons to dislike him (or her). So that person is likely to behave defensively, even if the first impulse might otherwise have been to reach out to you. You look at the defensive reaction, and say “See, look! I told you this person was bad news!”
And that’s before we even get to the issue of confirmational bias, which is a whole ‘nother can of worms altogether.
So are we left, then, with the grim conclusion that the only rational way to meet a lover’s new lover is to be defensive, even knowing that this defensiveness is likely to trigger the very thing we believe we’re defending against?
Thankfully, no.
In 1980, a pair of researchers studying Prisoner’s Dilemma problems sponsored a tournament. Attendees were invited to write computer programs that played iterative Prisoner’s Dilemma games against each other. Each could use whatever algorithm the attendees liked. The goal was simple: maximize one’s profits.
ow, at first blush it might seem that an all-defect strategy is the best way to do this. Problem is, if everyone adopts this strategy, then nobody profits at all. So people submitted a number of strategies, some of them very complex. Start out cooperating, then start defecting if the other program cooperates, and you’ll get the booty for free. Or cooperate much of the time, but randomly defect. Some programs attempted to analyze the other programs, looking for patterns in their moves and then computing a strategy for maximizing profits against those patterns.
In the end, the program that won, consistently, was also one of the simplest. It employs a basic strategy that can be summed up in the words “cooperation” and “forgiveness,” and it goes by the name “Tit for Tat.”
Tit for Tat is an incredibly simple approach: On the first round, cooperate. On each additional round, do whatever your partner did last time. If your partner cooperated, continue to cooperate. If your partner defected, defect, then see what your partner does this round; if your partner’s defection was a one-time deal and he cooperates, go back to cooperation.
This is an amazingly resilient strategy. Against a player who defects all the time, it defects all the time; against a player who always cooperates, it cooperates. Against a player who occasionally defects, it occasionally defects, but it doesn’t hold a grudge; if the other player returns to cooperation, it returns to cooperation. Simple as it is, in iterative Prisoner’s Dilemma problems, it’s virtually unbeatable.
That’s a good strategy for life, too. I’ve seen, and been involved in, relationships that were wrecked because one partner entered a relationship with another partner from an attitude of suspicion and mistrust, and then created the same suspicion and mistrust in the other partner. Tit for Tat shows that when we start from a spirit of cooperation, we both come out ahead; winning does not need to be done at the other person’s expense, and indeed, in an ongoing relationship, there is no winning at the other person’s expense. Either both players win or both players lose.
Tit for Tat is not naive; if the other person defects, so does Tit for Tat. But Tit for Tat doesn’t hold grudges either; if the other person then begins cooperating, then Tit for Tat does, too. Forgiveness is simply sound strategy.
In a very literal sense, you make the social environment you live in. People take their cues from you. Even in a world of people who adopt a hostile, defecting strategy, it is possible to do well. On your first move, cooperate. Open yourself. Invite this other person into your life. Only if it is not reciprocated–only then do you become defensive, and stay that way only for as long as the other person is defensive.
Sometimes, it’s the simplest approaches that work the best.
This is me, in a nutshell.
As if there were any doubt
