The Long Game (by alaric)

I've written before about my plethora of projects and how I'm trying to spend more time on them, and to focus on ones that can produce immediate rewards (such as Ugarit) at the cost of longer-term ones (such as ARGON).

However, I have projects I can't even start on without access to massive resources. I have them Far Out Beyond The Back Burner, just in case I gain the resources required to start them within my lifetime, but without any great expectation of doing so.

I'm listing them in an approximate order based on what ones I think would be easiest to start, and would in turn make later ones more approachable.

Molecular nanotechnology

I'm hoping for a proper Drexlerian revolution of molecular manufacturing. A post-scarcity economy of cheap diamond and home production of anything you can download or design a plan for, as long as it doesn't require exotic atoms (which only really rules out nuclear devices; no big deal).

Post-scarcity is always a relative term, however. Sure, we'd be in a world where we can use solar power to directly convert our own waste products back into all the goods we currently hunger for; where a small patch of land gives you enough space to plant a tiny nanotech seed (that anybody else on Earth can make for you at practically zero cost) to grow yourself a solar array and then use the energy from it to harvest raw materials from the ground and air to make yourself a house that provides a level of material luxury beyond what even the richest humans alive right now can have. But we'd still need some kind of economy to buy land in the first place, and to buy skills and services (from designing things you can tell your home to build for you to entertainment).

I hope that my skills as a designer of intricate systems would be held in high regard in such a world, so I don't need to spend too much time working. As a molecular assembly unit can just be fed a design and sit making it overnight, I won't need to spend my time laboriously making complex machinery; I want to focus as much as possible on spending my time designing the machinery and software for my next steps.

Get offworld

However, although I'll still need money to buy services, I have some plans that would require large amounts of material, and that might be expensive as the human population rises. So I'd focus my available resources on building one of those tiny nanotechnological seeds and firing it into space, to start converting asteroids into nano-replicators, under control from a nice radio dish I'd command my house to grow. I wouldn't be the only person to think of this, and I could expect territorial claims to start appearing around the solar system pretty sharpish, so it would be good to start quickly.

I might stay living on Earth, or try to build a large spacecraft and relocate to orbit if that's practical. However, my physical location will be largely irrelevant, and more so in later stages of the plan.

Artificial intelligence

Having to work so that I can hire the services of humans to fill in gaps in my design skills, or just to save me time so I can progress my plans faster, is a bottleneck. And a risk, as the rest of the human race may not react rationally to the emergence of a post-scarcity world and start wiping itself out. One way out (which is rather speculative, as I don't know if it would work) would be to turn all that asteroid mass I'm converting with my space probes into solar-powered computers and setting them the task of evolving intelligence in a simulated neural network or rule engine. Rather than doing lots of hard thinking about the nature of intelligence, I'd brute-force it - a massively parallel genetic algorithm trying to find a configuration of the simulation which can answer questions I'd feed into it. I'd train it on a mixture of my own questions and exercises from textbooks in fields of interest to me. With a large enough training set, I should be able to evolve a system that's a general function from questions posed in English with access to the background knowledge implied by the kinds of textbooks I trained it from, to answers in English. If it worked, I would have an artificial intelligence, without an artificial sentience.

That difference is quite profound. Artificial sentience opens up ethical questions: should it have the rights of a person? But I have no need to create a mind in the image of my own, with desires and awareness of time and sensory capacity and a continuity of consciousness based on memory of past events. All I need is a function from question to answer, that can be embedded into software that needs it. I can ask it questions beyond the scope of its training (if I manage to evolve it to be sufficiently general) by including appropriate textbook material in the question.

I could use it to solve problems by posing them as questions, firstly. But I could also use it for intelligent automation; systems could react to events by feeding the nature of the event, as well as background information about the situation and relevant history, in as part of a question as to the best course of action to follow to meet some defined goal.

Weak life extension

I may be lucky to get this far within my lifespan as it stands, but I don't want to risk any further, so I will have been learning (or assembling reference material for my AI) about human biology sufficient to cure ailments, and decelerate or reverse the process of aging, in case I need a bit more time to complete the next stage.

Accelerated consciousness

We think by exchanging pulses between the neurons in our brains. The neuron is a cell that, beyond the normal structures required of a functioning cell, contain one or more long thread-like structures called axons, which enable the neuron to connect to other neurons elsewhere in the brain; and the connection points, which are called synapses. We're still a bit vague on exactly what happens inside the synapses; we have an idea of their properties, but we can't really test it well enough to see if it's complete. Hopefully nanotechnology will let us put probes inside working neurons and examine them better.

But fully mapping the function of the synapse can come later. I'll start with a lower-hanging fruit: mapping the functioning of the axon.

Signals travel through axons at about eight metres per second. Signals travel through copper cable at about two hundred million metres per second. If I could inject nanomachines into my cranium that would trace out the neurons, finding the synapses and the axons that join them together into the neuron, and bypassing the axons with insulated copper cables carrying electronic signals directly between the synapses, I would significantly increase the speed at which I thought.

The danger would be timing dependencies in the brain. If a neuron fires, sending a pulse down a long axon, while the same pulse also travels via shorter axons through one or more extra synaptic junctions, then changing the speed of propogation down axons without changing the speed of processing of synapses would result in the relative timings of the effects of the initial firing arriving at the destination differing. So I'd start by having my electronic bypasses insert a delay to more exactly simulate the original axons at first, and try selectively decreasing it in various parts of my brain first, to see what happened (and with an automatic return to normal timings after fifteen seconds, like when you change the resolution on your display and the OS isn't sure if you can then actually see the dialog asking you if the result is OK).

In the worst case, I'd have to take time to study the synapse so I could model it in an electronic system and thus create a timing-perfect electronic model of my brain, but that would take longer. It is necessary for later steps in the plan, but it would be nice to reap the benefits of accelerated consciousness sooner than that, in order to make better use of my time.

It's hard to say how fast I could make myself go. The hard limit (if the response of the synapses was irrelevant to the speed of thought, and axon delays were the limiting factor) would be that I would think two hundred million divided by eight, which is twenty five million, times as fast. At that speed, anything that wasn't moving at a good fraction of the speed of light would appear immobile to me. I would seem to be frozen, stuck in an immobile body, and I'd probably go mad from boredom and claustrophobic panic. So I wouldn't do that. Since I'd already tapped all my axons, I'd divert my peripheral nervous system to a virtual body in a 3D computer simulation. Then I could do all the thinking and planning and designing and reading and writing I wanted to. Of course, fetching stuff from the Internet would be a pain; if I sent out an HTTP request to Wikipedia for some information, it would take a long subjective time for the response to come back. Likewise with communicating with friends by IRC and email.

But even if removing axon delays only made my thoughts happen ten or a hundred times as fast, due to synapse delays being significant, I'd still need to go into a virtual world to live without the slowness of my physical body trapping me. And unless it was only a few times as fast as normal living, I would find myself spending a lot of time waiting for the world outside to react to my latest HTTP request or other action.

So I would probably program my control software to make my synaptic delays infinite - suspending neural firing - until something interesting happened (or a timeout occurred; I'd want to wake up at least once a millisecond just to see what was happening through my real eyes, in case there was an explosion in progress or something else I needed to attend to).

I'd probably want to automate management of my body. Walking by taking note of my inner ear and eyes a hundred times a second and deciding what impulses to send to my muscles would be hard work; I'd need to automate it to the level of choosing a direction of motion and a desired body position and facial expression and letting the computer walk for me, checking up on it ten times a second or so. I'd want to be able to tell my mouth to speak a sentence and leave it to get on with it, and whenever I checked up on my body I'd replay to the past few seconds of recorded audio and video so that I could discern speech directed at me.

Driving my physical body might take only a tiny fraction of my time. So why not drive several? I could control heaps of robot bodies at the same time, by just examining the state of each in turn, via radio links. I could be an entire team of robot ninjas infiltrating a building at the same time. That would be awesome.

However, interacting with computers would be a pain. As much faster as my brain was, computers would be correspondingly slower. My 3D virtual world would need to be quite basic, even with a massively parallel nanotech computer rendering it and only needing to render my foveal region in full resolution, or it just wouldn't be able to generate frames fast enough for me. Waiting milliseconds for a web browser to actually render a page into an image would be intolerable. I would need to run very simple software on very fast processors if I wanted interactive responses.

But either way, my main limiting factor - time to design things - is now significantly relieved.

Mind transfer

But the logical next step is to get rid of those synapses, and entirely replace my brain with an electronic version. This would gain me the rest of the speed improvement available. Also, an electronic synapse would probably be smaller than the real thing, and it wouldn't need the body of the neural cell any more, so I could make my entire brain much smaller, thereby gaining an extra few times speed by just removing the distances those two hundred metre per second electrical impulses have to travel.

But being a fully digital simulation would have other benefits. My neural interconnection map and synaptic states would be a string of bits that could be transferred and a new electronic brain built and initialised from. This could be used to back me up in case of the physical destruction of my brain and body. It could also be used to work around the annoying consequences of communications delays being so notable when living at twenty five million times the normal speed; I could transmit my brain state into deep space and have my brain constructed there in order to get hands-on with some process, then send it back afterwards (or resume the old version still at home if the transferred copy is lost or corrupted somehow). If I build a solar antimatter refinery and made enough antimatter to send a nanoseed probe to Alpha Centauri at nearly light-speed (which might take a decade or so), and had it build an installation there, I could even visit it at the cost of four years of unconciousness while I was in transit each way. But that's nothing compared to the costs and risks of sending my physical brain there and back.

In principle I could duplicate myself and run multiple instances of myself in parallel, but I don't think I'd need to - with accelerated consciousness, I don't think that thinking time would be my bottleneck any more. A reason to run clones of myself at great distances in order to have more real-time interaction with events over a large area might develop, but I don't know of any reason why I'd need to do that, offhand.

Acausal near-godhood

So, assuming I've managed to not kill myself by tinkering with my brain, and I've not run into competition with other humans and been imprisoned or destroyed by them, I'm now a disembodied intelligence able to simultaneously operate bodies anywhere within a few tens of light-milliseconds of wherver I'm currently sentient from, and able to migrate between brains at the speed of light, and to be fairly immortal due to having backup copies of myself that activate if the "currently live me" stops checking in every millisecond. Arguably, I will have crossed some kind of technological singularity, as tinkering with my own cognition has made me able to out-think any normal human being (or team thereof), purely by being able to research and plan my actions in great detail - in the time it takes a visual signal to travel from the eye to the brain of a normal human being. But the post-singularity me would still be perfectly comprehensible to a normal human and vice versa; it is the quantity of my thought which will improve, not the quality.

Perhaps I will have had to leave the solar system of my birth by now, in order to keep my freedom from other humans, or whatever becomes of governments and corporations in a post-scarcity world, trying to lay claim to resources I need for my plans. But ideally I'll still be in touch with a happy brotherhood of humans rather than striking out alone or with a small circle of like-minded family and friends.

However, this next stage will probably have to happen in another solar system. Even if the rest of the human race isn't particularly hungry for energy and I can have the entire output of the Sun, that might not be sufficient. And if my experiments fail, I might destroy the solar system. So this step probably needs to happen in other star systems.

Basically, I want to implement time loop logic. There's a number of ways that might allow us to send a single bit of information back in time, and that's all I need. Perhaps I can string a cable (or send a photon) around a rapidly rotating singularity, or a uranium atom spinning in an intense magnetic field, or through the centre of a ring singularity, in order to create a timelike trajectory. Or some trick involving quantum mechanics. I'll try them all, and any others I or my AI manage to come up with.

Now, being able to build a hypercomputer with time-loop logic, and being able to solve NP problems in polynomial time, would be pretty neat. But that's not the eventual goal. Rather than just implementing pure functions such as prime factorisation in the hypercomputer, I want to perform I/O. With side effects. From inside a time loop.

You see, the consistency principle which underlies time-loop logic can be justified in quantum mechanics; in the presence of a time loop, the wave function of a contradictory state cancels itself out and becomes zero because of the link between its past and future. This is used to ensure that the desired answer arrives out of the negative delay gate in the first place, by ensuring a contradiction if it doesn't.

But what if we have a sensor attached to the computer, and arrange to have a contradiction if the value of the sensor is not equal to a desired value? Situations where the physical system monitored by the sensor would fail to produce that value are contradictory, so the physical system's wave function cancels them out and we can only have the desired states.

That gets interesting if the sensor is measuring the speed of light in a vacuum. What we have build is known as a "reality editor" and grants the owner godlike powers.

Of course, the equipment is part of the time loop, so the physical system being measured changing is not the only possible non-contradictory outcome; there's also the possibility that your equipment might just fail. Since the quantum mechanical odds of your equipment failing are probably much higher than those of the speed of light changing, you will almost certainly get an equipment failure rather than destroying the universe by altering its fundamental constants and causing all the matter to collapse to a point.

So let's set our sights a little lower. How about moving on from nanotechnology to femtotechnology? Tinkering with the energy levels inside atomic nuclei is tricky, but if we can build a sensor to tell if we've managed it, we could use a time loop to force the hand of physics. We can work out the chance of quantum tunnelling producing the desired state by pure luck alone, and make sure that the chance of our equipment failing is below that - by duplicating it. Don't forget we have the matter and energy of entire star systems to hand. Make trillions of time loop devices with their own sensors, all observing the same system. Make it more likely for the system to enter the desired state than all the time loop devices failing together.

So the time loop reality editor cannot provide complete omnipotence; it's limited by the probability of a complete system failure, and can only cause events which are more probable than its own failure, so it would be rated up to a certain improbability level (in a manner that sounds slightly familiar...). Indeed, in case of miscalculation of the probabilities or sheer bad luck causing a device failure rather than the desired event, it would be wise for each time loop unit to have a "circuit breaker" that is the most likely part to fail and can be simply reset, rather than risking more permanent, hard-to-diagnose, or violent failure modes of a device containing a significant amount of stored energy in one form or another.

An interesting possibility is of using the reality editor to not only make, but design, things. Rather than building a sensor that checks if a working femtocomputer processing element is created, create one that tests whatever is standing on the target platform is a fully working computer meeting certain design requirements, and see what appears. As the quantum-mechanical basis of the reality editor will tend to favour the most likely, and therefore generally simplest, solution, some interestingly optimal designs might result.

Perhaps the first thing to try and make is a more compact and powerful reality editor?

Oh, and negative delay gates will enable faster-than-light communications, so I can interact with my ever-expanding interstellar empire in real time now.

Hopefully, that will be enough to keep me busy and occupied until the heat death of the universe starts to loom. At which point, hopefully I will have figured out how to:

Create new universes

Probably by tinkering with black holes or something, if not by turning as much of the mass in the Universe as possible into a giant reality editor. Either way, make a new universe with a new entropy gradient I can use to power my ongoing experiments.

Medals and Memories and Memes (by sarah)

Today we watched the womans marathon which is part of the Olympics. It was fun spotting landmarks and talking to Jean about London and running. She loves the fact that her great grandmother won a medal for running in the Olympics of yester year - this lead her to start doing 'put your hand up if...' competitions.

It was mainly hands up if someone in your family is/was a runner, if you've been in an Olympics etc... but one of the questions was if you have ever been in a marathon. I put my hand up.

'Really?'

'Yes Jean a half marathon'

She then would not stop talking about it so I went to see if I could find my folder of bits. I did and produced the medal - explaining carefully that it is not a bronze medal I did not come third I just came in before a certain time and I can't actually remember what that time was. I ran the half marathon in 1998 during my A'levels with a friend from Guides. My cousin was in the same race though she is younger then me - she came in before me but was being like a young runner person at the time.

We on the other hand had just decided we'd do it for charity and my aunt (mother of the running cousin) had to lend me a pair of legging shorts to run in as I didn't have any. My trainers were good quality nike but had been bought in a charity shop for £4 - I left them in Kenya as a donation to a school/orphanage in 2000.

I remembered that I had been unable to drink the drinks so me and Gemma just poured the water over the top off our heads as our main issue was not thirst but over heating!

And so I ran a half marathon with no training and found it wasn't actually that hard at all.

I have fond memories of that race and so was excited when in my second first year at uni my room mate was training for the London Marathon - she had all the gear including full body suit making her look cool and scifi and I occasionally had to do a sports massage on her. She did really well - I on the other hand watched it on Telly whilst making the first full blown wiggly pets as congratulation presents for her and the other girl who were running. I was on crutches with torn ligaments which had resulted in me being flown back early from a field trip in Spain.

In the same folder I also found my old school report full of good efforts but a regular C if not D in PE. Basically I did not do team sports except football but as the girls club was disbanded that didn't last long. There was also certificates such as Young Writer of the Year and The Royal Mail competition which I won whilst still being in the bottom set for English.

There was a newspaper clipping of me and others sitting in sleeping bags outside the Trinity church in Romford to raise money and awareness for the homeless. And a certificate for Havering Citizen of the Year Award 2000 for the Kenya project.

There was stuff for the Buddy Reading Scheme and the Bully Line and the Tree Planting for Thames Chase with local dignitaries and singing on the South Bank and many many other things. This plunged me into memory lane, full of whist and nostalger and the feeling I have somehow come off the tracks. It made me sad which also made me feel somewhat middle aged.

As it is the feeling could have been worse, could have been darker and deeper but fortunatly this year has been pretty amazing with a medal in the Creative Olympics and a place in the Gloucestershire Poet Laureate finale to be held in two weeks time at the Cathedral and so much more.

I did however turn down a last minute oppurtunity to maybe perform at the Olympics as have just been doing so much I could not have fitted it in without letting people down. I regret not being involved in some way but for me it came on the wrong year - next year I would be well enough to have done things. So as part of getting me fit I have agreed to do the London Olympic Walk Challenge route with friends next year. At the moment a three mile walk with the stick leaves my pelvis sore.

I have a lot of training to do me thinks!

I am also starting my belly dancing classes in September which should help to stabilise the pelvis anyway. Alaric has also taken up a 'sport'. These were in the pipe line for years and we just needed groups near enough to us - this has happened at just the right time - ie when we are suddenly going - oh poo we are old and unfit!

However, that is another thing the Olympics have shown us - we are NOT TOO OLD! Alot of those athletes are in their 30's we can shape up still.

This brings me on to the meme part of the title. We are Geeks - not exactly renowned for physical prowess and yet both of us won awards and what not for things Archery, riffles and the like - the Olympics has reminded us that there are more sports than football, rugby and cricket. As Alaric tells Jean how to row a boat I am struck by the fact that geeky friends are now signing up to fencing classes after seeing the Tron-esk setting of the contests.

I myself found myself hooked to the archery, I made the statement, 'I miss archery' and Al responds with 'I've already looked up the local group for you.... I would like to do archery too.' Jean then walks in and says 'Mummy can I do some bows and arrows with like real arrows at a club or something?'

And so bizarly for the first time.... ever the geeks and nerds are on fire with the meme of sports! Friends confess that they now know athletes names and that they have scoured the wikipedia pages and the like inorder to get a better understanding of sport! What is going on?

This is not spectatorism but rather a seperating of the skill and self driving coolness of the competitors from the spectator bully mentality that we have all associated with sport - starting with the old 'take out the ankles with a hockey stick' in school. Like many things science included, love of sports is not embued in our school system or at least wasn't. You were either good at it or not. And worse you were either on the team or not and the team place had nothing to do with your skill but everything to do with the picking and your social rank in the play ground.

I personally thought I sucked at all sport until I went to a sports centre with the methodist church and wasn't made to take my glasses off - I won a badminton competition. I am aware that I would have struggled with sport no matter how it was taught due to the dyspraxia but on the other hand - I practiced each day until I could catch a ball - I had the drive and also I was good at gymnastics being double jointed/having hyper mobility - that should have been developed but wasn't.

All this aside I have never seen so many of my non-sporty friends suddenly so interested and intriged - I wonder how long it will last?

I think as it is basically super hero training and real life skill levels to be attained there is a good chance of sport permeating to were it has never been welcome before.

Differentophobia (by alaric)

At the time of writing, there's been recent controversy about a fast food chain called Chick-fil-A, whose management have made statements against gay marriage, and who financially support organisations campaigning against it. I'm not going to go into detail about that, as it's just one more battle in a long war against the idea that it's OK to fail to understand that people who are different to you are still people.

There's a natural human tendency to categorise people into Us and Them. We have emotional reactions like empathy towards "Us", as we can imagine ourselves in their situations. We tend to trust "Us", and help "Us" when they are in need, and would rally to defend "Us" from harm.

"They", on the other hand, are assumed to be attempting to take something from "Us". "They" are not empathised with; we do not imagine what it is like to be "Them". We merely see that "They" are different, and therefore, we cannot imagine what "They" are thinking; and we imagine that "They" must feel the same about "Us", and therefore not have our best interest at heart; we assume that "They" will feel no compunction against causing "Us" harm if it's in "Their" interests, so we are quick to defend ourselves against "Them", including pre-emptive strikes. If "They" ask for something, it is clearly "Them" trying to take things from "Us", rather than "Them" and "Us" negotiating to find a compromise over some shared resource, and we must stand up against it or "They" will take everything and leave "Us" with nothing.

This general mechanism is behind a lot of pain and suffering in this world. Once somebody has been classified as "Them" in somebody's eyes, it's very hard to lose that classification, as all the good deeds they do and other evidence of trustworthiness are easily interpreted as deceit. Meanwhile, the criminals in the "Us" group use their implicit trustworthiness to great advantage. This simple classification into "Us" and "Them" presumably did us some good when were crouching in caves, but now we're a globally interconnected society, it's harming us.

I have suffered little from it, personally; I am white (and live in a country where that's normal), male (and live in a society where sexism has abated, but is still rife), without any visible disabilities, living in the country I grew up in, with an accent and mannerisms which can fit into most social "levels" (I come from a lower working class background, but went through elite education into a profession, so I have experience of all sorts of people), straight and cisgender. My only "minority" trait is being an unabashed nerd, which is something I can easily hide when amongst people who would be bored stiff by a thrilling discussion about logic circuit design; and I hide that in order to not bore people stiff, rather than out of a fear of discrimination.

But it still deeply irritates me, because it's just a stupid waste of happiness. The human race has enough to worry about without us being nasty to each other.

I like meeting people who are different, as it's interesting to try and find my own limitations and boundaries. How much of who I am is because of the limited range of experiences I've had, rather than inherent limitations of my human brain? I'd still really like to sit down with some gay and bisexual people of both genders, to try and really find out what the experiences of love, limerence and sexual desire are like for them; there's clearly some underlying difference because the objects of their attraction are different, but does that extend to differences in what it feels like for them? Bisexual people would be well-placed to compare, but then their experience might not be representative of what purely homosexual people feel. As I was at an all-male school when I became really interested in girls, I've never felt I've entirely understood heterosexual flirting/dating/courting protocols, and I'm quite interested in how much is purely social convention rather than fundamental parts of our evolved mating mechanisms; finding out what it's like from the perspective of homosexual people, who have been forced out of the social conventions in the first place and had to form their own in originally hidden communities, might provide me with insights into my own heterosexuality! I watch the activities of my polyamorous friends with interest!

I am not, however, immune to the fear of different people. If I suddenly find myself in an unfamiliar cultural environment, I feel a twinge of alarm. This is partly justified; in an unfamiliar culture, my social protocols may be incorrect, and might cause offence, and somebody who is not familiar with my own culture might not realise that this is unintentional. So when I find myself in such a situation, I am well advised to pause and think carefully about how I act - but purely to ensure that I present a respectful and friendly first impression; I then try to find common ground and establish an understanding that I can expand upon until I am comfortable with the new situation.

When a group of hoodie-wearing black youth rush past me in an alleyway, yes, I am mindful that they might try to mug me. But I am also just as mindful that a group of smartly-dressed white females might mug me, too. After all, if I wanted to mug somebody, I would carefully avoid mugger stereotypes in order to lull people into a false sense of security! If I ran a Fagin-esque gang of pick pockets, I would train little old ladies in martial arts and equip them with knives to be my agents! But I digress... I do not discriminate in my distrust. And yet my distrust is provisional; if I know nothing about somebody, I will assume that they might be a threat, and I will take care not to give them an opportunity to harm me or those in my care in any way; but I will not show hostility towards somebody unless they prove their bad intententions by makin a move to attack first. And on the other hand, I will extend trust towards people who have earned it, but I do so proportionally, assessing the cost of losing the thing I have entrusted them with against the benefits of trusting them.

It's also important to recognise when people are being afraid of you because you are different to them. Their initial reaction to you might be to flinch, to be defensive, or even to assume that you conform to their culture's stereotype of yours. And if you are feeling skeptical of them being one of Them, then their initially negative reaction would just needlessly reinforce your suspicion. If you then act in a way that makes you seem hostile and defensive in their eyes, then your relationship has gotten off to a probably irreparably bad start.

So, dear reader, when you feel that frisson of fear and distrust when you meet, or hear about, strange people doing strange things, recognise that feeling for what it is: a quick warning that these people might find you strange and frightening, so you must be polite and welcoming; and try to turn the other cheek if they exhibit knee-jerk defensive reactions towards you. The more you can learn from them about the amazing variety of the human experience, the better a person you will be.

Getting kids into programming (and what the Raspberry Pi is lacking) (by alaric)

Back when I were a lad, if you bought a computer, you'd bring it home and plug it into the telly and turn it on and a BASIC prompt would appear.

Tough luck if you wanted to do practical tasks like word processing, but you could type a single command (such as CIRCLE 100,100,50) and be instantly treated to a circle appearing on the screen. Before long, my generation were writing programs to crunch numbers for our statistics homework, and lots and lots of games. And thus a generation of software engineers was born.

Getting started in programming is trickier for the contemporary twenty-first-century child; they have to install a software development environment (their computer probably didn't come with one), and then go through a wizard to Create New Project, write initialisation code to open a window, then write a redraw event handler that takes a graphics context and draws a circle with it. A little less approachable than "CIRCLE 100,100,50". At least you get a simple word processor and a Web browser out of the box, though... I'm no nostalgic Luddite 🙂

Now, the Raspberry Pi has been widely hailed as the answer to our woes; costing just twenty pounds and usable given access to a TV and a dirt cheap USB keyboard and SD card, it's cheap enough to be purchased and given to a child to play with, unlike Mummy's laptop. Also, it has a user I/O port, meaning it should be relatively easily to integrate with home-built robots and other such fun electronics projects.

However, that's just the hardware side. What's seriously lacking is the software. If you buy a Pi and install one of the available Linux images onto an SD card and boot it up, you'll be presented with a Linux desktop environment. You'll be able to get to a shell prompt with little effort, and start learning shell, or get into a Python prompt and start to write Hello World, but that's not incredibly inviting; the effort required to do anything interesting from there is quite high. In particular, getting graphics going is hardly a job for a beginner.

So, I set out to improve on this situation. I've written a turtle graphics engine on top of Chicken Scheme, called Simple Graphics. Installing it is often painful as you need to get all the required bits of SDL and Cairo installed, but once that's done, thanks to Chicken's excellent egg system, installing simple-graphics is easy. And once you've done so, it's just a matter of:

(use simple-graphics)
(forward 10)

...to get started with drawing things on the screen.

However, that initial installation pain can be bypassed by making a Raspberry Pi image, based on the existing excellent work on basic Linux distributions for the Pi, that has Chicken and simple-graphics pre-installed, with a desktop icon to fire up a Chicken prompt with the simple-graphics library already loaded so you don't need the use line. But then I'd also like to add Chicken eggs to drive the I/O port on the Pi, including I2C and SPI. And sound generation, so you can make noises to go with your graphics while driving a real robot turtle through the I/O port...

It would also be good to have a version that boots straight into a full-screen Chicken prompt (which, if you start doing turtle graphics commands, splits into two, a graphics area that can be hidden/revealed/made full screen with hot keys, and the command-line area), for people using small screens.

That way, kids of all ages could immediately have an interactive environment that lets them program the full range of capabilities of the Pi. And being based on Scheme, it wouldn't be a "dumbed down" environment they'll grow out of and have to learn a new language in order to do more powerful things; they'll be able to use all the Chicken Eggs available, as well as being able to write their own code in a language eminently capable of the full range of programming tasks - yet still simple enough for anybody to get started with. Sure, I could have based Simple Graphics on Python or Ruby; but anything they can do, Scheme can do better.

ORG-mode and Fossil (by alaric)

I'm always moaning about how I have too many ideas and not enough time, so it's quite important to me to manage my time efficiently.

My biggest concern, with many projects on the go at once (and I don't just mean fun personal projects, I'm including things my family depends upon me for as well), is that I'll forget something important I'm supposed to do. And I'm also concerned that I'll forget a fun personal project, so that when I do get a moment, I can't think of anything to do, or that I spend my time on something that doesn't get me as good a reward for the available resources as I could have had.

Therefore, I've always been a big fan of "To Do" lists in one form or another. I've tried a few apps to manage TODOs for me, from the excellent personal information management facilities of the Palm Pilot to Things on the Mac, but I've tended to find such things restrictive. For a long time I had a complex OmniOutliner setup that also computed my timesheets with AppleScript, which suited me well; indeed, I've still yet to completely migrate all of the content out of that file (tricky now I no longer have a Mac, but I've looked at the underlying XML file and it seems reasonably parseable), and I think it still contains some notes about ARGON that I've not written up anywhere else!

However, I've had the most success with text files, adding hierarchic structure with headings, so it was fairly natural for me to try Org Mode one of these days. For those not in the know, this is an Emacs package designed to help you organise things with hierarchically-structured plain text files. You write heading lines prefixed with an asterisk, indicating the level of nesting by adding more asterisks, and Org helps by syntax-highlighting the header lines, hiding entire subtrees so you can see the large-scale structure, editing operations to cut and paste entire subtrees (properly adjusting the levels to match where you paste the subtree too), and so on.

But that's just the start. That's what it inherits from the Outline Mode it's based on.

What Org Mode adds on top of that is really hard to list. You can add workflow tags (TODO -> INPROGRESS -> STALLED -> DONE, for instance; you get to define your own little state machine), along with optional priorities, to mark some headings as tasks requiring attention (and obtain a report in the "agenda view" of all headings in certain states, ordered by priority, for instance). You can attach tags to headlines (and use them as filters in the agenda). You can attach arbitrary key-value metadata lists to headings (which are folded down into a single line, and opened up on request, so they don't clutter it), and use those to annotate things with deadlines, or scheduled dates, and have a calendar view in your agenda. Or use the key-value properties to filter the agenda view. Or have Org Mode automatically record a log book of state transitions of a task in the metadata. Or take metadata keys out and display them as extra columns in the hierarchy of headings, in a manner reminicent of OmniOutliner. You can embed links to other files that can be opened in Emacs; if it's an org-mode file you can link to a heading by a unique ID, or you can link to any old text file by line number or by searching for nearby text. There's a feature you can use, while editing any file, to create an Org-Mode heading containing text you are prompted for and a link to the place you were at in the file you were editing, timestamped, inserted under a specified heading of a specified org-mode file, so you can trivially create tasks referencing the file you're working on. Or you can embed executable elisp code to perform arbitrarily complex operations.

I'd been using Org Mode for a while, but I wasn't really using it properly; I had a whole bunch of .org files for different areas of my life, but it was sometimes difficult to fit things into the taxonomy. However, lately, I've had a big tidy-up of my home directory.

I've migrated old projects from Subversion or Git into Fossil, for a start, so now all of my projects - open-source ones at Kitten Technologies, and personal ones, are in their own Fossil repos, which means they have their own ticket trackers for their individual tasks. But each and every one of them has a heading in my new single tasks.org file, which is a unified repository of things I should, or would like to, think about. Fossil projects have a single heading, tagged with "FOSSIL", that lists the place in my home directory where I have the repo working copy, and the URL of the master repository on my server; ŧhis exists to prevent me from forgetting about a project.

I've migrated our long-standing home wiki (mainly a repository of recipies and other such domestic stuff) into the inbuilt wiki of the Fossil repo I already use to store documentation about the house, such as network configuration, a PDF of the plans from the Land Registry, and stuff like that; and the ticket tracker in that repo is now the domestic TODO list. Running the Fossil web interface for that repo off of the home fileserver means that Sarah and I can share the Wiki and task list. And I've configured the Fossil user roles so that anonymous users can't see anything too sensitive.

So in general I've moved as much as I can to Fossil repositories, combining versioned file storage and ticket tracking with a wiki as appropriate; and my tasks.org exists to act as an index to all of them, and to store actual task list items for things that don't naturally map to a fossil repo, although I may find ways to deal with those as well (for instance, I have a fossil repo I use to store my org files, encrypted password database, household budget, address book, and the like, that I'm not using the ticket tracker on; that could be used as a place to put my general administrative tasks as tickets).

However, although putting tickets in the repositories that store individual projects is conceptually neat, and allows for third parties to interact with my task list for open-source projects on Kitten Technologies, it does mean that I have a lot of separate task lists. tasks.org means I won't forget about any of them, but I still have no simple way of knowing what the most urgent or interesting task out of all of my twenty-five repositories is. That's not a great problem in itself, but the next logical step will be to use the automation facilities of Fossil to pull out the tickets from all of my repos and to add them into tasks.org as tasks beneath the corresponding Fossil project heading (including the ticket URL so I can go and edit them easily), so I can see them all consolidated on the agenda view...

Part of this process which has been interesting, though, is digging out various old TODO lists (such as the aforementioned OmniOutliner file) and project directories scattered over archives of old home directories and consolidating them. I've found various projects I'd forgotten about, and neatly filed them as current projects or into my archive tree as old projects (and, oh, how I look forward to being able to put things like that as archives into Ugarit, automatically cross-referenced by their metadata...). Having brought everything together and assembled an index reduces the horrible, lingering, feeling of having lost or forgotten something...