Author Archives: itlandm

Be crazy so we can be sane

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Screenshot anime Sakurasou Pet

“Love is simply an electrical bug in the human neural circuit.” Now if only we had a forum where we could get together and assure each other that it is the rest of the people in the world who are crazy…

The trigger for this entry came from another absurd question on Quora. This time: Should religious belief be classified as a mental illness?

It is kind of disturbing that people even ask this, but there are in fact a disproportionate number of the mentally ill who manifest their illness in terms of religion. That is perhaps not so strange, since religion is already the domain in which we have the most unusual experiences and traditions, and insanity is pretty unusual for most of us. It is hard to manifest insanity in the form of accounting, for instance.

Science comes somewhere in between, I guess – I see some pseudoscience that looks nothing like sanity to me, but still has some few but vocal supporters. Like “Venus was a comet which passed Earth during historical times before entering its current orbit.” But enough about that. But then again, ten years ago we weren’t a result of interbreeding with Neanderthals, now we are. (That would explain me, to some degree…) So science is pretty crazy even when it is true.

Given that almost everyone is religious, the notion that “religion is insanity” sounds more like a projection if anything. Like people worry in the dark corners of their mind that something may be wrong with them when they are so different from other people; therefore all the other people must be crazy, that would explain it!

The truth is, as I have said before, that almost all modern atheists are really half-a-theist: They tend toward Socialism, which gives them the option to serve a powerful, invisible, mostly benevolent invisible being that already has an established caste of servants dedicated to bettering the world on behalf of the otherwise invisible Greater Power, which in this case is called the State. True, the State does not offer an afterlife, but neither did Moses. Read the Pentateuch – the original Torah – and you will see that the question of the afterlife was left open. God promised them that their cows would have calves and their enemies would flee. Socialism is on that level now.

But atheists don’t know how similar they are to other believers, so they need to fabricate this vast gulf between them, with the believers being crazy. Luckily this is still a minority position among atheists, it seems. But the fact that some seem to really think so, made me think back to another small group of people who were Different.

For many years, I was part of a church (or sect, as pretty much everyone else called us) which was very pious. We took the Bible very seriously, although not always literally. If you think Jesus was literally a door and Christians are literally sheep, I guess some suspicion is in order regarding your mental health. This was not a congregation where you just went to church on Sunday and otherwise went on with your life as if nothing had happened. The founders and early adopters, in particular, were men and women of heroic virtue. They set aside even the usual “harmless” cravings of human nature: Entertainment, tasty food, pretty clothes, sightseeing … stuff that no one else would consider sinful, but they set it aside so they could use their time and money and thoughts to serve God and help their fellow man.

But by generation three and four, most of their descendants were not like that. They were still good people who stayed away from crime, drugs, drunkenness and fornication, by all means. But they had hobbies (much like me), they had tastes and interests and wants and wishes that were their own and not those of God. They were by and large human, although very good humans, loved by employers for their loyalty, honesty and hard work.

The problem was that they were really good people with a doctrine saying that they were far more than that. The chosen ones, the bride of Christ, the saints, the overcomers. They should be exceptional, rather than just good. And so, subtly and softly like the slow falling of night, rumors spread. Not rumors about anyone in particular, friend or foe. But rumors about The World and those who lived there, those who had not been saved. This is indeed a motley crew, as life will show us, but the attention became steadily more selective, until The World was a cesspool of depravity, an ongoing parade of drug abuse, divorce and drunken gay sex. All of which certainly happen in The World and not in the Church, but … you see the point, I hope. Because they could not get better, others had to become worse to keep the distance.

And that, I think, is where the more sectarian atheists are today. Because they aren’t all that different from believers, the believers need to become worse. Crazy, evil, or at the very least amazingly stupid. Because the need to feel superior is very strong, particularly in those who are average.

Are we rich enough?

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Screenshot Sims 2 Apartment Life

In the last years of the Long Boom, when economists said recession was a thing of the past, I wrote the “Micropolis saga” about a near future where jobs were scarce and education expensive, and where it was natural to grow your own vegetables to save on the food budget. I tried to show that it was possible to find happiness in such times, and I still believe this.

Well, I probably am rich enough. I have food, clothes, a rented apartment, and a small gaggle of Android devices. What more can a man want in this world? It is nice to get a little more salary now and then, but it would have been nicer if the rest of the Norwegian workforce did not get twice that much increase. The relentless inflow of money squeezes housing prices, which again squeezes rent, which I pay. So if it were up to me, we would have wage- and salary-freeze for the next few years.

That would be nice for other reasons as well: Norwegian incomes are on average about 60% above EU average, and 25% above neighboring Nordic countries. I think we could safely take a breather now. We are awesome, but not THAT more awesome than our blood-brethren.

In America, where I have a bunch of online friends, people are gradually getting used to the new times where they will not automatically earn more money for each passing year. If they are lucky, they will keep their job, and maybe even work no more than last year for the same pay. The economy is picking up, so they say, although this is still largely for borrowed money. Now and then unemployment goes down a little, but there are still many who used to be employed but are now sliding helplessly into poverty. In a society where people pride themselves on being “self-made”, there are not a lot of handholds to stop that slide.

In southern Europe, official unemployment is extremely high in many countries. In all fairness it must be said that these nations have a large black economy, and even during the boom years many were officially unemployed, although they strangely seemed to always have money. Now that actual unemployment has skyrocketed, they may have second thought about not having paid taxes and earned pension rights and higher unemployment benefits. There is no doubt that things are pretty bad in such countries as Spain, Portugal and particularly Greece. But more than in the US, it is a shared misery. When school kids have to search garbage bins for food, as occasionally happens in Greece, you know things are pretty bad. If people had seen this coming, they would have made other decisions: Found a smaller place to live, perhaps, saved more and borrowed less. But every arrow was pointing upward for so long, people took it for granted.

This was the common theme of the rich world for so long, it became second nature. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and each year we earn a little more. Laws of nature. And then the sun turned.

If you can’t afford food or prescription medication, then I’d say no, you aren’t rich enough. (Somewhat depending on whether the reason is that you’ve borrowed a fortune to buy a palace, but I mean after you have tried to balance your economy.)

There are still a lot of us though who don’t face anything like poverty. I mean, basically the entire middle class and most of the working class in the first and second world are better off than my parents were when I was a child. They worked long hours and had little money. We had food and clothes, but the clothes we used at home were patched and darned and (for us kids) handed down, often more than once. Expensive luxuries like oranges were for special occasions, and chocolate and soda were known mainly from visitors – we did not buy those even for Christmas and New Years, if memory serves. On the other hand we managed to subscribe to a couple newspapers and my dad usually got me a book for Christmas or birthday or both each year, as well as some other books for himself and the rest of the family.

I don’t wish myself back to those days, but we survived. We were used to it – in fact, my parents were used to worse, so they felt pretty good about it. No invading armies since the 40es, for instance, and no rationing. Times were good.

I don’t wish myself back to those “good old days” – I rather enjoy the current affluence. But I think looking back a few decades can help us overcome the false despair induced by not getting richer and richer anymore.

 

Regression, not recession

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Screenshot anime Hyouka

“The world is going to hell pretty quick…” says this Japanese animation. Economists used to talk about Japan’s lost decade, but now it is around two decades and the economy is still stagnant. Yet now the Japanese have grown used to it, and several other rich nations seem to have started their own lost decade or two.

As I’ve mentioned, for the last few years my friends in Europe and America have experienced something very like a recession. Unemployment stays high, wages stay low, some savings have been wiped out, there is uncertainty and a feeling that the middle class is slipping and slowly sinking toward poverty. People worry what the future will bring as the economy stagnates or shrinks. Even when the economy is growing a bit, as it is in the USA, it is powered by a large and rapidly growing government debt. How long can it last before this too fails and a new Great Depression sweeps the nation?

But if we look at the developing world, the picture is quite different. As a whole, the developing world is growing by 5% a year. Not as much as the first years of the century, but a respectable pace. And the “as a whole” includes a few countries that are still in the grip of war, civil war or dictatorship, and are not doing well at all. But most are doing well, quite well, although from a rather dismal starting point.

There has been a tendency in this direction for a while now. Many people are locked in the picture from the 1950es when a few rich countries stood out while most of the world was mired in abject poverty. People still say without thinking that 20% of the people have 80% of the wealth while 80% have 20%. But obviously this cannot continue to be just as true as it was, if the developing world is growing at a brisk clip while much of the rich world is stagnating at best.

One name for this process is “regression to the mean” (where mean is read as something similar to average, not “nasty”). It is globalization in practice. Perhaps we were just looking for cheap workers to do the things we felt too important to do anymore, but things tend to take on a life of their own. The poor never promised to stay poor, we just felt secure that they would, them being inferior to us and all. We were born to rule, we were created in God’s image and then we evolved. We had no competitors, but we gracefully allowed these strangely colored people in faraway places to serve us, as is good and proper. Well, things seem to have gotten a bit out of hand.

The poor, once they are no longer starving, have started looking ahead and improving their own lot. Their kids have gone to school and learned to read and write, and before we knew it they began to become technicians and engineers. Instead of taking just the jobs we did not want, they are now just as qualified as we and still doing the job much cheaper. So more and more work is done in developing countries, even work that we would not mind keeping here in the north-western world.

But this is not a process that goes on forever. China, for instance, used to be a low-cost country, but that is no longer the case. Well, there is still a reserve of rural poor, but it is no longer enough to supply all the cheap labor China needs. So China has outsourced cheap jobs to other, less prosperous, developing countries. Those of us who have lived a while remember when Japan caught up to our labor costs, and later Korea.

I used the expression “regression to the mean”, as in the rich nations becoming poorer and the poor nations becoming richer. But at the same time, the whole global economy is still growing. Even though some countries face shrinking incomes, others are standing still (which is not really a bad deal – zero economic growth does not mean zero money, it means no more money than last year.) And the mean, the middle, is still steadily rising. That is to say that even if we should eventually end up with the same income for workers in America and Namibia, that income will probably be closer to that of America than of Namibia, compared with before this process started.

Things could still go horribly wrong, of course. There are at least two big black swans. The one is a new major war. The Middle East could explode anytime, with Israel being wiped off the map and most Arab capitals reduced to glow-in-the-dark glass and radioactive rubble. China is likely – almost certain – to try to invade Taiwan (which most mainland Chinese does not think of as a different country but a small rebellious province). If they ever trust America to have a sane leader who is not willing to wipe out everything bigger than cockroaches rather than let a tiny island reunite with its parent country, that is. Right now, there is no such guarantee. So they bide their time. After all, for each year, China grows stronger compared to the rest of the world.

The other black swan, beyond war, is natural disaster. Global climate change is a glacially slow process – literally, because the world’s great glaciers play a key role in regulating the climate. So it will still be many years before the sea starts to flood the streets of London and New York every high tide. But other things could go horribly wrong. The supervolcano below Yellowstone could explode, as such hotspots do every few hundred thousand years. An earlier supervolcano eruption in south-east Asia almost put an end to Homo Sapiens – we were down to a few thousand at most. When Yellowstone goes off – and it is overdue – it will kill most humans in the USA in a matter of days at most and plunge the world into a temporary deep freeze. That is bound to depress the global economy for a while (and probably end the current civilization). But it could also be a thousand years from now – it has waited this long, after all.

Just as we cannot really know when the black swans will land, there are also “white swans”. We might discover safe fusion, finally (it has been 20 years in the future since I was a child). This would make energy trivially cheap for thousands of years at the very least. We could put an end to aging, possibly (although unlikely). That would certainly have some interesting effects, although we would still be mortal. We could develop technology to settle under the sea and colonize the three quarters of Earth’s surface that are covered by salt water.

So we don’t really know the future. We can only make guesses, and not very far ahead. But the current trend is one of convergence: One world, no longer first world or second world or third world. And I for one welcome our new global citizens.

Food is too cheap now

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Screenshot anime GJ-bu

What is the proper way to eat hamburger and fries? No more than once a day. ^_^ Food has become so cheap that there are now more obese humans than starving ones.

Back to our world, which has its own troubles. But most of these troubles are not natural or technological or even economic, but moral: Greed, anger and ignorance. Today, let us look at the Quora question “What would be a good plan to produce enough food for everyone on the planet?”

Ryan Carlyle pretty much nails it in his answer, and I am happy to say that this is the most upvoted answer at the time of writing. We already produce 2700 calories a day for each human on Earth, enough for everyone to get a little chubby. But some of the food spoils, some is wasted, and much of it is eaten by those who already are a little chubby (and then some). The real problem however is bad government, says Carlyle.

I tend to think that for the most case, bad government stems from bad culture, specifically a culture of war and strife. The most terrible places to live on earth are those where people have a tradition for war, civil wars or tribal feuds. It is impossible to have a good government in such places. Bloodthirsty people will follow bloodthirsty leaders. Those who do not feel bad about people being shot will not feel bad about people going hungry either.

If it is not obvious to you that the problem of starvation is human rather than natural, just read his explanation again until you get it. It is pretty straightforward. If there is more than enough food for all, then the problem is not in the soil but somewhere between the farm and the mouth, at least I hope we can agree on this.

***

What I want to bring up is related to that, but not quite the same. What would happen if all the wars ended, the dictators set their peoples free, and the ruined roads and warehouses were repaired? What would happen if hungry could finally eat their fill? The price of food would go up.

Today, because a billion people don’t get to eat their fill, there is that much more for the rest, and this presses the prices down. You may not think food is cheap, but in that case you are probably thinking of the wrong food. (Or you are reading this in the future, when various things have happened that I may or may not have predicted.) The price of food to farmers is so low that a great deal of arable land lies unused – the people who might have farmed it prefer to do things that are better paid, and buy their food in the supermarket. In the rich world, almost the only land being farmed is that which is suited for full-mechanized farming, where the work is done with large diesel-powered tractors and other farm machines. This is because if it required more manual labor, the hourly wage would simply not be worth the trouble.

If a billion more people came to bid for the same food, the price would necessarily rise. The supermarket may not look like an auction, but the food that ends up there has often passed through an auction earlier. Grain, potatoes, even cattle are auctioned. Unless you are getting your food from the local farmers’ market, chances are it has been auctioned. And even the local vegetable farmer will keep an eye on the Net to check what the current prices are.

So if all goes well, if we manage to end the wars and not start new ones (a big, big if) then food prices will go up. But this is not a bad thing. It is a good thing. First, it is a good thing because it is a sign that more people are getting food. But it is also a good thing because it means farmers will reopen their fallow fields, and small farms that would have been closed down will get new owners and continue to operate. With higher food prices, it will be worth the time to farm in terrain that is not quite as perfect for large machines. The production of food will expand until the price stabilizes, and it will likely do so on a level that is still very comfortable for us in the rich world. Even a ten percent increase in the hourly wages of the farmer would bring a lot of land back into production.

Over the last couple decades, the number of Chinese who have gone from poverty to middle class is large than the population of the USA. This means their eating habits have changed. No longer eating rice for all meals unless it is a public festival (in which case the family eats a chicken), people now eat pork and beef. It takes about ten pounds of corn to make one pound of beef (somewhat less for pork and poultry) so a lot of grain has gone into this process. But the world has not really noticed. The prices of food vary somewhat, but other factors have much larger effect. (Here in Norway, for instance, groceries have been consolidated into a few chains so the competition is less fierce. The chains have a lot of profit now, which they would not have had if we bothered to enforce competition. But food is too cheap for us to bother. Your state may vary.)

The population is expected to peak around 9.5 billion at the middle of the century, barring some unimaginable disaster (which will likely happen, but it is not clear whether this will make the number lower or higher). We can feed them all with a moderate increase in food prices. Of course, this is not a big deal in northern Europe or America. But there are other parts of the world where food is a big part of the budget. The solution to this is to let these people earn more. And this is currently happening.

While my friends in Europe and America feel like they are trapped in an endless recession, the developing world is growing at about 5% a year. That is from a low level, of course, but as Albert Einstein said, “compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe”. The next time it grow by 5%, it is 5% of a higher number. And as an old friend of mine would say: “$10 is a lot of money when you don’t have it.” For the poor, 5% more money makes a big difference. It allows them to improve their lot even more. With a bike, they may be able to commute to a better paid job in the town. With that better paid job, they may be able to afford an Android tablet. With that tablet, their kids may improve their school skills and get a better job than their parents ever could. Poverty is a deep valley, but the higher you climb, the higher you can climb. By 2050, it may not be the same parts of the world that are struggling. It may be those who are fat and lazy today.

We do not need cheaper food – we need less poverty. And we know the way to that. As the Buddha said, we need to remove the 3 poisons of the mind: Greed, anger and ignorance. The world is not Heaven, but we could make it a lot closer just by this.

Magical Daydreams worldbuilding

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Oblivion portal (Screenshot game Oblivion)

After writing the below, I looked for a good illustration photo, and suddenly realized that the game Oblivion does have portals to pocket universes. However, Oblivion is itself set in a highly magical world, and the pocket worlds are limited variations on the same theme. Not really what I am talking of.

The muses in my head just came up with a worldbuilding I have never read about before. It is a mostly ordinary world where the economy is largely based on magical daydreams.

The only “magic” in the ordinary world is the ability to access the Dream Aether, where daydreams are real. Well, more or less. Each Dream is basically a small pocket universe, and people can visit these and, on certain conditions, bring things with them back.

(It is not specified whether the Dream Aether is local to that planet, that alternate universe, or whether it exist everywhere but some mutation in the distant past gave humans the ability to interact with it. If the muses know, they are not telling yet.)

The Dream economy is based on three types of people: Makers/Dreamers, Stayers/Visitors and Fetchers/Adventurers. The Makers and the Fetchers have the more specialized talents.

Pretty much everyone can Dream, but most people’s dreams remain small, personal and flimsy. There is a kind of bell curve from the few who cannot Dream at all, over the ordinary people who can only make small banal Dreams, to the actually useful Makers, and a few extraordinary people whose Dreams change the world.

Dreamers cannot simply wish into being whatever they want. The Dream Aether has its own rules, which are fantastical but consistent, and different from (or rather in addition to) the natural laws of the ordinary world. The magic inside the Dreams is more similar to High Fantasy, in a general sort of way, but its principle is that Everything Comes at a Price. There is a balance of risk and reward, effort and result, light and darkness etc. So if you create a Dream in which you can only grow potatoes, your enemies will mostly be weeds and beetles; but if you want precious treasures of gold and jewelry, you will have to fight deadly monsters and dodge devious traps. Stuff like that.

A Great Dreamer can create a fairly large fantasy realm with extraordinary treasures, but the Dream Aether will enforce the corresponding challenges, presumably dredged from the subconscious of the Maker. (Although some crazy philosophers believe that the Dream Portals actually lead to other worlds that exist elsewhere and are just “found” rather than “created”. Dreamers generally disagree with this, although they admit that they often start with a vague idea which then takes on a life of its own.)

Maintaining a Dream takes effort, but Visitors can do this. The more (and the more Dream-talented) people that are inside a Dream, the more persistent it becomes. It is even possible to maintain Dreams indefinitely after the original Maker is dead. Some people stay more or less permanently inside the most important Dreams, having houses and families in there.

Fetchers have the dangerous task of grabbing the loot, at considerable risk to life, limb and sanity, and getting it back to the ordinary world. No magical talent is needed for this, but obviously they need other skills that Joe or Jane Farmer is unlikely to have.

A few extraordinary Great Dreamers created realms that have been permanently settled for centuries at the least, possibly millennia – there are legends of forgotten realms that are still inhabited. (The oldest of these was supposedly created by Allfather, the progenitor of all Dreamers now alive, millennia ago. But no one knows where it is, if it still exists.)

The rise of a Great Dreamer can alter the geopolitical balance, for lack of a simpler phrase. It is like discovering a very valuable natural resource – but one hard to extract.

Magical weapons and armor (and other magical artifacts) exist in many of the Great Dreams, but they lose their power permanently when taken out in the mundane world. This also means you cannot bring magical artifacts from one Dream to another and game the system that way. You can however bring weapons and armor made from mundane materials but with exceptional quality. Of course, these are not exactly left lying around unguarded – they are usually found on ferocious opponents.

ANYWAY, this is kind of meta-worldbuilding in the sense that the actual pocket universes could be anything from a poorly disguised World of Warcraft clone to something never before imagined. The muses may or may not follow through on this. At the moment, they seem more interested in the meta. In such a world, would you breed for super-Dreamers in the hope of discovering new amazing realms, or hunt them down in order to preserve the existing order? What if different countries take different approaches? What if there are more or less secret cults doing each? What if there are secret cults guarding the entrance to Dreams forgotten or never revealed? What if any random kid could be the next Great Dreamer, with the power to change the course of history forever?

Your challenge, should you accept it, is to recommend fiction similar to this, so I don’t need to write it myself. Writing is a thankless job, especially if others have done it already.

Unlimited games

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Screenshot anime Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai NEXT

“There sure are a lot of games in this world.” There sure are! Hindus even claim that the world is God’s game (lila). With most of us not being God, the closest we come to that feeling may be computer games. For better or for worse.

I don’t like computer games where you win and then it’s over.

The best part of games like Civilization or Master of Magic is when the enemy is reduced to 1 city that I keep on the map so the game won’t end, while I transform the planet into a utopia. But even these games come to a natural end. At some point all technologies (or magics) are researched, and every square of the map is gainfully used. At that point, the game no longer merits my interest. It is not perfection I enjoy, but growth.

Even better are games which are for all purposes unlimited, or only limited by the human lifespan. (I suppose someone could inherit them, but I doubt there will be many volunteers.) The games that come to mind are simulators from Maxis. I am afraid Sim City is not among them, certainly not in its latest version. But the game Spore is the star example: The imaginary galaxy has thousands of stars, most of them with at least a couple planets. I’ve seen someone claim 50 000 planets (or was it stars) – the point is, there are more than you could possibly colonize in your lifetime, so the game is basically unlimited. It is also unlimited in that you can add your own creations, and the possible combinations there are also in the millions. Not only your own – the game will automatically load some of the worlds with creatures made by your friends and strangers. So this game is for all purposes unlimited.

A less obvious example is The Sims 2. Each neighborhood in this game can have up to 999 shopping districts or downtowns or both. (I judge this from the structure of the filenames, as far as I know it has never been tested.) You can only see one suburb at a time, but they are all part of the same neighborhood: If you run a shop in a shopping district, sims from the various suburbs will show up as customers. If you play a family in the main neighborhood or in one of the suburbs, sims from the other suburbs will randomly walk by. If you go downtown on a date, you will see sims from other suburbs come and go. So over time, theoretically you could have tens of thousands of sims who all knew each other. But usually the game crashes or people lose interest before it comes that far.

Role playing games are more limited, but here you have many different paths you may take. There are various classes or archetypes in such a game, and usually you can choose different specializations even within each class. In a massive multiplayer online RPG you can make teams with an almost unlimited variation of different classes and specializations. I rather enjoyed this in City of Heroes, which allowed many different combinations of archetypes to be viable, not just the standard formula from early medieval RPGs. For instance, perhaps you did not have a healer on the team, but you had two forcefield defenders. Two layers of force fields would make you hard to hit, so you would not need all that healing. The game had many such alternative routes, which made teams different and unique. Still, not exactly the same as the unlimited building games.

***

I think it is natural to want unlimited growth, but of course it is not really found in games. In this case, it is really all in our minds. Although our lifespan is limited, we desire to see the growth of individuals, families, neighborhoods, cities, empires, even worlds without end.

Well, some of us do. Others prefer games of endless killing, war and destruction – or at least to pull up the ladder while the sims are swimming. I guess there is some truth to the old proverb that you can learn more about a man from watching him play for and hour than hearing him talk for a year. (Although it is pretty certain that it wasn’t Plato who said that, no matter how many people attribute it to him. It is first seen in the early 20th century.)

 

Unlimited Internet and me

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Screenshot anime Nyarko.W

“Books, games, bras and missiles! All at your fingertips, ready to be downloaded!” Honestly, I have not downloaded any bras and missiles yet.

I am consolidating and expanding my Internet access. I had four different mobile broadbands from two different suppliers. The plan is to go to one mobile broadband from each plus one DSL landline broadband. It’s a low-capacity broadband, at 5 MB it is barely worthy to be called broadband by modern standards, but that’s fine with me. The main point is that there is no upper limit of n GB use per month, as there is on mobile broadband.

In my previous rented home, I had fiberoptic broadband, which was a huge overkill. But because I had rented the place for 5 years, it was actually quite affordable – it required a large initial cost to get the fiber to the small house by the riverside, but it was cheap from then on. Of course, the house was sold from out under me after a year and a half, so I decided to rely on wireless broadband for a while. This DSL broadband is a bit of a compromise. It cost nothing extra to start using, and I should be able to take it with me if I move to any house that has had copper-cable telephone at some time in the past. This was common until 20 years ago or less, so most homes fall in this category.

The DSL needs a special broadband modem. It comes with a wireless router built-in, so that’s nice since the phone contact is not in my home office. The modem is sent by mail, but the post office opens after I have gone to work and closes before I go home, except on Saturdays. Not a big deal, the line will for some obscure reason not be enabled until the 23d this month. I am pretty sure they just need to flip a switch, but perhaps this makes them feel important or something. I’ve made do with mobile broadband for more than a year and a half, so I can live with that for a couple more weeks.

Only after I ordered the DSL did I find out that one of my wireless broadbands actually has unlimited 3G, there is no n GB per month upper limit. (I have another with 8 and one with 5, I think – it varies.) Of course this was the one I used the least. I have now set it up as the default Internet connection for my home PC. So, it turns out I did not really need to buy anything new to have unlimited Internet… but at least I will now have 3 different sources of broadband, so I’m unlikely to get another 2-week vacation from the Net like I did back when I had only DSL back in the original (and best) Chaos Node, when Telenor threw the wrong switch and their helpdesk couldn’t find out what was wrong.

Anyway, I am celebrating my unlimited Internet by downloading and uploading more freely than usual. I’ve downloaded the new Neverwinter MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game). It is distributed via BitTorrent, a file sharing technology more famous for illegal copying, but which also is used for legitimate purposes like this (it is free to download and free to play, they get their income from selling various in-game perks and decorations.) So I’ve uploaded a few gigabytes of that.

But really, the Internet is too big for me to have it all running through my home, much less my mind.

 

Daydreaming with spreadsheet

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Screenshot anime Ore no Kanojo

“Not to brag, but I’ve got a talent for fantasizing.” As a neurotypical human, you probably don’t need meticulous text files, spreadsheets and dice to maintain the integrity of your fantasies. Wait, do human fantasies even have integrity? And why don’t I know for sure?

If I have been failing to update my journal regularly, it is not because I have been lost in prayer, alas, but quite the opposite: Because I have been lost in unusually intricate daydreams.

I have come to understand that a favorite brain activity of neurotypical humans is to daydream of what could have been if they were able to change some event of the past. I am led to believe that this happens spontaneously, or very nearly so. But I am not a purebred neurotypical, I come from a family where autistic genes have run for at least three generations now. Judging from self-observation, I probably have a few of them myself, although I am not a purebred Aspie either. More of a half-breed, I guess. But daydreaming is one of the things that is probably different. I strongly doubt there are many neurotypical humans who use spreadsheets or dice in their daydreaming.

I am told that autists don’t daydream, but I do. Sort of. Lately, I have done a great deal of time traveling in my mind, branching off from various times in my past, creating alternate time lines with various differences from the original. I have written down summaries of a number of these in text files, one file for each major timeline. I have a spreadsheet in which I track a parameter of divergence. I roll three 6-sided dice to simulate randomness in some of the outcomes. That’s just the way I roll! ^_^

In the online superhero comic Mindmistress, my old acquaintance Al Schroeder wrote about a mentally challenged young woman who became super-intelligent through a technology developed by her late mother. After the heroine learned about role-playing games, her super-intellect created an interior world into which she disappeared and almost didn’t escape alive. As a father of two full-scale autistic sons, Schroeder probably had an idea of what he was talking about. One theory of autism is that it is not a lack, but a superabundance of brain activity, amplifying normal stimuli beyond what ordinary people experience. In favor of this theory is the fact that the brains of autistic infants grow faster than those of neurotypicals of the same age.

Luckily, I too survived my immersion in my elaborate daydream, although I was at some risk, and may still be. There are still timelines I would wish to revisit, if I think I can do so safely. And I still have my spreadsheet and my dice at hand. But for now, I write this entry.

Germans are intelligent now?

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Screenshot anime Minami-ke.

“You can just go to America!” The USA has the highest proportion of people with a long education, but Japanese schoolkids do as much homework in a day as American kids do in a week, and a German high school diploma is roughly the equivalent of a Bachelor’s Degree in America.

More fun with Quora! Humans can ask the most amazing things. “Why does Germany tend to have a large amount of intelligent people?” This question is correctly marked with the label “Questions that contain assumptions” but is answered with great seriousness. There is even a short answer-wiki that sums up the consensus of the answers.

My first reaction was pretty much today’s subject heading. Germans are considered intelligent now? That was certainly news to me. But then I am Norwegian, while Quora is still somewhat America-centric. And in Norway, Americans are considered stupid (and fat and lazy). Of course, these are simply the stereotypes, we are well aware that there are many who are not. Even that stereotype may be wrong, since it is largely based on tourists. For a long time, America was the only country rich enough that even stupid people could afford to go abroad for fun. Therefore, the observation of stupid Americans.

As for Germans, the observation here in Norway is that they seem to be suicidal. German tourists rent a small boat and go out to sea when a storm is coming, then drown. They decide to hike in the mountains when a blizzard is coming, and freeze to death. They fall into raging rivers, or into cracks in glaciers, or drive with summer tires on icy narrow roads. Not what we consider intelligent, but I suppose they do well enough in their homeland, where nature is largely reduced to decorative parks rather than a main player in everyday life.

***

The generally agreed answer is that Germans are not more intelligent, exactly, they just have better education and live in a society where intellect is regarded more highly and money less, compared to the USA. German schools teach children many seemingly useless things, because a cultured German is supposed to have broad interests, including things that rarely earn money, like literature and arts. And because of that culture, they keep up with this knowledge later in life as well.

If I may here, I will point to my previous entry,  where I mention that children who learn many different things will have a head start on learning later, because as an adult you can associate things with what you already know, which is much more effective than learning something in a void, isolated from the rest of our life. I am surprised if American children don’t also learn many “useless” things, but perhaps these things are chosen differently, and the role of school in America may be more similar to daycare for a longer time than in Europe and specifically Germany.

One point that is mentioned repeatedly is that higher education is free in Germany. Actually I was of the impression that this is the normal in the civilized world, except if you want to attend an elite university and you don’t have any particular qualifications to commend you other than money. Well, it is that way here in Scandinavia, and evidently also in Germany. Of course, it is still not a life in luxury – you usually need to take a part-time job or borrow some money for your living expenses, even if tuition is free. Unless you are lucky enough to live with your parent(s) or working spouse within a short distance from the university, it may not be exactly literally free, but close enough that it won’t hold back those eager to learn.

But perhaps more important than the formal education is a culture where coming across as “cultured” is looked up to and respected, in much the same way as being rich is in America. You want to have a number of fully stocked bookshelves in your living room when guests come over, including classics you may not actually have read. You want to be seen at the opera or theater, and you want to be able to discuss arts and sciences instead of just the weather.

This is not just Germany. The Japanese are very much into this cultural refinement, and being intellectual is a badge of honor even if in many cases it earns you substantially less money than those who are less academic. There is some of it in much of Europe as well, and it used to be some of it here in Norway too when I grew up. We have always been a bit Americanized for a European country though, and we still are, although we may hesitate to admit it.

One thing however where Norwegians and Germans are on the same side, is the feeling that being exceptional is a bit suspicious (unless it is in sports, then it is great). If you are resourceful, you should be a little better at everything, not committed to one thing where you are the best of the best. People who specialize are referred to in Norwegian as vocational idiots (loosely translated, the original Norwegian word would probably be stopped by most English profanity filters.) This is a typical European attitude. An American may ask: “If you are so smart, why aren’t you rich?” but in Europe, we might ask: “If you are so smart, why do you only speak two languages?”

One thing is the same on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean: The day still only have 24 hours, and you cannot do everything in a lifetime. You have to choose. Germans often choose differently from Americans, and this is probably why many of them come across as more intelligent. They have used their time differently.

Improve the ability to learn?

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Screenshot anime Minami-ke

“You try to get good marks by studying just to deal with the tests ahead.” That’s a bad idea. The brain is not that easily fooled.

Let’s play Quora again! Here’s a question in the category Neuroscience: How can one improve their ability to learn?

There are a couple good answers there, most notably living healthy and be physically active. A little caffeine would probably not hurt either, for most people. But this is not really a question that should be confined to neuroscience. Learning is a process influenced by many factors. Let us look at a couple of them.

***

To stick with neuroscience at first, how do we learn? We learn in three phases, four if you count the fleeting phase of sensory input. Next is the bottleneck of short-term memory. On average, an adult human has the ability to keep 7 items in short-term memory, but this ranges from 5 to 9 without a huge impact on daily life. You may be able to increase this number by 1 with systematic training, and it may give you an edge in a few situations. Like remembering Norwegian phone numbers, which are 8 digits. ^_^ (Seriously, for some years most of the calls I received were people dialing wrong number. The surge of smartphones has nearly put an end to that though.)

In practice, short-term memory does not have the huge impact one would expect. Most things we notice are either deemed unimportant and quickly forgotten, or passed straight on to working memory. While we hold things in short-term memory just for a few seconds, working memory may keep things floating around for several minutes at least. Memory loss after concussions and electroshock imply that memories may not be transferred to long-term memory until after half an hour or two, but some of this processing is surely subconscious.

If we had short-term memory but not working memory, we would not be able to make sense of things like novels, scientific texts or poems, where we have to remember much more than a handful of words, but don’t commit every detail (or even most of the details) to lasting memory. We automatically select the parts we think are important, and keep these around and put them together into meaningful structures, such as mental images or stories. It is unclear to what degree our furry friends have the same ability, since they can’t talk, but our use of working memory seems pretty special.

If the working memory runs full, which it easily does during focused study, you can not add more without losing some of what you already have. There is another bottleneck in the transfer of knowledge from working memory to long-term memory, which is encoded as actual physical changes in the neurons (nerve cells). At a minimum, the sensitivity of certain synapses (contact points between neurons) is changed. Over time the physical size of synapses may change, new synapses may grow, and the tendrils of the neurons may change in shape or size a little. In a few parts of the adult brain, new neurons are born. This applies mostly to the hippocampus, a small part that seems to serve as the brains “index” where links to memories are laid down. A lot of memories exist in the adult brain that cannot be recalled. Electric stimulation can cause such memories to appear, but there seems to be no system in them, except a rough categorization into smell, sight, sound etc. Without the hippocampus, memory as we know it cannot exist, although primitive conditioned reactions can bypass it.

Transfer from working memory to long-term memory is greatly aided by sleep, notably deep (delta) sleep which helps brain cells grow, and dream (REM) sleep which helps integrate memories. Also, during sleep we don’t cram more data into the working memory, so it gets a chance to unload.

Recent studies show that moderate physical activity also helps the brain encode information from working memory to long-term memory. This could be because our species did not originate in chairs, but our ancestors spent much of their non-sleep time on their feet. Or it might be as simple as the increased blood flow caused by a more vigorous heartbeat.

This explains why strategic use of sleep and exercise can improve learning, all other things being equal. It also explains why cramming for long hours is wasted time, and it is better to study in intervals.

***

But neuroscience is not the only aspect of learning, and not the one that makes the most difference in practice, except for the few where it does not work as it should. There is much that can be done to improve learning through the “software”, the data structures, rather than the “hardware” of the brain. I want to say a bit about this.

Adults learn mainly by association. Babies have nothing but basic instincts to associate with, but have a higher ability to just pack random data into their brains and retain them. Then again they spend more than half their time in REM or delta brainwave states, with delta even appearing while awake for a while. As the infants become children, this ability begins to fade, and in teenagers it goes downhill fast. For the rest of our lives, we depend heavily on association.

If you were introduced to many different experiences as a child, you will have the hooks to associate similar things. For instance, if you spent a year of your childhood in a foreign country, you probably have a rudimentary knowledge of the language. This makes it a lot easier to pick up that language later and learn to speak it fluently.

What if we simply don’t have the relevant experiences? Well, we can still learn through repetition. I have occasionally mentioned Spaced Repetition, a system where you recall a fact repeatedly but with exponentially increasing intervals, so as to recall it as close to possible before it is forgotten. It is possible to learn utterly alien things this way, but it takes some time. You cannot do this just before an exam, to put it that way, or just before you go on a vacation to a foreign country and need to understand a bit of the language.

Another strategy is “bridge building”, where you learn something unnecessary but related to what you already know, and then use this knowledge again to learn what you really need. Arguably much of school is spent doing this, learning useless stuff so that we can bridge the gap from counting on our fingers to making a Mars rover. Of course, different things are useful for different people. But learning by association is so powerful that it can be used as a conscious strategy to learn otherwise meaningless information.

The impressive memory feats of memory artists are usually done this way: By associating new data with existing structures in a form that is not necessarily entirely sane if you were to describe it to an outsider. For instance, English is my third language and I may want to remember the word “gaffe”, a social blunder or embarrassing mistake. Being already familiar with the giraffe, which has a similar name in my native language, I may imagine a giraffe tripping over its own legs. There is no actual connection between gaffe and giraffe (I looked it up), but it causes my brain to build a “bridge” from a word I already know to one I don’t. Your giraffes may vary.

The more associations we build to a new fact, and the more vivid they are, the better we learn. Part of the “more” is location. You may have seen people who walk into a room, can’t remember why they came, and have to go back to the room they came from. Then they remember. So that shows that even a small change in location can influence memory. We can turn the tables on this by learning something, then going to another room and recall it. This can be enough for the brain to not archive it as location-specific, but general knowledge. (Of course, if we only need to remember it in one specific place, it is best to learn it there if possible. Or at least somewhere similar.)

Neuroscientifically, it may not be strictly necessary to go through all these tricks to learn things. There are a few scattered persons who seem able to remember pretty much everything in reasonable detail – whether they want to or not. This is a mixed blessing at best, as an endless torrent of memories runs through their head all the time. Remembering just the things that fit into our world and that we meet repeatedly makes life rather easier. So that’s why, if we expect to need something we learn, we should focus on just these two things: Integrate it in our world by linking it to things we know, and repeat recalling it, preferably in different places. Good luck!