It From Bit

Mythological creatures are interesting because of the wide range of roles they played (and continue to play) in the human imagination of how the world works. They’re a way for us to transform the random chance of systems far beyond our control into relationships with beings that we might have some hope of influincing. I’ve recently been considering using one particular mythological creature as inspiration for a project that may, or may not, at some point become a piece of publishable fiction. But in my pursuit of more options to choose from, I decided I needed more than just a few options. I needed ALL the options.

If you can make it past Burning Man’s whiteouts, baking heat, throngs of veering bicyclists, dudes with megaphones advertising a good time (usually involving food or drinks), eerily synchronized drone swarms in the sky, and the sheer diversity of distractions of every imaginable variety, then you will find a thriving intellectual space populated by people who will sincerely tell you that they are trying to build a better future–and it won’t sound like someone’s trying to sell you something.

There is a dog across the street from the cafe I’m writing this in who is considering entering the 7-11. They decide to instead play with another dog, deftly avoiding the motorcycle traffic as they wander away, probably in search of a bite to eat.

Here on this tiny Thai island where I’m staying, there are a lot of street dogs and they are integrated and accepted by society. You’ll find them sleeping in side streets, wandering through restaurants and street fairs politely begging, sleeping by the counter in a 7-11, and riding on scooters (with the assistance of humans, or course).

A bit over a year ago, I wrote about my intention to move away from Google products.

Here’s where I was last year:

I rely on several Gmail accounts, use Google Maps constantly, own a phone designed by Google connected to Google’s telecom service, browse Youtube a lot, have a decade’s usage of Google Drive, coordinate with friends and family using Google Calendar, use Chrome as one of my daily web browsers, and since I’m a programmer I find it impossible to not use Google Search. It would be quite a challenge for me to never use a Google product or service again.

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This is the first year I’ve nominated for the Hugo awards, and I wanted to make sure that my nominations weren’t just what I had happened upon reading and enjoying. So I focused on short stories, because I could read a majority of what was published in 2021 (at least in the pro-zines). I found the best way to narrow down all the good stories into my favorite five was via a tournament bracket.

Any magic which is sufficiently systematized is indistinguishable from science

–popularized by NK Jemisin

This post is actually an intentionally ambitious, almost obnoxiously ambitious, calendar to challenge myself to create fiction next month. I haven’t written any good fiction in a while, and the only fiction that I have written which I still like I wrote under (consensual) duress. One can do a lot of world-building in a weekend, but there’s some hand-waving that you have to do at a certain point when you run into the limit of your knowledge about something in your story.

“Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they tell me to take you up to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? ‘Cos I don’t.” -Marvin the Paranoid Android

Articulating what you do, and what you want to do, is hard. Consider the following exchange:

Person at social gathering: “So, what do you do?”

You: “I am a software engineer at XYZ Corp.”

It certainly answers the question! Or maybe:

I recently became an uncle (yay for new humans!). During the fretful hours while we waited for news from the hospital to know that all was good with my sister and her new daughter, my family messaged away on our group chat, and I turned to something that might seem on first glance to be contradictory to a person who considers science to be the greatest gift of humanity. I turned to my horoscopes.

We need more stories that tell of the promise and terror of biotechnology. So, Internet, if you could go ahead and get on that, that would be fantastic.

Because who is writing of dystopian futures with ubiquitous molecular surveillance? If you’re trying to create a totalitarian surveillance state from scratch, why install cameras when you can just sequence the DNA of the molecules in every airport, hospital, and hotel? Or better yet, simply install electronic noses with high-throughput molecule sensing. Sure, you can track the location of practically every person on Earth with a cell phone so long as you control the cell towers, but can you tell if that person has cancer?

During the long, dark winter of the COVID pandemic, I wanted to learn things. Specifically, I wanted to peer into organizations working on things that sounded interesting and write out some case studies of what tools they were using. Because what tools you use, or choose not to use, are an interesting measurement of what your needs are. And also because it was a lonely time and I wanted an excuse to pick the brains of people working on things that interested me.

CSVConf is over, and all I have left are memories and a large number of open tabs.

Calm Code has a nice diversity of introduction videos to various tools.

Deploying Datasette on Glitch. Datasette is a really cool lightweight way to expose a dataset on a webpage, and it’s super easy to create an instance on Glitch, upload a CSV with coordinates, and have a map of your data that’s interactive.

I rely on a lot of Google products, and I’ve generally found that they do what I want them to and I don’t have to think about them. There are a variety of reasons to migrate away from them, especially having to do with privacy. But up to now, letting Google have my data has been a bargain that I’ve been willing to make.

But then this happened a few months ago–a well-known game developer was locked out of their entire Google account, with no recourse except to tweet about it. For me this underlined, highlighted, and circled in Sharpie how truly terrible Google can be to its users. Sprinks (the developer) was banned from all his accounts for a terms of service violation on his Youtube account. This included Gmail, all Google apps, and thousands of dollars of purchases on their Google account. All this happened with barely any justification in what was likely to be a mistake.

We are in the midst of a resurgence of interest in psychedelics. Studies into their effectiveness in treating mental disorders are being fast-tracked by the FDA. Decriminalization and legalization efforts are succeeding. Perceptions about the acceptability of psychedelics are changing. Like any emerging technology, the narrative around them will probably change as we figure out what place we think they should have in society. Personal computers were once much more explicitly tied to mind expansion, and of course they do expand our minds–but that’s not something that we go around every day having our minds blown about. Psychedelics will probably go through a similar cultural narrative.

Around sunset on August 25, 1929, San Franciscans were treated to a most unusual sight. A huge grey cigar-shaped mass flew in from the Pacific Ocean, silhouetted by the setting sun. It was the Graf Zeppelin, the largest aircraft ever made at the time, finishing the first-ever trans-Pacific flight and on its was to completing the fastest-ever circumnavigation of the globe. It was the pride of Germany and a bold statement of the promise of industry and progress. The navies of the US and Britain were assembling fleets of airships, and they were symbols of a bright future.