Dream Dance

Day 422 - Grift and Murder as a Plausible Alternative

How do Tanzen deal with cheating? One of the signal characteristics of human civilization is the management of anyone who would shirk the social contract, or otherwise try to make illicit gains at the expense of others. There have been many different approaches to the problem, from religious sanction in traditional societies, to industrial-scale incarceration in post-industrial societies, to the sometimes oppressive openness of our own. In every case there is an issue that has to be managed.

The Tanzen are no different. They live in large complex societies where each individual gains substantial benefits from the whole, but which is only possible because enough individuals contribute to the whole. But what if a specific member -- because of personal history, personal choice, or just aberrant genetics -- took advantage of the rewards of living in a community but did not contribute to it? Every society must have mechanisms in place to handle this kind of parasitic interloper in order to be stable.

It's not completely understood how the Tanzen deal with this problem. In fact social aberration is rare, so it has not been observed very often. There have been cases where the members of town will brutally murder one of their own. It doesn't happen often, and we don't have enough related observations to understand the context, but it seems obvious that this is at least part of the Tanzen system of social equilibrium.

I've been watching Shell and Sen intently recently, and it seems like there is some interesting data there if I can tease it out. The mother/child relationship is relatively long-lived. Sen will stay with his mother for perhaps another two or three seasons, and although she will not be the sole provider of his food she seems to be his intermediary in the social domain. Like many offspring, the Tanzen infant is incapable of participating in the complex social dynamic that is practiced by adults. In fact he acts more like an animal -- like the primal basis from which the Tanzen evolved.

He will quite often engage in anti-social behavior; sneaking or hiding food especially, but also hitting other youths or breaking pots or other craft articles. Shell brings him into line with a sharp smack -- not to him but to herself. This was at first read through the human filter as being symbolic; she was hitting herself to symbolize what she was going to do to him. The problem is that there is almost no record of Tanzen adults brutalizing their young. To be symbolic an act must relate to a real act, and in the absence of the real act the symbol is meaningless.

The primal but predictable anti-social behavior of youth disappears almost completely at about ten seasons of age. Do they learn to live in the Tanzen society, or is it a more physical change, like a kind of social puberty that alters their goals and perceptions? It's still unknown. It's clear that something happens to them as they mature, as transformative for them as learning to speak is to us.

Day 415 - Dreaming of Ants, Plants and Fame

My new ant habitat came together over the course of almost a year. It was a little bit of "three steps forward, two steps back," but at least as I learned I progressed. My ultimate apparatus required more resources than I had budgeted and was nothing like I imagined, but it that was OK. It was better than I could have foreseen.

I had acquired something of a mentor, and he had urged me to work on the problem of symbiosis. In fact the new research had all been about undermining the whole idea of symbiosis. Both partners benefit, certainly, and yet one was ultimately in charge. Recent theory had thrown everyone into a tizzy showing, without much room for doubt, that the queen of an ant colony wasn't really the queen. She was more the reproductive slave of the workers. An ant colony was more of a Marxist paradise than a kingdom.

I was looking at another symbiosis, the relationship between ants and their plants. Specifically some ant species and plant species have close, nearly symbiotic relationships. The plants provides the ants with nectar or places to farm their aphids, and the ants protect the plants, acting like a personal army against more potentially damaging invaders.

But who's in charge? Do the ants work for the plants, or the plants for the ants?

After McMarky-Lemming, et.al., many people were asking this question, and yet it wasn't clear how to approach the problem. But I had an idea, and I wasn't sharing. I occurred to me that the question of dominance was etched into their DNA, so the question could be asked separately for each species and the answer should be the same. It was just a matter of recording their responses to certain kinds of stresses and determining -- basically -- who cracked first, the ants or the plants.

Once I had my parameters designed I worked in secret for about six months, collecting data. I felt bad about being so exclusive, and yet at the same time I was terrified that someone else was doing the same experiment based on my previously public discussions. I didn't know what I was -- shrewd scientist or information terrorist. I was an emotional wreck, but at the end I had my data and ultimately that's all that mattered.

The ants work for the plants, in case you were wondering. I guess it's sort of obvious in retrospect, but I have data, graphs and error bars to back me up. It was a bit of a yawn in the Roam. At 18 my writing lacked a lot of the flourish that science expects today. Hundreds of people anticipated me and thousands found all the primary sources I failed to quote. My first serious result was like a drop of rain in a thunderstorm. In the middle of the ocean. When no one was looking.

Day 411 - Tearing Down the Walls of the Prison of Knowledge

Source doesn't stop at code, or blueprints, or processes. Source is everything of value in anything. Life itself is nothing but source. For billions of years the source code of life -- DNA -- has been innovating and sharing (with great gusto!) and bridged vast gulfs that we can only wistfully imitate. Ultimately our own humanity is hackable.

People living in the first half of the twenty-first century knew that what they were doing was not working. It didn't take a genius to see that burning minerals for fuel and filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide was an ongoing, slow-motion disaster, or that the yawning chasm between rich and poor was a social and economic time bomb. On the other hand, what were the alternatives? Mass producing more cheap goods wasn't the answer since none of the plastic doodads were of any use in combating the real problems, and yet that seemed to be the only solution offered by industry. It was also clear that waiting for the free market, or national governments -- which were more and more the same thing -- was simply naive. And yet patience (and buying more cheap goods) was that only council that the financial powers could suggest.

Graham Gregson could not imagine, as a child of his time, a force as revolutionary as the Reawakening, but he was able to sketch its broad outlines. His book, Open Source World: How Free Knowledge can Make us Healthy and Wealthy, is quite favorably quoted by Princeton and his ilk. I don't know what's up with the title; all the books from that period have titles like that. It's interesting to see the relative importance of "health" and "wealth", however. That health is subordinate to wealth -- that readers of the time would reject a solution for global health unless it also allowed for personal wealth -- is just bizarre.

The "source" in the title originally referred to source code, the computer instructions that perform subtle computations, or entertain us with interactive experiences, or just let us store and access our data. There's a lot in common between science and software. They both have correct results which are very hard to find, relying as they do on a combination of inspired ideas tested through long hours of painstaking experimentation. For that reason answers found by one research group can be applied by others, and open sharing of results generates a kind of exponential return. Science figured this out a long time before, which is why for the most part its informational products were open. Software, on the other hand, was a mostly a commercial venture with its source code a closely guarded secret.

The open source movement came out of people frustrated with this state of affairs. Gregson described it as being like city-states before markets. The value in an ancient city was the people and their possessions, so you'd build a wall around the city to keep raiders from stealing them. Inside the wall there was vibrant trade, but between cities there was little. Likewise the massive corporations of the financial age knew that their information was their true value, so they built walls of privacy to keep it away from everyone else. Historically those old cities tore down their walls because they found that trading what they each had made them wealthier, and, Gregson argued, we would all come to realize the same thing about sharing knowledge.

Admittedly his ideas for how to implement this goal were somewhat lacking. He did understand the distinction between primary and secondary value (although under different names), and he did realize that innovation required an incentive structure based on the quality of the innovation itself. That his description of such a system sounded a bit Utopian can be forgiven. We see these things with hindsight and they look obvious to us now. For them, they didn't know another way.

The term "open source" may sound anachronistic, but recall that the venerable series of lifters -- the rockets that took eager generations to space after decades of confinement -- were called Oshavs. We still use the term today. That originally stood for "Open Source Heavy Ascent Vehicle."

Day 405 - A Girl and Her Glasses

I started wearing glasses at about age six and did so until I had cornea surgery when I was 19. The doctors had reviewed the literature and determined that my eyes would grow and change and that early surgery was useless. I needed to wait to grow up, so I wore corrective lenses.

My peers thought it was the weirdest thing they had ever seen. For those who don't know, corrective lenses are like safety glasses except that instead of being hard and transparent they have optical properties that affect your vision, and instead of only wearing them when working in a shop or lab you wear them all the time. Everyone I met used to ask me, "Why don't you take them off now?" and I had to explain again how I wouldn't be able to see well without them. It continued to puzzle anyone who wasn't a close friend or was uncomfortable with my condition. My "nearsightedness."

e2 children don't have vision problems.

It ended up being the most odd and yet intimate bond with my mother. She was not -- to put it politely -- a warm and open person, and yet she was an avid scholar of old cinema. It represented millions of hours of video scripted and staged for an audience steeped in its cultural milieu -- a kind of visual time capsule. It was possible to see the evolution of any idea over decades by tracking its representation in film.

Anytime my mother would drag herself away from her other projects long enough to think about me, we would be likely to look for eyeglasses and how their meaning changes over time in film. I loved it. We developed theories about the various stages -- and it was always glasses on girls, mind you. It had a long history. Glasses mean librarian, restrained and bookish. Glasses mean unrealized potential, and once the obviously pretty girl takes off her glasses she's obviously pretty to everyone (and can still see, somehow). Glasses mean a dangerous knowledge, where the girl puts on glasses to hack into a government computer, or to properly use the force of her psychic fire. Glasses mean a fashion choice -- a girl who really knows what she's about and doesn't care about anyone else. Glasses mean pragmatic and resourceful, a girl who could fashion her own prostheses. Glasses mean a disability -- this affected me the worst -- a girl who is different and less able than everyone normal. Glasses faded away from popular symbolism sometime around the mid to late 22nd century and are simply not referenced anymore.

Of course for the most part my mother would either forget I was there, or would yell at me about forgetting my glasses in one place or another. Ultimately that's what I expected from her.

Day 399 - Fact-free Fighting and Unmotivated Defense

Earthdate: April 29, 2314. Wednesday. I'm not sure why this particular day was so difficult. Paal and I had developed a routine that worked for us. I still felt that I loved him and things would work out in the end, somehow. Our primary focus as a couple was the paper we would publish and spent most of our personal time working on. In fact just about everything we did was about work, work, work. There was no time to think about the reality of our relationship.

I guess the catalyst was my work on the Crab Database Project. CDP was a meta-hub for all things Crab -- peer-review and meta-analysis of Crab research, Crab data synthesists, auditing of anything Crab-related, as well as a forum for crazy Crab theories and unfounded speculations. For a Crab-obsessed person like myself it was heaven. I spent so much time there that just a week earlier I had been invited to be a contributing synthesist, which for me was like dream come true. I think it was nice to be appreciated, even if it was just for my nearly encyclopedic grasp of Crab research. Paal should have been happy for me.

He wasn't.

I forget what set it off -- probably just one of the many things that Paal hated. Pickles, maybe. Whatever it was he went off on me. How I was spending my time on something else, but worse, how I was betraying our results in hub forums. Normally I think I would have agreed with his attack, and I'm sure he was depending on that. But I didn't. I forget the back and forth, but mostly I asked him why he didn't audit CDP as well. Since he had no good answer he replied with bluster.

Nothing changed, of course. It was just one of many fights. But this was the first time that I really didn't understand his motives. Now it makes sense, but only in hindsight.