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Asparagus boys

Over the past few months, I have gained about ten pounds more than I should. I am still not overweight, but I'd like to turn this progress around, so I decided to spend the July eating 1,500 calories a day. I really also ought to start properly exercising again, but it's just so boring, especially the treadmill.

Even though I will eat no more chocolate or candies or any other sweets, information is nonfattening and I can digest as much of it as I want without fear of fat or tooth decay. For starters, my reader in Britain points me to David Rennie's blog at the Daily Telegraph. This plucky reporter, who is no doubt not that much different from Jimmy Olsen, is currently visiting Helsinki, since Finland is the new chair of EU for the next six months. In his post "A 'walk-straight-in' city", David makes an observation about certain deep differences between Helsinki and London.

A few posts ago I wondered whether the concept of "evil" could simply be defined as engagement to negative-sum games. Another reader informed me by email that Mark Nau has also examined the nature of evil in his three-part post of Objective morality (part one, two, three).

A while back I linked to the excellent blog "Bulletproof Pimp", whose contents most resemble the writings of The Danimal of all the blogs that I have ever seen. After a break, the poster has moved to Philippines and now reports from there. The new posts "Impotent Jibes", "Sexual Poverty" and "Christianity vs. Human Nature" seriously ought to be read by every single gamma male in North America who don't realize what tremendously powerful and desirable alpha males they are by the average world standards. For some strange reason, few men seem to be able to grasp the way that supply and demand work in human mating, and give up a tremendous edge that they would otherwise enjoy.

Somebody please explain me why the space shuttle, which flew something like a hundred missions without any newsworthy events, has now suddenly become so dangerous and is falling apart. But it's not like manned space flights have any future in the first place: to any extent that space flights will be useful and profitable, they will be robotic. As I explained in my old post "Beyond the beyond", sending smelly meat sacks to space is like communication with messenger boys. Udolpho has a new post "Another shuttle hopes not to blow up" about the same topic, and his previous post "New Superman" convinced me not to go see this cinematic boondoggle (and it looks like I am not the only one). But pray tell me, somebody: since the premise of this movie is that Superman has been away for years and then returns, how is Clark Kent's simultaneous long disappearance explained so that the usual gang of morons doesn't suspect a thing?

Speaking of cinematic turkeys, the page "Not Coming to a Theater Near You" of RetroCrush lists a whole bunch of movies that the world was never allowed to see. The link was provided by Relapsed Catholic, whose post "This is Canadian, isn't it?" explains how you can recognize a Canadian movie. I can still remember watching the trailer for "Foolproof", in which the hunky Ryan Reynolds jumps inside an elevator shaft, and the screen flashes to show the text "This Fall". I almost stood up and applauded at that point. Only the pure mind of an absolute beginner could come up with something like that.

Ace of Spades links to the essay "When Geography 'Equals' Bigotry" about the new handy leftist tool for silencing criticism with the race card. But even in San Francisco, where everybody must celebrate and nobody can judge a leatherman who is walking his slave behind him in a leash, but normal heterosexual sex is the ultimate sin if the man has given any money to the woman, you can still publish an article "When Speech Becomes a Crime" that explains what you are not allowed to say. Unless you are a Muslim, of course. In that case, homophobia and sex discrimination are no problemo for leftists.

Last, the fellow Canadian blogger at "Dust my Broom" asks you to "Support your Police State". I actually support security cameras in any private area and also in any public places in which a human cop would be allowed to stand, since unlike humans and their frailty memories and observational skills, videotape can later be used to determine exactly who did what to whom. If it was possible for me to carry around an embedded minicamera that recorded my life and encrypted the data so that I could later show the events of any given time period at my discretion, I would not hesitate to implant such camera. With the price and physical size of storage constantly plummeting, this might become technologically possible in a decade or so when the disk space is routinely measured in petabytes.

3 comments

Gregg Easterbrook pointed out the shuttle's dangers to its crew in 1980, so the criticism is hardly new. (But after the Columbia many more people finally snapped out of their uncritical comas.) The shuttle is a victim of bureacracy, mission creep, and pork barrel politics of imperial proportions. It must die before it kills again.

As for Mr. Kent, the movie makes some passing remark about traveling to find himself. The whole move is so dumb that it kind of fits. I remember reading the comics back in the 70s, even though they targeted young children they came up with more plausible excuses than this. Movies are now an order of magnitude dumber than even the comic books of yesteryear (having already passed television shows that they also rip off for ideas).

I watched Network this weekend in an effort to forget my recent moviegoing experience. It worked, I felt like a grown-up in a grown-up world again.

You don't think that we should prepare to leave this planet? The weather is nice at the moment despite climate change and all that. The conditions will not remain the same. Life is very resilient, individual species isn't. Sooner or later there will be a catastrophy that will wipe out the human race on this planet. Shouldn't we prepare for it by first colonizing Moon and Mars and ultimately leaving this solar system?

Jani

You (or someone who you have read) suggested that evil can be equated to participation in negative sum games. In game theory, the option of participating or not participating is often included in the actions of the game, hence the game you talk about is not actually a negative sum game (I assume that not participating gives you zero regret). A negative sum game is such that participants MUST participate and they indeed always suffer in the game.

There is an additional difficulty in defining utilities for players of a given "real life" game, for the utilities may include moral values. This might be pointed out in game theory courses in order not to give impression that game theory gives "evil" recommendations. But moral values (or the lack of them) are outside the sphere that the game theory considers.

To speculate a little, if you want to think evil in terms of games, then perhaps evil is associated with trying to give negative utility to other players, and morality in considering the joint utility of all players (or at least the moral ones :-) Note that the joint utility of all players is not necessarily maximized by rational play, which is defined as selfish play in game theory.

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