Eco-games

In the spirit of my new job, & new project to save the world, I'm playing new games. Research. It's all about the hard slog :)
Eco-games, so far, are all basically managers along the lines of SimCity, some at higher levels of detail, some lower. There's a fundamental failure of imagination when serious game devs keep approaching the eco-game with a concept for Manager-types, when management of the large-scale environment is impossible for almost everyone likely to play such games. Maybe a political advocacy game, or an FPS where the enemy is methane belching cows.

Anyway, the last two I played where old-school, but nicely done and a good laugh for my managerial tendencies.

http://climcity.cap-sciences.net/us/index.php
This is like the LHC took a spreadsheet and fired it at a bitmap.

http://www.electrocity.co.nz/
This is like Duplo blocks (Lego for under 5's). You'd almost be fooled into thinking you can actually build something.

http://www.bigfishgames.com/download-games/5257/plan-it-green/index.html
A National Geographic game, but with no humping animals

iWeb 2.0

++Transmission begins++

For a while now it has seemed to me that the web has reached a plateau, that something more significant is possible and needed, than the endless parade of social networks and disassociated widgets and utilities. What I’m talking about is a purpose, a reason to be there, something that means that 55 profiles and accounts on different services and websites all jointly represent you. Not because it is necessary to link it all, but simply because the opportunity presents itself to achieve something by doing so.

Integration is coming, of course. Open ID sees almost all the major internet content providers getting into bed to supply a single way to log on to their respective services. A small step qualitatively, but significant with those backers.

Yet this is not the true nature of what I’m getting at, which is that the online presence must in some way come to represent who you really are – an avatar of yourself in the digital empyrean. It starts with the same motivation as Open ID – one can only remember so much personal info before a bootstrap optimisation is necessary. Then beyond that there comes a point when you can’t really remember every way in which you have represented yourself online over the years, and control over both access to, and knowledge of, your online presence is desired. Remember, aside from organisational entropy, nothing on the internet ever goes away.

Finally, (perhaps only finally in my limited vision), there is control of where you want to go, and what you want to know. The internet is a big place, and it would be nice to be able to link your online representation to the spotlight of your directed attention every time you log on, the better to swim in waters that are relevant and/or hospitable.

Perhaps it is my feeling of disenfranchisement as a citizen that prompts these thoughts, for the power of voting seems to be to have been annulled by the hydra of capitalistic democracy and consequent lack real choice between candidates. That is a whole other topic, but certainly I feel far more likely to have my voice heard by somebody online, than I do on a ballot.

So the representation I speak of is both a new and age-old concept. The phrase ‘citizen of the net’ has been bandied about for years, but it’s far from a reality and the infrastructure would be need to be evolved dramatically. To start with, and to return to where I started, is the melding of all those piecemeal representations that we call our profiles – and then comes real self-knowledge, and real control, as all the pieces of our online selves cohere in our own vision.

At the logical conclusion of this way of thinking, lies the representation of the impact your life has on the finite world in which you live. If we are no longer able to count the economic cost of environmental impact or natural resource consumption as zero, then any true representation of ourselves in any media must carry that caveat: ‘What I am as a social being, is accompanied by this tally of my impact on the world’.

And the value of that, is that with self-knowledge comes self-control. But this again, is another topic.

++Transmission ends++

My Brain on Games

My BrainHex Class is Socialiser-Mastermind!

Survey taken under beta for the good folks at iHobo, see their website for details.

Results

Your BrainHex Class is Socialiser-Mastermind.

You like hanging around with people you trust and helping people as well as solving puzzles and devising strategies.

According to your results, there are few play experiences that you strongly dislike.

Learn more about your classes and exceptions at BrainHex.com.

Your scores for each of the classes in this test were as follows:

Socialiser: 7
Mastermind: 7
Survivor: 5
Achiever: 5
Daredevil: 5
Conqueror: 2
Seeker: 2

Go to BrainHex.com to learn more about this player model, and the neurobiological research behind it.

Feel free to take a copy of your BrainHex icon and display it anywhere
you wish! Simply right click and choose "save as". All we ask is you
provide a link to BrainHex.com anywhere you use our images.

Thanks for taking part in the BrainHex survey!

---

Last Updated:
26 May 2009


BrainHex is the latest player satisfaction model from International Hobo Ltd

©1999 - 2009 International Hobo.

Das Dual Boot

Ubuntu is so sweet :)
The idea that a thousand nerds at a thousands Sun workstations could produce an OS that plays nice in a dual boot with a shared data partition, with Windows friggin XP...beggars belief. Yet they have. And it only continues to get better.
As long as nothing ever goes wrong...ugh, terminal :(

Back in the saddle

So having given the old site a facelift, and blown a tiny fanfare, I find myself in the embarrassing position of having even less time to write than before. I've put up nothing but unintended publishings of old draft material and that has to change - but I'm a bit blocked. Thus, I'm going to give a bulletin update of news and hope to get my regular posting back on track within the month.

• There is one PhD thesis in the bag, and one viva defence still to come. That was a long haul, but never got out of hand, I think. It becomes more like a job of work than a Bachelor or Masters degree, since its sooo long and sooo precise that you can't really just throw manic energy at it and expect to get anywhere. Then, there's still the viva, and I haven't even thought about what that entails. More research required!
• Job secured. Uh oh, I'm going back to the World of Work! A mystical place where work disappears into a gaping void of 'what exactly have we achieved?', and money appears out of the great blue yonder of 'whyyyy?' I'm going to be working on a couple of EU projects as a post-doc researcher, with the Centre for Knowledge and Innovation Research, Helsinki School of Economics, Suomi. All very grand sounding, although I admit I'm not yet quite sure what I'll be doing there. Being wonderful as usual, I suppose :S
• Moving time! Moving house is a logistics fetishists dream, and moving house between countries, especially one with a (very) different language, is just value-added complexity. So great fun for me...
• Finland, Finland, Finland. The place where I want to be. Will be. Officially bi-lingual, practically tri-lingual, the most and least Scandinavian country, depending on perspective. Problems with Russia. I wonder if Finland is a good place to weather the coming storm. I know Ireland and the UK are not good places, more like epi-centres, but I'm unsure of Finland's exposure. They have masses of potable water, but in Helsinki they have water charges. They have a huge land-to-population ratio, but most of it is under snow. They have a great economy, but its heavily service-biased. They have a great standard of living, but I expect it costs a fair bit to keep it through those winters.

Watch this space!

Yes, yes, very nice...braaaains

Ok, so it's an interview for the insufferably smug self-satisfied Edge club, but it's very nice all the same.

[ALVA NOË:] "The central thing that I think about is our nature, our human-animal nature, our being in this world. What is a person? What is a human being? What is consciousness? There is a tremendous amount of enthusiasm at the moment about these questions.

They are usually framed as questions about the brain, about how the brain makes consciousness happen, how the brain constitutes who we are, what we are, what we want—our behavior. The thing I find so striking is that, at the present time, we actually can't give any satisfactory explanations about the nature of human experience in terms of the functioning of the brain.

What explains this is really quite simple. You are not your brain. You have a brain, yes. But you are a living being that is connected to an environment; you are embodied, and dynamically interacting with the world. We can't explain consciousness in terms of the brain alone because consciousness doesn't happen in the brain alone."

Thought experiment inspired by this article - what can we see occurring in the brain/cognition when the body/action is the main focus but is focused inward, on performing some task not involving environmental interaction? My example is a kata, where the entire action is conceptually, not interactively based; and all thought is turned to the action. Then a person is suddenly highly active, but not interactive, and cognate but focused, not distracted. Kind of like Flow.

They told me to do it...

4 months

Tomorrow marks the four month anniversary of the last blog post I made, and so I've decided to break my silence this once, just to prevent that momentous date from actually occuring. Very quickly after writing this, I will go back to the grind of trying to write a thesis in the face of massive and insolent procrastination and excessive alternative commitments of an unnecessary nature.

In other news the poll that I've had up for all that time, measuring the comprehensibility of my pieces, has returned a massive 10 results! Unless that was me, answering from multiple separate machines over the last 4 months and not remembering, this represents a huge jump in readership figures. Since there is nothing to read, I'll assume they've all gone away again.

Whaa!? Does anybody ever know what I'm talking about? Fiendishly over the top 50% 5 I can't read, I just like the pictures 50% 5 Perfectly pitched 0% 0 Actually, a bit simple 0% 0 total votes: 10 powered by blogpoll

The results clearly show that nobody knows what I'm talking about, unless they can infer a lot from the mostly randomly chosen pictures. On second thought, all those who chose the 2nd option probably represent the increase in subscribers, and thus don't increase my 'readership', at all.

A Little Something for the Weekend

"Enjoying all the loneliness at home"
Is it a question of being alone?
Employing silence to fill up a hole
the loud sound of thoughts all unknown
and buzzing memories to be owned.

The mind is I and the mind it is whole
or so it seems, so I feel I know,
but does cyclical confirmation hold?
Who holds me to be me, myself, my own?
Only one, the one that is all I hold.

Dream-beings

Did I dream this belief,
or did I believe this dream?
- Peter Gabriel

"In the further adventures of Achilles, he again crosses paths with the Tortoise just as he is pondering certain imponderables thrown up by an unfortunate accident involving excessive physical activity and mild concussion.

Achilles: Tortoise! I'll have a word with you, since you're going nowhere fast.

Tortoise: By all means. Nothing would give me more pleasure!
[at this point, authorial licence gives way to reality...]

Achilles: I have been thinking about when I went unconscious. When I was dreaming, do you think that was some function of the brain?

Tortoise: I do.

Achilles: What do you think is the evolutionary purpose of it?

Tortoise: My 'official' reaction would be to say that dreaming is probably an accidental by-product of analytical thinking

Achilles: hmmm, not very convincing

Tortoise: I'll elucidate then. Let us consider that we have this function to think analytically and not just instinctively like most other animals

Achilles: So animals don't dream?

Tortoise: Clearly they do! But their dream is a shadow of their particular form of thought process, as ours is a shadow of how we think. I wouldn't like to begin to address what I have not experienced, when explaining what I have experienced is such a challenge.
So we were considering the analytical thought process, a function that doesn't go away when we sleep. Working solely with memory data, as opposed to sense data, the analytical thought process is on shaky ground. It confabulates fantastical visions for the 'experiential self' by performing its normal function, which is to recognise, assign nominal or symbolic value and classify. That is, it reads memory, performs some processing (which was designed for waking operation), and writes back to memory.
That is my 'official' line.

I would stand by that (because it's not really very deep at all, so it's reasonably safe).

However, if I was going out on a limb, I might say that there is more scope for interaction with unusual sensory perception when asleep simply because our analytical minds are shut down.
I might go so far as to say that this extra-ordinary interaction causally precedes our evolution - i.e. we dream because the dream state is there to be had, in the same way that we see because sight is possible.
Now, I wouldn't defend that view since, by all standards of reason, a defence is impossible!

Achilles: What do you think of aboriginal concepts of Dream time?

Tortoise: I know of it, it's a mythology built around the common idea of the mythic oneness. I wouldn't gainsay it - we know time to be entirely subjective, so I have no problem with Dream time as a metaphor for reality, outside of a single frame of reference.

Achilles: Is it possible, do you think, that the evolutionary consciousness rises out of dream time, and is used to pick and choose its subjective linear experience

Tortoise: Evolutionary consciousness? Explain.

Achilles: Well, consciousness as an evolving construct - rising out of the primordial soup as it were.

Tortoise: Consciousness associated with what? A single human? The collective unconscious? Gaia?

Achilles: A single human - but at different levels it drops further into a larger "dreaming"
I just feel that what I experienced was something akin to a dream time experience, and that it was my evolutionary consciousness, that values my linear experiences, that pulled me out and kept my alive...although, the human experience also helped me, as I was woken up by another human being.

Tortoise: To my mind, it's a double question really
a) does consciousness come from before, and last after, the human body?
b) is there really a single great consciousness so that a single personality is just an illusion, one that we can 'awake' from (whether that be in dreams or in death)?

At first reaction, I honestly can't answer either question. These are truly imponderables.

Achilles: Well, if b) is true, is it possible that the dream isn't a shadow of the waking self, as you seemed to be suggesting?
Rather, that the dream is a fundamental state of being that we can all share and partake of, and where we all become incredibly similar...but in which the identity becomes increasingly malleable.

Tortoise: My own experience of dreams leads me to believe that most dream experiences are akin to normal conscious experience, and all the stuff about identity being malleable results from the faculty of imagination - modelling!
BUT...I cannot deny there is possibly something more happening.

Achilles: Surely though, what we bring back from dreams is influenced by our own waking self

Tortoise: I think I see what you mean - that we reinterpret the dream experience on waking.

Achilles: yeah

Tortoise: We 'remember' the dream, based on a model that is built by our conscious mind?

Achilles: yup

Tortoise: Well, I agree that may affect remembrance...but it doesn't actually imply anything different is happening when we dream.
I am open to the idea that there is something extra happening, but I can't really approach that idea of a greater consciousness...because the more I think about it, the more clear it is that any rational answer will only approximate a model of a level of consciousness which I cannot understand or even discuss rationally!
For instance, imagine a Gaia consciousness that persists based on a substrate of electrical energy within the world [or solar system or galaxy, why not?]. We have a concept there, but what more can we say about it? the why, how, what...none of our experience can begin to help us form answers.

Achilles: I think our analytical brain does influence the dream a lot, even during sleep...yet what was strange for me was how little influence it had during unconsciousness, and then its sudden attempt to reassert itself. It felt like the evolutionary process speeded up in a second, pulling random impulses into a fully formed human.

Tortoise: Ok, so I have a concept of some rather unapproachable level of consciousness, and you have your unconsciousness/dream concept, which brings us back to your recent personal experience...and I feel I can say this much:

Consider the analytical, self-oriented left-brain part as 'You' for a moment. 'You've' basically got a will to live, or a will to die - stay in the human body, or exit it. You can think of dying as the end of things, or as reunion with the One, enlightenment. Yet if there is this greater consciousness, then it doesn't matter what you think, because you can't approximate the truth with thought...and you can't escape it.
If it true, then when you die you join it.
If not, when you die you rot.
Seems like I just made a good rational argument for not worrying about spirituality too much!

Achilles: I think its the "you" part that I am having difficulty coming to terms with!

Tortoise: Is there anything more that we can say regarding the transcendence of dreams? What is the 'I' if all we need to do to wash it away, is to fall asleep? Are we remembering a true state of experience when we sleep or when we wake?
A good question, Achilles, and I thank you!"