Peter Merel

We live in a world of unplumbed wonder And everything around us is alive and pregnant with possibilities But we fail each other and we fail ourselves By seeing only the familiar and tried and true And leaving things be as they are And falling asleep.

Awake! Awake! Awake! Look around you and take it in your hands! Shake off your sickness and release your vendetta! Forget your habits and seize your opportunities! The essence of life is in your breast and your mind! Do great things now! Today! Here!

re: ItsNotOurProblem?...

Peter, I didn't know you were so bloodthirsty. Good on you! :)

re: global warming

I figured I'd have fun feeding your paranoid fears, fears which I only share with you half the time. Check out (http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=57&ItemID=8876) Apparently, we're looking at an unprecedented event in modern history. I especially liked,

: Where other researchers model the late 21st-century climate that our children will live with upon the precedents of the Altithermal (the hottest phase of the current Holocene period, 8,000 years ago) or the Eemian (the previous, even warmer interglacial episode, 120,000 years ago), growing numbers of geophysicists toy with the possibilities of runaway warming returning the earth to the torrid chaos of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM: 55 million years ago) when the extreme and rapid heating of the oceans led to massive extinctions.

Hadn't seen that but don't have an opinion on it. I mean I don't know enough to say anything about it. I found the ocean acidity stuff alarming because at least there there's nothing to leave to opinion - the data tells the tale. GOSP, if it gets off the ground, would have to spend some time figuring ways to evaluate the various alarums and wake up calls without "when in trouble or in doubt, run in circles scream and shout".

But hey, thanks for fucking with me :-)

You're welcome. :)

ElizabethWiethoff here. FWIW, increasingly increasing global warming comes up as a secondary issue in William Sanders' short story "Amba" in the December 2005 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction. Everyone who can will flock in desperation to Siberia, Canada, and Alaska. As for the rest of humankind, well...

It seems a little odd that in this day and age a global warming story qualifies as science fiction. Asimov must be snoring in his grave. But let me suggest an alternative; global warming is occurring far faster at the poles than at the equator. But Antarctica has such deep glaciers - miles thick on top of a continental base - that it will likely keep the southern hemisphere temperate long after the northern hemisphere has turned to mudaccino. Ergo let your story protagonists move to Australia and ... run a teahouse. And let their great grandkids recolonize North America. All those empty cities surrounded by virgin forest ... how romantic!

Pete SupermanReturns will solve the GlobalWarming issue you were so interested in months ago? Will he address GlobalDimming too?

Um, that's a movie review. You know, light entertainment for children. You have children. They might enjoy it too. But if you think the world dying is a big joke, you're part of the problem. Sorry to be harsh, but, you know, there's really extremely bad shit going on. GrandOpenSourceProjects might be part of a solution for same. But fuck, I'm just a little guy with problems of my own. If it's presumptuous of me to give a toss about the larger crap, fuck me, I'm sorry as hell about that.

Peter, you might want to check out FutureMap? if you haven't already.

Why remove your name from the winning entry on HowLongIsaPieceOfString? That was a nice bit of work, there. -- DougMerritt

I find myself sometimes adding signatures to old bits of tat that can use them to develop, and removing same from nice things that don't need me any more. That's probably WhyIamNotaBlogger. In this case I like the thing far too much to take credit for it. --Pete.

Hi Pete, I like your hierarchy of representations on LeibnizianDefinitionOfConsciousness. I translated it to German for my father in law. could find no other page with the same idea, does any exist? -- GunnarZarncke

Hi Gunnar, I don't know of one that takes the same form. As I said it derives from KenHappel, whose work is too seldom published on or off line. Ken used it as the philosophical basis of a kind of ComputationAsSignalProcessing. But if you like it you might also enjoy Leibniz's gloss of LaoTse, which he called TheMonadology?.

The following is priceless, and you are the very first one I thought of to pass it along to:

"I'm working on a screenplay for a disaster movie where the greenhouse effect kills off the entire human race except hard core drug addicts." --TatsuyaIshida? { http://www.sinfest.net/ }

I'm honoured but ... is it because they sweat more? How's that?

When not gadding about on wiki Pete frequently enjoys the IllusionOfIndividuality.

Pete, this is Sam, from CalDev?, in San Diego many years ago -- you probably won't remember me. Can you send me an e-mail at kc5tja at arrl dot net? I have a question I'd like to ask you regarding stone societies, but which is not appropriate for this Wiki (I don't think, at least). Thank you.

Folk wondering what Pete's up to now should check out his current riff on http://unlocktao.wordpress.com .

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