explore alternate worlds

My favorite prophet.

2012-01-14T22:37:00.003Z

http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling.html

It is very easy to conclude that the whole world is evil. Even the good merely tinker about the edges, improving one tiny area while the whole world carries on as it always has. They think that really changing the world seems too hard. But some people do it anyway. People like Hans Rosling. I could listen to him forever. I would not be terribly surprised if there were only five or ten truly good people in the world, people who devote their lives to doping the most good they can possibly do. But Hans Rosling is one of them.

He is the greatest teacher I have ever seen. He devotes his life to what is most important: saving the world, particularly for the poor. His teachings encompasses all of human life. He explodes myths, he opens eyes, he inspires. He shows us the future, with considerable accuracy, and he shows us how to create heaven on earth.

I didn't realize until I wrote that last sentence (this post originally had a different title)., but Hans Rosling is the greatest prophet I have ever seen.

power to the thinkers

2012-01-11T09:36:00.000Z

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/01/newspapers-paywalls-and-core-users/

When the politically engaged readers are also the only paying readers, however, their opinion will come to matter more, and in ways that will sometimes contradict the advertisers’ desires for anodyne coverage.

This move in newspapers is a variation of my "all the smart people should form their own group" idea. It is good to see. (Note that if the smart people are not as smart as they think then this will reveal the fact as well. So it cannot fail. But it really needs the 'choose your own government' principle as well so the "smart" people can produce something more than divisive opinions.)

Consciousness in cells

2012-01-11T00:36:00.001Z

tl;dr: Life is fractal. Cells increase their surface area by forming bodies, and those bodies form societies.

Whether something is conscious depends on how we define consciousness: being awake? able to make complex decisions? Having a model of self in one's head? Being unpredictable? I try t simply and clarify this on my AnswersAnswers page. Depending which definition we choose, most things are conscious to some extent. With that in mind, it is interesting to think about consciousness in individual cells.

Bruce Lipton points out some interesting features of cells. I am not using his name to support his other views, but he wrote the article and the article makes sense to me. But it is rather long so I will summarise the main points here:

Everything we do is done by our cells. In groups, usually.
Every cell has all the features of life: organs (organelles) that allow simple forms of respiration, excretion, senses, etc.
The DNA is commonly thought of as the brain, but some cells can survive for months without DNA. The DNA is simply the brain's memory. A better candidate for the cell brain (the controlling part of the cell) is the cell membrane.
The cell membrane is not just a container, it regulates what happens in the cell, just as a brain regulates a body: its proteins decide what comes in and out of the cell. In other words, the membrane decides how the cell interacts with its environment. In the same way, human brains decides how we interact with our environment, what information and nutrients we take in, what information we give out and what forces we exert, and so on. Our brains are of course made of cells: everything we do is done by them.
Cells are limited by their size, and so they form larger groups, such as humans, and we in turn form societies. It's a fractal thing.

Of course, I am talking about "me" as different from my cellular parts. I made AnswersAnswers so that questions like that, the precise meaning of things, can be clarified.

It is probably coincidence, but the cell membrane reminds me of Stephen Hawkins' work on branes - the idea that the universe can be defined in just two dimensions.

The idea that existence only occurs at boundaries ties in very nicely with fundamental ideas of what makes reality.

So many connections, yet everything fits together so simply.

Philosophy

2012-01-07T12:34:00.003Z

Like most thinking people I have an interest in philosophy, but a nagging doubt that it is all the emperor's new clothes. However, philosophers are clearly very intelligent and usually well meaning, so it seems wrong to condemn them without reading their books. Knowing this, they make their books as long as possible. So I was very pleased to discover this site: Squashed Philosophers

Squashed Philosophers takes the classics of philosophy and shortens them, thus doing the world an incalculable favour. Of course, I still cannot dismiss philosophy completely, as it is possible that the real truths can only be appreciated after reading everything, which is impossible in practice. Which just goes to show how clever the philosophers are.

For the record, I do not agree with all those people who say the universe is impossibly complicated. I base this conclusion on the definition of impossibly complicated, but that is another topic. My own site is full of errors, but I don't think the errors are insurmountable and I think I will have them solved when I next revise the site in a couple of years.

I should also say that there is ONE philosopher I admire: Pythagoras. It tickles me that he saw the ultimate answer right at the beginning (that the universe is made of maths). It left all other philosophers with nothing to do except try to make their profession sound more complicated than it is. They do this either by hiring professional wrestlers to intimidate people (e.g. Plato, famously named after his mountainous shoulders), or by being as ambiguous as possible (e.g. Wittgenstein).

I will close with what I consider the greatest ever treatise on the subject of philosophy, from HHGG: the philosophers discuss the creation of the computer Deep Thought:

"Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job aren't we? I mean what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?"

Happy New Year!

2011-12-31T19:18:00.001Z

I just discovered that most of the works of James Joyce go out of copyright at midnight. What a perfect Hogmanay gift! Now I know at least one book I'll be adapting next year.

nobody cares about lies

2011-12-31T18:03:00.003Z

This is something I find very hard to cope with. Nobody cares about lies. OK, an exaggeration, but not far from the truth. Here is an example. These ads are all over the Internet. It must cost them a fortune. Countless web sites rely on income from these ads.

All this money comes from tricking vulnerable people. I searched for information and nobody is talking about it, except for a very few minor bloggers. Perhaps one or two per year. And most of those just laugh and move on. That is why I conclude that nobody cares about lies.

OK, accusing someone of lying is serious business, so here is the proof.

The headline and pictures: lies.
Look at that middle ad: "55 year old Mum looks 25." How can that possibly be true? Look at how wrinkled the woman on the left is! Look at how young and smooth the woman on the right is! Have they discovered time travel? It has to be a lie. And just to prove it, they lie in every other possible way, just to make it clear that they are liars. So nobody should be in any doubt.

The locations: lies.
It says "local Mom." I get these where I live, with a "local" town name added. I live in a very remote village. No way are any of these women local. The same pictures and wording are used throughout the world, and sometimes local town names are added automatically. The local Mom did not expose the miracle. She either does not exist, or is a victim of this scam.

The business model: lies
The ad says the trick costs $5. You may ask how a company can afford to flood the Internet with highly expensive ads if the product (a) plainly cannot work as advertised, and (b) only costs $5? Delivery alone would cost almost that. It makes no sense. But change it to $80 a month (see below) and suddenly the numbers add up.

Their identity: lies.
I Googled "wrinkle cream scam" and these sponsored ads are at the top. Notice the URL addresses: Daily Mail and BBC. Other ads say the independent (a respected UK newspaper).

So I clicked the links, and guess what? Lies. They lead to fake pages that have nothing to do with the Daily Mail, BBC, Independent, or anyone who has any credibility of any kind. And you cannot leave the pages without clicking on their popup (that disables the normal 'X'). There is no way I am clicking on any of their pop-ups, so had to force the browser to close using Task manager.

Their history: lies

The phrase "Mom discovers secret" and the whole look and feel is very familiar: almost the exact same methods were used a few months ago with teeth whitening. As this Youtube video reminds us, this is a scam. That is, it obtains money by deception.

It claims that the product is either free or costs very little (typically free, or £4), then asks for credit card details and takes a large amount (typically over £80 at a time). That is how they afford all the expensive ads.

You can find this kind of post in many places, but you have to look hard it's drowned out by the money from the scammers.

They (or someone very similar) were taken to court in 2009 for this kind of practice, but still it continues, with the blessing of almost every web site on the Net it seems.

"Advanced Wellness Research, Inc., a company allegedly offering free trials for its products, including Acai berry supplements and whitening toothpaste, faces a lawsuit in Florida. That state’s attorney general filed the action, claiming the company failed to mention that customers would be charged approximately $80 on a monthly basis for products they did not intend to purchase...

"In August, Advanced Wellness Research was one of 40 companies sued by talk show host Oprah Winfrey, who charged the companies were using her name and likeness to promote their acai berry supplements."

Two years later, nothing has changed

Further searching reveals that they are still doing the exact same thing. Same wording, same products, same promises, same false use of credible names. These links are from just a few weeks ago. Year after year they do it, and it barely gets a mention. It is hardly surprising, as so many sites profit from their ads.

The disturbing part to me is that the victims blame themselves for being stupid. Like it's OK to lie, and the victim's fault for being deceived.

Their Google presence: lies
They benefit from another kind of liar: the one that claims to be top sites and to have useful information. But instead they offer no useful information at all. When I searched for the phrase "dermatologists hate her" I got all kinds of link farm type sites pretending to be objective. For example, these totally fake "blogs" (the addresses are "eklablog" and blog4ever" at two different addresses.

Notice anything?

They are the same site repackaged with two different addresses. I don't know the secrets of Google's search algorithm but I think it's safe to say that it supposed to avoid multiple copies of the same site. Someone is working hard to deceive the search engine.
It contains no useful content. All the links are bad, but I have moved the worst one to the top. It shows a happy family and offers a shopping comparison site for "Dermatologists Hate Local Mom." Is there even the slightest possibility that the link will take us to a shopping comparison site where we can compare the price of something called "Dermatologists Hate Local Mom"?
It flat out lies. "Top site." A top site is the one that offers no useful content? Really? That was not even top of the list (I moved it there to save space, the others were spam type sites). IT is not top in any sense.
It implies that this is a search site, to help you. "It's your search! Find what you need in seconds!" Yet the site has no useful content, other than links to other deceptive sites. At worst it obtains money by deception, at best it just makes searching harder by crowding out useful links.

"Don't blame us"?

But web site owners have no control over what ads get served, right? Well I am sure that is what they believe. It is very convenient and profitable to believe that. Who bothers to check?

A few months ago I considered running ads on my site, but they would be personally vetted to blatant scams don't get through. I made a mock up page, then did some research and found that I don't have to bother. Apparently all the major ad providers already offer filters. I don't know how good the filters are, but surely at least one ad provider offers a white list or a key word system? "Local Mom" and "one weird tip" type ads have been running for years. They are not hard to spot.

It is hard to blame the liars if we could say no, but instead turn a blind eye and take their money (laundered through the ad networks) year after year.

Summary

Get rich quick, miracle diets, teeth whitening, anti wrinkle, and so on have been going for years. The same look, the same tactics, the same results, the same victims (usually the poor or uneducated). The big ad companies, the web sites that rely on ads, all know about them. They all gain money from the deception. And nobody cares. Nobody even talks about it. A few high profile articles would shame Google and Tribalfusion (the people who served the first example ad), but nobody will write those articles because the web sites they write on make money from these ads.

It is sometimes worth being reminded that although we pretend to care about truth, really we don't unless it immediately benefits us. Any attempt to fix the world has to start from accepting that fact. It is why my approach is purely economic. I have to demonstrate that building an economy on lies is against out interests in the long term. You might think that is obvious, but apparently not.

Spelling

2011-12-30T10:45:00.004Z

If anything on this site is spelled badly I apologize. Apologise? I live in Britain but try to use American spellings, because I have two American readers but only one Brit. However, I often get them confused, and I sometimes blog on different computers with different spell check settings. Plus I type too fast and don't always read back. Sorry for the mess!

Property and theft

2011-12-30T10:36:00.003Z

Most of what we call property has no basis in logic, and so is indistinguishable from theft. The most obvious example is land: we all live on land that someone, somewhere, took by force. There are many more examples, but the others are closer to home so talking about them offends people. and I have no desire to offend people. The AnswersAnswers site discusses the concept of property as derived from logic, and how that would change the world. Later I will add examples of land rent in practise, but my first priority is to get the logic simple enough for a ten year old to follow, otherwise the examples just lead to misunderstanding.

Anyway, I was reminded of property (a topic never far from my little mind) by some quotes on today's Reddit. It began as a discussion of some Indian islands where people have very little contact with the outside world. "jurble" wrote:

"One of the problems Indians who live in the Andaman islands have is that the natives will walk in and just start taking stuff. They can understand the concept of how a watch works and what it does - but the concept of private property is actually harder to grasp.
That blows my mind."

Yet in the west we just do it on a bigger scale. We give it names like "national interest" (where our only concern with foreign nations is what we can get) or "mining" (when we just walk in and take stuff from the land) or "sovereignty" (where the ruling body can take what it likes by just writing on bits of paper and calling it laws). Bas on Reddit, "aardvarkious" replied,

"I remember reading about an early explorer in the pacific islands who came across an uncontacted group of natives. They boarded his boats and started taking everything in sight, he ended up slaughtering them, they ended up torching his fleet. His surviving crew latter found out that these people were taking things form the ship not as an act of war, but because that is how their culture worked. And, if the crew had simply said "we need this stuff more than you do," it would've all been recovered without any fighting."

"Orange_Drink" then quoted Raj Patel:

"In many North American indigenous cultures, generosity is a central behaviour in a broader social and economic system. One anecdotal account examined what happens when boys from white and Lakota communities received a pair of lollipops each. Both sets of boys put the first one straight into their mouths. The white boys put the second one in their pockets, while the Lakota boys presented it to the nearest boy who didn't have one."
Raj Patel - The Value of Nothing

I am not the only person moaning about western hypocrisy. But I think I am the only one offering a solution that is both simple and derived from pure logic: vote for land rent. Then see what happens when a society is not based on theft.

Anyone who has cats will understand

2011-12-30T10:00:00.000Z

Love this image! Just to prove that this blog is not super-serious all the time.

Though I could write a lot about the world is not all about conflict (lions, the kings of conflict, spend most of their time just lying around). Source. Newspapers never pay news subjects for news items, so I suppose it's OK to use this old pic as I linked the apparently original source. One day I will blog about copyright...

Angry Birds Compared with Enter The Story

2011-12-28T21:40:00.001Z

I'm currently watching a video on how they ported Angry Birds to HTML5. I have never played Angry Birds. I once played Tetris. That was fun for an hour. I once played Worms briefly, but lost interest after 5 minutes. it was plainly a well made game though. Most games just do not interest me, that's why I am making my own different kind of game.

Anyway, I spent the last few months creating a web based game engine, so everything this guys is saying sounds very familiar. Except he's an expert programmer and I am not. :) A few things stand out:

Getting games to work on a browser is very hard work. These people are world class and it they need a whole team of people to do it, and they expect to continue to upgrade the engine as time goes on. For a one man team myself that is just not a serious proposition.
I was right to change my approach (you will see what I mean when the new games go live). There is just no way that one person can do anything boundary pushing and still have time to focus on gameplay.
Angry Birds is an established formula a variation on an established formula. They did not have to reinvent the wheel and experiment with fundamental concepts as they went along. Most games are like that. It allows for much more polished games, and instant market. But it's not for me: I want to make a big difference, not an incremental one.
It does not work.

While listening to the video I'm trying to load the game. I use the latest version of Chrome. It is designed originally for Chrome. it should work. it doesn't. Or rather, it is SLOW. The guy keeps talking about instant start, and it isn't instant. I have to wait. Then wait some more. Yes, I am playing a video at the same time, and yes my rural download speed is terrible. But other web sites all work OK. My own game (he said smugly) loads as quick as a normal quick web page. but this does not. Also, it constantly nags me to log in. yes, I get that they want my details so they can hassle me for money. But I am tired of web sites that nag you for money all the time. The best ones, big sites like Google, and little (but profitable) sites like XKCD, do not.

Still seeing a "loading" screen.

I think other people live in a different world from me. I just don't see how loading screens are fun.

OK, now it's finally loaded and all I see is this:

I click somewhere and again get the "log in" nag screen. I am sorry, but give me a reason. Why go to the trouble of logging into something I may not even enjoy? At least let me see a few seconds of it working! It's also surrounded by ads, so it's not like they are making no money. Although granted, the chances of them advertising the kind of stuff that interests me is about zero.

I feel like an alien. Millions of people love this game. They shoot birds at people or something. There is no story, just bouncing stuff and explosions. I must sound like a terrible snob or the most boring person on earth, but how is that satisfying? What does that say about me that I don't get excited by the idea of (a) doing what everyone else does, or (b) shooting things?

But this blog post is not about the gameplay. The main thing is that my game loads MUCH faster, and does not nag people for money. It is also has actual stories. Those last two differences are why I will probably never be rich. :)

Dorian Gray is finished!

2011-12-28T13:35:00.004Z

The game that is.

I cannot overstate the importance of this event! For the first time in 14 years I finally have a game I am truly happy with. The code works. I guarantee it (i.e. if it doesn't then I can easily fix it and give you free games as a reward for spotting the bug). No more endless bug fixing and frustrating coding! No more worrying if the game will be any fun. Yes this is fun, and you can see for yourself in a few weeks. If you don't agree then clearly you do not know what fun is. :) :)

The new game web site won't go live for a couple of weeks because I want to create a couple more games first. "What?" I hear you say, "A couple of weeks to create a couple of new games? A new game every week??" That's right. Watch this space! All will become clear when I launch the new site.

For the first time in my game making career even I am excited about my games!

Consciousness only just started, and may be about to end

2011-12-28T00:55:00.001Z

This is a topic I haven't seen discussed anywhere else, so here goes.

Limited consciousness
Consciousness is usually defined as "awareness of one's own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc."

By this definition, for most of history, humans were only minimally conscious:

First, we knew very little beyond our immediate experience.
Second, our thoughts were not our thoughts, but were placed there by our tribe or religion.
Third, our existence was not our own existence, but we depended entirely on our tribe.

Read ancient texts such as Genesis or Homer: all ideas come from above or below, and all events are controlled by God or fate. The idea of individuals being in control of their lives is relatively new. Even the great heroes of the Iliad were constantly at the mercy of forces beyond their understanding. Julian Jaynes sees this as evidence that consciousness as we know it did not exist.

For related topics see The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins: we think we are smart, but to a large extent we are merely disposable carriers for our genes, they are in control and we don't even realize it. Or study the evidence for free will: there is masses of evidence that free will is an illusion (i.e. our choice are predictable and our ideas are never new).

Emergent consciousness
We like to think that, as humans, we are in control. But we are all have always been a team. As the poet said, no man is an island, complete of itself. Every man is part of the continent. when someone dies, we die. We need each other. The idea of separate existence has only ever been a partial truth. Our real identity is shared. The real decisions and intelligence operates at a group level. The group is more aware, has more identity, makes its own decisions, and is thus conscious.

This may seem unintuitive. How can a nation or a network or an Internet be conscious? But plenty of scientists ask the same question about humans, and come to the conclusion that consciousness is a shared or emergent property: there is no single conscious point, we are simply cells that work together. The idea of a personal identity has exactly the same meaning as a national or cultural identity: it is shared.

Some people find this scary. Does it mean we are weak? No, it means we are strong. Allegiance to the group gives us identity and power and safety.

Still don't believe it? OK. Here is a completely different approach
Don't believe it? OK, then forget the consciousness part. Here is a far simpler claim:

For most of history, individual humans were not at the top of the intellectual tree.

Individuals were conduits. Links in a chain. We simply followed ideas created by gods or tradition. Even direct experience was mediated by others telling us what it means. Very few people, if any, saw themselves as the originators of their ideas.

Obviously people still had eyes and sensations and made decisions. But this is like saying a hand is conscious because it will react to pain even before the message gets to the brain (the nerves in our limbs can do some simple things autonomously).

Throughout history the default position has been obedience. A class system made everyone a part of something else, passing on orders from above to those parts below.

This is true for kings as well as serfs. The kings were seldom the most intelligent people. They were there by accident of birth and often made really bad decisions. They were at the mercy of the wider forces of nature and society. Being in control was only ever true in a very limited sense.

This was of course also true for philosophers. Even the smartest man on earth knew very little and was at the mercy of the stupidest. Socrates ("true wisdom is to know that we know nothing") was forced to drink hemlock. Archimedes, while he knew that in theory he could move the world with a lever, could never actually do it and was killed by a Roman soldier. Consciousness is a story we tell ourselves, but our real control over our lives is very small.

Whatever decisions an individual makes, the decisions of the group take precedence. I will say that again. Whatever decisions an individual makes, the decisions of the group take precedence.

So who really makes the decisions?

What is conscious?
Can groups be conscious? Why not?

We are individually conscious because we are aware, we make decisions, we have memory, etc., but all those things are shared among our cells. We are groups. Groups of people also make decisions, decisions that no single individual can control.

Going in the other direction, whatever we say about groups and individuals can also be said to some extent about animals. And if we try to define consciousness precisely - as a point of view, a point where unpredictable changes happen, a point with memory and purpose, then it is even true of rocks: a rock can be seen as conscious. A rock is a point of view (a point in space), a rock has a memory (we can determine its past by looking at its present), a purpose (we can largely determine its future by seeing its inertia and other properties), and it causes unpredictable changes (not many, but random change happens everywhere).

Of course, we have a very strong feeling that we are different, but that is simply our self image. And our self image has dramatically changed over the past few centuries.

Masters of the world
This started to change with the ancient Greeks, who challenged the gods. The idea began that people might not be merely extensions of something else.

This idea grew with the renaissance and exploded with the industrial revolution that finally threatened the class system. Every the individual now had access to vast knowledge. Any person could be better than their master. Any person could know enough to challenge anything! We could leave our villages, learn new things, discover new things! We had vast new awareness and our ideas were truly our own, not just extensions of someone else. Our decisions were, for the first time, truly our own!

This probably reached its peak in the early 20th century. A recent TED speaker noted that the greatest concentration of new discoveries was in the period 1870-1890, and the greatest spread of these new discoveries was in the 1930s. Within a single long lifetime (say, 1870 to 1970) a typical person went from a farming life much like medieval times to a world where men walked on the moon! States and institutions could not keep up: individuals were masters of the world. For individuals, anything was possible!

Certainly this was not true for many people, but it was a dream that everyone could share.

But it didn't last long
Now this is changing back to the low consciousness, low individuality state. Knowledge has multiplied and a single individual can no longer hope to grasp it all, or even a large chunk of it. We are once again at the mercy of forces we cannot hope to understand. The greatest benefit comes from mindlessly fitting in. You get a good job, an ever increasing income, more and more shiny things. Just fit in and don't question except in your narrow specialism.

Information technology can only accelerate this trend. We become more and more dependent on machines and networks that we cannot understand. Even politicians and technologists and economists don't really understand what is going on, outside of their narrow specialism.

But people are still in control, right? Yes, but only in the same sense that our cells still control our bodies. In truth we are all part of a bigger system that has its own rules and makes its own decision for its own survival.

The masters are becoming cogs in a bigger machine. It has happened before
Don't be afraid of humans being subsumed into a higher intelligence, the global network. It will happen, but something like it has happened before, many times.

Billions of years ago the only life was single celled, then the cells learned how to group into tissues. Vast tissues covered great areas of the oceans - blooms of algea that could be seen from space. Those cells were master of the world. But then the tissues formed organs, and organs formed bodies. We are some of those bodies. Now, in turn we are forming global networks that are bigger and more intelligent than us. We are cells in this giant body, just as our own cells are part of us.

Welcome the new overlords
This is not a bad thing. Our cells support us, and we support them. Similarly, we humans support the new global networks and they support us.

Will the networks ever decide they don't need people? Will machines be our enemies? Probably not: do our cells ever decide they do not need us? Occasionally our cells go rogue - it's called cancer - but that is very rare. We cannot survive without cells and our networks cannot survive without us.

Will humans ever be obsolete?
Will humans ever be replaced by mechanical brains? No, because consciousness has evolved over billions of years to be extremely efficient at what it does: a certain kind of decision making. Sure, the rest of us can be upgraded. It would be nice to have more memory, stronger arms, and a body that lasted longer. Maybe the future human body will be much larger or much smaller. Who knows? But the core conscious part, the decision making part that involves short term memory, is very useful to the wider network. As long as continue to evolve we will always be needed by it. Keep developing the symbiosis. Keep upgrading that smart phone! :)

We need to stop seeing life in terms of conflict. We are not in conflict with our own cells, and if we are part of the global network it will not be in conflict with us. Neither will it outgrow us, because we can use its technology to evolve as quickly as it does, forever in symbiosis.

Humanity as we know it was a tiny blip
For a hundred years, individual humans were the top of the tree of power and intelligence. Now we are back to our normal state, cogs in a machine. But the machine is bigger and more intelligent than ever, it supplies our needs very efficiently, and as long as we evolve with it we are assured of a long and pleasant future.

All the world's religions promise a final oneness with God, so it seems to be a basic need. As we integrate more tightly with the networks that grow ever bigger and fill the universe, that oneness may come sooner than we think.

Peleg (how atheists and creationists can both be right)

2011-12-27T11:57:00.004Z

If there are three words that sum up my message, they are:

Anything is possible.

Now obviously some things are logically impossible, but you can always get close enough so the difference does not matter. An example is Peleg.

Many years ago I had a web site about prophecy, called "WhyProphets.com" (the URL is now occupied by cybersquatting parasites, but that's another story). I explored the relationship between religion and science. Peleg was a good example. For those who don't know Peleg, here is Genesis 10:25, King James Version:

"And unto Eber were born two sons: the name of one was Peleg; for in his days was the earth divided; and his brother's name was Joktan."

Eber was a great grandson of Noah. He lived (according to genesis) around 2200 BC. Some say "the earth was divided" just means a political dividing of the tribes. But others say it was a physical dividing of the continents after Noah.

Crazy? yes. But crazy is only a point of view. Let us see if this crazy can be made rational.

Let me be clear: I accept Lyell's geology and Darwin's evolution. The scientists are right. One hundred percent (or as close as makes no difference). I want to see if Genesis can also be right.

Why bother? Conflict versus cooperation

The world is full of conflicts. Creation science is supposed to oppose evolution. Atheists are supposed to oppose Christians. Capitalists are supposed to oppose socialists. Why? Why not accept both sides? Sure they disagree, but with a little thought the disagreements can become trivial. There is always another way to look at any problem.

Why avoid conflict? Because conflict is economically inefficient. It means people work against each other, cancelling out each others efforts. This wasted effort. It makes us weak. If we continue down that route some smarter groups will eventually arise and be economically more efficient (through cooperation). They will be strong, we will be weak, and suffer the consequences of our own weakness.

Avoiding conflict does not have to mean submission, It can mean using your brain to find a solution where both sides win. That is a much better way.

Peleg illustrates the principle that anything is possible. Here we take two completely opposite views (creation science and evolution) and show how they can both be correct. We can do the same with Adam and Noah and the rest, but let's start with Peleg.

What I am trying to prove

I want to make clear: I am not trying top prove that Peleg is "true." I am not trying to prove that this particular approach is "true." I am demonstrating that there is always another way to approach a problem: if this approach fails (which is might) then we could find another way, and another way. That is why anything is possible, or close enough that the difference is trivial That is why we do not need to fight. We can use our brains and cooperate instead. OK, enough preamble. On with Peleg.

When the world was one landmass

When we read of the continents dividing, we tend to think of when America and Africa fitted together. That is, Pangea, many millions of years ago. But there was another time, far more recent than that: the last ice age, ending around 9000 BC. Because of the ice, the oceans were lower. So it was possible to walk from Asia to America. There were still islands of course, but the two biggest landmasses were connected.

When was the Earth divided?

Imagine that you lived in Beringia (the area between Asia and America) before it divided. You would walk from one part to anther part. You would have friends scattered all over. Now what happened in 9000BC? The ice did not suddenly disappear all at once: it was a gradual process. One year a stream appeared. A few years later it was a river. A hundred years later it was a wide river. A few hundred years later it was a channel. But this whole process took thousands of years.

Each generation of Beringians was used to visiting their friends and family. Each one needed to very slightly improve its boats, but so what? Friends and family are still friends and family. The difference in distance was almost unnoticeable. The same process happened over a much longer period with birds and continental drift: bird migrate across oceans because when their ancestors started the oceans did not exist. There was never a sudden change, so each generation carried on as before. It is only in hindsight that we can now say "those continents are divided!" It did not feel that way at the time.

But there came a time eventually when the travel across Beringia stopped. Eventually the distance became so great that some other event caused the two sides to go their separate ways. At that point the historians would say they were divided. At that point the physical division became official. So when did it happen?

A short history of Beringia

For thousands of years after the ice age nothing much changed, The people who crossed back and forth were still there as they had always been. Then finally, around 4000 years BP (BP = Before the Present), around 2000 BC, archeologists find major changes:

"Beginning around 4000 BP, the archeological record becomes richer and more detailed, and a finer focus can be utilized and more specific chronologies and hypotheses proposed."

This new culture began in the north west - the former land bridge - and spread away from it:

"One of the most distinctive and widespread Arctic cultural traditions appeared around 4000 BP. The Arctic Small Tool tradition (ASTt) [...spread] from the Bering Sea side of the Alaska Peninsula, northward along the coast and throughout the Brooks Range, and eventually, along the Canadian Arctic coast and the Arctic Archipelago to Greenland. [...] It appeared fully developed in northwestern Alaska and spread rapidly southward and eastward."

How would historians at the time see this?

Imagine that you were a historian living in Beringia after 2000 BC. Your ancestors had lived there since time immemorial, for thousands of years. Oral history lasting thousands of years is not unknown - just ask the native Australians. Since time immemorial Beringia was one land. Sure, there were rivers that got wider and wider, but it was still Beringia. But finally, around 2000 BC, the tribal elders got together and faced the fact: the world had changed. The lands had divided, and it was time to accept the inevitable. They moved on.

After thousands of years this was a major, major event. This was bigger than the end of Rome, bigger than the end of Sumer, bigger than leaving Africa (because you could always just walk back again). This was the complete dividing of a world that had always, since before the origin of civilization, been one. This kind of story would be passed down from generation to generation, to the hunters who reached the east coat of the Americas, to the fishermen who traded from Greenland to Iceland to Britain to the Mediterranean. And a thousand years later (some time before the captivity of 600BC) it merited a line on the Hebrew book of origins. They naturally linked it to Noah and the Great Flood (a topic for another day).

The Book of Genesis

The Book of Origins (Genesis means origins) says that Noah had a son called Shem or Sem: the father of the Sem-itic peoples. Sem had a great grandson called Eber or Heber: the father of the Hebrews. His son was called Peleg, he lived around 2200 BC, the time "when the Earth was divided."

Conclusion

Once again let me stress that I am not saying this is right. It may be proven wrong, so we would need a different approach. This blog is not about the Bible in particular, it is about stories and their relationship to truth.

I am just demonstrating that there is always another way to view any disagreement. Bible literalists and scientists do not need to argue. Both sides can be right. Atheist geologists can be one hundred percent right and yet still accept Genesis as an eye witness account if they want to. Anything is possible.

My story, and why this plan will work.

2011-12-26T15:18:00.003Z

This all began when I was a child.

The problem, and the solution
As a child I discovered that a billion people are starving. Why? Because they can only earn around a dollar a day. But this is economically crazy! If they had better roads and better laws they could each earn 10 or 20 dollars a day. Not from handouts: they would be creating that wealth themselves! It would only take a small investment and then the pay off is enormous. We just need to find a way to do it.

Later I discovered that this is not a coincidence: what we call "morality" is simply the rules that work. Societies that cooperate and give freedom will become wealthier. And the winners write the rules! Morality just means cooperation,. Treat the other guy decently because one day the other guy will be you.

Later still I discovered something else: the miracle of compound growth. If you can just do 5 percent better than someone else, then in a few years you have double the wealth! Then the wealth doubles and doubles again. So if the rich and powerful oppose you, you can buy them off!

The real problem: thinking it through
So why doesn't everyone do the right thing and make everyone rich? Because it is always more profitable to steal, in the short term. The trick is show the greater long term benefits of not stealing.

This is an intellectual problem. It does not require wealth or armies, it just takes one person to work out the details. Then when people see how it makes them money they will do the rest themselves. Think about it! One person, by sitting and thinking, can save the world.

But could I do it?: I am not Einstein, how could I succeed where others have failed? Well this is where it gets interesting.

Standing on the shoulders of giants
I knew it should be possible in theory, but did not know how. In my teenage years I studied everything I could, and refined my ideas. I knew that I was not the first person to try. There must be thousands of people throughout history who had given the world's problems deep and serious thought. Clearly none of them had found the complete answer, but they must have found different pieces of the puzzle. It seemed to me that the best thing I could do would be to spend my life finding all the pieces and putting them in a slightly better arrangement, so that smarter people then me could take the next step.

And then something amazing happened.

The Internet changed everything
I was born in 1968. When I decided to study poverty I was 12 years old. I was a teenager in the 1980s, during the rise of the computer. I was a young adult in the 1990s, during the rise of the Internet. My life's goal. to find the best existing ideas and synthesize them, became a thousand times easier. Previous generations could not even dream of these tools, and now they are available to anyone.

I have summarized my life's research on AnswersAnswers.com. I have shared these ideas with philosophers, and all the criticism relates to presentation, not the underlying logic. I just need to work on the presentation and then it will be ready for the world.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why I think saving the world is simple in theory, and why previous generations have failed, and why this generation will succeed.

Who's with me?

How to save the world for 99 cents

2011-12-26T13:37:00.005Z

Please buy my games.

Selling games is the only way I fund my research. I live very cheaply. I do not need to sell many. I see every game that is sold. Sometimes I only sell two games in a whole month, so when you click on "buy" on EnterTheStory.com it really does make a difference.

This money gives me the freedom to work on the answers that will save the world. Those answers still need a lot of work, but they are improving. When they are finally right then people will see how to make more money for being good than being bad, and so the world will change.

Billions of lives will be saved. Trillions of dollars. The planet itself will be saved. The dollar you spend makes a very big difference.

The new games are 99c each, or 14.99 for everything.

Thank you.

Be yourself: more about this blog.

2011-12-26T13:19:00.003Z

You may think that my web sites ("EnterTheStory" and "AnswersAnswers") have nothing in common, but they are the same thing really: they explore ideas: they explore alternate worlds. To understand my take on books (EnterTheStory) you need to understand my goals (AnswersAnswers). I need to understand the world in order to try and fix it. Yes, I know it sounds crazy. That is just who I am.

I see ideas, including ideas in fiction, as thought experiments. They look at the world in a different way and say "what would happen if...?"

I used to have a conventional job. And a conventional blog. And I made almost conventional games. And I did the things you were supposed to do: I started threads on conventional web sites and I encouraged people to play my games. But none of it felt right.

I am not a conventional person. I cannot succeed in the conventional world. So I gave up, and now I concentrate on what feels right, and just hope it makes sense to somebody.

If you recognize the links between AnswersAnswers and EnterTheStory you will understand this blog and what I am trying to do. You will also understand my interest in religion and the value of comics as efficient ways to explore ideas. I hope you get something out of what I do, and find it worth a few minutes of your time.

The old forum (not this blog!) is closing down

2011-12-26T11:42:00.002Z

For the past few months, the EnterTheStory forum attracted around five spam posts per day. I have it set up to require moderation, so I delete them before anyone sees them. But for the past three days the forum has attracted around fifty spam posts per day. They somehow get past moderation. The forum is set up to automatically update to the latest version, but it made no difference. I manually updated today, but that takes too long - it involves downloading files, then unpacking and uploading, then going through an upgrade process that involves typing my FTP details in again... and then doing it again for every minor update, and there are no guarantees that will stop the spam.

Life is too short for that nonsense. I cannot afford to spend every minute of every day monitoring the forum. So the forum will be closed down: I apologize for any inconvenience.

This blog is now the place for feedback. Please post any comments as replies to these posts. If you want to start a new thread on another topic, please consider using one of the established game forums or social networks - Google for an adventure forum, or a book forum, or Facebook, etc. That way, the game gets extra publicity.

Thanks for being understanding.

P.S. Spam is just one more symptom of a fundamentally broken economic system. Our system is based on wealth transfer, not wealth creation, so naturally it rewards theft, lies and aggressive and parasitic behavior. AnswersAnswers.com shows how do change to a more rational economy, but that is another topic.

My hero

2011-12-26T11:09:00.000Z

This is my hero, Grigori Perelman. He solves the world's hardest problems, and that requires a level of dedication that leaves no space for anything else.
So he lives in a run down St Petersburg apartment with his mother. I am sure he would love to have friends, especially a girlfriend, but if he did that then he would not be able to solve those problems. He made a choice.

His choice will create a better world for centuries to come, in ways that we cannot even imagine. One day he will be loved and admired. But right now he is just a weird guy who probably doesn't wash enough. Indistinguishable from a million other weirdos. He does what he does purely because it is right, for no other reward. That is true heroism.

My favorite quote, about why he turned down a million dollar prize for his work: "I know how to control the universe. So tell me, why should I run for a million?”

A love that lasts when the stars grow cold

2011-12-26T11:06:00.001Z

I'm a romantic. I believe in love that lasts forever. But not in any metaphorical or faith based way. I got proof.

Who am I? My physical atoms? No, they get recycled constantly, like water in a river. The real me is the river itself, the genes and the memes. When you love someone those genes and memes are mixed and the river continues stronger through the next regeneration.

Some of me, some of my genes, can be traced back to the days when the Earth was new born, and the first life fought to survive a burning hell (the Hadean period), and won. Those winning genes are still alive in my body, 3.8 billion years later! It's a proud heritage, and the love that creates the next generation will similarly last forever. These same genes, and their loved ones, will be holding hands in 900 million years as technology allows us to leave the then uninhabitable earth. These same genes, still in love, will be mixing and remixing and come back to visit the Earth in 5 billion years, sitting on a rock watching as the sun expands and burns off the remains of the planet's surface. By then our memes, through evolved technology, will have created new worlds. Those memes are being created now.

As we raise the children we love, we pass our ideas on, and the best of those ideas last forever.

As we hold children and cuddle them and give them confidence and help them with homework, we are ensuring that our love - expressed in their genes and memes - will still be together and loving and pro-creating long after the current stars grow cold. Love we share now, the things we do, really do last forever. And I MEAN forever.

We all live on a giant water balloon

2011-12-26T11:05:00.004Z

When you blow up a balloon the skin is something like 0.1mm thick, and the balloon is around 250mm across. Or a ratio of 1/2500. Our planet's crust is only 5km thick on the ocean floor, and the planet is about 13,000km - or a ratio of 1/2500. Under that thin skin our planet is mostly liquid. We live on a giant water balloon!

Scientists think the moon was formed when another giant water balloon hit this one, and there was a very big splash. It could happen again.

Why do we hate getting money? (part 2)

2011-12-26T11:02:00.001Z

If you have a job, the government will fine you. They call it income tax. They also fine your employer: they call it business tax. If you go further and create something then they fine you even more: they call it sales tax.

All of these fines add up to around 40 percent of any money earned. Which means if you have a $100 job to do you can't do it unless it makes an instant profit of $67 (because 167 - 40% = 100). Obviously most work does not make such a huge instant profit, so most work cannot be done.

For centuries economists have said we should tax land instead of work. But we hate making money so we never listen.

Why do we hate getting money?

2011-12-26T10:54:00.000Z

I don't understand immigration control. If someone wants to come here and work, that means they create more wealth than they use (otherwise nobody would hire them). So more workers means more money. Economic migrants are basically saying "we want to give you money, please let us, pretty please!" And we say "we don't want your money, we have too much already. Go back to where you came from."

I understand the argument: we don't have enough jobs. But that is our choice. The government hates jobs: they have stiff financial penalties to fine anyone who dares to create jobs. That is the subject of the next post.

Why do houses have roofs?

2011-12-26T10:51:00.004Z

I've always wondered this. People pay a fortune for land - thousands of dollars for a tiny area - then they only use half of it. Go to Google Earth and zoom in, and you'll see. Half of a typical property is garden - an area that the people actually use and grow stuff, and half of it is roof. They just cover it with slate and leave it. Why not just put the garden there, and then you only need to pay for half the land?

People work insane hours, have gigantic mortgages, get trapped in a rat race, all so they can pay for land that they just uglify and leave. People are mad. I can't see how anyone can complain about land costs or not having enough space when half the land they buy is just covered in slate and ignored.

How rich countries vacuum the life out of poor countries

2011-12-26T10:47:00.001Z

How closed borders kill people, and also make us poorer:

In Richland, a typical worker earns $10 per hour.
In Poorland, a typical worker earns $1 per hour.
A typical product takes 10 hours to make.
Poorland works 100 hours to buy 1 Richland product.
Richland works 1 hour to buy 1 Poorland product.

So whenever they trade, Richland sucks value out of Poorland at 100 times the rate that Poorland can get value out of Richland. ONE HUNDRED TIMES! Poorland never has a chance. Anything of any worth gets sucked out, the people stay poor, some of them starve, they die of easily preventable diseases, and so on. Richland is just a giant vacuum cleaner sucking the life out of Poorland.

Obviously the answer is for the good folks of Poorland to come and work in Richland: with superior technology they become more productive, and so THE TOTAL AMOUNT OF WEALTH CREATED INCREASES. It's up to the government to allocate this wealth so that everyone benefits, especially those who temporarily lose jobs.

But instead of letting everyone benefit, Richland puts up big fences at the borders, and watch as their poor neighbors starve to death. Then we maybe spend maybe 0.5% of our budget on "aid" and see ourselves as being sooooooo generous.

Bottom line: we hate making money, we love bleeding people to death, it's much more fun.

Yes, one person like you really can change the world

2011-12-26T10:46:00.003Z

Everyone says that one person cannot change the world, but why not? The world is based on incredibly stupid rules. All you have to do is point out a better alternative.

For example, one of my interests is tax. Taxing work is stupid because it reduces the amount of work that can be done profitably, thus making everyone poorer. Taxing other stuff instead would make everyone much richer, even if the same amount of tax was paid. Such a change would benefit absolutely everyone in a massive way. Economists have been pointing this out for centuries, but nobody has the courage to listen.

The world is full of stupidity like that - rules that hurt absolutely everyone (especially law makers) and can be easily changed. To change the world you just have to be the little kid who says "the emperor has no clothes."

Does a single honest person exist?

2011-12-26T10:46:00.001Z

Diogenes of Sinope used to carry a lamp in the daytime, claiming to be looking for an honest man. He would still be looking today. The problem is not that people deliberately lie (that causes cognitive dissonance) but that people do not care whether what they believe is true or not.

How many people have thought through their beliefs? How many can trace their ideas to pure logic? How many people even try? Sure, philosophers specialize in narrow areas, but where is the general theory of everything? Maybe it is hard to find, but who is even looking for it? Who cares?

Take economics for example. Read any economics text book. You will find thousands of pages of anecdotes, and logic with gaps - i.e. major assumptions are not traced back to first principles.

Nobody is even trying. Many economists make a lot of money and have high intelligence, but they don't spend their free time in fixing their intellectual house of cards, they spend their free time enjoying their wealth. Truth is much less important to them than the accumulation and enjoyment of money. The same can be said for every occupation on Earth.

"We cannot fix the big problems." Oh really?

2011-12-26T10:45:00.003Z

Hundreds of years ago, war and starvation were common in every nation. Now they are eradicated in half the world (rich countries still sponsor wars in distant lands, but those lands had their own wars anyway, just as ours once did). Most of this change has happened within the last century. So clearly we can fix the big problems if we want to.

Often it is trivially easy to fix problems. We could solve most of the world's urgent problems for a tiny, tiny fraction of what we spend on killing. But we choose not to.

"it's not my fault that people are starving"

2011-12-26T10:45:00.001Z

People don't get involved in solving global poverty because they say "I did not cause it."

First, how do we know that? We are voters and money users in the most powerful nations on earth, devoted to our self interest above every other consideration. Our decisions have always had major influence on the shape of the world, yet we insist that we do more good than harm to all other nations. How do we know?

Second, that is irrelevant. We are not evil because we caused poverty, we are evil because we could save individual lives, at no cost to ourselves (e.g. by spending less on getting fat), but we choose not to.

"it's not my fault"

2011-12-26T10:44:00.003Z

The whole world is evil, but each person says "it is not my fault." Each person chooses to let children die in order to get a chocolate bar, but their choice is not their fault. Clearly the concept of "choice" and "fault" need to be rewritten. If deciding A instead of B is not a choice, what is it? If choosing death is not a faulty choice, what is?

The whole world is good

2011-12-26T10:44:00.001Z

Here is a thought experiment. You have one dollar. You have a choice: buy a chocolate bar, or save a child's life.

What will you do? Save a life and miss that chocolate, or have that chocolate and let the child die?

Most of us have seen charity advertisements. So we face that choice every day, with every dollar we spend. Statistically, we choose good perhaps one time in a hundred, and evil the rest of the time. Because of our choices, children die who would otherwise live.

Therefore we are objectively evil.

But since when were people objective? Good and evil are defined in our individual hearts. We all like to see ourselves, and therefore we are good, in our hearts, by definition.

So please forgive me if I sometimes sound a little cynical. I try not to be.

the next few posts are from my other blog

2011-12-26T10:43:00.003Z

For a while I had several blogs. I'm copying the best material here. I can't keep track of all those login details!

The difference between men and women

2011-12-26T10:40:00.003Z

The best article I have ever seen on the difference between men and women.
Is There Anything Good About Men?
tl;dr: men are more expendable, and more extreme, both good and bad.

answers to all life's questions

2011-12-21T09:53:00.002Z

The new AnswersAnswers.com is now online. (If you've visited it recently you may need to hit refresh).

This is the only place on the Internet, or anywhere in the universe probably, where you can find rational answers to all of life's biggest questions on one page.

It is not yet perfect. I hope visitors will suggest improvements.

Visualizing worlds, and the flow of time

2011-12-05T12:24:00.001Z

I love time charts. They convey so much, so simply. This is how I see the world. It is why I like comics (but not modern decompressed comics): art and words can convey information more efficiently than any other way.

Original link. For a while I did not like XKCD: like most comics it has a tendency to be shallow. But producing a masterpiece like this restores the balance. (Yes, I see the irony of being deep by analyzing movies.)

This also shows how it can be more useful to consider time statically, rather than as moving.

It is worth noticing that while to us time appears to flow, we share the universe with other structures and particles. To them, time and space are just something we humans imagine because we cannot cope with the reality.

Most of the universe is filled with photons of light. To us they seem to be travelling through time But to the photons, who massively outnumber us, time does not flow. As Einstein showed, at what we see as the speed of light, time stretched to infinity and distance shrinks to nothing. To the photons that hit your eye, this is still the singularity at the start of the big bang. What we see as space and time they just see as numbers. And so do we: our brains simply interpret data as a physical world because it makes the world easier to understand.

game progress update

2011-12-04T21:05:00.001Z

First the good news: music!

The game now has music! In previous blogs I may have mentioned that I gave up on music (its a technical minefield), but after encouragement from site visitors I’ve finally got it to work. I had to try three different music solutions, but finally found the excellent AudioManager2.

It can’t work in every browser – most mobile phones prevent the browser from running background music, but the music plays in enough desktop browsers to make it worthwhile, (You have t turn the option on though – it won’t just play when you’re not expecting it).

And better looking art and animation!

Other good news is that the background walkers now work in all major browsers, and I am now adding static background crowds. Remember in Les Miserables, how random full size people would stand around, as well as people walking by? I liked that and am bringing this back, sort of, except now in color, with more detailed images. The minimalist style isn’t as suited to the browser. This is because the browser has less power than a native program (because it has to run itself plus cross-browser Javascript), and so sprites need to be smaller and move less where possible. But I still want the game to look busy – busier than ever in fact – the the obvious route is to have fully detailed images.

So much coding, so little time!

How the old game blog died

2011-12-04T21:02:00.001Z

It appears that a few days ago a trojan appeared on the main site. It was spotted by a visitor using Avast (if you run any kind of browsers based antivirus it will have warned you). As far as I can tell it was a WordPress vulnerability. WordPress was up to date, but it is constantly targeted by malware writers. I cannot afford the risk that my site will ever be added to a malware blacklist, so I removed WordPress completely.

About the trojan, and safety

As the name suggests, a trojan does not harm you itself, but is designed to sneak in other stuff. Obviously I don’t know what, as I am not going to sit back and watch. I also could not find any reference to its name so left a message on my web hosts’s boards, and that now shows up in Google if anyone else searches. This one created a file called “recatpcha.php” (it looks like the innocent “recaptcha” but spelled slightly differently) that included a “post” command to send some data somewhere. It also injected some javascript into the index page.

Javascript is specifically designed to be impossible to change your computer. It is also limited in what data it can find – mainly stuff like screen size, browser type, etc. So a trojan can only send whatever it can find and use that to trick you into clicking on a regular virus (e.g. it finds you run Chrome, so later someone sends a fake email saying “chrome update – click here”). So the trojan itself is not the direct problem, you still need to get a separate virus by the usual methods (clicking to run a bad download) or be tricked into giving your bank details to a fake site – the usual malware methods.

Global politics and why it might be harmless

A lot of (most?) trojans don’t result in anything bad happening: they are sent out by virus writers trying to get lucky by stumbling on something interesting. For example, according to Reuters yesterday, it is likely that the US and Israeli governments jointly created the Conficker worm in order to infect millions of machines around the world, purely so that one of them would get close enough to the Iranian nuclear facilities so they could used the Stuxnet virus and disable them. All this malware did was look for signs that you were maybe in Iran, and if so then look for other signs, and so on. (The Conficker link is a new theory, but the fact that the US and Israel create Stuxnet is fairly well established. That’s right, our governments create viruses.) The trojan could be looking for something specific, or just sending anything it can find in order to make email spam more effective. So the trojan of itself would have done nothing.

Javascript

This is where the new game engine has been a real help. Two months ago I could not read Javascript, but now I am familiar with the basics of how it works, so I can see roughly what the trojan did. Its code was designed to be as unreadable as possible, but in order to do anything at some point it has to use a recognizable Javascript command. In this case, most of the code had variables that tried to all look the same: either upper case I, number 1, or lower case “l” and the target URL was stored in base 64 so it would look like garbage. But the final stage was in the php file, using “eval(base64_decode” to de-convert the URL, and then it used ”POST” to send the data there. What data? As I said, Javascript is designed to minimize what malware can do, so this would be mostly data that your browser might innocently supply: whether you use Internet Explorer or Firefox, XP or Linux, that kind of thing.
Conclusion

This is the first time something like this has happened. Three yeqars ago there was breielfy a virus warning abiout Adventure Game Studio, but it was a false positive, and the virus company in question patched their virus list the next day. Anyway, I now use a browser scanner to detect any future problems instantly. The malware was only there for a few days, and this is a very quiet period (nothing is happening until the new game engine is ready) so I doubt that more than one or two people accessed the main site in that time, and security programs like Avast would have flagged it up immediately. And as I said, in order to do any actual harm the user would then need to also respond to whatever virus or phishing scam was then created based on the limited data sent by the trojan. So probably no harm was done to anyone.

It just goes to show that the old rules still apply: have all patches up to date, run a virus checker, beware of emails asking for data, and never click on anything suspicious.

Welcome to the new combined blog

2011-12-04T20:03:00.001Z

This blog combines two different blogs:
References to land rent and saving the world are about AnswerAnswers.com
References to "the game" are about EnterTheStory.com

In the past I started many different blogs on different topics. Each one would have long gaps as another topic took priority, and I lost track of some of them. Well today I got a wake up call. My game blog was infected with malware. My software was up to date, but I hadn't visited it for a week so I didn't notice. I realized that this was no way to carry on. I need a single blog, one I can update daily, hosted by a professional blog service.

It might seem that my different interests are wildly different: I want to save the world, I make games based on books, and like to talk about whatever interests me at the time. But really they are all the same topic: I like to explore alternate worlds. In particular I want to explore different ways of seeing our world (AnswersAnswers), and to do this is helps to read about imaginary worlds (Enter The Story). They are all the same: they are all alternate worlds that provide useful insights and options for this one.

Another advantage of combining these blogs is it helps to explain my game, Enter The Story. This is likely to attract the most visitors at first, and as a game people expect it to be about puzzles or conflict. It isn't, it's about ideas and exploring. It's about big ideas and alternate worlds. The best stories tell us about our own world, and I think the best games should do as well.

I will with the famous quote from George Bernard Shaw:

"You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?'"

Land rent is the answer to the horror in the Congo

2011-05-18T00:56:00.000+01:00

Over a thousand women are raped every day in the Congo. How can we stop it?

Those who discuss it usually despair - invading or giving money won't work. The discussion concludes that the only hope is to set up small communities where sanity prevails, such as the "City of Joy" - a refuge for women.

The only lasting solution is to create islands of good government and let those islands grow. Land rent is ideally suited for the purpose: it can be introduced in a single town, it creates wealth based on good government, and that wealth ensures it can expand.

Land rent is the answer to exploited workers

2011-05-15T08:44:00.001+01:00

Today's top story is of a rich man allegedly abusing his maid. I don't know the details of this particular case, but in general, low paid staff are more likely to be harassed because they have to accept unpleasant jobs in order to avoid unemployment.

Land rent ends unemployment, so nobody has to accept a job where they might be exploited.

Land rent is the answer to questions of free speech.

2011-05-14T18:48:00.003+01:00

The headline news today is about support for terrorism, and I've covered that twice. But another news item raises the question of free speech: when does it become a hate crime? How do you decide rationally?

Land rent measures the value of any behavior to society. It measures the value of unlimited free speech. It measures the value of protecting people from libel. It measures everything in between. Land rent gives objective answers to difficult questions.

Land rent is the answer to terrorism

2011-05-13T20:09:00.001+01:00

Today's top story is terrorism. The specific case of Bin Laden was discussed earlier: land rent removes the need for war, and so removes the main cause of anti-Americanism. In addition,

Historically, most terrorists simply want their own government, and land rent already offers that.
Extremism is usually fuelled by economic injustice, and land rent fixes that as well.
Lone fanatics are in the same situation as criminals - they rely on secrecy - and land rent makes most crime impossible because when people choose their own government they cooperate with the authorities.

Basically, land rent drains the swamp that breeds terrorism.

Land rent is the answer to computer bugs (blogger lost my lost post)

2011-05-13T19:20:00.000+01:00

Google's Blogger service crashed yesterday, and lost yesterday's blog. This is why you should never rely on the cloud.

How would that be different under land rent? First, a healthier economy means more choices, and so higher quality software. Second, a reputation system (discussed here) means only the most reliable software survives. And third, more trust in society means fewer cyber attacks: cyber criminals have nowhere to hide.

Land rent is the answer to the Libyan conflict

2011-05-11T16:35:00.001+01:00

Today's top story (the main headline when I checked the BBC world news page) is the continuing conflict in Libya. As with the previous blog about China, the solution is to do a deal.

As with all uprisings, the causes are economic. Most people just want jobs, and non-corrupt leaders. Land rent provides both those things. A land rent deal with Gaddafi (i.e. to send consultants to help set up a land rent system in rebel areas) would ensure the people got more jobs, better local leaders and more autonomy, while Gaddafi accepts it because he stays in nominal power and has a healthier economy.

This may offend those who want instant revenge, but the objective is to continually improve life for ordinary people, not to continue the cycle of failed revolutions.

EDIT: December 2011: it seems that the Libyans got lucky: Gaddafi had no friends, lots of oil, and an easy to defeat country (basically just one road along the coast). So the world got rid of him. But I stand by my assessment: these solutions are rare, and a lasting democratic result is even rarer. Meanwhile, what of all the other corrupt nations? Conflict is expensive, destructive, and only occasionally works. In contrast, good business (such as that offered by land rent) is usually more effective in the short term, and always more effective in the long term.

Land rent is the answer to Chinese human rights abuses

2011-05-11T00:40:00.003+01:00

Today's top story is of America criticizing China over human rights. Ai Weiwei was arrested for "economic crimes" because he "investigated the collapse of shoddy school buildings in the Sichuan earthquake and led demonstrations in Beijing over the demolition of an artists' village."

Land rent would make it easy for the Chinese people to choose better leaders, even if they were restricted to choosing party members. As long as leadership steadily improves, problems like shoddy buildings and fear of dissent will naturally go away.

Condemning a proud nation seldom works. Promoting land rent would be more effective, as it also furthers China's aims (growth and stability).

Land rent is the answer to finding bin Laden earlier

2011-05-10T19:44:00.000+01:00

Why did it take so long to find bin Laden? Anti American feeling. The Afghan people would not cooperate, and the Pakistanis would not cooperate. It's the same anti American feeling that caused 9/11. According to surveys, the number one reason seems to be wars.

Land rent provides a way to change the world through agreements, not war. By removing this main cause of hatred, land rent would have made bin Laden easier to catch.

Land rent is the answer to healthcare.

2011-05-10T07:33:00.000+01:00

Healthcare is an emotive issue. It is statistically complex, it risks lives, and costs vast sums of money, so arguing about it will not lead to agreement.

Land rent solves the problem by allowing each person to choose their own form of government. So we will each have the system we want. Also we can watch other systems without risk, and see what actually works.

Land rent is the answer to the global recession

2011-05-09T21:48:00.000+01:00

The global recession was triggered by the collapse of sub prime loans in 2007: banks loaned too much because they expected land values would always go up.

This cannot happen with land rent. If the owner pays rent on land then he only buys land for productive use, never for speculation.

And once in a recession we need rapid economic growth. Land rent provides that.

Welcome to the blog

2008-10-29T11:01:00.001Z

Every day, this blog will look at the news and ask, "Is land rent the answer?"