SeanTerrill.com » future

Wow. Just… wow.

webmaster — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 15:26:07 +0000

I don’t know why people keep laughing when I say I expect to live forever. This is happening, folks. Start planning accordingly.

Obviously I haven’t posted in a good while. Big things are in process. Stay tuned.

The Future Is Gonna Be Incredible

webmaster — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 17:07:35 +0000

Or more sinisterly, who is safe from the man who controls a swarm of nanites with his thoughts? Snow Crash meets The Diamond Age.

Science: It Works, Bitches

webmaster — Sat, 01 May 2010 14:18:17 +0000

Suffice it to say that I’m not so wild about religion. I have nothing against funny hats, and some of the music is very nice; it’s just that blind adherence gives me the willies. I fully acknowledge a continuum of harm, but psychologically, chemically speaking, there’s no difference between getting up earlier than you want on a Sunday and driving a bus into a coffee shop. What really bothers me, though, is the idea that there are inherent limits within which only religion can provide valid answers. If history has taught us nothing else, it’s that the contemporary monotheistic god is a god of the gaps. Every few years – sometimes spectacularly, but more often by fits and starts – science ratchets down the boundaries of the unknown and supposedly unknowable. Science works. Indeed, the scientific method is the only reliable means of problem-solving yet discovered, and quite possibly the only means there is.

So why are massive areas of human experience, arguably the most important ones, held to be outside its purview? Why do questions of right and wrong automatically default to answers based on musty tomes of poorly-understood, frequently-mistranslated non sequiturs? Can a rational, scientific approach instead give us a basis for morality? Of course it can.

Objectivism provides us with the crudest first-order approximation of this concept: the choice that minimizes harm is the right one. One can easily conjure up a decision for which it fails (there may be a logical case to be made for the death penalty over life imprisonment, for example, even though it requires one death instead of none) but in most day-to-day situations it holds up just fine. “Thou shalt not kill” isn’t going anywhere.

Anyway, it’s nice to see that I’m not alone in this. One of these years I really have to see if I can wrangle an invitation to TED.

It is the position, generally speaking, of our intellectual community that while we may not like this – we might think of this as wrong in Boston or Palo Alto – who are we to say that the proud denizens of an ancient culture are wrong to force their wives and daughters to live in cloth bags? Who are we to say even that they’re wrong to beat them with lengths of steel cable or throw battery acid in their faces if they decline the privilege of being smothered in this way?

Who are we NOT to say this?

Napoleon, Health Care Reform, and the Gentleman from Massachusetts

webmaster — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 04:13:11 +0000

(Or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Filibuster)

Apparently Republicans are sore losers.

First of all, it irks me a little every time a talking head uses the phrase “health care reform”. As Americans, we have the best health care in human history, and almost all of it at even the smallest hospital or doctor’s office. It’s just that for me, and 40-odd million other Americans, actual access to that health care would result in personal bankruptcy. We don’t need health care reform. We need health insurance reform. (Well, and tort reform, but apparently that’s a pipe dream.)

The actions of the health insurance industry over the past few decades amount to profiteering at best, and collusion at worst (not that that matters, since the health insurance industry is immune to antitrust prosecution). So I, and a gazillion other people, voted in favor of a massive, sweeping change in Washington, because a year and a half ago, Democrats sure as hell were talking the talk. By god, there was going to be change. Instead we got this. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that an industry that hires six lobbyists per Congressman would get a sweetheart deal. And by and large, it seems like the American people agree. While most of the individual elements of the Senate bill are supported by a majority of voters, the bill itself polls more like 22%. Americans want a reform bill – as long as it isn’t this bill.

So why are Senate Democrats so afraid of a Republican (or wishy-washy independent) filibuster? Why is the election of Scott Brown the death knell for health care legislation? Why, when the bill has been watered down to a massively expensive exercise in legislatorial masturbation, is there even an opposition left? In thinking about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason has nothing to do with health care. Or politics, or economics, or anything really. The reason is that Democrats have no balls. You want to cement your 60-seat majority and keep the House? Then get out there and do what the American people elected you to do.

First of all, let this abominable camel of a bill die in conference. Then draft a new one, with all the trimmings: individual mandate; public option; Medicare and Medicaid expansions; employer plan portability, antitrust; death panels… er, you get the idea. Get it out of committee and onto the floor. Then let the bastards filibuster, for as long as they want. One day, three, ten, a month… no cloture, no suspension, just Republican after Republican passing out at the podium. Then have your damn vote, go home, and stump about how the big bad Republicans ground the government to a halt because they hate poor people. The ads practically write themselves. There are really only two groups who reliably vote Republican: rich white dudes; and rural “values voters”. Most of whom, coincidentally, would probably like to be able to afford a doctor for the first time in their lives.

It’s Napoleon’s Battle Plan:

Show up.
See what happens.

It’s high time Congressional Democrats sack up, show up, and see what happens.

Put me down at 1:24

webmaster — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 19:09:02 +0000

Happy Brew Year!

webmaster — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 18:33:05 +0000

I have it on good authority that Santa will be bringing me a pump and/or grain mill this Christmas, so the odds are good I’ll be brewing my first self-sufficient batch by the New Year. My only dilemma is, what should it be?

My go-to “house” recipe, Behold a Pale Ale.
My other house recipe, Man in Black Lager. It’s a sort of bastardized American Schwarzbier-Vienna Lager hybrid. I can easily ferment lagers in the garage right now, but maintaining lagering temperatures for any length of time would be a lot of effort. Fortunately I only need to lager this for a couple weeks.
A doppelbock. I’d really like to have one on tap in the spring, which means I’d need to get cracking on it, but I think 2-3 months of lagering is probably impractical under the circumstances.
A single-hop IPA. I haven’t decided exactly what yet, but it would most likely be Centennial or Columbus.
A “redemption” porter, to avenge the one that I brewed a couple months ago and subsequently let pick up a (mild) Lactobacillus infection.

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God Doesn’t Care About Your Penis

webmaster — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 02:10:17 +0000

Lesbian and gay students kissing in front of protesters from Westboro Baptist Church at Oberlin College

Today I went out in the rain, carrying a sign that read “YOUR GOD IS A LITTLE GOD”, to counter-protest the Westboro “Baptist” Church, who apparently drove here from Kansas because a local high school is doing a play they don’t like. The more I read about these people, the more convinced I am that it has to be an elaborate hoax, but apparently they’re for real. Or at least they mean what they say; I shouldn’t assume any of them spend much time in or around “reality”. So there we were, the six WBC members (including a kid of about ten I couldn’t stop referring to as Damien) across the street, the two hundred or so of us in front of the school, the cops in the middle. I’m probably on the news.

On the one hand, you have to kind of admire their perverse doggedness (they apparently do this thousands of times a year, and always outnumbered); on the other hand, you can’t deny they give religion as a whole a bad name. Just think what a legitimate church could do with $250,000 a year. But can we be so sure religion doesn’t deserve it? After all, among the scores of counter-protesters in tie-dyed t-shirts and jeans and suits, there was no priest in cassock and collar, no minister waving a bible, no signs saying “I DON’T LIKE HOMOSEXUALITY EITHER, BUT I’M NOT A DICK ABOUT IT” – no religious response at all, in fact. Every single one of my fellow counter-protesters, so far as I could tell, was there to take a principled, secular stand in favor of gay rights.

It’s the same thing that happens when jihadists blow up a bus, or a doctor who performed abortions gets shot, or a high school kid gets dragged to death behind a pickup truck. There are memorials and wakes and tears and soul-searching, and condemnations of damn near everything, but somehow no one ever quite says it: religion itself is at fault. If the bible contradicts itself, and you choose to follow one passage while these asshats choose to follow another, how can you really say their interpretation is any less valid? Stop taking fairy tales seriously and I promise you’ll see a lot less of this crap.

Atheism: We may not have all the answers, but at least we don’t kill each other.

Waste Not

webmaster — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:03:12 +0000

This is the coffee-making apparatus from the hotel room in St. Louis. Note the waste associated with brewing a single cup of coffee. I can understand the need for ensuring the hotel-room coffee-maker is clean, but I mean, this thing still has a water reservoir, so what’s the point? I guess I just feel like after the whole “we don’t wash sheets every day” thing, this is a big step backwards.

Beer in a Bag in a Box?

webmaster — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:55:02 +0000

Per MSN’s James Dlugosch:

Despite what the microbrewers will tell you, all beer is pretty much the same. Consumers who pay a premium do so more for the experience than the taste.

But for me, the issue is the bottle. I like drinking my suds from a cold bottle. Period.

Put it in a glass, and the experience just isn’t the same.

Pro Tip: When 650 people leave comments on your blog calling you an idiot, you were probably wrong.

Extreme douchebaggery aside (how can you be a wine snob and not a beer snob?) it turns out that even the facts of the article are wrong; this is not boxed beer in the same sense that there is now boxed wine, but simply MillerCoors’ entry into the mini-keg market dominated by Heineken. Which, in the long run, is probably a Good Thing. Anything that moves BMC consumers out of their beer comfort zone, even if it’s just drinking their favorite brand on draft, could open them up to the possibility that taste can be a factor when purchasing beer.

The key question then becomes: will it be pasteurized? I think it’s safe to say that almost all beer drinkers prefer non-pasteurized draft beer to its bottled counterparts. If domestic mini-kegs put it into the hands of more consumers, they could end up cannibalizing their own market.

One Small Step

webmaster — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 02:56:58 +0000

Forty years ago today, a Purdue alumnus (BTFU!) stepped off a ladder and into history. And yet last week the Obama administration had to hedge its bets regarding whether or not we’re going back – ever.

It’s easy to be pessimistic about designs so grand they almost elude comprehension. In an era of staggering deficits, it’s even tempting to subscribe to a view of manned space flight as a boondoggle. But like democracy, an awareness of humanity’s future in space is destined to spread. It lurks beneath the surface of the cultural zeitgeist, and cannot be suppressed indefinitely. So yes, we will be going back to the moon, not because we can strip-mine it for water, or because it’s a natural location for an amusement park, but because every man, woman, and child on the planet looks up and knows that we have been there. The legacy of Apollo is not Velcro and Tang, but hope.

Apollo was never meant to be a scientific mission; rather, purely scientific objectives were allowed so long as they didn’t interfere with the program’s political goals. The entire mission architecture was built to support ludicrously brief lunar stays (from Apollo 11 at less than a day to Apollo 17 at just over three), and landed only one trained scientist. We left some instruments, picked up some rocks, and yes, hit a few golf balls – and then we left. Thirty-seven years later, despite all that the moon could teach us, we still haven’t been back. Because science wasn’t the point.

Apollo was exploration in the grandest human tradition. It was, to quote Kennedy, “the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which mankind has ever embarked.” It strained, then broke and reset the limits of what technology could accomplish. It claimed the lives of five astronauts, and in perhaps the greatest demonstration of engineering prowess of the 21^st century, failed to claim the lives of three more – and had someone been able to tell them that in advance they still would have volunteered. Four decades later, we would still volunteer.

I can’t listen to that recording of Walter Cronkite without getting goosebumps. Sometimes I can’t even listen to it with dry eyes. I don’t even know that I can fully explain why this date means to much to me. I feel a (admittedly, largely unjustified) kinship with astronauts. For as long as I can remember I’ve harbored a desire, bordering on an assumption, that I should go into space. Four of the thirty-eight Apollo astronauts were Purdue alumni, and I’ve had the honor of meeting both the first and the last men to set foot on the moon. (That’s Cernan below, in one of the nineteen images used in a Wikipedia article literally titled the History of the World.) Perhaps it’s simply the ultimate expression of wanderlust; like Alaska two hundred years ago or America two hundred years before, the moon remains just over the horizon: attainable, but only at tremendous expense.

When I look at photographs from the moon, the first thing I notice is always the striking degree of clarity. It is literally, and magnificently, otherworldly. On earth objects become less distinct as they move further away; it’s the price you pay for having an atmosphere. But a man on the moon, standing there surrounded by nothing but dust and radiation, can see forever. Twenty-four Apollo astronauts remain the only human beings to have truly left the earth. Twelve of them left their awkward, bulbous footprints on the surface of another world, footprints that will remain long after our species is gone. Those twelve flirted with immortality. They came as close as any man could to touching the face of God.

But did they really have to leave a note up there from Richard Nixon?