Delicious LiveJournal Links for 6-6-2008

• Portal map pack, from the makers of the Portal Flash Game
  
  
  Heard good reviews - and I loved Portal, so I'll be coming back to this one.
  
  
  (tags: flash games half-life)
  
  


• Revealed: Secret plan to keep Iraq under US control
  
  
  I can see this one going down _really_ well...
  
  
  (tags: military war politics iraq corruption usa occupation)
  
  


• What Obama's actually done
  
  
  In case you were wondering what he's ever achieved.
  
  
  (tags: Obama politics usa)
  
  


• Qinetiq ships first 'Transformer' war-droid | The Register
  
  
  The MAARS - Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System - has now been placed in the hands of the US military's Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office, also famous for its combat deployable climate-controlled swimming pools for US Navy war dolphins
  
  
  (tags: electronics technology war military)
  
  


• The Bicameral Mind
  
  
  Today's wacky theory of mind - whereby back in ye olden days one part of the brain would work things out and then command the othe part what to do, in the form of hallucinations of Gods, muses, etc.
  
  
  (tags: consciousness intelligence philosophy psychology wikipedia religion brain)
  
  


• Mobile phones expose human habits
  
  
  Anonymous movement data is used to show the patterns people move in.
  
  
  (tags: society sociology mobile_phones technology)
  
  

PC Thoughts

Considering the success of Linux laptops like the Eee, how long until someone brings out a non-x86 variant?

Are there processors out there that would be as faster, cheaper and more power-efficient?

The folly of youth.

I used to be different. I used to believe that there was a moral truth out there. Hell, I used to believe I was _right_ and that given enough time I could bloody well prove it.

I'd been involved in a lot of arguments, both on and offline, about Right behaviour. This is a topic that's always fascinated me, and I became obsessed with it after I spent a year-or-so moderating an extropian mailing list, full of particularly rabid libertarians that equated any kind of government with a full-on totalitarian state. I strongly disagreed, and was, as I said, sure that given the time and the tools I could prove that they were wrong and I was right.

Attempting to prove them wrong was both the biggest waste of my time possible, and an incredibly enlightening period of time, as I slowly proved to myself that the idea of absolute morals, correct behaviours, etc. was not just nonsense but utterly incoherent and indefinable.

I still believe in the truth when it comes to actual reality, of course - although I'm completely aware that my access to that reality is crippled, partial and overlaid with huge amounts of social, biological and physical illusions. But I have no such beliefs when it comes to morality.

And that's what happened when I was 22.