Quick one today as I’m tired and what not, but I’m hoping to have a site design up soon. I say “design” and not “redesign” because this site is so far using the default WordPress blog design which is apparently white text on black background dark mode. Not sure why that is but whatever. In the future I’m hoping to put up little updates of the other things I try to get done in a week, be they scientific or artistic, and hopefully those updates can go in logical places so I can find them more easily in the future.

Otherwise I’m just going to put down what I have been thinking of in my head and hope to write about in the future:

• how some areas of real life are trying to be replaced with zoom and it isn’t always working
• how seriously are people taking the monkeypox epidemic?
• how would or could one make a game to teach proteomics, or really any science?
• proportional representation vs first past the post voting

I hope to get those ideas out of my head and onto paper (or the internet in this case) soon.

Intrusive thoughts

I often have thoughts about all the shitty things I’ve done during my life. The people I trusted and then betrayed, or the times I’ve made the wrong choices and lost out. At this time in my life in particular I keep being haunted by the thoughts of all my mistakes which led me up to this point, and I find myself cursing the people who in some way helped get me into this mess. I need to remember two things. First: I can’t change the past, and while remembering it is a good guide to not repeating it, focusing on it is unhealthy. Second, I got myself into this just as much as anyone else. I can’t act like I was blameless. As the song goes, though I did not pull the trigger, I built the gun. And eh sometimes I did pull the trigger.

I’m sitting here remembering a lot of times when I made the wrong choice, thinking of how my life would be otherwise, and that’s not healthy. So whenever this happens I instead need to focus my energies into something new and productive, like honing my skills or searching for new opportunities. New opportunities basically means jobs, and I’m working on that. My skills is a harder one, science isn’t something you can practice at home. But I think coding is, and I should take up some coding projects in my free time to at least give me something to look back on as a success story.

So with that in mind here are a few synopses of games I’ve thought about in my head.

Geniuses who are able to build wonder machines out of spare parts are tasked with defeating martian invaders who only they can see. The game would feature a comprehensive “wonder” system where you can specify and build a specific device for a given purpose. A gun perhaps, or an airship, or a cloning machine that creates replicas of your dead soldiers. But every wonder comes with a price, they all have a base fault which can never be removed. The gun may be possessed by a committed pacifist, and its spirit must be placated before it allows itself to be fired. The airship may have an inscrutable control scheme that seems to change every time you fly it,
necessitating that pilots sit and re-familiarize themselves with it before or during each flight. The cloning machine may work on “life for a life” principles, meaning any gain of life must be paid for upfront and in full.

A turn based strategy FPS. America does a bit of nation building in Mexico after our policies and others lead to a civil war their which threatens America’s interests. The new model army is not one of vast bomber formations or miles of tanks, it is one of small strike forces of a handful of troops, using every weapon at their disposal to isolate and eliminate threats with surgical precision. To this end, an experimental unit of marines is given brain implants which allow them to communicate instantaneously with each other across the battlefield and to strategize their moves. Part of this is the BullShit system (I need a name for it) where the player can pause the game and see the locations of all of their and the enemy soldiers within range on the battlefield. The player can then give orders to each of their units in turn which will be executed together once the pause is ended, essentially allowing them to plan a coordinated series of moves from their own and other characters in order to act as a team to take down threats. Several units can provide covering fire as two outflank from either side. One unit can juggle an enemy into the air while another takes to the skies, attaches a grenade to his chest, and throws him down at a separate enemy position. As part of this planning, the player would see what the predicted movements of the enemies would do in response to the early movement that the player queues up. Early game enemies have slow reaction times and can basically be seen to do little in response to the player’s planned movements, making them easy prey to be eliminated according to the player’s plans. Later enemies will in kayfabe have the same skills the player has and be able to react reflexively to whatever strategy the player plans. The player will have to account for an enemy’s reactions, and in some way create a strategy that they can’t escape from like coming at them from multiple angles. The overall gameplay outside of turn based mode should be hectic and action-y, but with a pace that is too fast for twitch reflexes, and will thus encourage the player to use their abilities to plan movements against the enemies in turn based mode.

A time capsule, hopefully of the past.

I don’t watch much TV, but occasionally I’ll glance over at a show and see actors or sets in masks. Hopefully those eventually become a time capsule of our age, forgotten about as vaccination rates climb and COVID-19 hospitalizations drop. Shows shot during or set during the 2020s might include masks for COVID, but better vaccinations and drugs should make this unnecessary. COVID-19 is not the first nor will it be the last novel respiratory virus to infect humans, and after every new virus we have and should continue to adapt and overcome to the point that we can live with it “normally.” I don’t foresee a scenario in which any virus could force a permanent change to how humans inhabit our planet. 100 thousand
years ago, novel viruses were springing up in our ancestor’s societies, and yet even without vaccines each new one was overcome. Survivors (of whom most vaccinated people are expected to be) gain immunity to the virus, it’s a sort of truism of immunology that you cannot clear a virus without gaining some form of immunity. Some viruses never clear of course, and hang around in the body waiting for immunity to die off so they can re-emerge. But if a virus is TRULY cleared, and by all accounts COVID is a virus that can be cleared from the body, then it has to be done by the actions of immune system systematically gaining an adaptive advantage over the virus through antibody production, cell-mediated immunity or otherwise. If the immune
system doesn’t gain this advantage, then the virus just continues to multiply and kills the host. And once the immune system gains this advantage, then it should be better equipped to deal with any future infection from the new virus, even mutant forms of it. Viruses mutate all the time, but antibodies and T-cell receptors can also be adapted by the body to these new, mutated forms.

During the pandemic I saw a lot of fears that this virus was going to be so terrible, that some of the following would happen:
People would never become immune even after clearing the virus
Prior infections would not give defense against future infections
Vaccines could never be developed which would give immunity
COVID was going to kill off everyone

The people saying these things didn’t really know it, but for these fears to be true basically all of recorded immunology would have to be false. If you don’t develop immunity than you cannot clear the virus, clearing it is an EFFECT of the gain in immunity. This gain in immunity must by necessity protect against future infections which come from the same viral sero-types. And since COVID shows no evidence of being a latent virus, then vaccines against it must be possible. Finally it would be basically impossible for COVID to kill everyone, in any scenario there would be some people among the 7 billion on earth who by some mutation would be immune to the virus, and even if all the rest of us died off they would continue on.

I think some of this could have been brought on by a sort of doomerism that is probably common among all societies. “Giant Meteor of Death 2016” was something of a meme I recall pushed by people claiming the world was so shit it was better to just end it all. Pretty much every society goes through those feelings, and a global pandemic may have seemed like the realization of exactly those fears that society would or should be destroyed. But that just didn’t happen, and the people claiming that vaccinated folks shouldn’t go out and socialize like it’s 2019, well I kind of view them as essentially anti-vaxxers. For they deny what we all know, that vaccines are safe and effective at protecting from the disease.

Some people don’t realize that immunity isn’t a light switch, it isn’t on and off. It’s a sliding scale and can be modified by many things. Humans have a natural immunity shielding us from many many viruses already, whether through altered proteins that the viruses cannot well attach to or through innate pathways that defend against pathogens. Meanwhile immunity can be weakened by things such as obesity, pregnancy, emotional state, etc. So it isn’t a switch that once you are immune you never get COVID, rather gaining
immunity gives you a much lower chance of catching COVID later, but less chance is never no chance.

I’ve often come back to thoughts of fusion power, and I think the excuses brought up by fusion-boosters don’t hold water. The general feeling among futurologists is that fusion power was undone by greedy and short-sighted budget cuts, that if only more money had been given to fusion research we could have had working fusion generators to solve all our energy needs. I think this viewpoints is a bit too “Sid Meier’s Civilization” for my liking. It seems to assume that any technology has a set “cost,” and if you can just spend enough resources you are guaranteed unlock and that technology and gain access to its benefits. This sidesteps the issue of if fusion power is even feasible on earth, or if it were in any way feasible with the 1960s technology in use during Fusion’s early heyday. If America had plowed all of the Apollo-program money into fusion power instead, would it really have just “worked?” Was the metallugy, magnetic control, computer control, and plasma physics advanced enough to allow for the construction of fusion plants? I have my doubts, and I’d like to compare fusion to other 1960s technologies that DID work.

The most unflattering comparison that can be made is to fusion power’s close cousin, fission power. In the 60s fission power plants sprung up and became profitable, with some of these profits being re-invested into their technology, creating better fission power plants which could make more profits, which could be invested in better technology and so on. This is called a “virtuous cycle” and it is key to a technology’s success. Fusion power by contrast never brought in revenue. There was never a point where Energy Out > Energy In. No power could ever be sold to the grid or anyone else, thus fusion research could only be continued on the back of private investments and government grants. But unlike other technologies which relied on similar philanthropy, fusion never had the kind of positive results that could be spun into future funding, it only ever had dreams. There’s a common refrain that “we spent billions on the Apollo missions, we could have spent is on X instead” where X is usually fusion power. But the Apollo wasn’t just a money hole, it had genuine successes which could be used to politically justify its continued investment from the government. The first American in space, the first American in earth orbit, the first space-walk and the first trip around the moon. There were setbacks and deaths, but there were enough successes to make the program politically viable. And even besides the government, there were profitable private ventures into space, with satellites being launched and leased for the transmission of radio and other signals worldwide. These transmissions themselves could bring in revenue which fed the virtuous cycle. Even without a cent of government investment, it is conceivable that a manned moon mission would have been possible off the back of these private enterprise successes. Where were the successes of fusion power? Where was the first power plant which created clean, if perhaps unprofitable power, thus justifying continued investment? Where was the first solenoid or tokamak which was demonstrated to be able to contain 100-million degree plasma for days or weeks or months on end, as would be necessary for a sustained fusion power plant? Every milestone in the history of fusion power was people learning about why they had failed the targets they had set previously. If goals could be set and achieved, then maybe a virtuous cycle could have been created whereby prior successes fuel future investment, but alas it never happened.

The virtuous cycle is key to any technological adaptation. If investment isn’t leading to new revenue, then investment will dry up. And I think this is forgotten by a lot of tech enthusiasts, who would rather believe in conspiracy theories to explain why their favorite technology succeeded or failed. Yes oil and coal companies were threatened by fusion power. They were also threatened by fission power, and by wind power and by solar power. Yet throughout the 20th century none of those technologies utterly failed in the way fusion did. Wind and solar in particular continue to advance at a staggering rate, and more wind and solar power is being added every year. The vast power of oil companies has not managed to kill off
Tesla or Solar Star, even though those technologies were once a far off dream just like fusion. And more to the point a conspiracy among fossil fuel companies to kill off fusion would require them to be the only entities in the world unaffected by the prisoner’s dilemma. If fusion power is a profitable venture, then the first energy company to successfully use it can kill off its rivals and corner the market. Why would greedy coal companies pass up the opportunity to drive all their competitors out of business and make billions or trillions of dollars in profit off of safe, clean energy? The usual explanation is that fusion power would be SO cheap that fossil fuel companies would be unable to make a profit, but that is just economic illiteracy. Energy isn’t expensive because coal is expensive, energy is expensive because the market will willingly pay for it at a high price. If a coal company suddenly switches to fusion power, they can and will continue to charge the same rate because that is the rate the market will pay. And if fusion is clean and cheap, the coal company will pocket the revenue as almost pure profit. They company can lower its prices to gain market share and drive rivals out of business, but companies are profit-maximizing, they won’t willingly lower prices to a point where they’re making less than what they could. Any reduction in energy price would have to be made up for in increased market share, and thus increased gross profit for the coal (now fusion) company. And if it really were that simple, then coal companies all over the world would have switched to fusion power. Trying to make a conspiracy to strangle fusion power in its crib wouldn’t work, because again of the prisoner’s dilemma. The first company to break the conspiracy and create fusion power reaps all of the profits at the others’ expenses. The only way out of the prisoner’s dilemma is for all the coal companies to be perfect altruists who would never harm someone else for personal gain, but the entire history of coal companies proves that to be a lie.

I think if fusion power were possible and profitable, then it would be a great technology for our age, helping a huge number of problems overnight from climate change to the cost of living crisis. But it also seems clear that fusion power isn’t currently possible and that throwing more money at the problem isn’t guaranteed to solve it.