The swells and waves have got noticeably stronger over my 50 years holidaying on the Otway coast, so I would very much welcome anything that could take any energy out of them and make it more useful elsewhere.

Then I might get back to diving more than once or twice per summer, down from better than every second day in years gone by.

Wolfram pushes his principle of computational equivalence which says that anything you can find in one discrete system you can find in any other (which can be shown to emulate a universal Turing machine). His preference for 1D and Conway's, my and others' preference for 2D cellular automata for exploring some of that space is much more a statement about human visual perception. He actually suggests that a simple graph (formal math term for network of nodes and links) is a more likely candidate, but they are much harder to get your head (and your algorithms) around.

Personally I find his strong notion of computational equivalence only distracts from the need to find smarter exploration strategies in a space of boundless possibility, although it has some value as a "weak" principle analogous to the weak anthropic principle.

Wolfram's argument for exploring the space of discrete computations as a source of models richer and cheaper than continuum math needs wider endorsement. Much of the criticism is the inverse of a long recognised problem: shooting the message when you really want to shoot the messenger (and that only because you know the reputation rather than the person).

And your critique of totalising narratives has long been well understood in the postmodernist framework, but pomo too has been so badly misrepresented as to have hidden its useful contributions. It's not just the physicists who try to formulate the whole world in their terms. You should be much more afraid of the accountants and lawyers doing likewise without hint of oversight.

If Goedel was still around I'm sure he would like to say to Wolfram what he was too polite to say directly to Wittgenstein: that while the formalism project can be a handy tool in isolated circumstances that it must ultimately fail to account for the world we find ourselves in, because there are truths formalism cannot reach before they emerge unexpectedly from expanding chaos. He might even add that you could see that all in cellular automata if you looked with better tools in more likely places. So any lifeboat needs to try to be ready for anything, not just the expected.

Yeah, I too would like to believe, but the track record is abysmal and getting worse.

There is a cigarette paper between rationality and rationalisation.

They even made a movie about the case Larry Flint won, but nobody else has his courage.

With every carriage/set having its own drive power (as our V/Locity and I'm sure many others already do) and superseding driver cabins though use of remote (including onboard remote) sensing and control functions, or even fully automatic, you can have stopping services docking at the front and dropping off the back of an always moving train system.

This could even allow a return to the once very comfortable mode of separate cabins opening off the side of a long corridor rather than the current fashion of squeezing longitudinal access between open plan seats so that every passenger is disturbed by anyone walking past.

... and on and on. By then I'll surely have even more things to leave unfinished than I look like leaving now.

One good thing serious life expectancy increase might do is help us get over quarterly profits disease, but then again I'm always too optimistic. It might also make the choice clearer between getting off planet and cutting per capita resource wastage down here.

By the time anyone dies of age-related causes they are already quite a work of art, albeit of varying quality, and something is lost when they fail to leave dense traces of at least their best bits for posterity. Yet I bet, I'll still put more effort into observing than into recording. Can't wait for a Siri descendent that will be able to tease out our stories.

I'm not convinced there are any technical obstacles to getting to a point where life expectancy increases by more than a year per year, but have no expectation that I'll find myself on the right side of that curve, so finish up thinking more about technical systems for reincarnating, systems we are surely going to need to move beyond this solar system, no matter how long we can stretch our biological span.

says it all, though even we aren't immune to those living off the teat of advertising by preaching doom and gloom.

Never has there been anywhere more comfortable/indulgent to look forward to (increasing) retirement, nor to work on interesting stuff/making it even better unless you insist on relative poverty of those around you as your reward.

Though I really might appreciate the extra half hour on Mars.

AFAIK this is one point not two as frictional clumping is mediated by photons, as at some point are all our observations. Not that I don't fully accept the evidence for dark matter, nor have any sympathy with DM deniers. From a history of science perspective, their kind have always been wrong.

Two arbitrary lines in a 2D plane will meet with probability 1.0.
Two arbitrary lines in 3D space will meet with probability 0.0.
(In each case, the exceptions are vanishingly few relative to the norm.)

Extrapolating this to expanding 3D bubbles in almost any higher dimensional space the probability is again 0.0. Even more obviously, there is nowhere for collisions to happen if those bubbles are each creating their own space, not infecting some pre-existing space. The latter would have way too many other observable consequences to be a serious proposal.

(I have played with enough simplistic models to be currently comfortable with a notion that the implosion of a Type 1a supernova might be a good model for a cosmic egg which gives rise to a chaotic larval stage in which such conservative bubbles arise. (The political metaphor is not lost either.))

I still cite Out of Control as the most readable introduction to the oft confused subject of complexity, and am right now wading through What Technology Wants but finding it far more forced (sleep inducing). While I clearly don't disagree with the idea of seeing technology as a partner with humanity, your newer book reads like you have invested too long in a world constructed from your imaginings and cut back your level of interest in looking at what is actually going on, an interest which seemed to pervade your earlier projects.

Yes, I am well past your rationalisation for abandoning "extropy", so what I really want to know is whether we are all going to be condemned to defend our business models to the death?

The observer bias regarding areas of education here on Slashdot is really something to behold. In general I've seen 'liberal arts' described as the study of comparative literature, shake spear, latin etc. Generally liberal arts are 'soft', do not lead to jobs, never invent anything or bring in university research. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, utter horseshit.

We shall for a moment accept the Slashdot definition of liberal arts as not including things like math and science (more accurately in academia it just means 'not vocational'), so if we just look at a 'school of arts' we have fields such as the study of all languages and linguistics (my areas), politics and international studies, criminology, design, economics, psychology, environmental and developmental studies, journalism, sociology just off the top of my head.

The amount of people studying the sorts of things which incense slashdotters so much, the Latin majors etc, is actually pretty low. Vitally, arts-type degree holders often go into jobs in the workforce which are not directly related to their degree. The idea that this made their degree useless is, well, quite depressing really. The fact is, these graduates didn't get a job in spite of their liberal arts degree, they very often get jobs because of it.

Yet there's also a very great deal of direct interest in a number of the arts fields. You may not believe it but every academic conference I go to, companies queue up to entice us to internships and employment. At a recent conference in my area, I was struck by the number of tech companies (I specifically recall Google and eBay) that had open ended invites for internships for anyone involved in the discipline, lamenting the fact there weren't more students in the field.

My field within 'arts' is extremely rich in research, practical applications, and yes, vocational opportunities. Yes, things you use on your web sites, on your phone, in your car. I was specifically drawn to it because it was apparent just how much further we had to go and how I might make a real difference. Believe it or not, modern technology doesn't just have 'science' bits under the hood, they have things that human beings control and that's where we come in.

It may bend your head to discover that a good number of people within 'liberal arts' also consider themselves scientists and very often work on issues imminently more practical than majors in mathematics. Yet despite that, you will generally not find people within the arts that are derisive about the studying the hard sciences.

Perhaps if more of you had a wider human-focused education then you would see that science does not live in a vacuum and university education does not have to be exclusively focused on the skills you need for your first job.

(The ex electronics engineer that went back to university to study 'liberal arts')

Quite so. This is in fact exactly how it's done in Australia. In fact the price I'm charged on my HECS student loan is different for each of the units I've taken, depending on the department that runs them.

There is another critical difference to US education, we have an extremely generous fully public student loan system which covers the entire cost of our university education and is only repayable when earning above a certain threshold of earnings, and it's interest free. While I would imagine such a thing would be called communist in the United States, it's a great way of insulating students from higher costs of studying sciences, medicine and what have you.

Arguably the higher costs of science is often not reflected by potential higher earnings. For reasons other than cost, just as in the US, science tends to be less popular. To encourage take up in some areas deemed to be in particular demand, the terms of cost of education is assisted with government funding. Making it cheaper still, but since we don't really care how much university costs (it's a fraction of what you pay in the US and we have those loans), the encouragement extends to outreach to high-schools, cost-of-living scholarships, lower entry requirements and so on.

I don't know what it's like in the US but in the UK and Australia, and presumably elsewhere too, there are a great many schemes that are aimed at encouraging take up of in-demand professions. Things like scholarships, grants, lower fees or even exempted fees for a portion of a course. Outreach programs to high school, ensuring that students with lower-than-expected results are aware of their opportunities to apply for the in-demand professions.