How to Cherish the Earth, Save the World, and Spread Peace and Brotherhood Throughout the Universe

.

Think big!!  After you’ve spent most of your adult life trying to be helpful one blade of grass at a time, you have to seriously start thinking big.  Just keeping my lawn mowed is not going to make much of a difference to the neighborhood, you’re telling yourself.  Taking home one little pup from the animal shelter doesn’t begin to make a dent in the hundreds of pets who are destroyed every day across the nation.  More aggressive action is needed.  (But you have to take the pup home.)

Seriously, though, someone must keep an eye on the big picture.  You’ve done your share for twenty years, but when you look around, things are actually getting worse.  You pick up a hamburger wrapper one evening, but there’s a million kids out there throwing out hamburger wrappers with great determination.  It’s as though they’ve told themselves: this place needs more hamburger wrappers on the street, to be just perfect.

It’s time to step back, and write down some basic principles; some Axioms for doing everything that needs to be done.

We can’t stop doing our part.

• There’s no point in retiring early, liquidating all your assets and giving it all to charity, if you give up steadily doing the right thing at the local level.  You’ve got to keep on with minimizing your resource footprint, leave alone your carbon footprint.   You’ve got to keep grinding on.
• We have to keep alert for what others are doing that’s good.
• Isolation is counterproductive.  Anything that anyone else is doing is worth commending, and worth encouraging.

We must keep alert for new dangers of all sorts.

• New fires must be spotted, and put out.  We have to keep a lookout for large movements by people, businesses or governments that need studying.  In the long run, will they be destructive?  Will they use up resources that will be to the detriment of everyone? 
• We have to keep educating ourselves, because new threats must be countered with new knowledge.  With every advancement in science and technology, the potential for destructive exploitation multiplies, and we must be in a position to act knowledgeably.  It is no longer a time for knee-jerk reactions, if there ever was a time for it.

We have to pass on our attitudes and information to others, especially the young.

• Education is a huge part of the total program.  One of the biggest frontiers is how to mobilize the most effective PR techniques to forward the program of conservation, preservation, protection, and education.  We spoke about the organization called TED, which features exciting and effective speakers to address a carefully selected and influential audience.  They have stumbled onto this idea of making creativity in problem-solving sexy.

We have to recognize that we are not in this alone. 

• The feeling of being in a partnership with everyone is probably a bigger force for peace, generally, than other initiatives for promoting peace for its own sake.  Certainly peace needs no reasons for being a goal: if ever there was a null hypothesis, peace was it.  But in a world that takes conflict as a given, partnership for conservation is good motivation for peace.
• No one is too mean or too young or too anything to be enlisted in the war against senseless consumption of resources.

Identify all resources.

• Some are focused on fiscal resources, especially those who are chained to the dominant economic paradigm in which everything that is done has to be paid for with money that comes from somewhere.  All that they do is designed around how to stimulate certain activities, perceived by them as desirable, with money; how to stifle other activities, perceived by them as undesirable, by denying funding.  These people have to be taken seriously for the moment, because their paradigm will continue to be in force for a long time.  But not forever.
• Some are focused on energy resources, especially economic planners.  This is an industrial mindset, where early in the last century automobiles were the dominant industry, and it took a fair degree of energy to keep the production lines working.  Later in that century, the lack of gasoline threatened the health of the auto industry, reinforcing the belief that development and energy were inseparable.  This mindset is becoming a hindrance, though clearly we cannot do without energy.
• Some are focused on time resources, especially those who believe that time is of the essence for various programs, such as addressing global warming, or developing alternative energy sources.  The elderly are always conscious of their limited resources of time, for obvious reasons.  Busy individuals who are constantly battling the tendency to be given additional responsibility are naturally preoccupied with how much they can do effectively and well in the time they have.
• Some are focused on environmental resources, which is the one resource that cannot be restored easily.  Once an environment is destroyed, not much can be done about it.  Businessmen and traditional politicians tend to ignore the Environment because it is a paralyzing constraint, and highly inconvenient.
• Food resources preoccupy those who are concerned with world hunger.  We have been aware of food resources versus population for so long that we are fatigued.  But it is a real need, and if a sufficient stream of high-quality natural food is not going to be available in the future, as a result of depletion of environmental resources particularly, and the annexation of land resources for more lucrative deployment as industrial real estate or business premises, then we’re going to be faced with food shortages.  As long as business interests are trusted with decisions about land use, land will be funneled towards creating money for businesses rather than growing food for those who cannot afford to pay a lot of money for it.  If land availability gradually evaporates, we will have to make do with low-quality artificial food, and the present uproar about genetically modified foods will be laughable in retrospect.  We will have to start eating foods that are good for us but taste terrible, or food that tastes wonderful and kills us off fast.  If land is used wisely today, we can have food that is both tasty and nutritious.  We had better be careful of where this is going.
• We must not forget human resources.  Businessmen think of human resources as low-wage employees who can be treated like dirt.  But the real issue is how to make use of the human talent that is available to solve the important problems facing society, rather than enlisting them to entertain the bored masses.
• Cultural resources.  This is probably the one that is least thought about by most people.  But we are at one end of a vast chain of humanity, the memory of whose challenges and achievements and joys have the potential to encourage and inspire us.  It is easy to sacrifice priceless historical artifacts for the purpose of locating an office building, or entertainment, or personal glory.  Most of us are accustomed to regarding our own culture and its achievement as the epitome of refinement, and to disregarding the triumphs of other societies and peoples.  But this mindset is self-defeating, and at the least will alienate potential allies, and at the worst will destroy something that we can learn to be inspired with ourselves.  The richness and the diversity on this single planet is the greatest marvel in a marvelous universe.

Virtual Stuff

.

When you play a videogame, you’re immersed in a ‘world’; you’re looking into the screen, and it is as if you were really there.

Sort of.

Something a little different, but with some common elements, was how computing was done in the sixties: this was before individual PCs.  The idea of having a complete computer all at one’s own disposal was completely alien to our minds (since back then a computer could cost up to $100,000, and a house cost only about $20,000).  Right up until about 1960, a computer indeed was at the disposal of a single individual; you had to reserve time on the thing in advance, and then you would show up at the appointed time, use the computer for your allotted 30 minutes, and go home.

Then someone came up with an operating system that could do something amazing: it could handle up to, e.g., 10 users.  Each user would be given a fraction of a second of computer time, in strict rotation.  But the users were switched in and out so smoothly, each one felt as if the computer was giving him or her its undivided attention.  So the users were virtually in control of the ‘entire’ computer for as long as he or she wanted.  (Unless, of course, there was an 11th user who was getting impatient to get on.)

Think of what the computer had to do to accomplish this: it’s dealing with user A.  Now A’s time is up, so the computer has to (1) put all of A’s program states somewhere on the hard drive, which the computer labels “A’s stuff; do not touch,” (2) loads up B’s stuff from where it had put it before, (3) restores all B’s programs to the exact place(s) where it/they had been before, and resumes talking to B.  This is called Time-Sharing, a phrase that is used in many different contexts with different meanings, e.g. real estate.  It is a very specific instance of multi-tasking, which we’re all familiar with.

This is just a simplification; imagine the details the computer has to take care of!  But this is the genius of computer programming: you only have to think of every eventuality just once, code it in, and it’s never going to be forgotten.  Actually, you don’t have to do it all yourself; eventually someone will notice something more you could do, or something you can do better, and you put that in in your next version.

What does a user need, to feel in control of the entire computer?
* access to the operating system.  There must be a keyboard and a mouse, basically, and...
* a monitor, so that you can see what you typed, and the computer gets to talk back to you,
* a printer, in case you need hardcopy of something; and in these modern times,
* an Internet connection.
When a computer is time-sharing, all these resources are swapped in and out.  Each user gets his or her individual keyboard (and mouse) and monitor, of course, but the other resources have to be rotated.  Many of my readers are probably familiar with printer queues, which is how the printing services were rotated among several users; your print job simply waited in the queue in the order in which it was sent to the printer, and gets printed out when it gets to the top of the queue.

In certain very sophisticated video games, and so-called massively multiple-player games (mmpg), each user has a head-set consisting of video glasses and headphones, and each player has in his hand(s) a gadget or a glove, which (1) gives the user the feel of whatever he or she is holding, e.g. a light saber, or a sword, or, ugh, a machine-gun, and (2) sends the direction and control-signals of the glove into the computer, to be transmitted to the game program.  You are immersed in the game in a very intense way, because most of your senses, namely sight, sound, and touch from your hands, at least, are channeled via the computer.

Another example popped into my mind, namely flight simulators that are used to teach pilots to fly, without the liabilities of actual in-air experience.  Many video games for teenagers involve driving virtual cars in a high-speed chase through a virtual city, for instance.

One of the most interesting applications of this concept of virtuality is actually in programming.  Suppose you’re a PC person, but your wife has just bought a $10,000 super-powerful Apple ^® workstation.  All this while, she has been using your version of some software which is not available for Macs.  And she absolutely has to have it on her brand new, water-cooled, nuclear-powered Mac.

There are what are called Virtual Machines that can run on various operating systems.  In the present instance, there is an application called something like virtual PC, which emulates a PC right inside your wife’s new Mac.  It is a program that maintains the following:
(1) It uses a portion of the Mac memory, and maintains it as though it were the memory of a PC.
(2) It sets aside a modest file on the hard drive of the Mac, and manages it as though it were the hard drive of a small PC.
(3) It grabs input from the Mac keyboard, and responds to it as if it were a PC.  For instance, it can read a CD software disk, and pretend that it is a PC, and install the software, right on your Mac hard drive portion which it was pretending was a PC hard drive, and then proceeds to run it.  It can even register it on the internet.
(4) When your program wants to print, the virtual PC intercepts the printer signals, converts them into the signals that your Mac printer is accustomed to expecting, and your Mac printer prints it.

[Added later:

A few months ago, I installed a virtual Linux computer inside my PC!  Yes, I did, naughty me.  (Actually, this is one of the few instances where nobody cares that you do this.)  I could install a virtual printer--which, of course, printed off the regular printer that I had; the virtual computer interpolated between the Linux output, and the output my printer was expecting, etc, etc.

One of the most interesting things was getting on the Internet.  The imaginary Linux machine had to negotiate with the real PC which was  “hosting” it for access to the Internet.

Lastly, the virtual computer had to add the host computer as an external drive, can you believe it?  That was the only way to pass files back and forth.  The usual way is to mail the files back and forth.  Mailing takes care of the fact that file formats are different in the two systems.  (Actually, they’re the same, but the virtual operating system pretends that they’re different.  And there’s nothing we can do about dispelling this illusion that won’t screw up the emulation, other than, of course, passing files the approved way: pretending that one computer is a hard drive on the other.

When I ran out of space on the PC, I went into investigative mode, and found out that my virtual computer occupies quite a lot of space on my hard drive.  It occupied as much space as the installation CD and virtual hard drive combined, in addition to the size of the virtual machine software.
]

Obviously a lot of effort is going into running interference between the Mac input-channels: the keyboard, the mouse, etc, and the virtual PC inside the Mac, and in the opposite direction, intercepting PC output from the virtual PC, and converting them into equivalent Mac output-streams.  But this sort of thing has been fine-tuned over the years, and is very well understood.

In fact, in recent Windows operating systems, many programs run inside their own little private virtual machines.  Minimal virtual machines were implemented back by Windows Xp, resulting in allowing one program to crash, while the other programs kept going.  In the bad old days, if one program crashed--which meant that the program was finding itself having to respond to a program state that was not anticipated--the whole computer crashed.  You probably noticed this slight improvement in crash-handling, and never connected it with the idea of virtual worlds.

How efficient are these virtual machines, really?  On the one hand, a Mac providing a fake PC environment is working a little harder than a simple PC just being itself.  But a powerful Mac emulating a modest little PC could be expected to do very well.  Don’t misunderstand: PC’s can emulate Macs just about as well as the other way round.  Most of all, open-source Linux systems emulate both PCs and Macs all the time.  Virtual machines are here to stay.

Finally, many new software environments are written to run always in their own virtual machines.  This is the philosophy of the Java platform.  Java code is essentially operating-system-independent, and the Java software can be made to work on any computer, via the browsers on that computer.  Browsers, once you think about it, are a common feature of all computers, and so provide a way of interfacing with software in an operating-system-independent way.  Many other programming languages and systems are being developed to be more platform-independent.

I’m sure there’s a lot more information I ought to be giving you here, but this is a start.

Arch‘’“”