I think I should try to wean myself off scoffing at things, just to see if I can, and to see if it makes me any happier.

Never fear, dear reader: I don't mean to suddenly become a fool who accepts everything - some things are worth scoffing at. Rather, I'm going to try to stop unconsciously or automatically scoffing at tastes and preferences I don't share or enthusiasm that seems to me unwarranted.

These are things that I can't reasonably dispute as they're far too closely wound up in the speaker's personal wiring, and so they're not at all appropriate for me to criticize.

Let's see if I can wind back my criticism to times when it is either appropriate or at least warranted..

A set of photos taken during the recent earthquake in Sichuan province, China, by a wedding photographer who'd just begun taking photos of the bride and groom when the earthquake struck.

Two strike me in particular - one of masonry falling off a church, the other of the bride, resplendent in dress, veil, and dusty debris looking out over the rubble as her new husband is climbing to his feet.

It seems their photos were being taken on some steps outside the church, within which many of their guests remained. You can only imagine the shock - they've just experienced an intensely joyful experience, then, having only recently left the church to have photos taken, they experience horror, as the building, filled with friends and family, collapses behind them. 33 are reported missing or dead.

Photos like this, untouched by professional media, give, for me, a much more intense window into events - it was easy to see imagery of rescue workers and devastation on the news and think of it as a distant tragedy, a statistic - this brings it all into so much more focus.

In the post mentioned above, Jamais says 'With every snapshot, every recording, every blog entry, we're documenting our world.' - that's important - it emphasizes the breadth of documentary that crowd journalism can give - if everyone has a camera and a voice, so much more is captured, and so many more perspectives are presented. That said, I think crowd journalism is similarly important for the personal, immediate nature of it - there's an increase in perceived honesty and emotional intensity that you get when you're seeing footage and accounts by people who were actually there, experiencing the event. To some extent, I think this is what makes embedded journalism during wartime so interesting, too..

So, I keep thinking it would be neat to have a regular brains and coffee night.

The idea is that a bunch of relatively learned, not too egotistic, but still opinionated people get together and discuss some topic to a depth a little beyond that reached in normal social discourse. I've read, mostly in blogs, about this sort of thing in all sorts of forms, but outside of technical interest groups and other more specialized forms, I haven't come across anything much like this in Christchurch.

Here's my motivation: I frequently encounter ideas, articles or books that I'd love to talk over and think about in a bit more detail, but very rarely do I get that opportunity, except, perhaps, when they're coincidentally relevant to something else I end up talking about. It's not to say that I don't get this sort of opportunity sometimes, so much as that I have little control over when it happens, and I'd like more of it in my life. I can read and think alone to my heart's content, but one's thoughts are not truly tempered until they are tested in argument.

I have ulterior motives, of course - one thing I'd love to experiment with is brainstorming ideas about the future; for example, ethics, current affairs, social evolution, and, yes, even technology.

Who'd be interested in this sort of thing? There's not a lot in the way of pre-requisites other than a desire for coffee and good conversation. Topics are hardly difficult to come by - at minimum I end each week with a long list of things I want to have a yarn about.

Assuming I get at least a couple of interested folk, I'll arrange something for next week, probably on Tuesday or Thursday night. If you're keen, let me know which is preferable. Finally, if you've got any suggestions of a good cafe in Riccarton, let me know that, too - the key criteria is that they not have loud background music.

I'm surfing a rather strange mood right now. I got home from gaming 20 minutes ago, feeling strangely bemused and disappointed with the world, largely for broad social and political reasons than for anything one particular thing.

I've been grappling a little of late with the troublesome conflict between ideas of social fairness and communal action versus libertarian ideas of avoiding coercion and maximizing freedom. Both sides offer attractions, but both have drawbacks - freedom and self-determination are desirable, but do they trump the Rawlsian desire for fairness and equality? Always? Never? Sometimes? Where do you draw the line?

Obviously, compromise between the extremes of these positions is necessary, and I know thinkers out there have formulated amalgamations that seem to offer a way forward. My concern is that society at large doesn't seem able to follow sophisticated hybrid policies, and tends to leap to extremes - we're either ignoring a problem, or flooding it with ill-considered, wasteful solutions. While the barely competent rule of the fickle crowd is perhaps measured and appropriate for some issues, it seems foolishly slow and indecisive for others.

However, this isn't all that's bugging me. Rather, it's a contributing and compounding factor in a mangled mass of disappointing trends I discern - the tragedy of the commons wrought large on global resources. What happens next?

It seems my attitude towards the future ranges from measured optimism to resigned pessimism. I guess this to be expected - we live in truly interesting times, and I really can't tell if that's good or bad.

Maybe I just shouldn't listen to essays about existential risk when I'm tired..

Moore's Law - that the number of transistors that fit on a chip doubles every 12 to 18 months - is the classic example of exponential change; change that increases in rate over time. Similar laws exist for technologies such disk space, bus and network speed, and memory capacity; and for other phenomena such as network growth and value (Metcalfe's Law), meme spread, epidemiology, and so forth.

One of the things I'm hoping to do over the next year is write seriously a lot more. It's nice to think I know something, but that's nothing compared to knowing that by having successfully communicated it. I've a pile of topics I want to write about, and since this runs through so much of my thinking, I decided to start here. At some point I hope to get into this issue with a lot more depth; in particular, I'd like to start discussing some of the subtleties of different formulations of this idea and some of the criticisms, but in this post, at least, I'm really just re-formulating the ideas that accrete on me as I read and listen to what other people have to say. What I'd like most, though, is by doing this to be able to get involved in more thoughtful discussion. So, I'm really interested to hear what people have to say - particularly those who don't agree.

Anyway. Watch this little short by Scott McLeod et al of Shift Happens. It's really quite illuminating.