Jay McGavren's Journal

More on overpopulation

Excuse me while I indulge in unbridled futurism (bordering on science-fiction)…

Population growth is already levelling off in societies where children are more of a liability than an asset. (They can’t help you till the fields anymore, after all.) Once the overpopulation problem peaks, I could imagine it becoming the norm for teens to seek permanent contraception (reversible or not).

So then the question becomes: what sort of person would make the choice to become a “breeder”? And how will that affect the gene pool? There are already theories flying about that there may be genes that cause a predisposition toward conservatism; what if there’s a gene that causes an especially strong desire to procreate? If contraception is the norm, those without such urges would quickly (willingly?) die out.

Macro procrastination...

You’ve heard before that patterns at the micro scale are repeated in the macro. Patterns in a fractal recur as you zoom in; the veins in a leaf look like the branches of a tree.

I suspect that procrastination at the individual level recurs at the societal level. We’re only moving on this global warming thing because now there are visible signs of climate change (and scientists telling us it’s already too late). We’re only developing fuel-efficient cars because gas is over $4 a gallon.

I suppose we’ll need a viral epidemic or food shortage (in a first-world country; we already have them elsewhere) to wake us up on the topic of overpopulation.

If THESE guys can't make money...

So, looking up Dr. Horrible last night led me to find a whole slew of great web video series:

The Guild

Retarded Policeman

Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show (haven’t fully watched this yet, but it seems promising)

I’ll be keeping an eye on these to see if they monetize themselves successfully. If even they can’t, I’m declaring internet video still not ready for prime time.

Lenny saw a multi-exposure photo on Flickr and thought it was pretty cool, so I gave him a quick demonstration of how to duplicate the effect in Photoshop:

jay@MIDORI:D:applicationsInstantRails-2.0-winrails_appstest
$ ruby script/generate scaffold Recipe title:string instructions:string

Man, you miss out on a lot if you’re following Rails 1.0 tutorials. In fact, I tried setting up on Heroku and gave up, tried setting up on DreamHost and gave up, and was about to give up on InstantRails as well. Wonder how much of that was due to 1.0/2.0 incompatibilities?