Practical Useful

The Simulation Argument proposed by Nick Bostrom in 2003 remains the single most perplexing answer to the Fermi Paradox yet proposed.

The short version of these two arguments are:
  - Fermi Paradox: Given how many habitable planets there are in the Galaxy and how long they’ve been about… where the hell are all the aliens? They should have over run the place with von Neumann probes already!
  - Simulation Argument: Given that it will become possible in the future to simulate not just individuals but whole populations, it is significantly more probable that we are ancestor simulations being run by our future prodigy rather than real world residents who will first develop that technology.

So SA’s answer to FP is simply: You are a Sim. The simulation does not include the aliens.
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“How to be the Luckiest Person Alive” by James Altucher is the author’s first self published book that he is pushing at the Amazon minimum price of 99c as the object is to get read, not get rich. It is not his first book, he has published through the more traditional route before but I haven’t read any of them for comparison.

I have been an avid reader of his blog for some time now. He is prolific, occasionally produces profoundly insightful gems and has pushed the line so far out on how much honesty one can put into bloging it is amazing. There are a great many blogs by and for wannabe entrepreneurs out there, the ones that standout are not those that claim to purvey fullproof get-rich methods so much as those that discuss their failures as openly as they discuss their successes. James’ blog is stunning in his discussions about and deep honesty in portraying his failings, and yet he is a slightly socially reclusive geek who has made the occasional multi-million dollar success. The journeys from crashed out, penniless failures back to success and happiness, by following his Daily Practice , are entertaining rides indeed.

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Recently a great deal of books I have purchased and read have been on the back of first following the author’s blog. Indeed most of them are collections of work that had previously been published on said blogs and this is part of a growing trend in micro publishing which I am fairly certain sounds the death knell for traditional big house publishers who should be radically altering their model if they hope to survive.

Unsurprisingly, these projects have produced a fairly mixed bag of results, from the hastily and poorly constructed gathering of old posts with little thought to structure to the hastily but rather better constructed and themed gathering of old posts to a demonstration of the state of the art for this kind of project.

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