Freedom Dreams

There’ve been quite a few interesting things that have happened me over the last week. Firstly, last Thursday, I finally (after 2 months of waiting), received my A-Level results – AAAA, in Maths, Chemistry, Physics and General Studies – so, I will definitely be going to Cambridge University in about a month’s time. Also, well done to everyone else who got their results, A-Level and GCSE, and good luck with your new colleges/universities.

Secondly, last weekend, I went with the rest of DFEY, to Young Rewired State -  an event to get young (~15-18) coders doing cool stuff with government data. Me, Joe and Richard worked on creating something to give bloggers opinions on the various bills currently going through parliment – Blog-o-tics. This uses Google blog search, and then does a manual count of predefined positive and negative words – as a result, it is heavily inaccurate, as our word lists were limited and language can be used in confusing ways (this is not *good* at all). I do plan on reworking blogotics to use a different, more reliable source of sentiment data at some point, but I’ve not got round to it yet.

The event it self rather good, and accommodation and travel costs were kindly provided. The venue used was Google’s UK offices, which was quite cool. The food was okay, not amazing, but much better than at 2morro (the other event DFEY attended this summer). The whole thing seemed quite well structured, each group had a mentor to help them along. I would very much like to thank Prem (who also blogged the event) for being our mentor. I don’t think our group would have managed to pull it all together without him.

Finally, this week I’ve be coding the innovative new Web2.0 app, pokebook. Which has just as much importance and relevance for the future web as its ad campaign suggests.

I’m a voluntaryist, this means that I believe all human interactions should be voluntary – I don’t think that the initiation of force is an acceptable means to any end. As a result, I don’t support the fundamental basis of current governments – I consider the way they forcefully gather money and forcefully change people’s behaviour to be immoral.

So, the most “purist” thing to do would be to take a moral stance and refuse to participate in this system that I found immoral. This is an idea that does have some legs, if enough people made a clear, peaceful decision to do this, it would have a massive effect. This is why I’m so excited about what the Free State Project is trying to do. However, the truth is, if I tried it as a single individual, it would end up with me most probably in jail, alone, and looking to everyone like a crazy nutcase.

For this reason, and partly because I have little other choice, I am still part of the system. If I want to have the ability and the means to maybe be part of the Free State Project one way, I can not cause too much fuss here.

For example, for my education, I’m going to go through the government managed university system, just as I have gone through the state education system. This is because there is little viable alternative way for me to learn in the area I do best in – pure sciences. Whereas more vocational skills would have ways of recognising achievement with little government involvement, it is near impossible to get a job involving pure science without a degree from a (state managed) university.

However, there are some parts that I feel are less clear. I’ve also applied for a government grant, as I’m from a lower income family. I don’t feel great about this, but if I didn’t get it, it would probably be my parents being strained, and they’ve had much of their money go into the system, so I don’t feel I’m leeching. Its not ideal, but there’s little I can do. I believe that a voluntary system could easily match this government grant, but since the government exists, no-one else feels they need to be there to provide it, or where they do, expect me to be already receiving this grant.

Another, less obvious way I’m still involved in the government system is through the software I release. Since I object to the government force that copyleft relies on, all my software is now permissively licensed. However, a permissive copyright license is still a copyright license. Permissive licenses use the threat of force to make people retain attribution – and, this force has been made real through the legal system, on at least one occasion. However, I am in favour of giving attribution to the source of a work – and a free markets would have systems like ostracism to support this. But, since we don’t have a free market, I use the “magic words” of copyright legalease show my intent in a way other people understand.

Finally, I have a current example. I am currently working as a coder on a project that is funded by a government agency. Although this seems contrary to my ideas, at first, its not that simple. I’m working as a contractor, for a contractor, and both my, and my direct employer’s services are market ones that exist already in the market. Also, my employer are an research/monitoring company, so they at least will help avoid some of the inefficiencies in our current government system. Lastly, the project I work on mostly is about getting certain government information into a more open format so that more people can do to this. Encouraging this openness is a good idea whilst we still have this system. A more open state is still bad, but preferable to a closed one.

In conclusion, although a fully voluntary society is my ideal, we are an awful long way off. Whilst I still live in a country with a largely socialist mindset it makes sense for me to just “go along” some of the time. That way, more people are likely to listen to me, since I won’t be looked at as a lone crazy weirdo. However, the rules change completely once liberty minded people get together in larger numbers, and to this end I hope to one day participate in the Free State Project.

Me and my friend Joe have been wondering about lucid dreaming recently. He recently livejournaled one of his dreams. Now, I don’t really want to share my dreams, they are either too private or too weird, and I should imagine too uninteresting to post here. Also, some of them are written on a real notepad, and I cba typing them up. However, for about a week, I did make an effort to write my dreams down.

I gave up with it in the end, it was too much hassle. However, I did find that my dream recal increased dramatically. I now remember a dream most nights, wheras before I could go for over a week without remembering any. This, and this alone makes me think that lucid dreaming may be attainable for me.

The only other thing I’ve been doing, so far, to work toward lucidity is looking at my watch twice. Now, I hadn’t been doing this very seriously, and didn’t expect much of it, but a couple of nights ago, I did it in a dream. In the dream the time went funny the second time, and in the dream I eralised I was lucid. I promptly ran backwards and forwards very quickly, flew up into the air, before trying to edit a door with blender. However, frustratingly, I am not sure that this was really lucid, or if it was just a non-lucid dream about being lucid. *sigh*

Either way, its interesting. Even if I don’t get any further, at least I now remember my dreams.

Well, OCR (uk exam board) has just gone and shown how useful copyright acknowledgment can be In a GCSE music exam they contained the answers to the questions!

Now, I can just about understand how that error went unnoticed – it just proves that everyone ignores copyright . But, what about obvious errors in the wording of the question? Simplified a bit, we had something like this in our physics exam.

Write down the wavelength and speed:

Wavelength ………………..
Wavelength ………………..

I mean surely anyone with half a brain cell could spot that. Okay, one person might make a mistake, but how could it pass through the chain of people involved in this and still come out wrong? Unless this error came near the end of the process (like I imagine the copyright printing would have), then there must be something going wrong with the chain! Either that or everyone at OCR is retarded! Yeah, I know calling an exam board isn’t nice, but at least I don’t do it in an exam!

Seriously though, exams do seem a bit broken. We go to school to pass exams, instead of to learn. Its difficult to learn stuff outside of exams and outside of the normal school system. More and more people are getting As, so universities have to discriminate much harder on other things.

</rant>