new years come and gone.

This, I am confident, is the year I shall remember as a starting point for many important projects that will remain defining in my life for a long time. I've spent the last few years learning at the expense of doing. And I'm finally in a position to change that. This year is going to be all acting, with little reaction or passivity.

And that, is good.

Grr. Christmas, and me without a credit card to max out.
As my schedule quickens and things happen faster, I find it takes more and more guilt to motivate me to do things I don't really feel are very important. And yet, I still try and get presents for my family on christmastime, and spend the day/days with them. Why is that? Environmental programming? Lingering memories of christmas past? Or some editorial filter, that picks those bright and worthwhile things about christmas, and lets me enjoy all of it, for the sake of the pure intent in parts of it.

But for the record, Fuck You, Santa Clause! And your celebratory capitalist pig-dog elves too!

oh, FLENSER is all salvage electronics and materials at this point, so amazingly enough, the only costs I've incurred are some gas charges transporting, and a new battery for my trusty DMM. We may yet run into trouble, but thus far, FLENSER is pretty sturdy for little cabbage. The current design/test phase should cost us little or nothing, and then the debug/rebuild phase will be where the costs start piling up, with the nice batteries, motors, and titanium weapon/armor pieces. ugh. It's cheap, but I hate block aluminum. At least with Titanium I don't have the option of trying to do it myself and I'll have to pay someone else to do it. I can watch them sweat. heh.

More progress on the front lines, I've organized a team to field a combat robot, code-named FLENSER. He'll bear the MadScientistMagazine nameplate, and hopefully compete in either Robot Wars, or Battle Bots (or both) His control and weapon systems are currently in spec with the requirements of both. I'd hate the let out too many details and then be embarassed when we change them later, so I'll just say that while it's mostly a virgin crew, I have high hopes we'll see results quick, and with interesting(if not victorious) results. FLENSER will hopefully get on TV during the next BattleBots season, if we finish him quickly enough, and grab some eyeballs for MadScientistMagazine.

Which of course means I have to work on creating a team for that also. Pending Funding, I'll be recruiting real writers and features soon. "Soon" being within the next two months. Not quite up to internet speed yet, but things are building. Money remains tight, even through these prospective times. I'm full of ideas and projects, but stereotypically low on funding and allies. Christmas will be lean this year. I'm planning on giving mostly self-constructed gifts to those that expect them, and agnostica cards to those that don't.

I have to also admit a desire to use Mad Scientist Magazine to prove my friend Eliezer Yudkowsky wrong. He said to me recently, within a larger conversation, "But Corwin, mad scientists don't exist in real life." Realizing that he's mostly right, and wondering to myself why that's so is at least tangentally related to my decision to start this magazine.

I also cannot help but think that an organized sub-culture of maniacal rational engineers that communicate and assist each other would be a good thing.

There are two paradigms of Scientific Endeavor just now, one is Science for Science's sake, and perpetuates itself in Universities, research institutions, and the heart of every mathematical platonist. The other is Applied Sciences, and it lives in Corporate Think Tanks, Design Engineering courses, and Product Delivery Systems. I'm trying to discover and promote a third kind of Science and Scientist, the Artistic Scientist, who creates and searches and discovers for his own sake. And if there isn't a sub-culture that puts Nicolae Tesla on the covers of it's books, and has inside jokes about rational madness, well, I guess I'll just have to make one.