The Human Condititon
I'm reading the introduction to Nielsen and Chuang's Quantum Computation and Quantum Information. My mind found itself drifting to ways to make the scientific condition better and a discussion developed with my roommate.
This is related to me starting to read some Culture novels by Iain M. Banks. I greatly enjoy these books and recommend them to any interested SF nerds (the Culture is Reed in space).
The utopian SF stuff had me thinking about how our world might be improved and I asked my roommate (who also happens to have "book pimped" me into reading the Banks novels in the first place) about how we might be able to create some societal entity that would help more effectively advance Science, Technology, and other Awesomeness. We mused for a bit and the thought that on some level we were discussing some kind of progress on "the human condition" was broached.
In response, I have created a new complexity class. In addition to NP-complete and NP-hard, I hereby declare The Human Condition to be in the NP-Ridiculous complexity class (proof is left as an exercise to the reader; the method of proof by strong assertion is recommended). This is, of course, not the worst complexity class. NP-Ludicrous remains unpopulated, though some theorize that the question of Life the Universe and Everything falls into this complexity class.
This is related to me starting to read some Culture novels by Iain M. Banks. I greatly enjoy these books and recommend them to any interested SF nerds (the Culture is Reed in space).
The utopian SF stuff had me thinking about how our world might be improved and I asked my roommate (who also happens to have "book pimped" me into reading the Banks novels in the first place) about how we might be able to create some societal entity that would help more effectively advance Science, Technology, and other Awesomeness. We mused for a bit and the thought that on some level we were discussing some kind of progress on "the human condition" was broached.
In response, I have created a new complexity class. In addition to NP-complete and NP-hard, I hereby declare The Human Condition to be in the NP-Ridiculous complexity class (proof is left as an exercise to the reader; the method of proof by strong assertion is recommended). This is, of course, not the worst complexity class. NP-Ludicrous remains unpopulated, though some theorize that the question of Life the Universe and Everything falls into this complexity class.