Lambdas and meathooks and crossbows, oh my!

I have now returned from Edinburgh, where I was visiting a symposium to celebrate the 60th birthday of Gordon Plotkin (not his death, as totherme and I had somehow assumed: fortunately, we discovered our mistake before we tried to console anyone). It was a theoretical computer science conference, which isn't really my area, though there's some overlap: I think I knew five of the other attendees, including totherme. My motivations for attending were a) a chance to hang around and chat with totherme, b) a chance to meet some CS people, in case I decide to move in that direction when I finish my PhD, c) a chance to hear the extremely eminent Dana Scott speak. I mostly got at least something out of all the lectures (with the disturbing exception of Marcelo Fiore's lecture, which was pretty much pure category theory). However, if I have to see another model of the untyped lambda calculus in the next month I shall not be responsible for the consequences of my actions.

One of the things totherme and I discussed (as well as the monadicity of trees, database APIs, context logic and the like), was the idea of the Grim Meathook Future. ( Explanation, cut for length )

Now, post-Katrina, the possibility of the GMF has been weighing on my mind rather: in fact, I become more and more convinced that this is what the future has in store for us.

Which leads me to my question: assuming for the sake of argument that the GMF is inevitable in some form, what should I be doing now to prepare for it? What skills can I gain that will enable me to survive (I've given up on prospering) in the post-oil, post-tech, post-sanity economy? I'm thinking things like first aid (to patch yourself up, and to make you too useful to be killed outright). Knowing how to tan leather or make bread or grow food or some other tangibly useful thing. And knowing how to do it all without electricity or anything made from petrochemicals.

So, I turn to you, my personal brains trust. What do you recommend? Assuming that we don't nuke ourselves to death, of course.

On a completely unrelated note, this is the best eBay item description ever. Thanks to Mat for the link.

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I've read a couple of good books lately.

The first one I want to talk about is Newton's Wake, by Ken MacLeod (I've linked to this before). It's SF, set several hundred years post-Singularity. The AIs, after wreaking great amounts of destruction (they were military, Skynet-style things) have lost interest and gone... somewhere... leaving humans in control of the ruins of Earth. By the time the book starts, there are four major power blocs: the Knights of Enlightenment, who are into Zen, biofeedback yoga, general machismo and investigating posthuman tech in a very cautious, hands-off way; the DK (expansion unknown), who are into Communism, self-reliance, ideological orthodoxy and strip-mining entire planets; America Offline, who are into Jesus Koresh, terraforming, and huge monoculture farms; and the Carlyle Gang, who are a bunch of two-bit gangsters from the South Side of Glasgow, who somehow managed to gain control of a galaxy-spanning wormhole network. The book starts when one of the Carlyle's combat archeology missions discovers a terraformed, civilized planet, whose survivors believed hitherto that they were the only survivors of the AI war. A certain amount of mental adjustment is called for by both sides. Anyway, it's great SF, very Scottish, and I literally couldn't put it down. Similar in some respects to Iain M. Banks. I think a few book tokens may go on some of his other books.

Currently, I'm reading Evelyn Waugh's Officers and Gentlemen. It's the second book in a trilogy (I haven't read the first one) about the Second World War. So far, it's been about a Commando troop led by a very upper-class officer, who naturally picks all his friends from the club to lead his troops. So you have the prewar gilded youth huddled together in a windswept island in the Orkneys, playing at being Special Forces. I haven't read much Waugh, and not for ages, but it's very nicely written, and quite funny in a wry, despairing way.