"The ethical dilemmas of virtual reality"

Brookings Tech Tank:  In a new play “The Nether” that opened this month at the Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington, D.C., playwright Jennifer Haley explores the troubling questions that arise when the main character known as Papa uses advanced software to create a fantasy environment where adult clients molest young children and then kill them.

The play shows detective Morris quizzing Papa on the line between fantasy and reality, and the rightful boundaries of human experience. For those concerned about a Frankenstein future of misguided technology, the production raises a number of thorny questions. Should there be limits on human fantasies involving heinous thoughts? Do fantasies that remain in the private realm of someone’s brain warrant any rules or regulations by society as a whole? (read the whole thing)

Ya wanna bet?

Breibart News November 11, 2015 by Daniel J Flynn

The office of New York’s attorney general fired off cease-and-desist letters to FanDuel and DraftKings fantasy sports websites.

Tuesday’s letters conclude that FanDuel and DraftKings’ “operations constitute illegal gambling under New York law.” The nearly identical missives order the sites to cease accepting money from residents of the Empire State.

“FanDuel’s customers are clearly placing bets on events outside of their control or influence, specifically on the real-game performance of professional athletes,” the attorney general’s office holds. “Further, each FanDuel wager represents a wager on a ‘contest of chance’ where winning or losing depends on numerous elements of chance to a ‘material degree.'”

"‘Breaking Bad plot’ was fantasy, says woman accused of trying to kill mother" (Update*)

"She said: “By this time, because of the messages I received from my mum and because I couldn’t cope with it and I wanted to escape from it all, I started to fantasise about trying to kill myself or my mum."

“It was as if I was thinking through it as if I was in my own TV programme or a character in Breaking Bad. I was in a really strange place in my mind.”

She said the person who wrote the emails “doesn’t resemble me”, adding: “I know how it appears, but the truth is I didn’t do anything. It’s all fabrication.

“It escalated and I had to go to work and pretend like everything was OK and I had to be at home and pretend everything was OK.

“But I was living this other life. This was my own way of coping – it was my coping mechanism. It was how I survived daily.”

Patel denies trying to murder her mother, who sits on the bench at Thames magistrates court, and acquiring a biological agent or toxin.

Patel wiped tears away from her eyes and told the jury: “I didn’t do it. I didn’t put anything in my mother’s coke.”

* Graphic designer who 'fantasised about being character from Breaking Bad' is cleared of trying to kill her mother... but convicted of acquiring biological agent or toxin.

Fantasy Quotient

I saw this piece at House of Eratosthenes, a blog hosted on Peekinthewell. By this guy, I do not see his name.

The author's idea is that IQ is calculated a certain way, a commenter corrected him about how, apparently, but that is not important, in his model the measure is related to age.

The writer goes on about his observations regarding the healthcare act and the site rollout, how all that happened, observations about how the Act's  proponents see things and what all that means, then the more value he sees in measuring what he calls F.Q. for fantasy quotient.

In his model he uses to understand people an engineer would have F.Q. of zero and a healthy F.Q. would be oh, he doesn't really know, maybe somewhere in the 10's or 20's.

If your F.Q. is 100 you cannot learn anything and that is what the author sees now. In his model such a person never grows up.

Eratosthenes is an interesting place.