In tonight's dream I was listening to Eliezer Yudkowsky describe a project he worked on about ten years ago, when he was convinced that pervasive formally verified statistics software was key to raising the sanity waterline in America. He subtly reached out in an email to programmers working "in Seattle" to see if he could interest them.
At this point in the conversation he opened up Google Maps and turned on the Terrain layer to show that there is a giant mountain that covers Idaho, Wyoming, Utah and Colorado, and that Seattle is located on the west slope of the mountain. That makes those programmers ideal because they are "politically unaligned" (neither Democrat nor Republican), "geographically unaligned" (neither on the east coast nor the west coast) and "alignment unaligned" (because the mountain slope is at an angle to the rest of the U.S.). As he sent the email he had to tilt the laptop to match the mountain, to make sure the communication would go through.
