Chuang Tse Redux

"Is it me that has become more stupid? Or are there others who have not become so stupid?"

This is how I feel lately. Actually, for quite awhile now. At least since the summer of last year, I feel much, much more stupid than I can ever recall. Not just logy or sluggish, but actually diminished in intellectual capacity and metabolism.

I went back and read essays from 2012. I'm glad I wrote these essays, as they serve as both benchmark and memory palace. A lot of the essays are embarrassing to read, in a is-that-really-what-I-sound-like? type of embarrassment. But a lot of the essays also made me think, Jesus, I've become a lot more stupid than I used to be.

I kind of suspect, with not just writing and composition, but working on pretty much anything, that this increased stupidity is real, distressingly real, and I am able to determine a root cause.

(Actually, I don't believe that much in root causes, being a philosophical epigenesist. Stupidity does not unfold from the implicate order, but rather blossoms under contingency. The Red X, that Dorian Shainin proposed, is in my view, usually a whole shitload of little pink x's. And in my view? Pink x's usually mean there are way too many solutions and not enough problems to go around, and so the solutions become problems. Am I making sense? I don't know anymore.)

Well, if I'm right, and I think I am, the "root causes", the things that has got me stuck endlessly time-looping 2012, is the general anesthesia I received from the two surgical operations in 2013. I think those prescription drugs they done give me fucked up my haid.

And this is bad too, because, at this stage of the game, moving into silverback territory, brains is about the only asset I bring to the table.

But that's not what I want to talk about.

Batteries, baby. Everybody and their uncle, since, what? 2009 or before? Everybody is squirting a stain about being left behind in the coming giant trillion dollar electric vehicle and alternative energy industries of the 2020-2030's. Which is why just a huge tsunami of monies is blasting materials science governmental and corporate research labs.

Ah-ha-ha, no.

True, there is ongoing research, and there is always gonna be that out-of-left-field shit that I so dearly love, but we aren't seeing any Moore's Law sexiness going on.

But think of this way. And let me use a water metaphor. So, for the longest time in hominid history, we humanoids, because we can't last more than 5 days without water, have been constrained to fresh potable water sources. Which means, you can only hunt and gather so far without convenient storage containers or potable water to lug around.

That all changed, well, we don't know when, maybe say two hundred thousand years ago, somebody came up with the water bag of skin, or maybe the gourd, and then later - for sure 40 thousand years ago - pottery.

So you get the idea. Water = energy, battery = skin bag of energy metaphor, and so what? Well, this goes back to my idea that we don't really don't have an energy crisis, we have an energy density crisis. We got a shitload of energy, we just don't have to good way to store and transport energy.

(That, of course, will all change with near room temperature superconductors, which is gonna happen fellow babies. It will. Not sure when, but it will).

Well, my suspicion is it really isn't about electric vehicles, or even alternative energies, or even global warming or any of that shit. It's really about getting those electrically powered robots to be more efficient and better than the food powered ones. Those food powered robots are just a pain in the ass, and if we can eliminate them as a middle-man, then fucking Solar System is ours for the taking.

What's this "we" shit?

I don't know, and that's why I'm wondering if I'm not becoming stupid by accident.