Random Walks

Small Doings at the College

2012-02-09T08:10:00.000-08:00

There was a little bit of excitement here. I embed a videoof an electrical fire that we had. An outside drain is kept free flowing duringthe winter with electrical heat tape. The insulation deteriorated, and a short developed, resulting in a fire.When I opened up the studio this morning, I noticed a funny sound, and at firstthought some stupid person had fallen into the dumpster and was rathernonchalantly pounding out their distress. No, it was a short in the sewer. WasI in danger filming it? Nah, I don’t think so:

Also, a student’s clay piece, not yet bisqued, and thereforeready to be knocked over and broken, was knocked over and broken. One of thenight maintenance people did this. They left a note of apology and explanation.One of my student aides read the note, and mocked the poor syntax and brokenEnglish.

My response to her was, “Hey! HEY! Can you speak two languages? NO?You can barely write in the one. I’ve seen your phone text messages to yourfriends. So. Yeah. Shut up.”

Actually, the apology and explanation, from Attie theCustodian is, after a measured reread, fucking poetry, and I now share it withyou:

"It's broken, when I was trying to move.
Clean on blackboard.
It was fresh, maybe.
I didn't think to broke.
It was an accident.
Sorry this inconvenient.
Or matter.

-- Attie, Custodian"

Poesy in prose. Fucking great. Interesting how fluency in a different language so often does that. Or even translating from one language to another can do that.

And... I cleaned up the Rockwell Delta 14" metal cutting bandsaw which probably dates back to the 16th century. BC. And has an agglomeration of metal shavings and bits and pieces to prove it, because those accumulated detritus was actually slowing the saw down!

I fed the monkeys and birds that operate it, the ones that were still alive, and threw away the mummified remains of the ones that didn't make it, plus all their shit (being careful not to breathe the dried feces lest I get a brain worm, like you do with raccoon feces).

You know, we all vastly overestimate our abilities. Some call it hubris. I call it delusion.

But you know, reading through this, I got a strong sense of deja vu, as if I had written this up before. Going back and reading some of journal entries, I can testify to the fact that I am able to crack myself up.

So, at least I can entertain myself pretty well.

Too Many Assholes

2012-02-08T15:20:00.000-08:00

Cat Valente. Not familiar with her. A youngster. And a looker. She was a Hugo (that's an Oscar to the SF crowd) nominee for best novel "Palimpsest". She has also written a novel called "The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making".

I've not read either, but I did peruse this story, and I found it interesting and engaging. Good visual imagery, and I'd say pretty clear-eyed and realistic portrayals of being human. She recognizes that we are still magical thinkers, superstitious, primitive, more rationalizing than rational, and that because of the contingencies of evolution, any attempt to make us rational species would be akin to psychic genocide. We would no longer be human. We would be... something else.

So, a fantasy writer, and currently guest blogger over a Charlie Stross's place. She recently wrote an essay involving Star Trek Deep Space Nine and made the following two observations about the Star Trek universe:

"Nobody uses social media, and nobody wastes time".

I left a comment on the second portion of her observation (which basically was "There are plenty of timewasters in Star Trek, but they all are superior beings") and it drowned without a ripple. I suspect the reason it sank under the waves so quickly is a result of the first part - being that people only pay attention to stuff in their own little worlds. Now, she does realize that Star Trek could not have foreseen -

"Twitter, email, text messages, Facebook, our blogs, Reddit, news feeds".

- and I know that, had these forms of communication been shown, they would have made for less dramatic TV. And really, that's what it is. But it is an element of folklore now. Like it or not, Star Trek is part of myths and legends now, or the modern version, or rather, the 20th century version.

However, I disagree with her conclusion as to where these supposedly new social media are taking us, which, according her:

"We are a baby hivemind spinning our training wheels".

Maybe. Certainly possible. Or. Or. We may be witnessing the creation of a whole new crop of assholes. And rude, fatuous, and shallow assholes at that.

I'm not a big Nietzsche fan, in fact I think he suffered from softening of the brain fairly soon into this writing career, but all this new social media stuff reminds of something he wrote in "The Wanderer and his Shadow":

"Premises of the age of machines. The press, the machine, the railroad, the telegraph are the premises from which nobody has dared draw the conclusion for a thousand years".

In other words, don't get cocky. It takes some time for the real consequences - intended or unintended - to resonate down through the ages. Why, the Victorian Internet still isn't done with us. And the fact of the matter is, this new distraction is not all that different from the old distractions that Nietzsche eyed with a hairy old eyeball.

And I do think that the new assholes - the twits that tweet, the blowhards that blog, the domesticated animals on Facebook, all pathetically desperate attention seekers - that use the new shit are not only out there, but the new shit seems to have been created by assholes. We find out that Steve Jobs was an ogre. And that Zuckerberg is psychopathic. Or at least a "backstabbing, conniving, and insensitive" asshole. And what about Julian Assange? Isn't he pretty much of an imperious asshole?

Look I understand that history is just one string of stories about psychopaths, but can we never break the chain? What do we have to do to get the nice, smart, friendly people to come out on top? Or at least, make them the new normal. Do we need to start rewarding people to not be assholes?

I'm not the only one who is noticing this. Corey Olds, of the Oakland Local, chalks it all up to:

"1) the easy creation of dot-com and social media enterprises by means of venture capital; 2) America’s ever-increasing neoteny--ever notice grown men or women who disgracefully retain all the behavior of children?; 3) the meltdown of any distinction between “high” and “low” culture--we live in a “degraded landscape of schlock and kitsch,” writes Fredric Jameson; and 4) the lack of insurmountable caste barriers requires the new, parvenu assholes like Zuckerberg and Denton to be forever fearful that they might slip back down whence they came and lose their imperial place".

Is there some way we can restructure this new social media to cancel this distressing trend? Isn't there some programmatic override, some parameters, to preempt these motherfuckers? Isn't there some big red purge button for the intertubes, to, you know, shunt them all off into some digital quarantine zone, Sector A? For Asshole? Or Sector B? For Butthole?

Because it is starting to look like the same old shit all over again, but this time Cat Valente's global hive mind will just be a big giant asshole.

Kluges

2012-02-07T07:42:00.000-08:00

I spotted the NWI dialect through the crowd. There is no mistaking it. Growing up in Northwest Indiana, I'm ashamed that I speak this way, but so it is.

The dialect is a monstrous chimera, an unholy marriage of that awful countryfuck Hoosier buzz-saw-on-sheet-metal twang and the rust-patinaed Northern Cities dialect with all the vowels hammered flat by an industrial sledge.

This is pretty close to what they look like

Couple this fact - that this stranger spoke the same as I - with the fact that the number of humans in this volume of space approaches a homeopath's wet dream of ultra-dilution, then it is a startling coincidence. Couple that coincidence with the fact that the crowd around me consisted of those cute furry octopoid kind-of-cat-headed aliens that call the galaxies of the Horologium Supercluster home, and you've approached a serendipitous anomaly.

So, if you haven't figured it out by now, I am, once again in the BOAPWC - The Best Of All Possible Worlds Convergence, and, yes, I'm sorry, there is no better acronym.

And no, I am not sipping a scientifically optimal superlarger in Sam's Pub out Hercules Way. (For those not in the know, I usually inhabit a bar stool there when I write these missives, back in Spiral City, on the world of Alterra, circling a pleasant G-type yellow dwarf star in the galaxy catalogued NGC6264, which is in the Hercules Supercluster some 450 million light years from Earth).

And what brings me nearly a billion light years away, way out here to Furry Octopoid Space? Why I'm planning to get a nail pounded in my head. It's a titanium nail. And it seems like it is time for that.

But about that Hoosier from Da Region... turns out he had just got a nail in his head, and was on his way back to Earth. Virgil was his name. Didn't catch the last name and didn't think it all that important. I'm sure he mentioned it. I asked him where he originally hailed from, and he told me Lake Station. Well, fuck me.

We didn't have much time for a conversation anyway. The Furry Octopoids have modified themselves to live on planets surrounding red dwarves, which are the most abundant of stars. And these worlds are typically low metal planets with no magnetic fields. Sometimes the Furry Octopoids modify the worlds, inject a metal core in them. Most times not. And on this particular world, not. Red dwarves are cantankerous stars, with more than your normal stellar storms and flares cropping up. We both stood out there in a city plaza, this kind of spongy gray surface surrounded by Doctor Seuss buildings, with our UV goggles on. His teeth were a sickly day-glo green and his acne scars shone white beneath his skin from flare storm. That angry little red star up there in that purple sky. Yeah, best to get inside, so he on his way to the spaceport, and me to my "medical" appointment.

I guess I should clarify the whole nail in the head thing. It's not really a nail, but it feels like it for awhile. It's some pretty sophisticated nanotechnology. And yes, they do plant it right in your head. Usually, but not always, in the left temple, but seeing I'm left-handed, for me, just behind the right ear. Go figure. The purpose of the nail is to get your mind right. Something the Furry Octopoids figured out, well, about the time of Earth's Devonian. Yes, they do have a bit of a head start on us.

The further, the closer

But you know, when the Earth scientists first opened the very first throats of the very first Everett wormholes, we really didn't much of a clue as to the practical idiosyncrasies involved. Like the fact that more distance out you cast your wormhole, the more accurate is your aim. Kind of a perverse inverse square of precision.

Those wormholes aimed a few dozens of light years out ended up all over the goddamn sky, whereas, the wormholes aimed out millions or billions of light years further ended up pretty much Nixon's nuts on target.

(Note: the diagram to the right? the equation should read: r = M * E / h-bar. I know you noticed the error. Hush now.)

It looked like a lot of expeditions and colony ventures would be lost in space and time forever, until we humans chanced upon a world full of Furry Octopoids. After a brief fumbled attempt at communication (which amounted to wild gesticulating, strange pantomimes, and shouting loudly and slowly "We come from Earth! Where the hell are we?"), our expedition scouts were seized by taloned fuzzy tentacles and held still long enough to drive nails into their heads. And our scouts suddenly, instantly, perfectly, calmly understood what the Furry Octopoids were saying.

Well, it turned out the nail to the head was more than a universal translator or telepathic facilitator. Suddenly, that evolutionary kluge we call a mind, with its deliberative (can't really call it reasoning) faculties getting cues from the cobbled-together, ancestral, reflexive portions of our minds, that tangled and frizzed up collection of cognitive dissonances, suddenly, got all straightened out and put in order. It wasn't exactly like that. Not quite exactly like that. The kluges, the clumsy and inelegant engineering of our minds and brains, were still there, its just that the nail in the skull made you recognize it. And compensate. Kind of like meditation. Or medication. But it also provided some extra computational space to supplement our prefrontal lobes so that the deliberative process has the time that, well, evolution hasn't granted us yet. I'm guessing we would have calmed down in a hundred thousand years or so, but if you get the opportunity...

Needless to say, the modified humans, the ones that had a nail in their skull, preferred the company of the Furry Octopoids, but the Furry Octopoids said:

"No, I'm sorry. You can't hang with us. We've got important matters to attend to. But... hey, if any of your kind want to get their mind right, they can see us to get a nail driven in their head. Oh, and here is the simple mathematical trick for not getting lost in space and time. And you should be able to find all your lost expeditions with it. So, later, dudes".

So, yeah, here I am to get my mind right. You'll still be able to find me at the bar, though. When I'm out Hercules Way.

Suffer For Fashion

2012-02-06T09:11:00.000-08:00

Back when I had a real job, there was a woman in the office who was a complete fluffhead. Just a head completely full of lint, dandelion fluff, cotton swabs, and maybe a packing peanut or two.

She went to the tanning salon every day. As a result, her skin had a strange tone to it, rather like a parboiled chicken, or something in tone that approached the hazard orange of a biohazard sign. She just didn't tan, and as a result the skin coloration was, I guess, just a permanent sunburn. She also dowsed herself with way, way, way too much perfume.

I made up a joke about her: "How come ____ looks sunburned all the time? Because her fucking perfume burns a hole in the ozone layer!"

In retrospect, it wasn't that funny, but in any case, she clearly suffered for fashion. She wanted the healthy tanned glow of an active out-of-doors lifestyle, and this was her way of doing it. Lots of people disfigure themselves in an attempt to be more attractive.

Here's something that isn't a new technique, but it recently caught my attention. Gregg Homer of Stroma Medical has developed a laser treatment to burn all the pigment out of your iris. This irreversible process will burn your brown eyes blue. It's not approved in the US yet, and when it is, the cost will probably be around $5000 per eye, with, so far, minimal side effects and the long-term effects are unknown. Some eye doctors worry that the procedure could cause a potentially blinding condition called pigmentary glaucoma (which is known to be associated with the chronic seepage of melanin into the fluid within the eye, and how the fuck that occurs naturally I really don't want to know).

Is it really that objectionable? I mean, people disfigure themselves in worse ways. I've seen some really awful tattoos and the whole scarification thing pretty much baffles me. Or when Asians have their epicanthic fold removed to appear more Western. The eyelid surgery doesn't look right, because Asian have a round eye socket, and Westerners have an eye socket that looks more aviator sunglasses, so an Asian with this operation just looks... weird.

So yeah, there are worse things than burning your eyes with a laser. But still. You really hate your eye color that much? I mean, what are blue eyes good for?

I asked Google. Google didn't really give me a satisfactory answer, but then Its doing that a lot lately.

Still, the myth is that blue-eyed people see better in the dark. Is it true that there is a general trend for Northern peoples (some of whom have blue eyes) also have bigger brains? Maybe, but it would seem only in the occipital region, where vision is processed, but no real functionality has ever been adequately demonstrated. It's fun to think about. The idea that blue eyed people see better in the dark.

Neanderthals (and to look at my big yellow Scandinavian horse teeth, you'd suspect I've some of their genes) had a pronounced occipital bun at the back of their skulls. Anthropologists see the enlarged back of the Neanderthal skull as a counterweight to the heavy browed and jawed face. Were I to speculate, I'd say they were night or gloom hunters, which would tie in well with some bits of folklore about giants and ogres and trolls.

But blue eyes better seeing in the dark? Well, my personal experience is I have a hard time with glare. I'm told it gets worse as you get older. But I don't have a hard time with grey gloomy days. In fact, I like grey gloomy days! And if you happened to have lived in a really cold shitty grey gloomy climate for some tens of thousands of years, it kind of makes sense that people who are bummed by this would get deselected. But again, blue eyes have anything to do this? I doubt it.

Regardless, if someone is going to fuck with my eyes so that I can make a fashion statement, I think I would prefer an operation where they insert some other controllable pigmentation. You know, some tunable pigment so that I can change my eye color at will.

But honestly, sweetie, think about that hard, because I can personally attest to the fact that brown eyes are not boring.

Almost three decades ago, I went to the Exploratorium in San Francisco. It reminded me of the Museum of Science And Industry in Chicago, or the Deutsches Museum, which I went to daily during my week's stay in Munich. If you have any doubt that I harbor the brain of a five-year-old, these visits should utterly erase it. Not only am I a science geek, but a hands-on science geek. I guess that comes from being a primate.

The next time I was in SF, maybe two to three years later, I went again to the Exploratorium. And that time I left the gift shop with a sweatshirt that had an image of the galaxy printed on it, with an arrow pointing into a spiral arm two-thirds of the way out from galactic center that said "You Are Here". And I wore that sweatshirt unashamedly until became a ratty paint-rag. I would even, if properly jollied, sing "The Galaxy Song", and sometimes when I was wearing it.

Can you possibly think of an even more circus geek thing to do? Well, how about this. Our local stellar neighborhood, or even, the galactic neighborhood, has become rather boring and tame to me.

(I actually made a 3D model of the closest stars. I mounted the stars in their proper positions. I found different sized plastic beads to represent stars large and small. I glued together beads for the binary and trinary stellar systems. I even painted little plastic beads the correct color. And worst of all, I did not label them, as I knew the star names by heart. I was twenty-two years old when I did that. I kept that stellar diorama until well into my thirties. Sad, huh?)

I didn't go quite so far with making a diorama of the galaxy, but give me an excuse, and I might.

http://www.3dgalaxymap.com/

http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/galaxy.html

Lately, I'm fascinated with the bigger picture. Here's one: This is the Local Galactic Group. As you can see, it is dominated by two giant galaxies, our Milky Way, and the Andromeda Galaxy, M31. The Andromeda galaxy is on a collision course with our galaxy. It is scheduled to smack us about two billion years from now. I wouldn't worry overmuch about it, as the meeting will be about the same as two clouds of cigarette smoke banging into each, although the mutual gravitational pull will merge our galaxies together into a big elliptical egg. There is a chance that our Sun could be thrown clear of the whole mess, in which case, Old Sol may end up spending its doddering years drifting through intergalactic space. But fear not, we won't get too far out before it (the Sun, the planets) goes gablooey into a white dwarf.

But there is a much bigger picture. The Local Galactic Group encompasses a volume of billions of cubic light years, but the Virgo Supercluster, our larger home in the Universe contains quadrillions.

And it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

That's what she said.

The Uncanny Valley

2012-02-01T09:34:00.000-08:00

For some reason lately, I've been having these dreams that, for lack of a better term, seem to have a metaphorical draw towards class warfare. Now, I myself have about a 50/50 work experience between white and blue collar jobs. And in the dreams I'm pretty much a working class hero, with, at various times and guises, my antagonists being upper middle or ruling class assholes. And the things, these snobbish assholes who treat me with disdain in the dreams are not quite human. Not primitive subhuman, but more like, soft, squishy, chinless, pale, pudgy, and puny, dressed in gaudy country club attire. More like uncanny humanoids with Mafia-style bad taste than subhumans.

Well, surprise! The on-line magazine "The Atlantic" has a fun little article entitled "The Uncanny Valley: What Robot Theory Tells Us About Mitt Romney". I know I'm not the first to notice the metaphorical comparison. I'm not even the first to refer to him as the Romneytron 9000 (or some variation thereof). It's not really fair to call Romney a robot. Of course he's human, unless....

Unless the Mormons are actually a time-traveling conspiracy, spanning the ages to complete the total and utter subjugation of all humans throughout time. Then a case can be made for Romney the Robot. But of course that's all bullshit. I mean, if they was a time-traveling organization, we'd all be Mormons now, unless they are slowly losing the timewar... I'd have to review my temporal physics class notes...

... anyway, the article goes into more length than I would care to cover in explaining the whole Uncanny Valley theme, and Romney's apparent image problem. So you just go read that link, and I'll wait.

Done already? Fucking A! You know the one thing I notice is pretty much the whole Republican field fits somewhere on the human familiarity curve. I went ahead and borrowed the graphic from that article, and modified it to suit my observations.

So, yup, there's Romney, alternately deer-in-the-headlights while his brain processes, processes, producing some awkward behavioral output, or, yes, some genuine human emotion there, but restrained by arcane Harvard mental trainings. Almost Spock, but not as human. And no, not even that, Obama gets the Spock award, for "No where is he more desperately needed as among a shipload of illogical humans".

Then there's Newt Gingrich, who gets the animated bloated corpse title, and enough said on that.

Ron Paul. Can anyone find me a picture of him where his mouth doesn't look like a puckered asshole? I mean, yeah, he does have some muppet qualities, but that just makes me wonder whose hand is up his ass?

Santorum? Goddamn, that fucking Mr. Sardonicus rictus he calls a smile is just fucking creepy as hell. It's more reptilian than anything else.

So there you go. The rest of the field that dropped out or never joined? Who gives a shit. They're losers.

Is It Art? Guest Editorial

2012-01-31T12:28:00.000-08:00

Nude Descending A Staircase

There is an apocryphal story (apocryphal in the sense that I just made this shit up right now), that the day after the close of the Armory Show, March 16, 1913, former President Theodore Roosevelt was granted a private tour.

TR did not shoot well, but he did shoot often, and so, armed with his trusty F-Grade A.H. Fox 12-gauge shotgun, TR eventually scored a number of hits on quite a few pieces, all the while roaring his battle cry "THAT'S NOT ART!" The final tally by the curatorial staff was TR: 14, ART: 0. The surviving objects were sent on to show at the Art Institute of Chicago, and then on to the Copley Society of Art in Boston. By then, many other big game hunters had attritted all the works of American artists. Huzzah!

Alright, so maybe it didn't quite play out like that, but the important point was TR's role as, not just a viewer, but an indispensable participant in an informational exchange. With that in mind, Eldest Bro sent me an email, which I now present with commentary (interspersed in emboldened italics).

"Too big to fit in the comments section of your blog, but this is something that has occupied my mind for a long. OK, you have Spoken, so now I will take my turn in the Bitch Box."

As the late, great FZ once said, "Alright, whip it out".

"Many years ago I had an artist as a house mate. He was a cowboy artist, by which I mean that he was an actual cowboy, from Okanagan, Washington, wore a hat, drove a pickup, the whole schmear. And he was in the graduate Art school program -."

I remember that guy! Dana something. He was a potter, or a ceramicist. I liked his work. I remember the piece with the psychoanalyst's couch, with the cowboy boots at the foot, and I think a lasso, draped over one corner.

"-Our schedules did not intersect much, so most of the time we spent together was watching big-time wrestling on Saturday mornings. One day, motivated by a big pot of coffee and an especially stimulating match between Mad Dog Vachon and Ivan Kohloff, we had a cerebral discussion about the nature of Art."

Well see, right there, you guys had just watched Art on the TV, in case you are wondering what Art is...

"Dana's point of view (and I say this because his name was Dana), was that an object of Art had some ineffable Quality, shall we call it Beauty, that conferred upon it the status of Art. My perspective was much more pragmatic, namely that Art was defined by the presence of a Frame or "boundary", indicating where the Art picked up and the Rest Of The World left off. I am sure this is derivative of a deep philosophical thinker somewhere but, nevertheless, I came up with it all on my own."

Brain Map of the World

I would suggest that Dana was wrong but for the wrong reasons. I think it obvious that there are certain innate gravitation that we, as animals living in this universe, are quite naturally subject to. But a curious consequence of this philosophical stance is that there should exist objects that possess no ineffable qualities, and are therefore completely invisible. (See graph at right).

"My definition was motivated by a few observations:

1) For just a picture or such, there is definitely a frame or at least the edge of a canvas.

2) On the occasions I had ventured into his studio, which was shared with several other students, it appeared to me that the mix on display was about 90% Crap and 10% Art. This was suspiciously similar to the makeup in my own field of practice, engineering.

3) If there is not a frame, there is definitely a boundary of some kind. In a museum this might be a velvet rope or a guard; in a studio it is an artist shouting "Hey! Don't touch that!". (Me: "I thought it was just a sawhorse.")

Sturgeon's Law: "90% is all crap" originally attributed by him to only his own prose work, has now been shown to apply to every form of human endeavor. I would now categorize it as a Universal Principle, up there with Murphy's. As to context, see the last essay.

"Another interpretation is that Art consists of a communication between Artist and Appreciator of Art, and that this can take place across centuries or millennia, and across cultures. The Venus of Willendorf springs to mind here. But yet this brings up more questions. Once, on a camping trip, my wife picked up an interesting stone (she has a talent for this sort of thing) which upon further inspection bore a native American petroglyph. Was this art? Or was it just someone relieving the tedium of a long day long ago? (Much as modern teenagers will draw a cock and balls on anything that stands still long enough.)

Well, that would be the Communication Theory of Art, or the Semiotics. Thus:

Emitter ==> Objule (Object/Module) ==> Noise ==> Observer

and the problem with this particular model, at least from an empirical or behaviorist standpoint, is that neither the intent of the artist (emitter) nor the attributes of the objule (the emitted object/module, which I done just made up) have the slightest bearing upon how the observer observes it. All that matters is the observer (using his associational engine) and the universe in which the objule is embedded contextually. But of course not quite. More kind of like a strange combination of evolution (selection of a species does not occur in a vacuum, but is a global heuristic), and entanglement (granting, if you will, some small universal interactions). Or if you wish, He who Detected It, Ejected It

"For me, some of what I and other engineers do qualifies as Art. By this I mean a nifty trick, or a sweet hack that makes things work in a beautiful way. So, engineering can be Art. We exploit physical principles, same as any other artist, one requires a mastery of the medium. Just open up an i-Whatever or a laptop and think about the cleverness involved in putting all that stuff together and making it hum. Again, 90% Crap (Thigh-Master, Chrysler Cordoba) and 10% Art (DEC VAX, Ferrari Testarossa). I am not sure where the Popeil Pocket Fisherman fits into this scheme."

Absolutely. Or professional wrestling. Or ditch digging. Or nest building. Or dolphin bubbles. Or corvid aerial acrobatics. Or canine frisbee catching. I now feel that it is All Art.

"The "designation" theory brings up some problems of its own. Who knows what M. Duchamp had in mind with his urinal?"

On more than one occasion Duchamp said that the piece was meant as a joke. But once the audience accepted it as an art object, the genie was let out of the bottle. Duchamp's intent was no longer relevant.

"As it happens I have visited an immense collection of Duchamp artifacts at the Staatliches Museum Schwerin-Kunstsammlungen (pretty obscure I know, but I just stumbled across it on a trip) in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and again, the 90% rule was in effect. (Please note, this is Sturgeon's Law, I deserve no credit.) Was the urinal just a big middle finger to the "Art" establishment?"

Yes.

"Or maybe it just made M. Duchamp feel kinda funny and he wanted to share that with the rest of us?

Yes.

"(Note that both of those fall into the "communication" theory.) So, by the "designation" or "objet trouve" rationale, could I go into a restroom at SFO, sign and date a urinal, and charge admission to "my work of Art"? Or demand that it be removed and placed in its rightful location at SF-MOMA?

What about a fully functional urinal connected to plumbing? Can that be Art? What about a guy taking a whiz into "my" urinal? Is that Performance Art? Can I demand that he show up at 11:00 every day and urinate to preserve the Integrity of the Work?

According to modern art theoretics, if you can find a willing and accepting audience, yes. If you get them to accept it as a performance piece, you can piss in it too.

"So many questions. These are right up there with other imponderables. Why did Walter Payton never score a rushing touchdown in Super Bowl XX? Why doesn't Rex Ryan keep his yap shut and just coach his team like Bill Belichick? Why does Michelob make you fart so much? Why? Why? Why?

A guy could go crazy thinking up the answers to all these questions. Worse yet, a guy could lose his marbles thinking that there are even answers to be had."

Eee-yup.

Yes, But Is It Art?

2012-01-26T09:09:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, one of the art faculty assistant professors, named Charlie if that makes any difference, happened to see the book "Survival of the Beautiful" on my desk. An Art Conversation followed.

I really fucking dread those conversations. At least, the part where I don't talk.

Charlie, after asking for a synopsis of the book, proceeded to opine about all things Art. You have to understand, the reason I pretty much dread these conversations is, even though these professor types have a solid university grounding in art-making and art theory, they invariably will pull references from a more general ground of human behaviors to justify their opinions. Since I'm, in 99% of the cases, much more familiar with their references to (take your pick) evolution, natural selection, quantum physics, technological progress, the useless and superstitious topic of memes, group theory, graph theory, psychology, neurology, brain structures, holism, science, culture, the Internet, etc. etc., it gets to be a pretty fucking tedious conversation pretty fucking quickly. Sometimes it sucks to be a smart-ass.

And usually, they've got it all incomplete and ass-backwards. Artists, like all experts, are not exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer - outside of their field.

And I learned a long time ago that conversations with professors require strategic corrections and a great deal of tongue-biting, and internalizing of cringes and winces as they fold, bend, spindle and mutilate 10,000 years of hard-earned human knowledge - just so that you can keep the conversation moving forwards.

The other cringe-worthy portion of these conversations is that these professors do not realize they are indoctrinated religionists, that their opinions are faith-based. That they, like anyone who spends time specializing in a limited field of knowledge, are brain-washed into certain beliefs. In my case, studying mathematics, we are constantly pounded with the unfounded idea that number is real, that these systems have some existence independent of reality. As a mathematical apostate, a self-defrocked priest, I call this delusion Platonic Derangement Syndrome. It exists outside of the field of mathematics, of course. It exists in the art world in the following modern tenet: "Anything can be Art".

Of course, the demon of the perverse requires that at some point I take the wheels off of these conservation by offering up an opinion they cannot agree with. I have to commit a heresy. It's my nature, I think. Part pure cussedness. Part drama queen.

Oh, man, lack of consensus, putting up an obstacle, is not something they handle well. It is generally physically displayed by the complete shutdown of facial and gestural animation. The eyes dull. The pupils contract. The frown muscles go rigid. The shoulders slump. The chest caves. It's actually kind of funny to watch.

So, this time out, there came a point where I offered that something like Damien Hirst's pickled shark wasn't really Art anymore. It was a business commodity. A totem. A currency fetish. This was, of course, a blasphemy. The usual response is generally what is considered a mild ad hominem, that I am either a bit anti-intellectual, or ignorant, as in not trained in the field, or a philistine, or even smug, or even reflective of a sad decline in our society that I can't see that this is clearly a great work of art with a capital A.

And the, wow, the response from Charlie was pretty sad. "Um. No. Yeah, it is. It's Art". But there is always that quaver of uncertainty in that assertion.

Now, I have a variety of ways to go here, but this is the response I chose, based on what Charlie had said earlier:

"You claim, because of what Marcel Duchamp did in the 1917 Armory Show, display a urinal as an art object, that now anything can be Art."

"Yes."

"You back up this claim with the use of context. That it is all about context".

"Yes".

"The nature of the work itself is irrelevant -" (and before he can object) "- the intent of the artist and the intrinsic qualities of the work are not what matter, but rather how it is situated, and valued by the audience, by the appreciators of the art work".

"...yes". (Charlie says this only because he himself has at some prior point said this in his lecture to me).

"So - " and here I grab and read from "Survival of the Beautiful" "-the nature of the work itself matters little. It really can be anything, as long as a coherent story has arisen about why the work should be appreciated, and a community of tastemakers and art lovers evolves to celebrate the work (or style) and promotes it strongly enough so that it will endure in society long enough to make a difference".

"...yes..."

"And so, this category you, we, have created is changeable, in flux, not tied down to the standard Boolean binary logic of categories. Like a Venn diagram, it can occupy more than one set. Like an electron, it can be in two places at once?"

"(sigh) yes". (Because he has said this as well).

"So now, you have the general populace, which looks at the pickled shark, and says, 'That's retarded', and rejects it as art, then the audience of the hedge fund manager, who bought it clearly for sake of status, and his social circle, who call it art, but not really. And then that circle of art critics, gallery owners, collectors, who call it art. So, what is it? Whose perception wins out?"

"I... look it's Art. OK?"

"...well done, Charlie."

"Survival of the Beautiful": A Review

2012-01-25T13:04:00.000-08:00

I miscalculated and checked out one too many books from the library this past month. As a result, "Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science, and Evolution" by David Rothenburg ended up being the bathroom book, which I only skimmed. I think to need to check this book out again at some future time for a more thorough read.

There is a scene in the movie "Apollo 13" where, because the astronauts needed to power down the command module (CM) to conserve battery power, Astronaut Ken Mattingly (played by Gary Sinise), and Controller (EECOM Arthur) John Aaron (played by Lorne Dean) must come up with a way to power up the CM. They have a limited amount of battery power. With Mattingly seated in the capsule simulator back on Earth, taking no breaks, and after several failed attempts at powering up, they finally come up with a procedure they can use to restart the CM.

I would submit to you, based upon the high selection pressures (life or death) involved, that the final powering up procedure was a beautiful thing - a work of art.

On the other hand, country western music, hip hop, rap, or opera, with generally very low selection pressures involved, is not so beautiful, but still a work of art.

That's one of the things I take from this book. Not so much a question of whether of not something is Art (a stupid question BTW, like asking if something is Elephant), but whether it is high or low. Great or shitty. Especially now, in the 21st century, some one hundred years after Marcel du Champ let the genie out of the bottle and set it up so that anything, and I mean anything, could be Art.

Since I had only a chance to skim, here's a random quote from the book:

"The beautiful things we make aspire to be necessary as the rules of nature and forms of life that time has massaged into being through the evolution of beauty, which is such an important part of the complete development of life. We will never be sure of ourselves as the aesthetic of an single species is. Without thinking or wondering, the peacock knows he is nothing without his tail. Life is beautiful as it lives and endures, not needing to question whether it could have taken another path. Only humanity is plunged into such doubt, and only we have the choice to take the beautiful seriously, or not".

If Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes are Art, then a bowerbird's bower is Art. That is part of my take from this book. The rest? Well, some things I had already concluded before reading. Like, animals do appreciate beauty. Animals do experience joy and delight. I know this because I am an animal sharing this planet with other animals. Other animals that share the exact same internal brain structures as I do, with a connectome that more or less gets activated by the same stimuli.

Natural selection, it seems to me, favors animals that enjoy living, that avoid the painful and the terrible, as opposed to animals that merely experience and record living. And our forms have been selected on that basis.

Rothenburg explores the idea that forms found in Nature are inherently beautiful. That they are converge on the beautiful, based upon limiting aspects of the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. That animals (including us apes) do indeed appreciate this beauty, take pleasure from it, delight in it, and therefore select for it. That beauty is chosen through the process of sexual selection, in the ongoing Darwinian arms race between male characteristics and female delight. As such, biologists, and more directly evolutionary psychologists, seem to explain why animals desire, but not what animals desire.

To some degree, this theme has been explored in the late Denis Dutton's book "The Art Instinct". However, Rothenberg partially rejects the evolutionary psychologists' approach of explaining away all forms in terms of fitness and function. I tend to agree with this, mainly because their Kipling-esque "just-so" theorizing rarely is based upon empirical observation.

Rothenberg repeats is the whole arbitrariness of form. Again, biologists would prefer that the form have some function, some reason to explain fitness, either as a feature, or a handicap. But there are many cases (think the Darwin's frustrations with the peacock's tail) in which the best explanation for the origin of a selected form is that it is, or was, utterly arbitrary - in keeping with the whole idea of random mutation, or random selection. Though not entirely. There is a ratchet of progress, a conservation of innovation, that occurs in the evolutionary record. And a convergence of functionality as well. When you consider that things like camera-style eye has independently developed six times throughout the history of life on Earth, you start to think about convergence - similar solutions to similar challenges.

How this relates to human art making, I never got to that point. But I just may have to re-read the book "Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind" by Gary Marcus.

The GOP Deserves to Lose!

2012-01-24T08:13:00.000-08:00

Once again, I ask the question: "Is Bret Stephens stupid?" And, as always, he answers "Yes".

Not that Bret Stephens is ignorant or undereducated or unable to process a thought, but he is stupid. Dangerously stupid. Take for example, his latest editorial in the Wall Street Journal: "Republicans Deserve to Lose".

Yes, they do. Stephens has at least that right. What he fails to do, consistently, is to connect the dots completely to see the whole picture, which is that the Republican Party is a failed institution.

Ideologically bankrupt. Obsolete. Decrepit. Backwards. The Whig Party of the 21st Century.

After realizing that the Republican clown car currently running the circuit for presidential candidate, and finding all occupants wanting, Stephens offers up this pathetically clueless complaint:

"Finally, there are the men not in the field: Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Haley Barbour. This was the GOP A-Team, the guys who should have showed up to the first debate but didn't because running for president is hard and the spouses were reluctant."

Seriously? That's the GOP A-Team? How tragically, myopically, profoundly addled is Stephens. Stumbling perplexedly through the conservative wasteland, he does not realized that, aside from the GOP possessing the same lack of integrity as the Democrats, and vastly surpassing them in hypocrisy, they also possess no vision, no clarity of thought, no substantial intellectual metabolism, but instead display only a machine-like propensity to offer up a calcified, fossilized, plodding stale old program of more of the same. Same old failed programs. Time to scrap that rickety old computer.

Stephens mistakes the symptoms for the rot. If the likes of Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, and Haley Barbour represent the intellectual elite of the GOP, then I'm surprised the rest of the party doesn't wear bearskins and use stone tools. Quite simply, there's no there there anymore. There was never any there there.

And it's hard to move forward when all you can do is look backwards.

The Duct Tape Lesson

2012-01-23T10:56:00.000-08:00

Back in the late 70s, my younger brother was driving a car that was composed of around 70% duct tape. I don't know what kind of car it was. I called it the "Death Car".

I made fun of his car a lot. But you know, he was always prepared. The car was such a piece of shit, that he kept spare parts in the trunk (hinged, by the way, with duct tape). But it was a perverse form of preparation, as it turned out that the one part he always needed in a break down was not in the trunk.

Still, the lesson is, be prepared. This past Friday, I was not.

You may or may not have heard about it on the news, as it was pretty much a local weather phenomenon, but we got a big snow in Chicago Friday afternoon. Seven inches in as many hours. Naturally, traffic sucked. Naturally, I had to go down to NW Indiana to help my niece move. What was normally a one and a half hour trip took me about five hours.

Now, that's not that big of a deal. I managed to creep through Chicago before the heart of storm turned the everything into a parking lot. And, being from NW Indiana, which is the western edge of the Lake Michigan snowbelt, this was nothing new or unusual. Take your time. Max speed 35 mph on unplowed roads. The only casualties in ditches in the meridians are the giant SUV assholes who think they are indestructible.

To borrow from Jean-Paul Sartre, "Hell is other drivers".

Chicago Skyway Bridge

So, no big deal. After getting tired of listening to the radio, I sang Beatles songs in a cat voice.

"Meow, meow, meow". I've never had a problem entertaining myself.

The only fly in the ointment was that the driver's side windshield wiper decided to become unhinged, right when I was on the Skyway Bridge (which, by the way, is next to one of my favorite bridges, the Norfolk Southern vertical lift railroad bridge spanning the Calumet River).

I am proud that I had the presence of mind to turn off the wipers before the blade disappeared into Hammond someplace. So, I cranked the defrost heater and blower to maximum, and tried to think what I had in the car I could use to secure the blade.


I like the houses

And the answer was duct tape! Too bad I didn't have any.

So, that stretch of the Indiana East-West tollroad has got nothing on it. I mean nothing. Most exits are tortuously circuitous switchbacks to the entrances, and what with six to seven inches of snow on the roads, I ain't getting off. I drove about fifteen miles without wipers in blizzard.

Really it wasn't all that bad. I've been through much, much worse.

Duct Tape to the rescue!

Finally, though, I made it to a gas stop, and I asked the guy if he had any duct tape. He jerked his thumb at the notions display, and they had some weird imitation duct tape. Which I bought. And wrapped it on the blade, and off I went.

It's still on there. The way I am, it will be on there until it falls off, sometime in June.

But I did go out and buy some proper duct tape, which is now in my car.

Keystone XL

2012-01-19T09:30:00.000-08:00

Senate Republicans "held a gun" to President Obama's head, and he rightly decided not to succumb to the threat. I mean, children and guns, they usually don't go well together. Playing cowboy, I just can't see Mitch McConnell doing that well, unless it's the "Brokeback Mountain" kind of cowboy.

Pipeline map courtesy www. theodora.com

In any case, the Republican Superpac commercials are getting one thing right - not building the Keystone XL pipeline will not produce jobs (and it won't produce as many jobs as advertised). They probably could have (uncharacteristically) erred on the side of virtue and left it at that, but no, they have to go and fucking lie about how it threatens America's energy independence.

So, yeah, Transcanada is temporarily foiled, and does not get to ship the tar sand oil down to Houston for refining into diesel, loading into supertankers for export, and shipping to Europe and Latin America. Because that was the plan. No oil for US. Period. So all that bullshit about US energy independence is a fucking lie. It's all about the money. Big surprise.

You know, in my neck of the woods, the BP oil refinery in Whiting, Indiana just spent a shitload of dollars (~$3.8 billion) updating the works to handle bitumen - the Canadian extra heavy tar sand oil.

It's thick, heavy, caustic, nasty shit. It requires a lot of energy to extract it and refine it.

You know, uh, the refineries in Whiting and East Chicago aren't as bad as they used to be. I remember having to let lose with some major farts to sweeten the air inside the car when I'd drive by them.

Now it's all invisible, odorless carcinogens being pumped into the community - much, much better.

You would think the Republicans would be calling for expansion of the existing Keystone pipeline, since that actually does end (sometimes) in American gas tanks.

Or better still, build a pipeline from Cushing, Oklahoma to the Gulf coast. This would help alleviate a persistent price differential between Brent crude, the global benchmark oil, and West Texas Intermediate. Cushing, where most American oil is delivered, is landlocked. There is not nearly enough pipeline capacity to the Gulf where global markets set prices. So, local Texas refiners are probably real happy to buy just cheap Cushing crude and then sell their refined at the much dearer global prices. Nice tidy profit there, like they don't profit enough, right?

But Whiting and East Chicago? It don't make money the way the foreign markets do, and you can't ship the refined stuff on supertankers through the Saint Lawrence Seaway, so... America needs that Keystone XL Pipeline! Well, certain Americans do! People like Thurston Howell the III, I mean, uh, Mitt Romney, and the Party of Fuck You, We Got Yours!

Low-Hanging Fruit

2012-01-17T17:10:00.000-08:00

I want to apologize to myself and my readers for this essay, "State of the World: 2032". I originally figured it would be a great deal of fun, just wild-ass speculation with no holds barred. Somewhere along the line it got all conservative and boring. Why, I even promised three game-changing predictions and carried through with nary a one.

I don't know, are we going to count room temperature superconductors as one of them?

Oh sure, but let's develop it some. So, let's start with superconductors. This property was discovered by accident one hundred years ago, in 1911, when Dutch physicist HeikeKamerlingh Onnes cooled a bit of mercury to the temperature of liquid helium,4 degrees Kelvin (-452F, -269C). All electrical resistance in the mercury droplet disappeared, and it became a perfect conductor of electricity.

Fast forward some seventy years, ignore a lot of incremental advances, and witness something of a breakthrough in the mid 1980s, when, of all things, ceramic insulators where found to lose all electrical resistance at around the balmy temperature of liquid nitrogen, some 77K (-321F, -196C). Well, specially formulated ceramic insulators, doped with cuprates (chemicals involving oxides of copper), but the idea of higher temperature superconductors has gripped researchers and triggered a quest in the physics community ever since. Problem is, they still don't know why it does what it does. Such is the way of technology. Theory, for the most part, almost always lags behind effects.

So, let's say the doped rare earth/cuprate ceramic idea pans out, but it ends up being a ferrate ceramic jelly - a cheap, easy to make and bake, flexible, sturdy material that loses all electrical resistance below, say, 97F. The important idea here being that its cheap.

What happens? Well, superconductors can be used for magnetic levitation for trains, very efficient magnetic resonance imaging, lossless power generation, transformers, power transmission, supercomputers, particle accelerators,

The obvious consequences are all power lines are stripped out. Well, maybe not right away, but ongoing. Oh, hell, more than that, the whole electrical grid gets updated and metering of electricity for the consumer should drop to the absurd. Literally absurd, as in tenths of pennies per kilowatt (really think the savings will be passed on to you?).

The jump in efficiencies is mind-boggling, but that's the obvious stuff. Particle accelerators go from CERN or Fermilab to much smaller than tabletop stuff - gigawatt emitters that fit in the palm of your hand. Not phasers exactly, or blasters, more like lightning guns. (But, uh, wear protective gear to avoid french-frying yourself). Oh great, practical ray guns for dipshits.

With extremely efficient magnetic discriminators, combined with tiny petaflop computers, something like a hairnet can be worn on your head that takes the place of those giant donut MRI machines. Aside from the obvious medical imaging uses, it also means telepathic beanies, or teeper skull caps. These ultra-tiny, ultra-sensitive, super-powerful magnetic sensors can read your brain. Or write to it, if that's your clever hack.

I predict some one will be mind controlled with one things, maybe a robot zombie act, like a robot drone, or better still, if the resolution and bandwidth is sufficient, someone can use a suitably skullcapped porn star to enjoy a vicarious sexual experience, - telefucking.

Okay, there's a lot more there, bit I promised three game changers.

I should note, as an aside, that I have a feeling that the Singularity predicted Ray Kurzweil and all of the extropian hopefuls, the whole Rapture of the Nerds, just ain't gonna happen. I have a feeling that we've gone through all the easy stuff, and now we have entered the realm of diminishing returns. Here's a graph to summarize my thoughts, where 1.0 is the the maximum material instrumentality allowed by the laws of physics. I could be wrong. After all, a hundred years ago, physicists figured all the hard stuff was figured out, and that all future work would just be adding decimal places to precision. So, the next prediction is strictly way out there.

Before 2032, a whole new branch of materials science will open up called "Transmaterials". Unfortunately for me, the term "transmaterial" has already been coined and defined. Too fucking bad. "Creepsicle" was also already taken, and that didn't stop me from using it.

You've heard of metamaterials? Regular materials behave based on the atoms that make them, like, wood, stone, metals, glass. Metamaterials behave based upon the sum of their parts, like a emergent behavrio not predictable from mere atoms alone. Metamaterials are just getting started, but so far they have been used to make invisibility cloaks, superlenses, optical computers, stuff like that. For my prediction, a transmaterial is a material that alters physical reality, that changes both itself and its environment. It may be that a transmaterial can only make a change within a closed environment, something that will not affect the larger universe (at least, I should hope so), but can still produce amazing effects. In short, a transmaterial can't alter the laws of physics, but it can bend them.

My chosen transmaterial is based upon a really cool experiment done last year which may or may not be a landmark experiment. In 2011, scientists coaxed light out of a vacuum. This is a result of one of the predictions that come out of quantum mechanics, which says that the vacuum is empty. It is filled with evanescent virtual particles that are constantly popping in and out of existence over extremely short time periods. (The Casimir effect is another result).

The Chalmers experiment, done by Christopher Wilson and his co-workers, succeeded in getting photons to leave their virtual state and become real photons, i.e. measurable light. The cool thing is, well, here, let me quote the article:

"predicted way back in 1970 that this should happen if the virtual photons are allowed to bounce off a mirror that is moving at a speed that is almost as high as the speed of light. The phenomenon, known as the dynamical Casimir effect, has now been observed for the first time in a brilliant experiment conducted by the Chalmers scientists.
“Since it’s not possible to get a mirror to move fast enough, we’ve developed another method for achieving the same effect,” explains Per Delsing, Professor of Experimental Physics at Chalmers. “Instead of varying the physical distance to a mirror, we've varied the electrical distance to an electrical short circuit that acts as a mirror for microwaves.
The “mirror” consists of a quantum electronic component referred to as a SQUID (Superconducting quantum interference device), which is extremely sensitive to magnetic fields. By changing the direction of the magnetic field several billions of times a second the scientists were able to make the “mirror” vibrate at a speed of up to 25 percent of the speed of light.
“The result was that photons appeared in pairs from the vacuum, which we were able to measure in the form of microwave radiation,” says Per Delsing. “We were also able to establish that the radiation had precisely the same properties that quantum theory says it should have when photons appear in pairs in this way.”
What happens during the experiment is that the "mirror" transfers some of its kinetic energy to virtual photons, which helps them to materialise. According to quantum mechanics, there are many different types of virtual particles in vacuum, as mentioned earlier. Göran Johansson, Associate Professor of Theoretical Physics, explains that the reason why photons appear in the experiment is that they lack mass.
“Relatively little energy is therefore required in order to excite them out of their virtual state. In principle, one could also create other particles from vacuum, such as electrons or protons, but that would require a lot more energy.”"

The point being that (and hopefully you got the jist of the dynamical Casimir effect) is that when you pump more energy into these vibrating "mirror"s, the vacuum fluctuations will produce particles. Now, a synchronized bank of these mirrors should produce coherent vacuum fluctuations, basically lasing spacetime. No, this isn't some type of Zero Point Energy bullshit scam that hucksters want to sell you.

The device I predict, a spacetime laser, will produce mini-Einstein-Rosen bridges, little teeny tiny wormholes. (And actually, it's probably a lot easier to make wormholes than we imagine - the same way its easy to create nuclear fusion, it's just that you always get less energy out of it than you put in. It's keeping those wormholes stable is where the problem is).

Adult Swim's "Squidbillies"

So, in the scenario I envision, and let's let Doctor Wilson and his colleagues at Chalmers have the honor, is that they set up my predicted apparatus (which must be done in a vacuum chamber), notice that the dial of the vacuum pressure is way, way past what the pumps are capable of, like intergalactic space kind of vacuum. They freak out big time, since they think have created a black hole. Some are afraid to turn the machine off for fear the black hole will sink to the center of the Earth and devour the planet. Others want to shut it off for fear that the black hole is growing. But then they all realize that such a black hole that could create such a vacuum would also create a gravity gradient that would have spaghettified them all to their doom, so Phew! And what the fuck is going on? Eventually, they figure it out. They've created a stable wormhole. They can grow it. Make it big enough for people to go through, and foof! the Universe is ours. Okay, maybe not all ours. I predict the first alien race we run into looks a lot like the Squidbillies from the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. Do I really need to map out those consequences?

Okay, last game changer. Wow, after giving you all the larger Universe to play in, this one is kind of a let down. But here goes. Robot swarms. But not killer robot swarms. I know, the killer robot swarms are really easy to make, less than a hundred bucks to make a killer robot swarm that can swoop down and dismantle that neighbor's dog that has been keeping you up at night, but I'm not that kind of person. No really, I try not to do evil things like, or encourage them.

I predict friendly helper robot swarms, that can keep track of people, maybe the high risk behavior types, the accident prone, and the just plain unlucky. And since robot swarms use distributed intelligence, the way bees do, which is kind of alien to the way we think, these robot swarms may develop the ability to detect the accident prone behaviors in a predictive way. Maybe some people will just always have a cloud around them. Or maybe, out of the blue, kind of like guardian angels, they just happen to appear in the nick of time. You know, catching rock climbers. Holding opens the jaws of great white sharks to keep surfers from getting chompled. Stuff like that.

No, on second thought. No. That's just fucking stupid.

Spencer Tracy Kicks Ass With One Hand!

2012-01-13T09:43:00.000-08:00

We had our first real snow here in Chicago. I like it when it snows. It allows for the possibility of a penis joke.

"We got four to eight inches last night."

"That's what she said."

"Four to Eight? That's pretty confused. Hard to do with that range."

"Ardor often accounts for imprecision."

So, anyway, I want to apologize for the last online entry. It really was just a shameless display of public masturbation, and, upon re-reading, actually not particularly interesting in terms of speculative fiction.

So, today I was going to write about how much Ron Paul sucks, but, you know, plenty of time and material for that. No, really, Fuck Ron Paul. Why any progressive would back him is a complete mystery. I thought progressives wanted to move forward, and it is a certainty that Paul would have us all move back to the 1890s at the latest.

And I also want to discuss whether or not Mitt Romney is a psychopath. he sure looks like it, and he enjoys all the delusions. But, again plenty of time for that later.

Instead, since we had a good snow last night, I decided it was a movie night with cold beer and frozen vodka. Oh, yeah. So, I went to the library and came back with the movie "Bad Day at Black Rock".

Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan, Anne Francis, Walter Brennan, and both Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin. If you want to play Kevin Bacon, this movie is right next door to "The Dirty Dozen".

Directed by John Sturges, who also did "Gunfight at the OK Corral, "The Magnificent Seven", "The Great Escape", so, a guy who knows how to direct action movies.

At the very least, watch Spencer kick Ernie's ass with one hand:

http://youtu.be/A2o3QWwwQLI

"Bad Day at Black Rock" poses as post-WWII film noir, but it's really a Western. Not seen the movie? Fine, I'll spoil it for you, and do it by giving you the behind the scenes narrative without all the suspense and mystery.

Spencer Tracy plays a ex-lieutenant who has lost an arm in Italy. A young Japanese-American soldier serving under him died saving Spencer's life. He has traveled to Black Rock, a shitty little Western town, to meet the boy's father, a Mr. Komako, to deliver the medal posthumously awarded to his son.

(Presumably, his son was part of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, perhaps even in the legendary 100th Battalion, which had fought in Italy. So, though the medal is never shown, there is a good chance that it is a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor).

Unfortunately for Spencer, Robert Ryan has killed Mr. Komako in a drunken fit of post-Pearl-Harbor bigotry and rage. Other townspeople participated in the lynching (actually, Mr. Komako's house was set afire, and then he was shot trying to escape the flames) and so they are locked in a mutual stranglehold of blackmail and suspicion. The rest of the movie is an unravelling of the coverup, with the townsfolk's intimidation and suspicion of Spencer fueling his own suspicion's of foul play.

Now, Spencer receives a lot of intimidation and bullying, but no overt actual violence for much of the movie. I would argue, under various forms (no force or fraud/no initiation force or fraud) of Libertarian political philosophy, that the townspeople were perfectly justified and ethical in their actions. True, a murder was committed, but the coverup was completely sanctioned under Libertarian tenets.

Intimidation, bullying, and threats are neither force or fraud, as they do not engage in any morally questionable overt acts. The threat of violence is not in itself violence. One can argue that a threat is a form of violence, but it can also be viewed as an exchange of information - especially when individual rights to privacy and property are employed - which in the movie, they are.

In fact, the townspeople were completely within their rights to treat Spencer the way they do. If anything, it's Spencer who is apply initial coercion by his very presence, since in more than one occasion he attempts a non-consensual use of others' property. And the fact that he initally fails to divulge his purpose for being in town can be viewed as a form of fraud. His reticence is nothing other than a morally questionable ways to get people to do things.

In short, this is, yes, a nice little piece of sophistry, and yet, it is exactly the type crap that your average Internet libertard goof engages in.

Sophistry, it's what's for dinner!

State of the World: 2032

2012-01-12T15:01:00.000-08:00

Charlie Stross is making predictions. He's considering the years 2032, and 2092.

I, like him, have a personal interest in 2032. I'll be 75 that year. If, and there are a large but finite number of ifs involved, I make it to 75, then I'm interested in what people think it will be like. But forget 2092. Unless there are some major flukes coming out of left field, I won't see that time.

Reading through his projections, I have to say they are logical, common sense linear projections of a lot of the trends we currently see. In typical Strossian fashion, well-presented, well-thought-out, concise, cogent, and reasonable. They are therefore elegantly, wonderfully wrong.

The one thing I would note is there are no disruptive events listed, no game changers, no weird shit out of left field. Because you can trend all you want and be off the mark. Because guessing the weird shit out of left field is what is really going to come close to the mark. In a minute, I'll give you my three game changers for 2032. But before I do that, I'd like to mull over statements from Bruce Sterling.

Charlie cites Sterling's and Jon Lebkowsky's comments at the Well regarding the coming year of 2012 in his entry.

I have an ongoing amnesia with the Well. I'll stumble across it, read up a bit, nod my head, make affirmative grunting noises, and then promptly forget about the site until the next time I trip over it. I'd probably read it more often if were a member. But I'm not big on joining things, so, maybe that's why I keep forgetting about the site.

Charlie notes that Mr. Sterling is pretty damn good at prognostication. I don't where he stands batting average wise with respect to predictions, but Sterling does seem to notice the interesting future tidbits long before anyone else does. Perhaps the reason for this is Sterling seems adept at getting into other people's heads, and voicing their concerns. Sterling makes a rather interesting prediction about the near future which is this:

"So I often tell people that the mid-century will be about "old people
in big cities who are afraid of the sky."  I think that's a pretty
useful, common-sense, plausible assessment.   You may not hear it said
much, but it's how things are  turning out.

Futurity means metropolitan people with small families in a weather
crisis."

That's, um, that's pretty much my assessment as well. We'd all like to think things will work out, but the funny is reality is the shit that you least expect. So Bruce may be right and wrong here.

Speaking of getting into heads, I'd also like to draw particular attention to another portion he wrote:

SOME FRINGE BELIEFS ABOUT FUTURE CHANGES

It's surprising how little vitality these have nowadays.  Instead of
fanaticallly dedicating themselves to narrow, all-explanatory cults,
people just sort of eyeblink at 'em and move on to the next similiar
topic.  In a true Network Society, all fringe beliefs about the future
seem to be more or less equivalent, like Visa, American Express and
Mastercard.  "Conservatism" conserves nothing; there is no
"progression" in which to progress.

Peak Oil.  Oil probably "peaked" quite some time ago, but the "peak"
itself doesn't seem to bother markets much. The imaginary Armageddon
got old-fashioned fast. Peak Oil has peaked.

Islamic Caliphate...  With the collapse of so many Arab regimes, these
guys are in the condition of dogs that caught a taxi.  "Sharia Law" is
practically useless for any contemporary purpose, and Arabs never
agree about anything except forcing non-Arabs to believe.  

Chemtrails.  These guys are pitiable loons, but they're interesting
harbingers of a future when even scientific illiterates are deathly
afraid of the sky.  It's interesting that we have cults of people who
walk outside and read the sky like a teacup.   I've got a soft spot for
chemtrail people, they're really just sort of cool, and much more
interesting than UFO cultists, who are all basically Christians.  Jesus
is always the number one Saucer Brother in UFO contactee cults.  It's
incredible how little imagination the saucer people have.

BitCoin.  An ultimate Internet hacker fad.  You'd think they were
encrypting food and shelter, what with the awesome enthusiasm they had
for this abstract scheme.

Space Travel people.  Visible mostly by their absence nowadays.  About
the only ones left are nutcase one-percenters of a certain generation,
with money to burn on their private space yachts.  This was such a
huge narrative of the consensus future, for such a long time, that it's
really interesting to see it die in public.   There's no popular
understanding of why space cities don't work, though if you told them
they'd have to spend the rest of their lives in the fuselage of a 747
at 30,000 feet, they'd be like "Gosh that's terrible."

Transcendant spiritual drug enthusiasts.  People consume unbelievable
amounts of narcotics nowadays, but there used to be gentle, unworldly
characters who genuinely thought this practice was good for you, and
would give you marijuana and psychedelics because they were convinced
they were doing you a big, life-changing favor.   

You go into one of those medical marijuana dispensaries nowadays,
they're like huckster chiropractors, basically.  The whole
ethical-free-spirit surround of the psychedelic dreamtime is gone. 
It's like the tie-dyed guys toking up in the ashram have been replaced
by the carcasses of 12,000 slaughtered Mexicans.

Nuclear Armageddon enthusiasts.  Kind of a flicker-of-interest for
this around Iran right now.  Nothing compared to the colossal cultural
influence that this paradigm once commanded.  The WMD invasion of Iraq,
kind of the last hurrah for this, it's tragedy redone as farce.  

You show somebody a Dr Strangelove mushroom cloud these days, they're
like, "What is that, Fukushima?  I don't get it."

I could go on about other people's futurisms.  Doing Italy and Serbia
is tempting. But despite the variegated change-drivers that these
interest-groups imagine, I remain pretty sure that all these groups are
heading for a future world where they're elderly, urbanized and afraid
of the sky.   

Even if you believe in reptiloids, you're gonna be a
reptiloid-believing guy in a pretty big town with a lot of your
neighbors pushing walkers in a heat wave."

Hilarious, and also spot-on in almost every category, says I.

So, my predictions for 2032, using the same categories Charlie does:

Climate: Global warming denialism will have gone the way of all delusions, joining the Flat Earthers, Young Earth Creationists, Mormons, Scientologists, Objectivists, etc (see above). Mainly not because things got hot - though they will - but because things got so hot and so extreme and so weird so damned fast. Many now wish they had coined the term "global weirding" instead of "global warming". Doesn't matter. My game changer is the climate trends accelerate, and what world conditions were predicted for around 2100 will have gone through a transition by perhaps as early as 2014, and no later than 2022. That means an ice free Arctic Ocean, super hurricanes, unprecedented tornado events like Mississippi and Alabama last year. I actually don't think the tropical climes heat up all that much. That's concentrated at the higher latitudes. Torrential rains (dozens of inches in a day), decade long droughts, and sea level rise of, oh what the hell, 15 meters over the next decade. Bye bye Florida and most cities.

Energy: Same as before. Fossil fuels are out there, they will be used, and they will be extracted. Oh, sure, the current downward trend in solar PV will accelerate, lots of people will switch over. My bet is that natural gas will be the way to go, only because we can get the oil companies to cooperate on that front (meaning they got the tech, infrastructure and assured continued obscene profits). Peak oil did peak already, but all that does is make the difficult extractive processes affordable. Which means your best bet is to leave that oil in the ground until cheaper and more efficient methods of extraction come online. In other words, its rather stupid to use proven reserves. The alternative? My game changer: room temperature superconductors are developed. That means a revolution in power transmission, and a revolution in energy storage, and all electric vehicles with incredibly dangerous batteries in them. Solar farms will spout up all over the place, and extreme weather will mean there will be a big, big maintenance budget for them. Wind power, hydro, nukes, yeah, yeah they'll be there. Fusion, as usual, will be thirty years in the future.

Transport: Fossil fuel vehicles will still be around, certainly in the developing world, and for hobbyists, forever. Oh sure, lots of cute little electric cars, and trucks, and trains. Jets? Ships? Hmmm. Old skool fuel, and maybe carbon neutral synthetic fossil fuels, with hydrogen made via sunshine, and CO2 extracted from the atmosphere.

Population: Peak at nine billion, then a crash. Not necessarily where or when you think. China, Japan, Russia, Europe get old and shrink. India, Africa, South America, vibrantly young and growing. The US, surprisingly, through immigration and good old-fashioned humping, maintains a relatively young population. I predict no game changers. Any game changer translates as a massive die-off. If such happens, then been there done that. Boring. Moving on.

Politics: Oh, that's all too depressing. Next category.

Space: Not much. Lots of robot probes. China goes to the Moon and never goes back. Maybe some commercial launches, but, as usual, without some reason to go out there, nobody goes out there. I do predict eventual nuclear rockets, but not for a long, long time.

Food: Soylent Green. Now with more people!

Electronics: Maybe graphene. Maybe spintronics. Maybe optical computers. But I agree with Charlie, there's not much play left in Moore's Law. Doesn't mean we won't have even cooler gadgets, but we hit a wall at something, but something that would still make your average plugged-in geek of today shit their pants.

The internet: Aside from a few late-adopting hermits like me, absolutely everyone knows absolutely everything about absolutely everything and everyone on the planet, and we still don't know how to behave.

Medicine: In the US, healthcare will be out of reach for the average citizen. I think most everything will be curable, but unaffordable. You will start to see average life expectancy decline - unless you are rich. You will see diseases return that have not been prevalent since the early part of 20th century. This isn't a glum dystopian vision, this is an extrapolation of current trends in healthcare. What's to be done in the US? Hm. Socialized medicine, maybe? The current system is destined to fail. Worldwide? Oh, bad. But better than the US - even in Africa.

That's about it. Were I betting man, I would say every single prediction is wrong. Except the room temperature superconducting materials. And if that happens, well literally, all bets are off.

Less Graft, More Gadgets. More Widgets, Less Swindles.

2012-01-11T15:40:00.000-08:00

I remember an informal debate I had more than a decade ago with an MBA over basic R&D and the role of entrepreneurs. His contention was that entrepreneurs were much more important than researches, since they were the ones that brought this "useless" basic R&D to market. My contention was that entrepreneurs were nothing more than conduits, and that they can't develop what isn't invented. Further, there were a lot less people doing the research than exploiting it. In other words, he stressed the importance of visionary business types due to a biased sampling error. There were plenty of useless gadgets on the market, many now found only in landfills, but much less useless basic research.

I'm pretty sure I won that argument, though he would not give in. At one point, I grabbed his iPod (they had just come on the market, so it must have been after 1998), and asked him "Who made this?"

"Steve Jobs", he said, without hesitation.

"Bullshit", I replied. "Fuck Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs couldn't get this on the market if it weren't for Mark Kryder".

"Who the hell is Mark Kryder?"

"Mark Kryder is a representative of the kind of guy that does basic scientific research. He worked on magnetic disk technology, and without guys like him, there would be no tiny little hard disks to put into the iPods that your asshole hero Steve Jobs promotes. That's who Mark Kryder is".

And the problem here in America is that we are going the wrong way. There are too many Steve Jobses, and not enough Mark Kryders. Forget about the monies funneled into basic R&D, the amount of brains you can put on the job is much, much more important.

In 1986, the USA had 52 percent of the global doctorates in science and engineering. By 2003, that number dropped to a dismal 22 percent. The U.S. ranks 17th among developed nations in the proportion of college students receiving degrees in science or engineering. It was 3rd just three decades ago. Over the past two decades there has been an 18 percent decline in the number of students graduating with bachelor degrees in engineering, math, physics and geosciences in the United States. That trend is accelerating.

Where all the smart kids going? Into finance. That's where the money is. The question is, are we getting our money's worth out of it, and out of them? I would answer "No". To quote Dean Baker, in his book "The End of Loser Liberalism":

"An efficient well-run financial sector (channels money from savers to borrowers with the fewest possible resources), meaning that it employs a small share of the workforce and pays salaries comparable to those earned elsewhere in the economy. This is not the financial sector that the United States has today. Our financial sector is hugely bloated, and it is a massive source of waste in the economy. Measured as a share of private-sector GDP, our financial sector more than quadrupled between 1975 and 2009. The enormous expansion would be justifiable if it resulted in a better allocation of capital, so that promising start-ups, say, could more easily raise funds than they could in the 1960s. A better allocation of capital would also mean that hare-brained schemes like Pets.com or Webvan would be less likely to receive funding today than in prior decades. But neither seems to be the case, or at least not obviously enough to justify the quadrupling of the sector as a share of GDP."

Well, what has the financial sector been doing? Have they secured people's investments and retirement savings, grown pensions, reduced volatility in the stock and housing markets? No. The only area that seems to have benefited from the shenanigans of the so-called Masters of the Universe is to make people flee towards the rock-solid safety of Federal Treasury bonds. Standard & Poor downgrades the debt rating of the United States government, and more monies flow into bonds than ever before! That's a very strange way to grow an economy!

What else have these clever little boys been doing? Well, when they aren't busy figuring out for millionaires and billionaires to avoid paying any taxes, they set up all sorts of fun little diddling.

How about some churn? You know, moving money around without actually doing anything with it, and charging a percentage for moving it? Like high frequency trading, which takes advantage of well-timed arbitrage (small changes in information on stock and commodities prices that have not yet become general market knowledge). This type of trading, fully automated, and determined by computer models, accounts for more than 60% of all stock trades. And when the model is just a little bit off, or maybe just a tad bug-ridden? Why, you get an amusement park ride like what happened back in 2010. Thanks, finance guys! Way to take a shit!

And then, of course there is just your standard rent-seeking, making monies through tax and regulatory arbitrage that provides no real benefit to society. But for really classy stuff, you got to admire a scam like "dead peasant insurance". Again, from Mr. Baker's book:

"... the "dead peasant" insurance policy, gained prominence when it was featured in Michael Moore's film "Capitalism: A Love Story". A dead peasant policy is insurance purchased by a company on the lives of its lower-level employees. Wal-Mart reportedly purchased life insurance policies on 350,000 of its workers. Under these policies the company is the beneficiary and the employees generally do not even know that a policy has been taken out on their behalf. In fact, the relatives of employees typically will not know of the policy even after the family member has died. Moore focused on the morbid nature of the policies - companies profit from the death of employees who never knew they were insured. However, the fuller story is even more disturbing. Wal-Mart and other companies taking out dead peasant policies do not directly profit from the policies, in the sense that Aetna or some other major insurer is paying them more in benefits than they paid in premiums. Rather, the benefit is that dead peasant policies allow companies to control the timings of their earnings. ...the result is that the dead peasant policy is in effect another financial instrument that allows corporations to adjust earnings in ways that minimize their tax liability".

COCKSUCKERS! You know, my ancestors back in Europe may have been poor, but they never ever called peasants. We had to come to America to receive that distinction.

So, I don't about you, but the people who dream this kind of stuff up - dead peasant insurance, mortgage-backed securities, etc., I'm not sure I want them in R&D. Well, maybe in 1940s Germany, but now? I'd just as soon pack them off to Afghanistan, along with their office desk that they can cower under, and a video cam so we can watch them shiver, and cry, and shit in their pants. It makes you reconsider the whole "cruel and unusual" language in the 8th amendment.

So, clearly, the graft, grifting, fraud, waste, chiseling, cheating, and pigeon droppings that occur in our financial industries could do with some reduction in size, and the clever little boys and girls seduced with the glistening and unholy sheen of its glamour redirected towards more worthwhile pursuits, don't you think?

CREEPSICLES

2012-01-10T13:06:00.000-08:00

Licorice Flavored Bacteria Pops
Ingredients: Sugar, Corn Syrup, Bacteria, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Confectioner's Glaze, Carnauba Wax

Dimensions 10" x 6" x 10"
Urethane Plastic, Wood, Cardboard

So, the deal was I had a dream before the holidays, looking at the original waxes of the bacteria forms. In the dream, a woman came up to my side and said "That's the way they should be presented". I woke up from the dream and said "Yup". So, I made silicone molds of the bacteria forms. Bought some two-part thermosetting urethane plastic to cast them, and started cranking out the plastic forms.

Eat them before they eat you!

Then I built a cardboard box and glued it up with a hot glue gun. I printed off labels on a laser jet printer. I transferred the labels to the cardboard box with acetone and by rubbing with a spoon. I sprayed a fixative over the cardboard to make the labels permanent. I wanted the packaging and labels to look like cheaply made shit - the really shoddy product that people buy in the big box stores and feed to their kids and don't even think twice about it.

And there you go, my solution to this particular presentation problem.

I'll be entering the piece into several juried shows coming up. Hopefully someone will accept them.

"The End of Loser Liberalism": A Review

2012-01-09T11:35:00.000-08:00

(For those of you who would prefer a less-meandering and better-crafted review of Dean Baker's e-book (available as a free PDF here), read Jared Bernstein's much more concise and spot on essay, Loser Liberalism is a Winner).

Like it or not, politics is the prime mover of human affairs. It is the water in which we swim. We make war, wage peace, trade goods, starve babies, live in filth, wallow in unparalleled splendor, visit other worlds, all within the frame of reference of politics. It is a withering observation, an unsettling judgement as to the fundamental insanity of our species that this should be so.

The one thing we do not recognize, or should recognize more often, is that this frame of reference is not fixed or constant, that the Natural Order of the political landscape is wholly manufactured and artificial, and can be change. And by this I mean, most fundamentally our way of looking at things, what is called the "framing of the political debate" is based upon something as cobbled together as public relations.

In America, currently, we will see one of a myriad of scenarios playing between two extremes over the next year.

On the one extreme, Obama is re-elected as President, inertia from the campaign keeps Republican gains in the Senate to a minimum, and sees losses in the House due to public disaffection with the Tea Party faction of the Republican party. The Republicans recognize the slim but real chance of this occurring, which is why they are holding meetings in Texas to prevent a balkanization of the party, and a convergence around someone who is palatable to all. The fortunate consequence of this extreme scenario would be the end of gridlock, and some forward momentum in getting things done. The unfortunate consequence would be the resurgence of party agenda, as happened in 2008, and 2010, when, in both cases public opinion was tragically misinterpreted.

The other extreme unfolds with Romney being elected as Commander-in-Chief, the Republicans achieving a Senate majority, and losses in the House due to public disaffection with the Tea Party faction of the Republican party kept to a minimum. The fortunate consequence of this scenario is... wow, I can't think of one. But it involves one big Do-Over. Given the Republican's tendency to favor the status quo, and do nothing at all, or as little as possible, the best case scenario is that the nation gets a Reset to 2009, and then continues to bump along the ground until the next economic bubble appears. Then we go through another period of false prosperity, followed by a crisis and crash, as we have been doing for some thirty years now. The good news is we should all be used to it. The bad news is, well, the rich get richer, and the middle class, working class, and the poor continue to get fucked. Or at least until 2016 or so, when China overtakes us as the number one economy (some predict sooner). After that, all bets are off.

The unfortunate consequence of the scenario is something along the lines of a continuation of the 2010 Republican agenda - austerity, privitization of public institutions, and a scaling back of all restraints on the private sector, which pretty much guarantees a contraction of the economy, and most likely a Depression until 2020, or when China overtakes us, when all bets are off. Or when Mitt Romneys' People (read: the people that matter, large multi-national corporations), finally subsume us all into a vast autocratic propertarian utopia, with electronic devices in all our heads.

Of course, all of this is public relations to hide the actual conservation agenda, which is to benefit the rich by stacking the economic deck to promote massive upward redistribution of resources. You have to admit, in this public relations game, conservatives have been remarkably successful. Which is what Dean Baker's book, and I promise I will eventually get to that.

In looking at the above two extremes, my suspicion is that something in between will happen, unless, of course, public attitudes change. We have seen public attention directed towards this upward distribution of wealth thanks to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Paul Krugman, John Quiggin, and Jared Bernstein have also extensively commented upon this, but much more should be done. Even ordinary citizens are now expressing concerns about the ongoing "trickle-down" economics of the right, and the building evidence that income inequality stifles equality of opportunity and social mobility.

So, finally to Mr. Baker's book. Well, actually, not quite. For a slim 155 pages, Mr. Baker covers a lot of ground. One important piece of information I should mention is his covering of the manufactured recessions and bubble driven economy which we've had over the past thirty years. I've always had a suspicion that, after the real growth of the Long Boom (ca 1945 - 1976), we have been living in a period of false prosperity. Everything has been done to keep growth going, but the inherent flaws of capitalism, with its requirement of a compounded 3% growth per annum, virtually guarantee that this is not only unsustainable but unrealistic. Therefore, artificial booms have been required, similar to sugar highs that inevitably result in a blood sugar crash. With this in mind...

The book. Rather than me tell you, here's from the jacket blurb:

"Most people define the central point of dispute between liberals and conservatives as being that liberals want the government to intervene to bring about outcomes that they consider fair, while conservatives want to leave things to the market. This is not true. Conservatives actually rely on the government all the time, most importantly in structuring the market in ways that ensure that income will flow upwards. The framing that "conservatives like the market while liberals like government" puts liberals in the position of seeming to want to tax the winners to help the losers. This "loser liberalism" is bad policy and horrible politics. The efforts of liberals would be better spent on battles over the structure of markets so that they don't redistribute income upward. This book describes some key areas in which progressives can focus their efforts to restructure markets so that income flows to the bulk of the working population rather than just a small elite".

So, what are the two main governmental mechanisms the rich use to game the market? The Fed, and the Treasury department.

After Panic of 1907, when JP Morgan bailed out the federal government, Congress in 1913 created the Federal Reserve system. Conservatives will claim that the Fed was pure progressive evil by allowing private banks to control the currency. But the purpose of the Fed, in "immediate" response to the Panic, was to set up a central banking system to control and stabilize federal currency through a system of interbank lending and the setting of interest rates. It was set up to be purposely undemocratic by removing all processes from congressional and executive oversight (thus avoiding, among other things, graft, corruption, conflict of interest and the whims and fancies of populace). The purpose of Fed is twofold, two , as it turns out, conflicting functions: stabilize prices, and achieve maximum employment. The Fed is primarily a service to the banking industry, and as such, price stability is always, or almost always, it's primary concern. The Fed can actually do little to influence a stimulation of the economy, but its main trick is to lower interest rates, which is great for banks, making lending easier, and rent-seeking (e.g. banks charge much much higher rates to lend money than what they borrow from the government) more profitable. On the other hand, the Fed is much, much better at putting on the brakes by raising interest rates. And when you raise interest rates, you slow down the economy, put people out of work, reduce wages, keep prices low, and asset values high. Not surprisingly, rich people love the Fed. Can the Fed be used to help the employment picture? Well, ever since Volker, the stated goal of the Fed is to keep inflation at no more than 2%. But as Baker points out, there is little evidence that even modest inflation of 3-4% causes any serious harm to the economy. The right-wing flying monkeys descended upon Chairman Bernanke in the initial stages of the financial crisis when the monetary supply was expanded. They predicted runaway inflation, and successfully shut down any further stimulus. Prices in fact did not skyrocket:

"With massive amounts of idle capacity in almost every sector of the economy and an extraordinarily high unemployment rate, the conditions did not exist for inflation to take off. Furthermore, there had been prior instances in which central banks had vastly expanded a country's core money supply during severe slumps, most obviously the Fed during the Great Depression and Japan's central bank in the 1990s. In both cases the money went to excess reserves, since banks faced no demand for loans in a depressed economy. Inflation did result. However unrealistic they may have been, the complaint by the right had their intended result. They bolstered inflation hawks on the Fed and almost certainly made Chairman Bernanke and other relative doves more cautious about pushing expansionary monetary policy".

In short, thank you asshole Republicans, for unnecessarily prolonging the recession. And thank you, spineless Democrats, for not aggressively complaining that the Fed was taking inadequate steps to fulfill that portion of the congressional mandate encouraging full employment.

Baker recommends a bit more accountability and transparency regarding the Fed's favoring the nation's banks and bankers. Surprisingly, legislation was passed, sponsored by Congressmen Ron Paul, Alan Grayson, and Bernie Sanders, to make details of loan information public. True, the monies handed out were a conscious effort on the part of the Fed to dilute the amount of toxic assets the bank's creditors held, in order to make them profitable again, but at what cost?

Baker also covers the US Treasury and its long-standing attempts to keep the dollar strong. The Treasury can intervene directly in currency markets by buying or selling dollars, though it uses this power infrequently. But the strength of the dollar has a major impact on not only the unemployment rate, but also on which workers become unemployed and how much employed workers earn. Starting with Robert Rubin under Clinton, using the Asian banking crisis as the opportunity, Rubin has built up the dollar against other foreign currencies. Who benefits from this?

A strong dollar increases the size of out nations trade imbalance, as foreign goods are cheaper to import, and our own manufactured goods are more expensive to export. So consumers - those who have jobs - benefit with cheaper shoddy goods from, say, China (at the expense of domestic manufacturing jobs). The financial industry benefits in two ways:

"First, by making imports cheaper, a high dollar helps to keep inflation low, and stable prices are a financial industry obsession. Second, when the financial industry looks to move abroad, its dollar assets go much further when the dollar is overvalued."

You would think manufacturers would be opposed to a strong dollar, but then:

"Domestic manufacturers should oppose a high dollar since it places them at a disadvantage relative to foreign competitors. However, insofar as manufacturers are able to establish operations overseas, they are likely to be content with a high-dollar policy that disadvantages only some of their operations. Because they can shield themselves with foreign operations, they can gain advantage over purely domestic competitors".

So apparently a weaker dollar would benefit that segment of the US work force that relies on wages alone for income, not so much for the professional and ruling classes.

So-called free trade agreements further erode the working and middle classes, by encouraging manufacturers to relocate outside of the US. One wonders how the upper income brackets would feel if similar foreign competition occurred for their professions. Baker explores the idea of foreign competition for doctors, lawyers, business administrators, trust-fund managers, engineers, computer programmers, etc., but this suggestion seems unrealistic and untenable. One can hope, should one wish wages and benefits for the higher income brackets to be lowered to less obscene levels, that sophisticated automation will give them a run for their monies. This type of healthy free market competition would surely lower wages and benefits, freeing up monies to go back into general circulation, probably in an impact several tens of times the expiration of the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy, as it is well known that salaries, no matter who gets them, are a cost to everyone else. I doubt this will happen. Opening up the job market at the upper echelons sounds like something that would be strictly opposed, so, moving on...

The rich have really pulled a number on us. There's a lot more stuff, but, read the book. I ti s ironic that so many of Baker's progressive solutions involve, what do you know, leveling the playing field to allow for real competition.

In summary, just so you get the idea, I'll end with a quote Baker's from final chapter:

"The enormous growth of inequality over the last three decades did not come about as a result of the natural workings of the market; it came through conscious design. The job of progressives is to point this out in every venue and in every way we can. It is not by luck, talent, and hard work that the rich are getting so much richer. It is by rigging the rules of the game."

Indiana and the "Right to Work"

2012-01-06T11:18:00.000-08:00

"A lot of smart, young men have come out of Indiana - and the smarter they were, the faster they left" - attributed to Mark Twain

I really shouldn't, but I've a nostalgia for Indiana. It is, without a doubt, a primitive, benighted realm, populated with proudly ignorant troglodytes, and yet, it was once my home, and I would go back.

No small part of the nostalgia is a love of the land. I was fortunate to be raised up in Northwest Indiana. The middle third of the state is flat as a griddle, an unremitting and wearisome monotony, with only the sky for respite. In cloudless summers, or overcast winters, one feels like a bacterium wedged between glass layers on a microscope slide. There is just an overwhelming and paradoxical sense of agoraphobic claustrophobia. Wrist-slitting country.

Little wonder then, before the age of mass communications, the inhabitants resorted to sexual escape - rural perversions and incestuous burrowing on a pandemic scale. And out there alone on the prairie, if you want to bugger your kin, who is going to know? Who is there to tell? Ick. Ugh.

Things were better where I grew up. To the immediate north was Lake Michigan, and the Indiana Dunes. Great for summers, when the refreshing relief of those waters to the positively Amazonian conditions of the Midwest cannot adequately be described or imagined, but only experienced. Running down the vast sand dunes in thousand league boots - again, an experience that a paltry imagining cannot compare to.

Nice, huh?

The glaciers of the last Ice Age had dumped a great deal of Ontario in a region of hills and valleys known as the Valparaiso morraine. There are all sorts of dark gullies, deep sandy kettle lakes, mossy streams, and tree covered knolls to explore - secret hidden places that were, yes, even to a godless heathen such as yours truly, magical, mystical, and sacred. Real magic. Nature's magic. And I didn't even need to be stoned to recognize it.

Ah, but the people? You know, if Ohio still wears a bowler hat and chews on dime cigars, then Indiana wears a straw boater and spats. It's completely fucked, and living there, unfortunately, means receiving a mandatory lethal injection of conservative political RNA into your system. I've managed to avoid most of the consequences of that. Which is why I find the current Indiana Assembly's attempts to pass so-called "Right to Work" laws so repugnant.

There is, of course, nothing about any employee rights in the "right to work" law. The purpose is to reduce union funding, and also to encourage lower wages for employees. And, given the current economic straits Indiana workers find themselves in, they would be in a difficult position to complain.

Federal laws stipulate unions must represent anyone with a grievance that happens to be employed in the same company. Under Indiana's proposed legislation, companies and unions would be banned from negotiating a contract that requires non-members to pay fees for the representation the union must provide to all employees of a bargaining unit. In other words, the union must represent an aggrieved employee, but receive no compensation. This is basically a version of "taxation without representation".

Republicans cite high unemployment in Indiana and an incentive for businesses to locate here, much the same way as Southern states have encouraged employment with less-than-quality jobs in a "race to the bottom" wage fuck.

Problem is, its the Republican administration's fault that the employment picture is so shitty. Mitch Daniels, the so-called "cerebral" governor of Indiana (and the choice of many right-wing politicians and pundits for Presidential candidate) was, just a short year ago, being praised for the state's budget surplus. As it turns out, those budget numbers were not completely kosher.

Early in Daniels' first term, made improving jobs and income one of his most important goals. So, how is Indiana doing? Income growth has been negative. Indiana lags the nation. In 2002, Indiana ranked 33rd in the nation. Under Daniels, in 2010, Indiana ranked 41st. How about jobs? Well, while the rest of country saw unemployment rates reduced or at least hold steady, Indiana lost jobs. In fact, it's been only in the past six months that Indiana unemployment rates have held steady.

I think we have to rate Governor Daniels with a massive FAIL.

(And keep in in mind, Daniels is the guy that Romney is ready a job to, "any job". Pity Daniels doesn't feel the same way about his constituents).

Okay, was that parenthesized statement fair? Yeah, I think so. Daniels had it within his power to do a number to not only "create" jobs, but quality jobs. That "balanced" budget of his could have been used for Keynesian stimuli (and please, don't give that crap that it doesn't work. It works.) He could have offered skills programs, shared work hours, educational grants, infrastrucutre projects, all kinds of things that would have put his precious state budget in the red.

So, ultimately, I can't take Daniels seriously. Neither does Krugman. 'Nuff said.

Space is the Place (continued)

2012-01-05T11:15:00.000-08:00

I pride myself on my ability to recognize when I am acting like a childishly selfish asshole.

Note that I said acting rather than am. I feel I am introspective enough to question even that. For example, recently the press has been covering the subject of corporate psychopaths. ( I think we all already know about psychopaths in government, e.g the current flavor, Newt Gingrich). Reading through the article, I started to wonder if I'm a psychopath. But, sadly, no. I care about other people. Too bad, too. Life would be so, so much simpler without this unfortunate characteristic.

In any case, back in 1980, I thought I wanted to be a teacher. Again, after a semester of graduate school, with a stint of student teaching, I was introspective enough to recognize that I would have be a terrible teacher. I was just too much of a selfish asshole, too much of a child, too immature, too close in age to those I was to teach. In short, I wanted to act out in class and get away with it. Ironic, then, some forty years later that a not insubstantial part of my earnings comes from being a college instructor.

It wasn't all a waste of time. I took a speech class. Unlike most people, I am not afraid of public speaking. In fact, I got a B in the class because I enjoyed the attention so much that I consistently went over my time limit.

Anyway, another point of pride was that I totally called the Star Wars boondoggle. That asshole Reagan had just got elected, the Air Force had a hand in the Space Shuttle funding and was gearing up, along with the rest of the military, for war in space. I told my audience, rest assured, before that useless old cocksucker is out of office, hundreds of billions of dollars will be wasted on some kind of space-based missile defense or offensive warfare. I can prove my prediction. I got a copy of the speech stashed someplace.

Another speech topic was on the nuclear powered airplane, the Convair NB-36H "Peacemaker", which was considered back in the 1950s. The program was eventually scrapped because, well, planes crash. Good thing they didn't think about nuclear powered trains and cars, because, you know, they crash too. Not to mention nuclear powered vacuum cleaners. Yes, dearies. Alex Lewyt of Lewyt Vacuum Company called it back in 1955.

But that speech got me into full circus geek mode about nuclear powered rocket engines, so I did a speech on NERVA and stuff like that. I was so enamored with the idea of Atomic Rocketships I'm surprised I didn't sound like Sylvester the Cat with all the spittle I was producing at the corners of my mouth through anticipatory salivation.

Atomic Rocket by Ed Valigursky

But goddamnit, why not have nuclear rockets? Okay, okay rockets crash.

Still, who really wants to spend three fucking years going to and from Mars? That's what they are talking about right now. That's fucking insane. Why a nuclear rocket, thrusting at one Earth gravity for half the trip, then braking at 1g for the other half, gets you to Mars in 2 days, the rest of the Solar System in about a week. Plus you can sit in a big concrete and lead vault with wall-to-wall carpeting and comfy overstuffed sofas and chairs and drink brandy and smoke cigars while you are doing it.

Besides, it turns out that, not only is zero-G terrible for you, but artificial gravity produced in a spinning centrifuge is not much better. True, your bones don't turn to mush, but most people do spend most of their time in a centrifuge puking. I say most, but, you know even astronauts experience motion sickness, which is what happens.

But still and all, the cost of getting mass from the Earth's surface to low Earth orbit is the easy part. The energy required for any serious space exploration is several times that, and something that can never be done with chemical rockets.

Space is the Place

2012-01-04T11:42:00.000-08:00

For starters, score one for Kurman's prediction registry. Ekso Bionics has developed an exoskeleton for the disabled. Though not quite ready for street use, Ekso is set to sell the suit to rehab clinics in America and Europe. Not much of a prediction, given that, as I observed in this essay, the real market for powered exoskeleton suits is in the limited mobility field. Still, nice to see a worthwhile application outside of the usual bonehead Republican crush/kill/destroy type of applications.

Speaking of bonehead Republicans, I detected a gassy little whine emanating from the too-real-to-be-a-parody-but-oh-how-they-try Investors' Business Daily, the media version of exoskeleton for the limited thinking and intellectually impaired. Andrew Malcolm, who looks like he needs an Ekso Bionic suit to get around, and also is probably overdue for some radical surgical intervention of excess fecal buildup, laments that the Chinese are going to the Moon while the US has to rent seats on rickety old Russian spacecraft. And obviously, it's All Obama's Fault. Right? He canceled the aging white elephant shuttle fleet with nothing to replace it, like the Orion capsule and the Heavy Lift Launch System. Oops. Wait, Andrew. That's going to happen. Are you lying? Or just conveniently forgetful?

But hey, Andrew, twas Obama that gutted federal funding for the NASA, basic federal R&D funding, funding for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education programs, right? Right? Not the Teatards. It's all Obama's fault that science and education funding, the greatest economic engine in the nation, creating more than half of all new jobs, will be stifled. Andrew, you are a fucking asshole. But then, that's what you are paid for.

Let's ignore the federal subsidies to private aerospace companies like SpaceX and Orbital. Although, Andrew probably views federal subsidies as a bad thing, like, for example, the Defense Department's subsidizing the microchip industry to use in missiles. That boondoggle never panned out, did it, Andrew?

Let's ignore that SpaceX is sending a commercial flight to the ISS this Feb. 7th. Or that Orbital is set to launch in May. Or that Paul Allen is getting into the space business with a space plane.

And who was it that killed Apollo? Too expensive they said. $25 billion in one-time development cost, to develop an entirely new industry, and then just drop the whole thing after a few moon shots. Nixon. A Republican administration. Figures.

Hey, remember Skylab? That was put up with a modified Saturn 1B. That was built by, who built that? Oh that's right. Chrysler built that. Let that sink in for a minute. Here, this will help:

FUCKING CHRYSLER BUILT THAT!!!

THAT was 195,000 pounds in low earth orbit, four times the Shuttle's cargo capacity. That launch set the US of A back 170 million smackers. And if we work that out, that's $870/lb. And the Shuttle was, what? $5000 - 10,000 / lb.

No School like Old Skool.

Had we continued a post Apollo program as planned, which was to not only keep Skylab in orbit, but greatly expand it's size and scope, we could have had not only a ISS station about ten times the size of the current one, amortized the cost of the space program with continued missions to a commerial level, brought launch costs within the $100/lb range, and probably have kept a lot of people in Detroit busy building space rockets.

What a fucking waste.

Well, it's not too late. But, now what we really need (since we have so many people working on the Earth to LEO problem), is a really good nuclear engine, like NERVA.

Yeah, Okay, I'd take a fusion thruster also.

Yeah, what happened to that?

Panspermia (continued)

2011-12-23T13:53:00.001-08:00

Happy 2012. And good riddance to 2011. I don't know about you, but I'm happy to see that year slip down the lightcone. I can't remember which physicist said it, but the joke is "The future is all waves, the past becomes particles". Meaning quantum mechanically, I'd just as soon 2011 had been particle-ized from the getgo. This is not to say I look forward to 2012, but the one thing that can be said for 2012 is that it isn't 2011.

Not that the year was all terrible for me. Me, personally, I'd say I just marked time through it all. That in and of itself is kind of terrible. For others, it really was a bad, tough year.

I honestly don't know if 2011 could have been better particle-ized. Perhaps, in some other universe, in some Everett many-worlds multiverse, it all particle-ized quite well.

(But keep in mind that the true interpretation of Everett's quantum choices is not you making choices and splitting the universe up. It's not like a version of Nick the Bartender in "It's a Wonderful Life" handing out angel's wings with a cash register bell. It's not like Sheldon Leonard is flipping a coin saying "Dig Me! I'm creatin' univoises!" It may sound pedantic, but the universe is all that is, all matter, all energy, all spaces and times. It is merely a contemporary cultural conceit that we refer to multiverses. If the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, then all that happens when you make choice is that you get split into different versions of you. But no new universes are created. You just aren't that fucking important. Get over yourself).

Speaking of different regions of space and time beyond our apprehension, we really need to address the idea of just the one Big Bang. We, in our conceit, assume that we see is all there is. When, in fact, most cosmologists would say that the universe is much, much bigger than just the 13.7 billion light year radius of stuff around us that we see. Some say the universe is infinite in size, others put it at 150 billion light years.

What's wrong with this picture?

Don't how they come up with that number. I suspect the number is based upon cosmic microwave background data. Also on the principle of mediocrity, that conditions we enjoy are the same everywhere. Again, I consider that principle a kind conceit, making the assumption that there aren't strange and bizarre corners of the universe that play by different rules. And include in that conceit the idea that there was only the one Bang.

But it could be that our observable universe is only a recent thing, just a baby thing, just an effervescent pocket of new shit. There may be parts much, much older than we what we see.

In a previous essay, I calculated that, just using natural processes and some astonishingly good luck, that bacteria from Earth could travel to a potential new planetary home circling our nearest star in a mere few tens of thousands of years. 31,461 years to be exact. And, assuming some astoundingly amazing luck, the whole galaxy could have been colonized with Earth life. The chances are exceedingly remote, nigh on impossible, but not quite. And that's assuming a mere 3.5 billion years of known life, with random events and trajectories through natural accident.

More purposeful travels, which is to say artificial means such von Neumann self-replicating space probes traveling at some fraction of the speed of light, containing a software blueprint of life and the means to synthesize biology upon arrival (all reasonable and doable assumptions given even our present state of primitive technologies) puts the time frame for full galactic colonization at a paltry two million years.

In fact, all the data, and all our logic, suggest that we are not unique, we should not not be alone. Life should be every fucking where. And yet we have no evidence for it. The Fermi Paradox.

What about other places? What's the absolute best-case scenario? Well, we will use the Milky Way galaxy, as all the astronomical evidence suggests this galaxy formed early on at the beginning of the universe. So, some structures of the galaxy as old as the universe, 13.7 billion years. Other parts, like the halo of old, tired stars, the supermassive black hole at the center, and cold dark nebulae, are slightly younger, but not by much. If we grant some very fortunate circumstances, and assume (because we have no other example) that life is defined as our kind of life (carbon-based, aqueously mediated, planetary bounded), then it works out like this:

image courtesy Indiana U

Big Bang. Inflation. Expansion. Particle creation and nuclear fusion.

75% hydrogen, 24.99% helium. Trace of lithium.

First stars with this composition, hundreds of times the mass of the sun, get started some 100,000 years later, live hard, die fast, churn out metals (astronomical metals - anything heavier than hydrogen and helium).

Surrounding space is filled up with gas and dust with the ingredients for life, namely hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur for starters. If you want RNA or DNA, throw in phosphorous. If you want life that doesn't have to worry about hard radiation, throw in iron, for an iron core for an electromagnetic shield around the planet.

The first generation of stars are hazardous to life. The second generation of stars, made from the stuff spewed out by the first, might have planetary bodies around them, but do not have sufficient heavier elements for life. Third generation of stars includes our sun, start popping up around nine to 5 billion years ago. So, the earliest life goes back two to three billion years before Earth life got its start. So goes the conventional narrative.

But we are talking about best case scenario. It is possible for a star forming region to concentrate all the stuff you need for a sunlike system with earthlike planets with sufficient heavy metals as early as twelve billion years ago. So, some eight billion years before us, or twice the lifetime of life on Earth.

And that's the best case for the observable universe. But as I said, this could be new pocket. There could be parts of our universe that vastly older, or even parts that are no longer around, or have undergone a Big Crunch, or even more horrifying a Big Runaway in which accelerating expansion rips apart everything into a cold thin soup of nothingness.

So, want a tragedy? Ninety trillion years ago, a far distant part of the universe erupted in a big bang. It developed fast, much faster than out in our neck of the woods. And in the short span of just a few million years, there was a stellar splendor. And life developed. It grew complex. Then intelligent. Then technological. And this smart capable life looked around its observable part of the universe, and recognized that it was expanding. And to this life's horror, the expansion was accelerating. So much so that soon everything would be cold thin soup. And life set about trying counter this. But life couldn't do it. There wasn't enough mass and energy available, even if they gathered all they could see together in one spot, there own Big Crunch. Not that they didn't try. But they realized that even black holes would evaporate against the coming runaway inflation.

How They Did It

So they tried escape. They built wormholes, while there was a still a chance. But to their despair, the mouths of these wormholes always bottomed out within more cold, more darkness, more emptiness. Finally, half insane in desperation, with the very last of their resources, they rotated their local space with their remaining wormholes, and thus constructed a time machine, so that at least they could escape to the past, back to their warm stellar age.

Instead, they leapt beyond the confines of their prison, into the larger universe, and there they found a new beginning. And though they were fruitful and multiplied, they were still mad and scarred from their harrowing past, and determined never, ever to let it happen again. And any life they found was raw materials to them, or, if lucky, cannon fodder.

They are out there. But it's best if they don't know about you.

So, shhh! Keep quiet!

Plan F

2011-12-21T15:01:00.000-08:00

If procrastination was a virtue worthy of an aristocratic title, my family would be royalty.

Well, I'm crafting a Xmas present for my niece. She likes doors. She doesn't have any doors. So I'm making her a door.

I guess I should explain. She does have large doors. Regular life-sized doors. She doesn't have small quaint crafty doors, as in knick-knack doors, little curio doors, if there even is such a thing.

So, I told her I would make her a little door to get her collection started. You know how it goes, once someone starts a collection, people give them things, and that's how you walk into houses that have lots of metal owls, or ceramic frogs, or some kind of collection of things.

Well, the making of the door, which I figured would be a piece of cake, is taking ten times as long as I had planned. For starters, I decided to use some scrap walnut I had. It was very seasoned, meaning really dried out and done warping and bending and twisting and all the shit that wood does once you kill it. It was really nice walnut, until I cut into it with power tools. The power tools just chewed it all right up to an alarming degree. The table saw splintered the crap out of it, even when I did an initial cut across the grain with an Xacto blade to keep it from splintering. The router table chewed into it as if it were balsa wood, so much so that I was a little worried for my fingertips.

So, I was reduced to using hand tools. Which means the elaborate Plan A I had intended for it, with lots of fancy Roman ogee molding and separate panels and a kind of a Barbie Dream Palace look to it all, gave up the ghost. All that shit went right out the window. When was the last time you attempted crafting a molding with a hand planer instead of an electric router? Thought so. Me too.


King of the Wood People

So, Plan B was dropped as soon as I inventoried all the unmutilated remaining wood. I would have to scale the design down. Which meant the bronze fittings I had cast would no longer work as they were now oversized. So, off to the hardware store to purchase hinges and something that would as a door handle for the new Plan C door design.

Oops, wait! I was supposed to incorporate a small key into the mix that my sister-in-law gave me which had some childhood significance to my niece. So, on to Plan D. Quickly made a new fitting out of bronze, cast it, drilled a keyhole in it, and substituted the key and lock for the door handle.

Glued and Clamped

Then, cutting the frame for the door, it turns out the sculpture and design students had somehow fucked up the miter saw and not bothered to inform me. So, a mitered frame is out of the picture.
Now we are at Plan E, which is just a square frame, a plain door, hardware store hinges, no handle, but the key and lock act as the handle. And I have just now glued it up.

Taking a break here to write all this up while the first coat of tung oil soaks.

I will finish it with tung oil and butcher's wax tomorrow. This is the Plan F door. And it looks like a goddamn Fred Flintstone door.

-"it's a place right out of his-tor-y!"

She's getting it anyway!

Plan G would have involved a visit to Hobby Lobby, buy a doll house, trash it except for the little door, and say "Merry Fucking Christmas. Here's your goddamn present".

Panspermia

2011-12-15T13:12:00.000-08:00

I recently consumed little piece of hard holiday candy on The Fermi Paradox, Self-Replicating Probes, and the Interstellar Transportation Bandwidth.

It's a fun little paper about interstellar colonization, vonNeumann self-replicating machines, and why the heck aren't we knee deep in inquisitive and curious alien life forms? At one very brief point, the idea of panspermia is broached, in the sense of we-have-met-the-aliens-and-they-is-us solution to the Fermi Paradox, but the treatment last about as long as this sentence. And why should it? I mean, the paper itself is informed speculation, but for hard answers? Why, the standard excuse, into the foreseeable future is, Insufficient Data.

But what the heck, let's think about it a little bit. And for my object lesson, I choose the movie Starship Troopers. Now, most people would say "Oh my goodness why? That's a horrible movie. Why would you choose that for your speculative background?" And then, of course, there is the objection from the humorless little prig known as the Heinlein fan, who views the movie as an awful perversion of the book. Well, director Paul Verhoeven knew what he was doing. He presented a perfect fascist society of the future and showed that the only thing a perfect fascist society of the future was good for was killing alien Bugs. Not to mention, Verhoeven directed Showgirls, Robocop, and Total Recall, so the charge of taking things over the top is, at best, to identify yourself as a cluelessly humorless little prig. Besides, Heinlein book does serve a useful purpose. For those with a healthy and mature mental metabolism, it serves as a vaccine to Ayn Rand's wretched works.

Anyway, I'd argue that the alien Bugs in that movie provide a very good example of panspermia. I mean, we actually told in that movie that they have the ability to colonize other planets by "hurling their spore into space". To those geeks that object to this method as haphazard and inefficient, I'd suggest a scuba dive during the full moon when the coral reefs are spawning. The water is thick with eggs and sperm, which should freak most geeks out, and the chances of all that milky organic stuff turning into a new coral reef are frighteningly small.

(As an aside, a very nice visual aside at that, movie credits go out to Starship's Allen Cameron, Bruce Robert Hill, and Steve Wolff for the production design and art direction. In a wonderfully concise and clever group of visual hints, the viewer is invited to do a little creative world-building to figure out just how the Bugs can spread throughout the galaxy. First, there are the Bugs themselves who, through their exoskeletons and rigid hive society, seem queerly preadapted to life in the harsh environment of space. Second, those monstrously huge plasma bugs are shown shooting blue fire out of their butts right up into orbit to harass and destroy human starships above their home planet of Klendathu. Third, an explosion of one human starship releases warp plasma, the stuff that allows FTL travel, which is the exact same color as the bug plasma. In short, we are provided with a rationalization as to how the bugs spread through space. Bug colonies, on asteroids, propelled by big bug ass plasma at superluminal speeds. Interesting, at the very least, how this alien society does with adapted organic life, what we humans do with our technologies).

Alright, you know what? Clearly this essay is not going to be a serious attempt at discussing panspermia. I mean, your'e lucky it's only now that I snigger at the "sperm" part of it.

Sperm. Heh.

But I'll tell you what. I'll take a brief crack at it. Starship Troopers was a movie. So, let's get "real" for a sec. Is panspermia possible without violating the laws of physics? Well, clearly if we play by the rules, the speed of light cannot be violated. So, let's give the Bugs a moment of respite, and talk about bugs. As in bacteria.

If there is any life on Earth that might survive a voyage through space without technological assistance, it would be bacteria. Recall the brief period of excitement back in 1996, when it was believed microbial fossils were found in a piece of meteorite? It was dubbed ALH84001, a chunk of Mars that had landed in Antarctica 16 million years ago.

Let's send a bacterium from the Earth to the nearest star. Assume bacteria are well insulated within a rock from an event catastrophic enough to propel them into orbit. That's 7 mi/sec or 25,000 miles per hour minimum. That's a formidable event, itself undoubtedly an asteroid or comet impact upon the surface of the Earth.

Further assume that the bacteria are hardy enough to survive the journey by being flash frozen into cryogenic suspension, and that the rock protects them from the ravages of hard radiation (the number one space hazard for organic life). Given that some bacterial spores have been revived from a dessicated state in salt deposits after 250 million years, it's not an unreasonable assumption.

Further assume that a serendipitous series of celestial mechanical jugglery speeds up our spore enough to break free of our solar system. That's 26 mi/sec, or 93,600 mph. And now, we wait. Alpha Centauri, the nearest candidate star, is 4.3 light years away, or 25.8 trillion miles. Dividing our distance by speed gives us a travel time of ~275,600,000 hours, or 31,461 years. That's not that bad.

Figure on a latency of a few hundred thousand to million years between chances for further "voyages", and the majority of the galaxy could be colonized by bacterial life in as little as 3 to 4 billion years. Given that the life on Earth has been around some 3.9 billion years, there's a slim chance Earth life has colonized the galaxy and we will never know.

Amundsen at the South Pole

2011-12-14T12:55:00.000-08:00

It's the centennial today, Dec. 14, 1911. And, aside from a kerosene heater or two, Amundsen did it all with Upper Paleolithic technology - with the help of a lot of prior preparation and an indispensable co-evolved species known as the dog.

Scott, perhaps better known through his tragedy, was beaten to the pole by a good five weeks. It's hard to understand how Scott considered the use of sled dogs bad sportsmanship. Somehow, the use of gasoline powered tractors and ponies was not. I suppose incompetence and poor planning made up for any unacknowledged "cheating", especially once the tractors broke down and the ponies died of exposure, and Scott was forced to use Lower Paleolithic technology, pulling the sledges by hand.

It's kind of weird to think of how things have changed and not changed over the course of one hundred years. If I look around my place and subtract all the things that were not around one hundred years ago, the place would be quite threadbare. Lamps, I guess, would be there. A telephone, seeing as I am quite possibly the last man on earth with a landline. But the TV, the VCR/DVD player, the computer, the clock radio, the electric stove, the refrigerator, not only all in the future, but many of the components still in the future. (If you wonder about the appalling sparseness of current shit, well no, I am not a Luddite. I'm a late adopter. I prefer you get the metaphorical cell-phone shaped tumor on the side of your head, and then when that kink is gotten out of that piece of technology, I'll get it).

Then again, would someone from 1911 feel at his ease in my home. Of course. Most of the stuff unfamiliar to him would still be conceptually familiar. Why, even the computer, would be understandable and predictable. True, something of a marvel, but still something understandable.

What wouldn't be? Oh, well, I'd be a lot stinkier back then, with bad skin, bad breath and missing teeth, and probably smallpox scars. Probably a tapeworm, or if I lived south of the Mason-Dixon line, "seasoned" by malaria. I'd be threatened with diphtheria, scarlet fever, tetanus, tuberculosis, just to name a short few of the many diseases. 1911 is just at the end of the completion of many US sanitary projects, so I would just now be able to drink water that did not have someone else's shit in it.

Oh, and, I'd be ten years past the average life span and probably dying of stomach cancer (now practically non-existent).

So, that's all working out pretty well.

"People of Earth! Attention! People of Earth! Attention!"

2011-12-13T08:06:00.000-08:00

"What? WHAT?"

"Oh..., nothing".

When I was in, oh, I don't know, I guess 4th grade, I saw a movie called "Earth vs. The Flying Saucers". In retrospect, it's embarrassing to watch, much like admitting to watching the Space Hippie Episode on Star Trek. And the screenwriters for the movie must have been the same Aspergian group that went on to write movies like "Kronos" or "20 Million Miles to Earth". Which is to say a collection of writers in possession of an affable and earnest super-dorkiness which guarantees reception of an Atomic Wedgie, or at least a Purple Herbie.

The Future.. drawn...today!

Regardless, for several months afterwards, I would draw pictures of tanks vs. flying saucers. And they pretty much looked like this over on the right. It's not a very good picture, but I chalk that up to drawing with computer mouse, which is rather like drawing with a pencil up your butt.

Now, you will notice I have only the one tank against the one flying saucer, but in the original series, there was a whole Shakespearian cosmology of dramatic encounters, with both tanks and flying saucers exploding in jagged edged fulminations, and both aliens and men set aflame! And further note that the flying saucers require radar dish emitters to broadcast their lightning beams. Not being an expert on high energy collimating weapons, I had to rely on Hollywood's expertise. Interestingly, had this picture been done by a Name Artist, like Warhol, or Picasso, it would easily be worth a cool million at Sotheby's.

How fucked up is that?

Flash forward to the year 1976, and I am asked to join in a project to help produce a text-based adventure game played on a computer. The first I know of was called Colossal Cave, and it kind of went like:

"You are standing in the middle of a forest path. To your left is a small grass hut with an elf standing in the doorway.

Club Elf.

The elf had a small key which you now possess.

Club Elf.

The elf is dead. You have a small key."

You get the idea. No, I didn't play the game.

Okay, I played it. But I gave up pretty quickly as it was fucking boring. But here was the deal, and it was kind of interesting. Attending an Intro to Astronomy class and one of the students wanted to develop a text-based adventure game that was also science educational. The professor was enthusiastically on board, and was willing to accept the student's proposal as a grade-worthy project - should he develop it. The idea was it would present game puzzles that would also be lessons in physics and astronomy. After hashing various scenarios out in class, it was decided the game would be called Moon Base, and it would be a narrative on lunar colonization. I received the assignment of justification for the moon base from the professor, after I objected to the whole plausibility of a lunar colony being established the far-off future date of 1999.

So, here's what I come up with. (And, although this justification ended my participation in the game development, I still ended up with an 'A' for the assignment. Hurray for me!). In the year 1983, astronomers discover that a two mile wide asteroid is going to impact the earth sometime in 1995. It is a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid, which is seredipitous. Carbonaceous chondrite meteorites have been found to contain both water and carbon. In fact, the average one contains up to 10% water, and unusual contain organic compounds. These are substances which are common on Earth, but rare in space, just the kind valuable materials you would like to mine up in space.

Well, also, it turns out these types of asteroids are usually loose collections of boulders, never having become hot enough to melt together to form a solid object. So, the usual dipshit military procedure of zapping one of these guys with an H-bomb is out of the question. What to do with this sucker?

...a little bit to the left... no, my left... that's it!

But hey, when life hands you lemons, make lemonade. Since the space jockeys have a whole decade to plan something before Death From Above, they come up with idea of diverting the asteroid and "soft" landing it on the Moon. The deal is, they build a series of nuclear powered space tugs, go up and intercept the asteroid, use the mass of the tugs to gravitationally change its trajectory so that it impacts the Moon at a "relatively" slow speed, and you end up with a hundred mile long oval footprint of carbonaceous goodness on the surface of the Moon.

Not only does the scenario provide a good reason for a massive space effort, but it also provides a bonanza on the Moon, providing just the right materials for a successful Moon Base.

I thought it was pretty clever.

I am such a dork.

Libertopia For Dummies

2011-12-12T15:50:00.000-08:00

First off, I have to warn you. There will be disturbing images in this essay. You were warned.

2001: A Space Odyssey

A phone conversation with eldest bro always puts me in hypercynical mode for a few days. That, coupled with the fact that I do tend to rail against the incessant and ongoing stupidity of humanity, suggests the following is going to be a misanthropic complaint. But hopefully not so. Hopefully there will be some constructive criticism in there.

Eldest brother, talking with his son's friends, opined as how at this time, the year 2011 the hope was, when he was their age, that humanity would at least have a moon base. Granted, the movie "2001" set the bar pretty freaking high. Not only bases on the moon, but space hotels in Earth orbit, regular flights to and from Earth's surface to orbit, and, if that weren't enough, throw in an intelligent computer to boot.

With that kind of expectation, practically anything less is a disappointment. And so, what was the big deal of the 21st century? What was the major technological accomplishment for 2001, or 2011? Google? Facebook?

Pathetic. A glorified advertising and marketing industry set up to extract personal information and sell it off to the highest bidder. There's your glorious vision.

Alright, let's be fair. There was no way we were ever going to get to where 2001 wanted to take us. Not without a few nuclear rockets blowing up in the atmosphere. Not without a sustained grand vision, something bordering on religious fervor. Not without a major kick in the ass to get us going.

Can we blame the Baby Boomers for this? Granted, ~~they~~ we are quite the most useless, selfish, self-absorbed, risk-averse, pampered, privileged generation EVER produced. But, you know, there is that thing mathematicians call the Principle of Least Action. All things being equal, all complex systems would rather coast along than expend effort and energy. With no gun to our heads, like the (*cough*bullshit*cough*) Greatest Generation before us, we coasted along. And what would it have taken to get us into space? Some kind of existential threat that's for sure. Or some enormous enticement, some glittering cosmic treasure. But it didn't happen.

Fat-ass Captain from Wall-E

I tell you what did happen. We pursued happiness as far as we could, with the last 40-or-so years in overdrive. And as a result, we've been living in Libertopia for the past 400-some years.

The real deal, soon to be the 85% of America

You want the real movie about the future? Try Wall-E. Except we never go into space. Don't think so? Really now, think about it. If you are a certain demographic, you've pretty much gotten to do whatever the hell you wanted to do. You've enjoyed the maximum freedom as is possible without seriously wrecking society at large. And now, the party is over. And you have people like Ron Paul who, rather than trying to make Libertopia manifest and real, are actually trying to keep the party going just a little bit longer.

The Paragon of Animals

The Very Flower of American Masculinity

Who is this demographic? Why it's obvious, isn't it? Rednecks. Stupid white people. Dumbass, country-fuck, dipshit, cocksucking, fat, toothless, ignorantly proud, proudly ignorant asshole white guys. Do whatever they want. Get as fat and stupid as they want. Pretty much enjoy any intoxicant they want. Treat everyone else like shit, and it's been a blast. But it's over now. And probably as just as well.

Hey Ron Paul? Take a long, hard look at what you want to preserve.

This IS your Libertopia.

Demarchy, revisited

2011-12-09T07:41:00.001-08:00

Steven Pinker claims that, historically, humanity is getting less and less violent.

I don't think I buy into that. I have to at least question both his data collection and his metrics. He weighs total casualties during periods of violence divided by total population at that time. There may be other parameters involved, I would at least hope, like making sure the casualty rate excluded death by disease, famine, and other privations. How would this metric work on historical natural disasters? Would the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, which devastated Tokyo and Yokohama and claimed around 105,000 lives, be considered more violent than the 2010 Haiti earthquake, with 300,000 lives lost only because more people were around in 2010? That's silly.

But using this metric, Pinker classifies China's An Lushan revolt and civil war with a higher violence coefficient that WWII. Is that really kosher? Well, this commenter's bullshit detector went off.

Regardless, I would have had Pinker set his group of little grad students collecting and collating data on a much more important assertion, one that I hopefully am cherry-picking by counting the obvious affirmatives and ignoring the negatives, which is that, as the Russians say: "Whether salt water or fresh, shit floats to the top". Or, more succinctly, in order to succeed, you need to be an asshole.

Is human society that fucked up? Or the laws of natural selection? That you need to be an asshole to get ahead? Well, I think Pinker and his staff need to work on this.

If true, I think I have an empirical test for a systemic utopian fix. And it goes back to the idea of demarchy. I wrote an essay on this about a year ago. And a quick re-read of this suggests, wow, I've really got to brush up on my profane deprecative skills.

Now, I am not quite ready to say the democracy doesn't work. I am willing to say that the quick fixes, the bandaids, the simplistic solutions proposed will not work.

Term limits, for example, are completely fucking stupid. What term limits will do is to select for the most virulent, vile, corrupted asshole cocksuckers for office. Easily. Since money and politics are intimately connected, inextricable, always and forever entwined and entangled, whether it is election funds or taxpayer revenues, you will always, always have people who wish to feed at the public trough at the public expense. Term limits merely sets up an environment which further encourages public servants to get theirs while they can. So, these fixes are just fucking juvenile, and should be ignored.

But! But, I think I have a systemic solution and it amounts to this observation from nature: natural selection. When you select in nature, the filter is death and the filter is permanent, but the filter is done after the facts, or rather, the performance. And that filter, at the societal level, should be voting.

Problem is, we do it all wrong. We do it ass-backwards. What we should do, under the Kurman Variation of Demarchy is to vote people OUT of office, not into it.

So, quick review, demarchy is government by lottery, just like jury duty. It's not election time, it's selection time, and you, my dear, have been chosen by lot to serve. But, the main complaint about demarchy is, what if you get some idiot chosen by lot to serve in office? No problem. That's where elections come in.

You can still have recall elections, but you also have delections. And a delection is this:

"So we got Governor Titlapper in office and he wasn't recalled for being an insufferable cabbagehead, but he still sucks in some ways. Does he suck enough for removal? Yes or no?"

If he is not delected from office, he continues to serve. Otherwise, vote the bum out, his (or her) number is tossed aside, and we re-draw from the pool.

You got to admit, government by lottery is a heck of a lot more democratic than the current system we have. And who is to say you can't find wise, competent, and qualified people who are currently collecting food stamps. Because all you have to is look at the idiot millionaires currently fucking the country up, and say, Jesus, there's got to be better people out there than these asshole cocksuckers.

The Era of Peak Art

2011-12-08T13:29:00.001-08:00

Art Basel is in the news. They've had their big show in Miami Beach, and word on the street is the art market is hot, hot, hot - as in big ol' zit of an asset bubble ready to pop hot.

Of course, I'm talking high-end art, which, honestly, you can't really consider art.

It's more commodity than art. One person who has currently helped the centuries-old long-term commoditization of the whole high end art market is Charles Saatchi. He who has done for the art market what complex derivatives did for the financial world. Saatchi, no small irony here, bemoans the current crop of collectors as "... Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy, Hamptonites; ... trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs".

And so what? What's wrong with the idea of art as commodity? Why is it so bad that a Warhol, or a Twombly, or a Hopper, or even a Rembrandt or a daVinci, be thrown into the same category as barrels of oil, ingots of copper, wheat, soybeans, coffee, and hog bellies? These are all things that are available to the human animal to enjoy and consume. To say that art is somehow not to be included in this cycle of acquistion, that it is to be held in higher regard is in some sense quite delusional.

And, just as, say, oil is a limited commodity, as in they ain't (yet) making any more of it, so it we should view art. There should be quotes on the proven and unproven reserves of art in this country and in the world.

Because eventually, all rank speculation aside, if you aren't producing quality artists, you'll be running out of quality art, and sooner rather than later. In fact, I suspect we will be facing, at some ppoint in the near future, the Era of Peak Art, and a consequent Art Crisis.

Now, I know for you and me, since we are just Regular Folks, that the coming shooting war pf the oligarchs might make for a small of amusement, but what of the artists? I can tell you, if history is any guide, that rather than being valued and protected, will instead be abused and appropriated, just like little baby girls in China. You'd think all that female infanticide would make potential female mates for all those mateless boys an extremely valued commodity, but no, instead it's the opposite. the illicit trade in girls is thriving. They are being abducted, enslaved, and mistreated at unprecedented rates.

And so it will be with future artists. Perhaps there will be protected reserves for them. They will tagged, radio-collared, and guarded. But they will also be poached. And, given the insanity of our species, like bush meat, futures artists will probably be hunted to near extinction just to increase the value of their art.

Interesting times ahead, for sure.

1960s TV Really Fucked Me Up

2011-12-07T16:17:00.001-08:00

Word on the street is the US Air Force Space Command is throwing SETI a bone - supplying monies so they can check out Kepler-22b. You know, Kepler-22b? The superearth orbiting in a G type star's "Goldilocks zone" some 600 light years from here? Uh? Superearth? A radius 2.4 times that of the Earth's? Goldilocks Zone? Orbiting the star where liquid water is possible on the surface of the planet? You are keeping up on the science news, right?

So, the idea is suddenly this is Earth's twin and there could be life there. Provided, of course, this planet has the right mass, which we can't tell. I mean, it's fucking amazing that they can tell how big it is, from three thousand five hundred twenty-six trillion miles away. (No, really, don't let the budget "crisis" fool you, that's a big fucking number). But what they don't know is the planet's mass, because it could be, like some health-conscious German stool inspection category: watery, gassy, or solid, which is to say, rocky.

Now, if it is watery, it can't have too much water, otherwise it will undoubtedly have an ocean several hundred miles deep, and at the bottom of that ocean will be a peculiar form of pressurized ice. And that's not a good place for terrestrial life to form. Then again, if it is rocky, then with the radius being what it is, it is more likely a big super Venus, and that's no place to hang out. And if it is gassy, then it is a mini-Neptune, and again, no place you'd want to spend time at.

But, what the hell, SETI needs a new pair of shoes, and if they get to use their radio telescopes to check it out for Space Command for "space situational awareness", then why not? I can tell them right now, save them some time, that nope, nobody home. No life. Just like Mars. But hey, whatever, better to spend the money on that than tax breaks for job creators, which has done us Earthlings so much good.

And, you know, Space Command kind of reminds of Alpha Control from the old "Lost in Space" TV series. The series was just so hokey, not serious the way Star Trek was, but looking back, I suspect they had a better take on all things alien out there. Which is, if they are out there (and Where Are They?), they really don't give a shit about us. I mean, every time the Robinson's ran into a technologically superior alien race, which was always, the aliens were about as happy to see them as you are a homeless person wanting to wash your car windshield.

"No. No. No. No. Thank you. NO! Oh. Shit. Fine. Here. Here is some neutronium. Yes. You're welcome".

But honestly, that's the way it was, well, that and fuses had been invented so you didn't have sparks flying over the place whenever the power was turned on. But, hey, cut Irwin Allen some slack. I hear he was as bugfuck crazy as Mickey Rooney). And all the space alien babes have super powers and wear capes.

Anyway, Kepler-22b. Nothing there. Okay. Nothing. Except, oh, maybe the Bugs.

"Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman

2011-12-06T08:44:00.001-08:00

I've just watched the mutual dick sucking festival between Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump and tried to keep from retching.

Newt Gingrich: nothing a little spontaneous human combustion wouldn't cure.

Although, not really wishing much harm on my fellow humans, I'd just as soon put the entire Republican clown car - including the sticky wet turd Donald Trump - onto a ice flow and shove them off into the Bering Sea. You know, an experiment, just to see who gets eaten last, or which orca finally gets tired of playing with which bloated corpse. Nothing bizarre. Nothing grotesque. Just some good old-fashioned natural justice.

Speaking of Newt, I suspect he wouldn't get the fast-or-slow solution to the following problem, and it is mainly because Mr. Six Sigma is, despite conservative misconceptions, intellectually a fucking retard, and ethically an empty shit bag.

Ready? Think Fast! Think Slow! Problem: A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat is $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Answer at the end.

This is one many examples of figuring out how people think, and that's the cool thing about, not just Daniel Kahneman's papers, but Kahneman and Amos Tversky's papers. They have fun puzzles in them.

In case you haven't figured it out, this is a mini-review of Kahneman's book "Thinking Fast and Slow". I call this a mini-review because I obtained the book through the public library's new purchases reservation system, and so have had only two weeks to read it. So, I skimmed. Just as well, as probably 80% of the material I was already familiar with. As is Kahneman, for this book is primarily, a summary of not only his lifelong research, but other psychologists findings as well. As such, I would classify this book as a worthwhile introductory textbook, and leave it at that. If you are unfamiliar with this area, then I recommend reading it. If, like me, you have some familiarity with the materials, then I suggest you skim and not worry overmuch on missing the juicy stuff. The salient points will catch your eye, and you will be rewarded.

I first came across Kahneman in an article in "The Economist" magazine, which was devoted to demolishing the Chicago School's neo-classical version of economic models. I'm also ashamed to say that I also came Kahneman and Tversky through Malcolm Gladwell's book "Blink". (The nicest thing I can say about that book is that it provided a fun bibliography to work through). Back to the Chicago School, not being an economist or a psychologist, I still, through casual observation of human beings and occasional chance readings, came to the conclusion long ago that human beings are not rationally self-interested agents. Or rather, that a rational description served poorly to describe the human animal. In a more succinct manner, identical to my critique of the works of Ayn Rand, would be put thus: "What kind of a fucking retard would buy into this bullshit?"

Kahneman devotes a large amount of the book to developing two fictional characters, the two functional personae that make up your mind: System 1 and System 2.

System 1 is, for lack of a better term, your intuitive self, your associational engine. System 2, again for lack of a better term, is your rational self, your logical computer. System 1 has been honed by millions of years of evolution to be the very clever, very spontaneous, animal mind that each and every one of us relies upon to make it through the day. System 1 is the fast thinker. System 2 is the slow thinker. System 2 allocates attention to effortful activities such as complex computations, problems of agency, choice, judgement, and concentration. It is also extremely lazy. If System 2 can get away with not having to do work, and rely upon the mental activities of System 1, it will. This lies at the heart of practically every cognitive illusion and fallacy we operate under. Not all. We have to keep in mind that logic is stupid. That rationality is NOT the same as intelligence. But still, it requires work to be logical, and if we can get away with the minimum amount of effort, we will.

From my own personal introspections, I offer an indefensible allegory. We've all heard of the false myth that we use only ten percent of our brains. I submit that only ten percent of my brain is used to produce the conscious me, the "ego". The other ninety percent is used to produce the subconscious me, the myriad associational, emotional, instinctive, embodied processes that make up the majority of me. (In some sense, this part is an alien other, a portion that, failing to be replicated in an artificial intelligence, pretty dooms the whole project from the get-go. Then again, a realistic replication of this alien other, in an attempt to simulate human intelligence, may also doom an AI to automatic insanity).

So, in summary, I recommend the book to any reader. There's both insight for the beginner, and clarified summaries for the old hand.

Answer: Fast think: the ball costs ten cents. Slow think: if x is the amount of the ball, then x + (x + $1.00) = $1.10, then 2x = $1.10 - $1.00, then x = five cents.

Don't feel bad if you quickly said ten cents. Even Nobel Prize winning economists and people from Harvard business school and MIT get this one wrong. That's fast thinking for you. Better to be quick and wrong, than to be slow and right, but also dead.

OWS List?

2011-12-02T08:27:00.001-08:00

I found this list in the comment section of a Yahoo news piece about a truly horrid looking repulsive little pudge ball named Frank "Hey Frank! You're an Idiot!" Luntz. The list is by someone named Walter, but it sounds suspiciously like something I recall being put out by the Green Party of America. I tried to do some research, which, of course, consisted of perhaps a 30 second google search. In other words, I put in zero effort to trace the source.

Regardless, there are some sound ideas in here. Others sounds like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. My occasional thoughts below in italics. After reading through and commenting, I'm seeing that most of these items are actually kind of limited horizon short-term small visions fixes. Like most legislation, so what the fuck, try 'em anyway.

1) End Corporate Personhood (Keep Human Rights OUR Rights)
2) Reverse Citizens United (Corporate Money is Not Free Speech)

1) & 2) pretty much the same goal, no? How to do this? One suggestion is a constitutional amendment to limit corporate and special interest monies in politics. I don't see this happening for a number of legal and real world reasons. Rather than restricting corporate funding, how about making it completely transparent? That seems a lot easier to do, and it's probably constitutional.

3) Prohibit All Former and Future Congressmen or Staff from being a Paid Lobbyist.(Get Out of Washington)
4) Prohibit Any Lobbyist from offering ANY Monetary Compensation, Gift or Job or any future promise of the same to Any Congressman, or Congressmen’s Family, Staff or Federal Employee Directly involved with congress. (Congress Not For Sale)

End the revolving door between the Capitol and K Street? Ain't gonna happen. No more than prohibiting the selection of candidates for memberships on corporate board of directors. However, the selection field, like for those of the CEO field, could be broadened beyond the usual short list of asshole cocksuckers.

5) Apply All Conflict of Interest and Insider Trading Laws to Congress. (End Market Manipulation)

I believe I've read OWS objections along this line. This is completely doable and should be done right now.

6) Hold all Business Interests, Stock Bonds, and Assets in a Blind Trust During the Term of Office or at the very least, 2 Weeks Before Congress is in Session and end 30 Days After the Session. (Keep Congress Honest, Remove Temptation)

This is completely doable. Not sure what impact it would have, as a congress person could always have an "informed" third party handle their finances to get around this.

7) Prohibited Tax Breaks for Any Companies SENDING Jobs Overseas! End All Tax Breaks for Companies That Eliminate American Jobs. (Preserve American Jobs)

Not workable. Drop this.

8) Granted Tax Breaks to Companies for BRINGING Overseas Jobs BACK to the U.S.(Repatriate American Jobs)

Unworkable, and easily abused (a proviso for permanent job transfer in there? Nah. How to verify? Unworkable.) Drop this.

9) Promote Tax cuts for small businesses and the middle-class families who rely on their entrepreneurship. (Small Business Jobs and Credit)

Something like this already exists. Simply a matter of adding enough gov't staff to implement it.

10) Closed All Existing Tax Loopholes That Allow The Wealthy and Big Corporations to Abuse the Tax Credit System. (End Loophole Abuse)

Wow. Something even Republicans can get behind. Which is why it won't happen.

11) Reinstall the separation between commercial banking and the securities business, a return to Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 Strengthen ‘The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act “ (Work to Protect Consumers)

Doable. But open to abuse (there are whole law firms dedicated to Frank-Dodd interpretation). Do ti anyway.

12) Use Antitrust Laws to Break Up “Too Big to Fail” Banks, Financial institutions and Corporations.

Me, I'd just nationalize the fuckers, but, uh, oh wait, that's real socialism isn't it?

13) Restore Equal Justus By Applying the Law to Persons “Too Big To Jail”

I think Walter meant "justice". But, nah, no need. This is already in place. It's an enforcement issue.

14) End All Oil Subsidies to Multinational Oil Companies. (No Oil Welfare)

Yeah, even though it won't make much difference... unless Walter's talking about the defense subsidy as well. In which case, ain't gonna happen. Inertia.

15) Tax Every Stock Transaction at .001% On the Total Value of the Stock to End Multi Nanosecond Computer Trading That Artificially Drive up Stock Bubbles. (Restore Stock Market Sanity)

Now, this one has been kicked around forever, and, if I am not mistaken, places like Hong Kong and Singapore - free market darlings - have this and business has suffered not one wit. Do it.

16) Tax All Bonuses and Stock Options in Lieu of Corporate Bonuses as Standard income under $10,000, Tax Bonuses at 25% under $75,000 and at 50% above $75,000 (An American Bonus)

I'd... have to look at this one more closely.

17) Prohibit Any Bank that Contracts to Handle Any Public Benefits Program from Charging Any Fee to Any Recipient of Those Programs. Banks can only Receive a Flat Negotiated Fee the Government. (End Banking Enrichment)

Can't see the harm. Do it.

18) Provide For Publicly Owned Banks (State and National) to Handle the Peoples and Taxpayers Money, To Be Accountable to the Interest of the People.

I like it, but, oh, whoa. Socialism. See 12).

19) Increase Taxes on the wealthy by Increasing the Capital Gains Tax with a flat yearly exemption for all, Increase the Upper Income Tax to 50% deduction are allowed for U.S. Jobs, Manufacturing and Capital investment within the United States. (Tax Power and Control)

There's no question that huge chunks of the debt would disappear if the parasite class was made to contribute to the health of the nation. Considering how much wealth they've hoovered up these past 30 years...

20) Rebuild Americas Infrastructure Build Roads and Bridges, Schools and Factories. (America First!)

Fuck yeah! We really are looking like a seedy rundown nation. At least board up the shitty spots with murals, like the Soviets used to do.

Is Bret Stephens Stupid?

2011-11-30T12:34:00.001-08:00

Or does he assume everyone else is as stupid? That's one of the hallmarks of a stupid person, you know.

Whenever I need to know what stupid people are supposed to be thinking, I read the editorials at the Wall Street Journal. And then, if I want to know what incredibly stupid people are thinking, I'll read the comments from the readers of the WSJ. If these people are a representative cross-section of the business executive population, it's a wonder we don't have a stock crash every other day.

It's really quite sad how, with Murdoch buying that paper, it has just turned into the worst shitrag on the market. Take the following opinion from Bret Stephens on the Great Global Warming Fizzle. According to the WSJ, Bret Stephens received his education at the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics. Really, I didn't know they offered a degree in fluffing.

And the op/ed piece Stephens wrote is unquestionably a professional level fluff job. The question is who is he fluffing? Is this just a feel good piece for the readers? Something to take their minds off how much they suck, compared to the general population? I don't know. It sure as hell isn't supposed to be factual or persuasive or of any useful purpose in terms of a worthwhile dialog.

So I have to assume this is just Bret Stephens' print version of a holiday blowjob to his readers.

Slurp. Slurp. Says Stephens:

"Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen. As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term "climate change" when thermometers don't oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other "deniers." And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit".

So, what I'm guessing is he is none too popular with the evangelical portion of the conservative tribe. You know, the Tea Party types who want us all to buy into the notion that America is a Christian nation first and foremost? To call these people "spectacularly unattractive", for starters, is an interesting form of fellatio. But is that it? Is that his only descriptive for climatologists and those who heed their data? That's hardly a convincing argument. Not to mention that listed among those poor deluded religious types are hard-nosed realists like the US Armed Forces and insurance companies. But their opinion doesn't matter to Stephens. He keeps blathering away like the oily little shill he is:

"Yet a funny thing happened on the way to the climate apocalypse. Namely, the financial apocalypse. The U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and the EU have all but confirmed they won't be signing on to a new Kyoto. The Chinese and Indians won't make a move unless the West does. The notion that rich (or formerly rich) countries are going to ship $100 billion every year to the Micronesias of the world is risible, especially after they've spent it all on Greece".

So, I guess because the tycoons to whom Stephens services have taken a big old shit and fallen over, and have wasted all of the working people's hard-earned monies on a scam, climate change is now no longer a problem. Exemplary reasoning there Slurpy! Smarmy Fuckface continues:

"Cap and trade is a dead letter in the U.S. Even Europe is having second thoughts about carbon-reduction targets that are decimating the continent's heavy industries and cost an estimated $67 billion a year. "Green" technologies have all proved expensive, environmentally hazardous and wildly unpopular duds."

Cap and trade is dead. Who killed that again? Who was not going to make a money on that? And, uh, why is Europe accelerating the second phase of their carbon trade system, if it is wrecking their economy? And why is it that the world economies are now putting more monies into renewable energy than fossil fuel in new power generation? Could it be that Stephens is ignoring facts, pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate? Or is he just yawning that jaw bone as far open as he can to accept cock? Well, he's paid, well for his services, so...

Wait a minute, now, what about all those hacked climategate emails? What's the word on their impact. Oh, right, still doesn''t change the fundamental science. Still doesn't change the consensus.

And who hacked them anyway? Who's in trouble for hacking into lately? Hmm?

And despite the climate "skeptics" shrill denouncements, the evidence against them keeps piling up. Why, even a Koch-funded scientist who was supposed to debunk global wamring says it's all real.

Oops. Sorry, Stephens. Maybe you should just stick to opining about bombing Iran.

Addition: Latest NOAA report suggests we lost the battle of Arctic recovery back in 2006.

Sorry, Bret, you silly little cocksucker, but Greenland is getting green - or will be in your pampered little lifetime:

http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/12/noaa-arctic-report-card-3-fs-2-cs

Again with the Red Eye!

2011-11-30T12:23:00.001-08:00

Yesterday

Today

Last time it happened, back in April 2010, I chalked it up to abrasive grit in the eye. This time out, I didn't notice it until someone told me I had blood in my eye. I thought they meant I was angry. No they meant blood in my eye. Now it itches. Might be pink eye this time. So, probably pink eye the last time as well.

The Reagan Divergences

2011-11-28T15:33:00.001-08:00

-or-

How We Initiated a Global Thermonuclear Armageddon Without Really Trying.

Once more, I find myself in the Best of All Possible Worlds (BOAPW) in the year 2050CE. Which means I'm 450 million light years from Earth, seated in an incredibly ergonomic buttock-caressing barstool at the bar in Sam's Pub. I'm drinking a spectacular super lager with just the right amount of hops. Not enough to be overpowering, but enough to give the beer a bite.

It's a beautiful day here in Spiral City. I know this because all the bars here are not darkened caves but open to the sky, with windows and skylights everywhere. I can see just the most achingly beautiful set of puffy clouds right above me, and the horizon holds a darkness of promise - a warm, gentle, delightful rain later this afternoon.

A quick check of the Mr. Mark's Melodies app via my nonlocally connected aqueous assistant assures me that (per the musical incantations Mark derived from his father Hugh Everett III's nearly-lost Basement Equations*), there is not a Divergence in sight for the next week. I'm worry free through next Monday. What could be better? In the BOAPW? Um, nothing.

I often am amazed at how we pulled it off. Humanity, that is. How we not only managed to survive, but became worthy of survival. How a Hobbsian race - feral, brutish, and nasty - through a miraculous serendipity, became a fairly decent and respectable species - gentle, wise, tolerant, generous, and most importantly to sparse and fragile alien life, neighborly. Still more amazing is how we spread throughout the cosmos in a mere twenty years to occupy a cubic hundred thousand billion light year volume of spacetime. A volume which, despite our teeming trillions, is still imbued with a population density barely that of a wisp of smoke. Even more amazing is how the Older Races (vast forces eons older than us) tolerate our existence, and well, honestly, even when we reach their plateau, do not view us as a threat.

Could things get any better? Again, in the BOAPW? Quite simply, no.

This past week, being the universally recognized period of thanksgiving, is just a touch ironic given the anniversaries of a huge horde of Divergences that occur. And a disturbing majority of them are Reagan Divergences.

True, the nuclear arms race peaked in 1986, but its the years 1981 through 1985 that have more nuclear wars than the rest of the 20th century put together. Amazing. The peak of these Divergences is, not surprisingly, November 24th, 1985. You'd think it might be March 24th, 1983, the day after Reagan made his "Star Wars" speech. But no, with the Reagan administration's ~~dismissal~~ reinterpretation of the ABM Treaty in late October 1985, the Soviets conclude that the US is gearing up to start a nuclear war. The expected value of the contingent shit hitting the counterfactual fan jumps alarmingly several dozen times on November 24th.

Reagan with Dr. Merkwürdigliebe

The whole harrowing slew of disasters finally tapered off soon after, when Foreign Minister Anatoly Dobrynin informed President Reagan of the Soviet Doomsday Machine (officially known as System Perimeter, and unofficially as Dead Hand). The formerly belligerent Reagan, after realizing that all of his rhetoric and actions had been interpreted as an intention on the part of the United States to start a nuclear war, settled the fuck down.

Fortunately for all of us, the old asshole did settle the fuck down, and it also helped that Gorbachev stepped onto the stage. Few recognize the value of this man, but that's the reason there's a statue to him down in the central park of Spiral City.

The Good Earth, courtesy http://solarsystem.nasa.gov

And in 2050CE, I don't think you can find much that is named after Reagan anymore. Not even the National Airport in Washington DC, back on good old Earth.

* Did I not explain all this? Mark Everett, son of Hugh Everett III, found a pile of papers crammed with mathematical formulae in the basement of the family home. Mark, like most of humanity, not being instinctively statistically inclined, called three of his father's friends to see if they wanted the stuff. Fortunately for all us, the four of them were able, through an interpretation of tones and rhythms, to convert Hugh's maths into musical incantations. Those incantations opened up time, space, the forces of nature, and the universe to humanity. Proper applications of such showed us all possible contingencies to every possible situation. This allowed us to avoid the majority of catastrophes which would befall humanity for a million years up and down the arrow of Time. Catastrophes which, through avoidance, become unfortunate alternate timelines now known as Divergences. They also pointed us toward the associational coherence which, now called the Convergence, possessed us all into a one-and-only-one wonderful Now known as BOAPW.

The Tale of the Captain Nemo and the Leafblower

2011-11-23T14:31:00.001-08:00

-or-

It's the "What Can We Do With Oxygen?" Show!

For your holiday cheer. Back home in Indiana last weekend, a friend of mine had some dead wood littering his yard. We cut it up to burn it in his chimnea (which, because of the way it looks, like a steam powered diving helmet, I call it Captain Nemo).

After about fifteen seconds into the process of cutting and chopping up these small limbs of pretty much rotted wood, I was completely exhausted. I reminded myself of someone I knew in my youth, who was (possibly still is) the second most laziest person on the planet. This person's classic line, when we went for a hike in Turkey Run State Park, was: "Let's not going anywhere uphill."

I am told by eldest brother that I should not feel so badly about being feeble, and that, being in our mid-50s, by frontiersman's standards of life expectancy, we would be under the ground for some time now. Still, these past 10,000 years have made wusses of us all, have they not? In more robust times, I'd have just snapped all those limbs by hand, without the use of tools.

(Also, isn't it funny how there are places like Titan and Neptune with literally trillions of years worth of natural gas to burn through, but it would take the next technological energy source to get to them? Ironic.)

The other irony I would note is that, we worry so much about fossil carbon resources, and yet, as this video shows, we care very little for our fossil oxygen resource. The only time one cares about breathing, is when he cannot draw breath.

Enough talk, on with the show. Next week, firecrackers and liquid nitrogen!

Pseudorapidity

2011-11-22T15:22:00.001-08:00

When I was about twelve or thirteen years of age, I found a book at the public library titled "Spacetime Physics", by Edwin F. Taylor, and John Wheeler. Despite having only just mastered decimals, fractions, and ratios, I was able to follow this book on Einstein's Special Relativity.

It wasn't that I was a precocious young sprout. Rather that the text of this book was just so damn clear and accessible that even a 6th grader could follow it.

Well, after reading through the book a few times, I realized I could compute just how much fuel the starship Enterprise needed to zoom around in space.

Well, actually, no. I didn't know about the square root of minus one yet. I also had no solid figures on what the equivalent to specific impulse a warp plasma using a dilithium conversion of matter/antimatter explosion was.

Relativistic Kinetic Energy

So, instead, I decided, since I knew what specific impulse was from my geek eldest brother, I decided to find out just how much fuel it would take for 190,000 tons of the Enterprise to go from zero to almost the speed of light (.99c) using its impulse drive. I just found the (theoretical) numbers in other books at the library, applied No. 2 pencil to yellow tab paper, plugged in the numbers into the equation for relativistic momentum, and voila!

Imagine my disappointment, when my figures indicated a fuel tank full of liquid hydrogen approximately ten times the volume of the USS Enterprise.

Well, my sixth grade calculations were off just a bit. Really more like a fuel tank a thousand times the volume of the Enterprise. Nevertheless, I was quite disillusioned with the show.

(I think that was also the year I figured a loving personal God was also probably not in the offings as well. At least, no God worth worshiping. But that was done strictly via good old fashioned logic and scholasticism. So, two birds with one stone, basically).

But the graph for relativistic momentum provided me with a new epistemological metaphor for science and technology and truth. See? The closer you get to absolute truth, the harder it gets to get there. That particular mental model stuck with me well through high school, until I got to college.

No, I did not become a postmodern relativist butthead, thank you. I just realized that:

1) There may be no such thing as absolute truth
2) If such a thing exists, the path to it may be not so straightforward and direct
3) There's always going backwards, backtracking, dead ends, blind alleys, and wild goose chases
4) Even if you manage to struggle to the top of one mountain, there's a whole new, much bigger range on the horizon.

Now what do I think about stuff like this?

I think... I think I need a nap.

The Worm and the Thing

2011-11-21T09:03:00.001-08:00

- or - Why Buy the Cow When You Can Get the Milk For Free?

I'll just call them Victor (as in Frankenstein). Pardon the nationality mashup, since we don't know who they are, but have a pretty good idea that they are a they and that they are either Russian or Ukrainian (I'm betting Russian).

I call them Victor because they created a monster. It's theirs and they pwn it. They created more than just a monster, though. They created a whole new business model, and it is the wave of the future. And it is brilliant, because they borrowed from the best, the strategy of evolution itself.

In 1938 John Campbell wrote a science fiction novella called "Who Goes There?" Later it was adapted into two movies. The first movie by Howard Hawks, "The Thing From Another World", was considered a science fiction horror movie classic. The second movie, John Carpenter's "The Thing", conforms more to the original story. In Hawks' version, the monster is your standard humanoid monster, ala Frankenstein's monster. In Carpenter's version, it is much more alien, more like the Blob - all consuming, but with that imposter twist - and the accompanying paranoia as to whom to trust.

I've read Campbell's novella, and it scared the hell out me. I'll tell you why. One of the more delicious fears one can have is not fear of death, but fear of lack of control. The alien creature doesn't just consume you. It imitates you. It enslaves you. It mutilates your mind and will, and binds you to service it. The other factor is just the right amount of information. In a horror flick, or in a story, you need just enough information to know that something is a threat, perhaps even an existential threat, but not so much information that you are familiar with the threat. This has always been a problem in movies. How much of the monster do you show? Not enough, and it is all just boring. Too much, and the monster is just another character.

There is a defining scene in Campbell's story when the humans realize that even the tiniest piece of monster can take over an organism. And when one character realizes that their cows have not been monitored against "infection", and that they have all been drinking the milk.

"Mac, how long have the... cows been... not cows?"

It's a great creepy moment, when he realizes, in a fit of revulsion, hysteria, and self-loathing, that he may be a Thing and not even know it.

So it is with Victor's monster. What is Victor's monster? Well, you may have heard of it. It's called the Conficker Worm. It's a computer worm that was unleashed (as far as we know) back in 2008 or so.

Well, hold on. What's a worm? The term can be traced back to John Brunner's amazingly prescient 1975 science fiction novel "The Shockwave Rider". Brunner envisioned a future world connected by a global "data-net". The data-net, in turn, is controlled by a malevolent corporate-state entity. The protagonist of the story, a hacker named Nick Haflinger, creates a computer program he calls a "tapeworm", which infiltrates the net, takes control over computers, issues orders to replicate itself in still more computers, and, ultimately subverts the data-net, and releases all the nasty crony-capitalist secret files to the public.

Brunner chose to call the program a tapeworm because the viral code consisted of a string of segments that could each reproduce itself onto another computer - another "node" in the net.

The Conficker worm does pretty much that, but without the good intentions. Once this worm infiltrated a computer (yours, perhaps) it would look for others, and continue replicating as far as it could. All of these computers would then link themselves into a "botnet". A botnet is capable of good and bad things. The good witch versions of botnets could also be called "clouds", and they are capable of tremendous data-processing feats that allow complex problems to be solved, or vast amounts of data to be shared and stored. The bad witch version of botnets can be used to launch Denial of Service attacks against websites, or unleash a storm of spam, phish for identity theft, rattle cyberlocks for open doors to steal funds, or flood networks with all sorts of scareware and fraudulent bullshit. If you have enough computers and infiltrated the right systems, you could even, conceivably, disrupt a nation's electronic grid, or banks, or telephones, air traffic, financial markets, health-care systems, or even take down the entire Internet itself.

You could do all those awful things, that is, if you are thinking like a small-time hoodlum, a small-minded one-time blackmailer, a hooligan, a vandal, a stupid barbarian. But then again, for someone smart enough to code something that stymies even the hackers that created the Internet, why would you do that? There is so much more money to be had, power to be accrued, if your botnet is big and stable and lasts for a long, long time.

And there's the brilliant business model. Rather than raise havoc, or rent out access to the botnet to two-bit spammers and scammers, crooks, thieves, and blackmailing fraudsters, you could do a number of other neat things with it. Think of Victor as "ковбой", cowboy, or better still, a cattle baron, his botnet his dairy herd, and the Internet as the Great Plains filled with grass, free for the browsing.

Well, wait, wait, wait a minute, how big of a botnet are we talking about? Well, at one point, it's estimated that Conficker enslaved around 9 million computers, creating quite possibly something approaching the biggest platform on the planet. Oh, companies came up with anti-viral software to purge it, and institutions and businesses have wiped it off of their systems, but actually, it's still around. It's estimated by this guy to average at six and a half million PCs, marshaling a formidable eighteen million CPUs, and capable of generating 28 trillion bytes per second of bandwidth.

That's quite a cloud. The next biggest cloud is Google, with a measly 8% of capacity and processing power. Conficker is not a worm. Not anymore. Conficker is a Thing. A very, very big Thing, and this Thing is never, ever going to go away.

If you wanted to get rid of this Thing, what could you do? Well, create a bigger Thing to smush it, I guess. That's about it. And some people would like to do that, because they feel that this Thing out there represents a threat to freedom of information, and free access, and all that other technocrat-utopian crystal rainbows and marshmallow unicorns stuff that we all wish would happen.

But it won't happen. That Thing out there? It's not going away. And it's doing stuff. It's processing stuff. It's active. We don't what it's doing, but it's doing something.

Should you be scared? Nah.

If you spent all your time worrying about every existential threat that could befall you, why, you'd be paralyzed into inaction. This is just another annoyance. Or maybe not. Maybe it's just the way the future is. All I know is, unlike the movie "The Thing", this monster chose the respectable route. It lives net door, and, like the Munsters, might not be a good neighbor, but really hasn't done anything to call the cops out.

Victor may let us all know one of these days what kind of Thing he pwns. But I don't think he wants to wreck anything, not while he's making a good living off of it.

The Space Opera Ain't Over 'Til the Fat Alien Sings

2011-11-18T09:33:00.001-08:00

Not sure why, but lately, people in Russia have been actively searching for this blog's URL. Not sure what that all that is about, but to my curious Russian friends, I say "Привет!"

I'd say more, but my college Russian is really rusty, and about all I remember now is obscenities and, you know, phrases like: "The pencil is on the table" or "Your sister is very hot".

(Although I am told that my spoken Russian is impressively native-sounding. A big shout-out to my former professors at Indiana University for stressing correct pronunciation).

In the previous essay, in my response to observation on intelligence being the absence of stupidity, Barry queries: "Isn't dark the absence of light?"

A ZPE Formula

Well, you know, Barry, that all was just metaphor, not to mention anthropomorphic metaphor, but, no. No. There is no such thing as dark. If one examines what the emptiest empty is, one finds out that this state is called the Zero Point Energy state.

This can be empirically demonstrated through the Casimir effect. And in fact, a much more dramatic experiment has recently been conducted where light was created out of a vacuum. Sadly, harvesting the Zero Point Energy violates Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle, but this has not stopped bad science fiction scriptwriters or crank inventors from utilizing it.

But you know when it comes to bad science fiction, space opera is up there. I'm not ashamed to admit that I can't enough of that. And I've often considered a realistic space opera story. You know, one that obeys the laws of physics, or at least recognize the established physical limits?

Some say it can't be done. They claim such a story would be boring.

Take the speed of light limit. (Yes, I know, they claim to have broken the light barrier, but I suspect some unknown characteristic about neutrinos that is much more interesting). It eliminates the whole Horatio Hornblower in Space treatment favored by the likes of Star Trek. Difficult to keep the plot moving when it (optimistically) takes decades or centuries to move a scene or episode from one interstellar location to the next. It either calls for a new cast every episode (generation ships), or an immortal - and incredibly patient and persistent - cast of characters.

Is that it? Is that about the only road block to space opera? Well, yeah, within the context of a TV series or a Hollywood movie, yes.

Are there other limits to worry about? Well, perhaps, although it is hard to see how it would affect a story line. Some could put a damper on technological progress for us and any aliens that are out there.

That emptiest empty, that puts the kibosh on free energy.

Coldest cold? Absolute zero. You can only suck so much energy out of something. Again you run into Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle with that, but it still allows you to do cool things with Bose-Einstein condensates, and perform all sorts of optical tricks, possibly for computing (and also living into the bleakness of cold, thin soup era of the universe after the end of the all-too-brief Stellar Age). But effects on space opera? None, I think.

Densest dense? Well, neutron star dense, as far as we know, and applications effected might be for data storage. Although again QM suggests no information is lost in a black hole. In which case the ultimate servers and nodes for the Cosmic Internet are those supermassive black holes at the heart of quasars.

Smallest small? I don't know. Plan on shrinking anything? That plot device really verges more on fantasy, and anyway is of limited dramatic potential. It does put a limit on just fast data can be processed, or how closely something can be scanned. The old teleporter may not need the granular resolution of the Planck length, but that's your strict limit. (And if it turns successful matter transmission requires a scan length/time less than the smallest small, then no beaming down to planets).

Here's one that actually may be important: the hottest hot. Theoretically (depending on who you talk to), you can go all the up to 10 to the 30th degrees kelvin. That's... that's pretty hot. Although practically, you are limited to about 4 billion degrees C before you start to see virtual particle/antiparticle pair creation kick in. This again, if you are needing to transmit something over a small volume or bandwidth, like information or teleported objects, can get into trouble. (If for example, to incorporate all the information, you need a 14 petawatt laser beam confined to .001 millimeter aperture to beam your crew to the surface of a planet, then it, ooh, it gets messy and ugly).

Astrofood by Waldemar von Kozak

On an unrelated note, in keeping with the theme, a British company named Shackelton Energy plans on setting up Moon mines by 2020. I assume they will want to use robots more extensively than they plan on doing. The idea is to mine the Moon's estimated billions of tons of buried water ice at the poles to manufacture rocket fuel. Presumably, it would be better to wait on that, and consider perhaps that the future may find a wiser use for these one-time resources? No?

Oh well, perhaps by 2020 most people will be too fat to be ferried to the Moon. Americans, at least.

Hah! Stupid, fat, lazy, dumb, stupid, fat Americans! You're fat!

S = k ln W

2011-11-17T08:28:00.001-08:00

Herr B's gravestone in Vienna, Austria

The title of this essay is the Boltzmann equation. It is carved upon his gravestone in the same cemetery where Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, and the Strauss family are also buried. The form of the equation inscribed on his tomb was actually first written by Max Planck, but that's fine as the original equation written in 1872 by Herr B contains partial derivatives which are hard to carve in stone.

The terms such that where S is the entropy of a system, it can be described by the Boltzmann Constant k (1.38067 joules per degree kelvin) multiplied by natural logarithm of W, which is the number of states accessible to that system.

In plain English, the entropy of a system is determined by the number of ways that the system's components can be arranged. If we are dealing with a gas, it is the number of ways the gas particles can float around, interact, and collide with each other. It's a very, very, very, very large number of ways, so to get the numbers into a manageable form (read small numbers small enough for tiny brains to handle), you take the logarithm of it. This equation links entropy to probability. And, in a roundabout fashion I have no time to explicate, it also has something to do with thermodynamics, and the so-called 2nd Law.

Yeah, and so what? Well, this equation, along with Boltzmann's contribution of a statistical approach to the kinetic theory of gases, and still more, supplies the very broad shoulders that allow Max Planck et al to stand upon. It pointed the way for the development of Quantum Mechanics - by far the most successful set of theories ever developed.

And there's more. Once the American electrical engineer, Claude Shannon, grabbed ahold of Boltzmann's concepts, and developed his own version of Herr B's H-function and the term entropy, then the whole field of information theory opened up. (Although it should be noted that Mr. Shannon's claim that information theoretic entropy is the same as statistical entropy is in dispute in some circles).

Finally we get to the weird stuff. When Shannon investigated the informational aspects of communications, he found that a message transmitted with optimal efficiency over a channel of limited bandwidth looks exactly like random noise. Not surprising when you think about it. A message with the largest choice of arrangements will have the highest probability of not being degraded in all arrangements. So, the more random, the more likely to get through (whatever it is, noise, interference, etc.)

Not to be confused with...

Black-body power curve

When applied to a message broadcast over the electromagnetic spectrum (i.e. using an EM transmission medium) the most information-efficient format is indistinguishable from noise or 'static' (or, if you prefer, it will resemble black-body radiation).

Okay. And um, so...? So, uh, what do we know is all static? Shit on the TV? How about quasars? OR the cosmic microwave background? Could it be we are getting messages beamed to us all the time, and we are just too stupid to figure it out?

(Oh, as far as my contention that intelligence as such does not exist? That stupidity is a real universal force. And that, just as 'cold' is the absence of heat, so 'intelligence' is the absence of stupid, well, I do really need to go on? Like Shannon entropy, there are very few ways to do the smart thing, but a very, very, very, very large number of ways to fuck things up. QED).

What if they held a Singularity, and nobody came?

2011-11-16T07:02:00.001-08:00

Brain Injury Map: I think I took a hit to the Phonics

It's apocryphal and no doubt bullshit, but I once heard that you lose 10 IQ points every time you suffer a concussion.

Which means I am one knock on the head away from being a chipmunk. I'll be looking to squirrels and birds for advice after the next one.

This essay may actually come close to being a random walk. Not because I've suffered a concussion and can't think properly, but because I've four or five topics I want to cover and can't decide. I 'll just split this up into a number of essays. I guess that would the logical thing to do, but...

I got a big old knot right behind my left ear from slipping and falling on ice and planting my head right onto a metal stair rail.

It fucking hurt.

I mean, the kind of hurt where all you can do is just sit there and make that the spittle inhale sound and and a "AHH!" exhale, and let the entire universe revolve around that hot spot of pain. The kind of hurt where you've got to wait at least a minute before the profanity starts up. The kind of hurt where if someone asks you if you are OK, you tell them the truth. "No, I'm not OK, you stupid asshole!"

I'm guessing that big old bump is right above the superior temporal sulcus. Judging from the brain injury map, I really don't need to have this area damaged again, and I'll tell you why.

When I was in the 4th grade, I had really a bad fever. And when I came out of it and got back to school, the teacher noticed I was talking louder than normal. They brought in the hearing test guy, Mr. Carpenter. Mr. Carpenter determined that I had a hearing loss, specifically in the upper registers, from nerve damage. The damage made it difficult to understand conversation, especially with background noise. Later, after realizing I could not understand song lyrics on the radio, I suspected the nerve damage had been more than just loss of the ability to hear higher frequencies, but that I had difficulty recognizing word sounds. In other words, the damaged area wasn't the nerves in the ear, but in the brain. I've often wondered what an fMRI would reveal? A dead zone?

In any case, this, plus an ability to think only with pictures, makes me suspect that language is overrated.

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

Recently, Paul Allen thinks that Ray Kurzweil is dead wrong about the Singularity. Ray Kurzweil, in turn, thinks that Paul Allen does not have the first clue, and that the Singularity is still on schedule to occur on or about 2045.

Personally, Kurzweil's personal quest for uploading suggests to me that he does not get laid often enough. Not that I think he's hopelessly wretched, but rather he lives too much up inside his head. Ray is so concerned about the mind is brain metaphor that he forgets that the mind is the body, not just the brain.

Here's the deal. For the past few months, I've changed my workouts to include a lot more core exercises. You know, working on the trunk, the abs, obliques, back and buttocks. And I must say, my core is vastly improved. So much so, that I am quite the fucking machine. Working on all those muscles down in that area have really got me in shape for that kind of activity.

Hmm, not really sure if I'm getting this across properly.

Now, that there's some fancy fucking

Let's take one back extension exercise, designed to improve the lower back, which basically sets you up to fuck a Swiss ball. Not only fucking, but, with your hands behind your head, some professional porn Olympics fancy fucking. That type of activity, where you are doing much more than just the mechanical motion, but paying close attention to the form, the experience of the form, the experience of the motion, the experience of the combination of pain and pleasure, effort, and exertion, that type of activity is what Life is all about. How Life should be lived. Aware and active. Not that Zen Buddha detached bullshit. But a whole body and mind involved experience - wallowing like a pig in mud in the world, the flesh, and all the iterated reflections thereof and thereupon.

If Kurzweil thinks he can just do a physical scan of his brain, his connectome, his chemical orchestration, and leave it that, why, I suspect he ends up a head in a jar. In other words, he is more than just his brain, he is brain plus body, plus experiences, plus memory, plus life. And quite frankly, I suspect if you want to be able to handle experiences as esoteric and fulfilling in an uploaded computer state, you should at least completely replicate that wonderful whole body experience of fucking.

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

The one assumption I've noticed about the Vingean or Kurzweillian Singularity is that they require superintelligent computers to be created for it all to go down.

I question that assumption. It strikes me as unnecessary. My current working definition of the Singularity is, quite simply: "All bets are off". In other words, you cannot predict the after from the before.

Example: Life. Before life occurred on planet Earth, you had inorganic chemical processes occurring. True, they could be complicated. True, they may or may not have had feedback loops. But the thing is, there was probably (can't say for sure, wasn't there) did not have metabolism, or balanced disequilibria, or replication, or reproduction, or any of those things that we characterize as Life. and then afterwards, however the hell it happened, you have, wow, all that amazing shit, that organic chemistry we call Life. Before, dead as hell and boring. Afterwards, trending from the before, why, not a clue, not a hint.

Didn't. See. That. Coming. No. Sir. Ree.

Ah, question. Any intelligent design involved in that? I'm betting no.

So, why the need for hyperintelligence now for the next big thing?

Working Untitle

2011-11-11T14:43:00.001-08:00

I eventually come up with titles for all my artworks. I don't like "Untitled". To me, it suggests you really don't give a shit about what you made. Maybe that's why I rarely give a shit for pieces titled "Untitled".

In any case, more raw footage of the... whatever this is going to be. I have fifteen of the little hairy sperm bacteria done, with five more that need repairs and finishing. The metal froze out before filling the forms, and so I have to fashion little hairs and tails for the guys, weld them on, and then grind them to be seamless with the rest of the piece. The barrel-shaped bacteria I am done with. And I like the way they are arranged. So, approximately 30% of the whole project is done. the other 70% is presentation. that's going to take awhile to figure out.

I punched in my signature on all of the pieces. This is what it looks like, a reverse "JK", courtesy of good old "Proudly made in the USA" American quality control and assurance. The punch set I got had the letter J backwards. Makes me look forwards to synthetic biology and nanotech. I wonder what they'll fuck up with that?

In any, case, long day for me. I finished burning out all of the ceramic shells for the molten metal pour tomorrow, Saturday the 12th. The students around really hot stuff element of the class is, for me, nto that big of a deal. I herd them pretty well. The really nerve-wracking day of the semester will be the Monday evening class when they start cutting and grinding metal. Sparks will fly right into an eye. I will be constantly yelling at people to wear their safety gear.

I realized just now that the whole class would be a lot easier and faster if I just did all the work for them. But then, it's not life enriching, is it?

Design Freeze

2011-11-09T18:46:00.000-08:00

Briefly, because I have worked a 12 hour day and want to go home and take a shower. Get the smell of sweat and copper off me.

But I feel need to share what the manic/depressive cycle of art making has currently churned out. And it is a manic/depressive cycle for me. Two very dry years, and now, all of a sudden, I've no time at all to anything but make art. And it doesn't help that my regular job is getting in the way.

A number of years ago, we at the college were fortunate enough to have a fellow named Dan Lane who made art here. He used to teach at the Art Institute of Chicago, doing illustration and design. He was retired when I met him, making all sorts of interesting shadow boxes and things out of, well, pretty much anything that came to hand.

Dan was my hero.

Eighty-eight years old at the very end, and still cranking out art, and the art he was making was just... kicking ... my ass.

When his wife died, I figured, well, that's it. Dan has got a few months in him, and like all old birds that lose their mate, he'll fall off the cliff. That seems to be the way it is with men. They just fall off the cliff.

Women linger. They lose their husbands, and they just keep going. So Dan was a surprise. He managed a good two years past his wife's death.

Of course, eventually he slowed down, and then he started to stop eating. I tried to make him eat. I'd bring soup and bread from the school cafeteria, which makes really good soup and chili. I'd always make sure there was lots of butter for the bread. And after a while, he wouldn't eat it. He was ready to die, and I was trying to make him live. He got mad at me about that. So, after awhile, I realized how selfish I was, and I succumbed to his wishes.

Other people tried to keep him alive, but then he died.

Anyway, I remember a story he told me about a student he had at SAIC who he said was just brilliant. The kid was a natural, a visual genius, and could just crank out the most spectacular designs, and there was a bright future ahead for him. And then the kid froze. He got so tangled up and fussy that eventually he couldn't even produce a design. He would just stare at blank paper. And that was the end of the kid's art career. He was afraid to produce anything that wasn't perfect.

Now, reason I mention this is I think that is what I've been going through the past two years. Part of the problem at least. The dry spell has been a case design freeze. Failure to launch. So, now, having at least recognized this particular problem (and who knows what the next kink in the knot will be), I am trying to crank out as much shit as I can, and not worry to much about whether it's good or not, or been done before, or is original, or what have. Because if it is any of those things, why, I can just recycle the metal and start over.

So, I've been casting metal like crazy all week, to get my stuff out of the way (in anticipation of the class molten metal pour this coming Saturday), and trying to grind, sand, and patina bronze pieces. I still have about thirty pieces to go, and how to present them and all that stuff.

But anyway, here is the raw footage of some of the stuff, presented without further comment.

Catalog this one under "Ee-yeww"

2011-11-07T16:06:00.000-08:00

I've spent all day burning out wax from the student pieces for bronze class. The class starts in fifteen minutes, and I've gotten through the last batch, which looked like this in the kiln:

We have metal tray filled with water underneath the kiln to reclaim wax, this is what was in the tray:

Yeah, eww. That is all the red extruded tube wax. I think I will hold on to it, and maybe wear it under my shirt to show off.

We are the 99%...

2011-11-03T17:03:00.000-07:00

... if by 99% you mean percentage of species now extinct, and you add the qualifier 'eventually'.

There are days when I think, "You know what? We're fucked. We are just circling the drain". This is one of those days, and not for any particular circumstance or feeling or mood, but more on just a specific influx of information.

Now, does this mean I give up? No way. I think that whatever hope that died years ago with the realization that we have probably trashed the planet past the point where it will support us in the manner we (we being Americans, of course) are accustomed to, that hope has been replaced with a stubborn cussedness. I just heave a big old sigh and just wait to see how bad bad can get.

And when I say "trashed the planet", this is not to say we've trashed the planet. Far from it. Planet's a mean old monster, shake us off like a bad case of fleas (as George Carlin once said). Or, more if you prefer your Will Durant: "Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice".

And when I say "trashed the planet", this is not to say we as a species are threatened with extinction. Far from it. We are an opportunistic omnivorous generalist species. Things will have to get really, really bad to wipe us all out.

When I say "trashed the planet", this is to say that we have just completely fucking trashed our rental apartment, punched holes in walls, allowed bathtubs to overflow, strewn empties in corners, smeared feces in rugs, pissed on the couch during naps, set carpets ablaze, and, in short, and we won't receiving any of our deposit back.

So what put me into such a wonderful mood? For starters, it might be this quote, from Richard Ellis, author of Hive Mind:

People believe in their hearts that a piece of raw fish is worth $600 a plate. And one of the main reasons it's worth $600 is because you can afford it and I can't, but they can. That makes it very special, and it makes the people who eat it special. Any kind of luxury goods largely come from that sort of statement: I can afford it, and you can't. I'll drive a Maserati, even if I can't drive it faster than 65 miles per hour in most of the United States. I can afford a $280,000 car, and you're stuck with a Dodge Neon. I can fly a private jet, drive a Maserati, do anything I bloody well please, including having a $600 piece of fish. And you can't. And this is the brutal truth: bluefin, which beyond their intrinsic value as living creatures happen to be one of the universe's more majestic species, a Platonic ideal of oceanic speed and grace, aren't being extinguished by greed. They're being sacrificed to our vanity, pretension, and ostentation - most pathetic of our vices.

Ellis is talking about the bluefin tuna, overfished to the brink of extinction. Given that it is a much prized delicacy, the sensible thing to do would be to quit fucking fishing it and give the population a chance to recover, but instead its rarity puts into even greater demand.

We are told (although there is some debate going on) that Comet Chicxulub wiped out the dinosaurs. Comet Chicxulub is estimated to have had the explosive power of a hundred trillion tons of TNT.

There are larger impact craters. The Sudbury crater in Canada is twice as big, and impact that created the Vredefort Crater in South Africa - the largest verified impact crater - is estimated to have been ten times Chicxulub.

Sudbury and Vredefort both occurred some two billion years ago, back when nothing much was happening here anyway. It was "just" microbes back then, and nothing much happened to them.

(Actually, more and more evidence is being compiled that these impact events really didn't do much in the way of hurting the planet. One wonders exactly how much of an effect the rather pathetic mere gigatons of the world's combined nuclear arsenals would have. And the answer is, we'd get our hair mussed, but the hysterics of all life wiped out is a bit much).

So what do you need to get a really good extinction event going? Well, not counting the disappearance of Ice Age megafauna to hunter/gatherers (and to be fair, you can't rule out climate change as a factor), you have to go with agriculturalists. The last ten thousand years have seen an increasingly rapid extinction rate that is unparalleled in the fossil record. Yes, even the Permian-Triassic extinction event, the Mother of all Extinction Events is getting a run for it's money.

And it's all due to, global nuclear war? Supervolcanoes? Hyper greenhouse event from giant burps of methane ice? Comet strike? Nope, little old us. With our land clearing, our pets, our vermin, our diseases, our pests.

Is it too late? There are days when I think, nope, we got maybe a decent chance. Maybe, if we can pull our heads out of asses, we can turn things around.

BUT, they are very specific heads pulled out of very specific asses that are needed, and this may require massive surgical intervention.

Then there are days, like today, when I think, nope, the turning point was August 14th, 1975. That was the perigee of our existence, and everything after that is a let down.

I could be wrong. Check back with me tomorrow. Because there is that stupid intense little gamma ray burst of cheerfulness stubbornly wedged in the center of my soul, even on days like this.

From Wax to Bronze

2011-11-01T17:11:00.000-07:00

Wax pieces rigged up on a tree

Dipped in a ceramic slurry, and covered in fused silica stucco sand.

Second dip and sand coating, and three or four more to go.

Inside the burnout kiln.

Closeup of the burned out ceramic shells in kiln.

Ceramic shells in the pouring box

Me and student aide Vicki removing crucible from furnace with tongs (bronze temp is 2058F, and note nonchalant handling of crucible with one hand)

Placing the crucible in the pouring yoke

Set up to pour with the yoke

Pouring into the first shell

Pouring into the second shell

Closeup of pour

I never get tired of looking at molten metal

Success. All three pieces poured without mishap. Soon we will find out went wrong...

Nothing wrong here, but it is the first thing I ask. You know, not, let's see if there is a pony in there.

Ah, here's something wrong. The sperm tails froze out early. Note to self, add blind vents to tails on next waxes.

Again with the freeze out on tails, and the pili as well

You get the idea. There are 10,000 hideous things that can happen inside a mold.

Cut off the tree, sandblasted, and note the heat tear (the jagged crack) at the base of the sperm tail. This will have to be gouged out and welded.

The Dragon-Kings

2011-10-28T11:13:00.000-07:00

Back in the summer of 1977, I worked as a janitor in a magnet factory. After the first half-hour there, being shown my duties, I was pretty much on autopilot for the next three months. I could have used the time to really develop my dope-taking skills, but there were just a little too many industrial hazards in the place to make that a valid activity.

Fortunately, someone in the break room had an appetite for science and technology. I'd find magazine issues of Science Digest, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and the occasional Aviation Week or Scientific American. An article caught my eye about a NASA proposal to send automated factories to the Moon to create fuel depots and piles of prefab construction materials for future colonies and missions. Not just automated factories, mind you, but self-replicating automated factories that would produce fuel depots and construction materials as more-or-less excreted afterthoughts.

The article referred to these self-replicating factories as "robot farms". (No doubt alluding to ant farms as an applicable association to get the self-replicating part across to the public). I thought about those robot farms whilst sweeping floors and burning trash through the summer months. In the spring semester just prior, I had taken classes in mathematical models and simulation, a FORTRAN programming class, and an interesting elective on microbiology. Not knowing a damned thing about the required machinery for robot farms, the conditions on the surface of the moon, the composition of the lunar regolith, or even the amount of programming required to make a robot farm self-sustaining, I decided to figure out the theoretical - the ballpark number - aspects of the endeavor.

I felt no need to investigate the actual specifics of the robot farm, but merely to treat it as a reproductive unit. To stick with the ant farm metaphor, one would assume there would be different castes of machines. A specialized worker caste, obviously, to stripmine and gather minerals, smelt and separate the valuable materials, process, assemble, and store basic components. Perhaps an intermediate network caste - railroad, conveyer belt, and radio or telephone robots to link, coordinate, and ship materials and information around (as will be seen later, this might be the most important caste). And then their would be the reproductive caste, that would further construct the necessary robots, as well as program them. At the time, I was not aware of John von Neumann's investigations into self-replicating phenomena, in either the form of cellular automata, or machinery, but basically, this was the gist of it.

And I assumed, since NASA was contemplating it, that plans for building these robot farms with materials available upon the Moon existed and were feasible (apparently, the robots would be mostly made of iron, titanium, and glass, based upon the composition of the lunar soil. Couple this with solar power - either as concentrated heat or converted electric, and your best bet is some type of silicon ecology). That NASA would use processes that could be used on the lunar surface (no carbon, no hydrogen, no water, but plenty of dust to gum things up, and sunshine, but also solar magnetic storms and flares and gamma and X- rays and things that really mess with electronics). So all NASA needed was to, well, shoot some big magical metal seed pod up there and get the whole enterprise to going.

As such, really, I just assumed the plans for the damned things would work out, and could concentrate on how - and how fast - they'd "grow". Treating one robot farm as a reproductive unit, a logical starting place was Fibonacci's rabbits. In 1202, Fibonacci thought about rabbit pairs producing. He assumed that they would take a certain amount of time to mature, and from then on out, they would breed. So, generation-wise, 1 pair would take time to mature, then produce another pair. The new pair takes a generation to mature, but the first pair continues to breed and makes another pair, and so you have 3 pairs. And then the first pair has another pair, and the now mature second pair breeds and has a pair, and now you have 5 pairs, and so on.

Fibonacci Rabbits

When you add up the numbers, you'd produce the Fibonacci sequence, and they'd go like:
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 2584, 4181, 6765, 10946, 17711, 28657, 46368, 75025, 121393, 196418, 317811, 514229, 832040, 1346269,....

So, after 30 generations, there would be more than a million machine complexes on the Moon. Give them ten square miles territory each, and that's 13 million square miles of strip mined golden goodness. Keep in mind, the Moon's surface area is around 14 million square miles, that's something. Throw in some generation time number - a month or a year or even a decade, and the Moon is over run with machines and the material instrumentalities of human civilization in a very short time span, compared to its geologic life.

But, like the Drake Equation, these are all fairly silly and arbitrary numbers that don't really mean anything. First of all, notice that Fibonacci's rabbits are immortal. If rabbits die, that slows down the sequence some. For example, if a pair dies after, say, three generations, then the sequence is 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 12, 16, etc.

Mother and Daughters

Something like that occurs just through geography. As mother farms send out a daughter farm, the logical, or obvious, arrangement to share surface resources ends up looking like a bee's honeycomb, since the densest packing of circles is hexagonal. A mother farm sends out daughter farms equidistant to her, and after six generations, she has nowhere to send the next, provided she can only start adjacent daughters. (This may seem an arbitrary restriction, but geography and transport play a role in this). Things get worse for the daughter farms. If we restrict colonizing to adjacent territories, daughter farms quickly run out of places for their own children. This is a geometric consequence of expansion. An expanding circle sees its area increase faster than its circumference. The ratio of circumference to area, as radius increases is 2

π r /

π r

², which simplifies to 2/r. As r tends to infinity, 2/r goes to zero. (Well, no, not zero, but a really, really, really tiny number). This decreasing ratio is the same problem that animals face with the surface area to volume ratio. For an increasingly large volume, it is difficult to bring in nutrients, or materials, through a (relative to size) increasingly smaller surface area. This is probably why there are no 30 foot long bacteria sliding around...

In any case, I'd assume NASA would have some stop code in the reproductive stack for those geographic reasons. Not to mention the fact that the lunar surface will not be uniform in resources. Some areas will be a horn of plenty, others sparse and penurious, and the honeycomb will be anything but regular. Then there is the fact that machines break down, and if enough components, workers, assembler what have you, fail, the whole farm fails and dies. So, no, even in the most optimistic fantasy scenario would you see the Moon populated with a robot ecology in a year, or a decade, or a century.

Pen and Ink Robot Farm Simulation

Since I did not have access to a computer (and affordable home PCs were still some years in the future), I filled up a notebook with graphic simulations, not to mention at one point I took over the dining room table and represented the robot farm "states" with coins. I still can't believe my parents put up with it for two weeks. The notebooks are gone, but a sample page would something like this (perhaps best viewed through hemp-remediated brain to get the idea):

Hemp, or more accurately, herb, being the operative descriptor for this examination.

Another term that comes to mind would be Monte Carlo masturbation.

As is often the case with a general mathematical analysis, even a substandard one as this, no significant insights or profound revelations come from anything like this. (Indeed, my high school leanings towards numerical Platonism were completely quashed by investigations into higher mathematics. Once you realize that the best models are little better than toys, that empirical observations of the the thing itself is the best simulation of all, the maths quickly lose their shine. Mathematics may be more than just counting, but not much else).

Graph of a Logistic Equation

In retrospect, I could have just spent three minutes looking at a logistic equation and been done with the whole thing. Of course, a logistic equation is kind of a dumb shit itself, if you don't know what the population growth (r) or carrying capacity of the environment (K) is, and that is the unknown factor that you want to find out.

Fortunately, there was that microbiology class I mentioned at the beginning of this essay to draws from. Interestingly, for an intro class, it was taught by a full professor. In retrospect, he was on his way out, towards retirement, had a few heretical ideas about evolution, and was therefore, relegated to the academic gulag. Still and all, he was a smart fucker, and he talked about things that only now are being considered.

Oh, sure, he presented the usual accepted canon of the Darwinian fundamentalists, with the singular gene and in sole and supreme primacy for inheritance, and yet the old guy also talked of how often singular microbes talked to each other - through shared RNA rings, diffusible molecules, proteins, and peptides and who knows all what else. The amount of chatter at the cellular level - quorum sensing, eavesdropping on competitors, synchronizing with collaborators, not only between members of the same species, but also across species, is really quite astounding, and probably a trillionfold-plus the amount of electromagnetic chatter we humans engage in. Not to mention things like biofilms, which seem to serve all sorts of mysterious multicellular purposes. Teams of things, groups of things, were far more interesting and compelling area of study. The old prof was not quite ready to commit to Lamarckian mechanism or teleological impetus, but there was clearly some sort of purpose to all this.

It wasn't until my return to college that I got to spend time in the computer lab to run simulations. The problem is, I really didn't know what I wanted to simulate, or even what the equations would look like to do it. As Richard Hamming famously said "Many a physicist has gotten the right number with the wrong equation". Multiply that sage observation for "wrong mathematical model". I had experienced this in my prior spring semester's "Mathematical Models and Simulations" when I was assigned to replicate the population model of a simple marine ecosystem with the Lotka-Volterra equations - only to find that these equations did not accurately model the ecosystem. (The "prey" adults ate the "predator" babies, and thus a key coupled feedback parameter was lacking from the equations).

Way too many hours wasted on this shit

Plus, those slippery network connections that the old microbiology prof had talked about were dancing in my head. I knew that I was dealing with some kind of power law scenario here (and, what with Benoit Mandelbrot having just coined the term "fractal" a mere three years before, I was clueless on that particular front as well).

I would have to turn to discrete structures, combinatorics and graph theory for the answers I wanted. Late night computing ended up being all about hemp-flavored Star Trek games on terminals connected to the mainframe computer.

Suffice to say, I was never quite up to the task, but what I lacked in quantitative analysis I made up for in qualitative, and a judicious use of highly unscientific inductive thing.

Long story short, it came down to this. A networked system of robot farms would look a lot less like a superorganism of an ant colony, or for that matter, the loosely linked organism of a sponge or a jellyfish, and a lot more like a multicellular organism of an animal, or actually, more like a... nervous system. Yeah. Like a brain. And that sent a little thrill of fear through me the first time I thought of it, I can tell that much.

Herr Gauss's Bell

So, thinking, on average, about what a typical sample of such a thing would, perhaps, a Hebbian or neural network, I figured the average behavior would not be a sample that could be described by a Gaussian distribution, a bell curve, but, given the power law characteristics, something that would have a fatter tail (keep in mind, this is me describing my thinking back then now).

It's only lately that I've found the term I didn't have back then to describe what I saw in head. Here's bascially what I saw. A robot ecology up on the stark surface of the Moon slowly and painfully gains a small foothold. Over time, all the little components, working together, working along a code that NASA wisely saw fit to allow to self-optimize, talking to each other about hazards and bonanzas, mileposts, and breakthroughs and setbacks, for the longest time is a small silicon ecology, and then, with a sudden effloresence, blossoms and blooms into... something else entirely. And it, this event, though I did not know it then, I would now call a technological or Vingean singularity. The difference, though, and this is important, is that whereas Vinge and his predecessors relied upon some type of intelligence to see it through, I saw that this particular disruptive event would require no Intelligent Design. It was all strictly through ratcheted happenstance.

And the other term I was lacking? To describe this world-changing paroxysm?

I have finally have a term for it, it would be a Dragon-King Event.

All my silly reductive analysis would not have caught any of it: "By cutting the mammoth in pieces, we observe only mice".

Hat Etiquette

2011-10-25T15:36:00.000-07:00

Before there was the fist tap, there was the doffing of the hat. If hats are back, I want to see hat etiquette back as well.

I've never been a hat person. Coming of age after the sixties, when the hat started to disappear from the men's fashion landscape, let alone after the proletarian clothing revolution of the 70s, there was just never any call for the wearing of a hat.

And I don't include the baseball cap in the category of hat wearing. Let's be clear on my opinions on this. There is a difference between a cap and a hat. The former is worn by children. The latter by adults.

Aw!

But, as I say, with the proletarian revolution, caps are now the new hats. I myself am a strict adherent of the revolutionary canon. If I could I'd show you a picture taken of me when I was about five or six years of age, you'd see that I am wearing the same clothes now. Jeans, T-shirt, tennis shoes. Given a choice this is the default mode.

Still, since about a year ago I received a gift from a friend in the form of a baseball cap, and I've taken to wearing one. But I also am following hat wearing etiquette, even if it is a child's cap.

So, here's an old school website for hat etiquette. I've modified the rules to suit myself. For example, the rules involved to "greet a superior", on the street, in calling indoors, or in passing, I strictly ignore, as no man is my superior. So forget that shit. Here are my rules:

1) When to remove your hat: When entering indoors, such as a home, restaurant, library, movie theater, school, office, or place of worship. Entering into a public buildings or events, such as a post office, grocery store, airport, sporting event, etc. does not require at removal. Rather than list all contingencies, the rule of thumb I took was: a man does not remove a hat where he does not seat himself. The hat is also removed when the national anthem is played, or when the flag is presented in parade.

2) When to tip or doff a hat: Always when greeting a lady as a sign of respect. Rather than list all possibilities, the rule of thumb I adopt is that a man tips or doffs his hat in situations where he would say "Excuse me", or "Thank you".

3) All around advice. Keep the hat clean. Never display the inside of the hat when tipping or greeting.

Does Intelligence Have Survival Value?

2011-10-20T13:58:00.000-07:00

Possibly short-term, at least for the East African Plains Ape, but long-term? I mean, as a modern species, we've been around for perhaps 200,000 years or so, and yet we are precipitating a once in a 100 million year extinction event. Part of it kicked off when we had nothing more than stone, wood, and leather to work with (the Ice Age megafauna extinctions).

Seeing as I'm a direct descendent of the pioneers who wiped out the Neanderthal, the dire wolf, the giant cave lion, and giant cave bear, I'm perversely proud of that. (Although I'm sure my ancestors would look at me, an above-average 21st century physical specimen, as a chicken-boned wimp with a tiny brain. Not very big. Not very strong. Not very clever.)

Point being, I've really to wonder about intelligence as a long-term survival trait. And the theme today is, has it happened before?

All those mass extinction events in the fossil record, all due to "natural' causes?

The late Ordovician, life still bound to the sea, and 50% of it wiped out. Mostly trilobites and invertebrates, but some primitive jawless fishes, and straight-shelled cephalopods in shallow tropical waters, with the vast Panthalassic Ocean spread over the entire Northern Hemisphere. Did the continent of Gondwana park itself at the South Pole, causing catastrophic glaciation, lowering the sea level and eliminating whole swathes of habitable shallow? Or did some intelligent cephalopods get too smart for their own good? Very difficult to develop any kind of technological civilization under water, but then, I'm thinking like a plains ape, with fire and smelted metals and dry sticks and stones ready to hand. Why not build tools out of modified life? Who says you can't create a bacterium to generate electricity, radio waves, nuclear fission? Not me. It could have happened.

The late Devonian, another 50% wipeout, and again primarily marine. Animals still stuck in the ocean, save for early tetrapods, but land plants have developed to create their special form of havoc. Did a clever relative of Ancanthostega manage to screw the pooch (anachronistically speaking) upon landfall? Or did the tentacled ones manage a second chance, only to blow it?

The Big One. The End Permian. 250 million years ago. 96% of all marine species. 70% of all land vertebrates. Was it a comet? A continental United States sized volcanic eruption now known as the Siberian Traps? Super global warming from the coal deposits burned by said eruptions? Temperature extremes from the forming of the supercontinent Pangaea? Revenge of the hydrogen sulfide excreting purple bacteria? A combination of all of the above? Or was it one of the mammal's ancestors, a therapsid with a too much brain and not enough sense? One over time able to manipulate rocks into rockets, and thence to tip them with nuclear barbs? Would there even be a fossil record for that?

The end Triassic. Kind of disappointing as extinctions go, but still a respectable 48% death rate. it is thought to be due to the some two million cubic kilometers of magma released during the Central Atlantic breakup, along with two quadrillion kilograms of sulfur di- and trioxide molecules. But then again, it might have been an early dinosaur with a big brain.

The Cretaceous. Well, everyone knows it was Comet Chicxulub, right? The "tail of the devil" went smacko, whacko, slapping right into the ocean north of the Yucatan with an explosive force of 100 million megatons of TNT. Or could it have been some feathered serpents? Some smart version of Quetzalcoatl mucking up the timeline with a fissile slugfest with some other mythical power? And throw in a little peyote to get the whole Mexican flavored apocalyptic vision quest to going?

Which brings us full circle to the present. Or did I leave out the Oxygen Crisis of 2.5 billion years ago? Well, those of us In The Know, know it was the Spirochete Conspiracy. Yeah, Penrose's (if you buy into Penrose, which I don't, but never deny a source of entertainment) quantum-minded microtubules, not quite entirely tamed into eukaryotes yet.

The Crazy Man Strategy

2011-10-17T15:56:00.000-07:00

So, there was the strange plot to kill the Saudi ambassador on American soil. And various theories have been put forth as to how and why and what and all that.

Rank Amateur

But the one thing that the paranoid, short-sighted, small timers invariably note is that Iran just wants to warn us, makes us scared, deter from interfering further in the region. And also its a message, basically that it is ready, willing, and able to create havoc on American soil.

Yeah, right. As if they were dealing with a rational people.

It's what they call the Crazy Man Strategy. Act all ape shit, and they'll be all "hey man you don't want to mess with that crazy person. They're cr-rrazy!"

The problem with the Crazy Man Strategy is you got to do more than just talk the talk, or even walk the walk. You gotta demonstrate. You got to bite off noses. Burn houses with people in them. Bomb 'em back to stones. You got make it clear, absolutely clear, that you are ready to do whatever it takes to be sure that everyone, and I mean everyone, knows that you are over-the-bend, batshit, bugfuck, don't give a shit about anything or anyone at anytime anywhere completely fucking apeshit insane.

And we Americans got that act down pat. Professional.

Come on now. Iran gets a nuke? So fucking what? What are they gonna do? Put it in a cargo container, and waste LA? Chicago? Washington?

And they think what would happen?

Face it. Krushchev tried the crazy act. Bang his shoe on the podium at the UN. Nothing. We would burn the fucking world down for a few pitiful tactical nukes in Cuba.

I mean, we know how to nuke people. We're good at it. We have no compunctions about it. No hesitation. Not a second of sleep. Not a tear, not even a crocodile tear.

That little bug smear on the windshield? That was Tehran. Want to play the bonus round? Try for Isfahan?

You got nothing.

Instructional Videos!

2011-10-17T15:17:00.000-07:00

I tried uploading videos using the school's Piece of Shit IMac, and quite frankly, Steve Jobs blows, and his products (software products at least) are shit.

That's what I think.

So, anyway, I tried to give you an artisan's eye view here in the videos (I believe it's also called gonzo, or monkeycam video). Unfortunately, it would not all load properly and so I will offset the video with a textual description as well. But first, here's the setup I threw together in about ten minutes to get that crittercam experience to working:

The E coli bugs, the ones with the spermy tails, were made from a mold I made from some plastic jelly bean candy containers I found in the grocery store a couple years ago around Easter time. You soak the plaster mold in water. You pour molten wax into the mold. Let the wax skin up a bit over the course of a minute or so, pour the excess wax back out into the wax pot. Here's a video of that plaster mold:

Here's a quick video of my wax tools. Some of my wax tools:

Note in particular the carbon encrusted mini spatula like tool made from a piece of welding rod. This is the hot tool I use most often for "welding" pieces of wax together. You heat it up in the flame of an alcohol lamp, and apply it to the wax. I was not able to upload the latter part of the final video, which shows me using this tool to finish up the attachment of one of the tendrils to the jelly bean body, but you get the general idea. The touch and timing component here is key, learned from experience, as to how long you can apply the tool to melt the wax, as well as the interaction between gravity and the surface tension of wax to avoid drips and spills. It is part of the reason it would be very nice for the learner to experience what the artisan is doing. I think the combination of visual and haptic data would cut the learning time down by a considerable amount. The only thing better, of course, would be a download of my 20 years experience. Maybe. But then, if you can do that, what's the point? Right?

Right?

Anyway, here's the monkeycam video. It felt really weird manipulating the tools through the camera, but I could get used to it:

A final video, in which I attach a sperm tail to a jelly bean utilizing fire and a hot knife:

(Oh, and by the way, I just heard from Kohler! I was... rejected! 349 proposals for 16 slots. Eh! So what. Try again for next year).

Creepsicle, anyone?

2011-10-14T11:34:00.000-07:00

I believe, working on these things, I've had about fifteen people so far commenting about how weird they are.

Well, good, that was the point.

I get the feeling that these little fellers are communicating to each other behind my back. Perhaps, even, making group decisions... like the real things.

Working on my wax forms representing bacteria, I put together a makeshift cardboard tray to hold them on. As is usually the case in art making, it is the inadvertent action that results in the most interesting thing.

I can remember - many times - cutting up some wood for a project, only to realize that the scraps are more visually interesting than the intended object's parts.

Go figure.

So... I guess, when I am done with the current project, I'll be making a Creepsicle Tray for chocolate covered creepie-crawlies, and so near Halloween as well. Might be worth making them edible.

The Monkey Mirror Neuron Experience

2011-10-11T18:33:00.000-07:00

I don't know exactly what it should be called. I don't know what animals have mirror neurons. I don't even why we have mirror neurons. But I just like the alliterative phrase. And here's what it would be.

Well, actually, I think it was brought up in a comment over at Mr. Nulan's Liminal Perspective on Consensual Reality which got me to thinking. And danged if I can find the comment now, but it was basically an invitation through various electronic remediative devices to engage in a Tine Experience.

Although actually no. Vernor Vinge's alien race, the Tines, were these doglike creatures that collectively formed one individual. Kind of like the Borg, but without the technical implants. This was all biological, thoughts shared through sounds. Rather than a Tine experience, which would subsume the individual into something larger, this is more like, just a highly integrated form of Call of Duty multiplayer video game. Or so I suppose. I've never played it.

In any case, let's cut to my chase. Teaching how to work with a material, be it whether I'm glassblowing, or blacksmithing, or throwing pots, or carving wax, I know that the prime method is mimicry. The little monkey mirror neurons are firing so hard and fast in my student's heads you can practically here the static. This causes me to constantly practice the fundamentals so that the students will not immediately pick up bad habits. And I often repeat basic movements again and again until they get it.

How much easier, I wonder, would they get it if they could be me.

If they could, through electronic sensory devices follow my gaze, feel the weights in my hands, judge the shifting of my posture, all the while I'm talking.

How would that work out?

"This just in. Steve Jobs is still dead"

2011-10-10T13:01:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has paid attention to my scribblings must have figured out by now that I don't buy into the Great Man theory of history - unless, of course, we are talking about psychopaths. I would probably agree that the world would be very different without the likes of Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Lenin, Napoleon, Alexander, etc. etc.

But without the likes of Edison? Gates? Steve Jobs? Here's a counterfactual for you. Let's say Steve Jobs is killed in an auto accident in 1979. In the year 2010, do we have the iPod, the iPad, the iMac, Pixar films, iTunes?

Answer? Yes. They all just wouldn't be called that. They all probably would not be as sharp and slick looking either.

Because, yes, you guessed it. I'm being contrary about the notion that Steve Jobs was the Edison of our times. I'm not alone. Some are offended by this opinion. I have no idea why.

I do recognize that Steve Jobs had a sense of style and slick design.

Now, I have to be introspective enough to ask "Is this an envious post?" Only in the sense that Herman Cain calls the Occupy Wall Street protestors envious. In other words, no, and fuck you for suggesting that you fat ugly old asshole. (Herman, not you, dear reader).

But I do object to this uncritical hyperbole around Jobs the man. This undue reverence and worship doesn't do anyone any favors. Not Jobs, not you and me, and certainly not history.

Let's get the facts right. Jobs did not invent the mouse. Jobs did not invent the GUI interface. Jobs did not invent the laptop computer with a screen interface. Jobs did not invent the personal data assistant that you could call people on. Want to see amazing first-order innovations? Go to Israel. Go to Finland. Don't go to Cupertino.

And private investors did not put in the initial seed monies to make these things happen. All that blue sky shit would never, ever have been funded by timid private investors.

The Defense Department funded it all. That's right, the US military is responsible. DARPA, mostly.

Credit where credit is due. Let's be honest about it.

Apple has been very good at integrating existing technology. If you wish to credit Jobs for recognizing these various innovations as potentially fruitful, I've no problem with that. But don't go making him into something he was not. Making shit up is more than half the problems we have around here.

(Oh, and whoo! my 300th blather as of today. Sticks tongue out at you).

Get out of my trailer

2011-10-07T12:39:00.000-07:00

What my kidneys will be looking like in a few years

Earlier in the year, I sent in an application for Kohler's Art/Industry Residency. I haven't word one back from those bastards. So... I'll try again and apply for 2013 pretty soon.

It would have been a lot of fun had I been accepted. They have a cast iron foundry and a clay studio, and I had planned on utilizing both of them, making cope and drag sandcast molds for the iron, and plaster molds to slip cast porcelain. The obstacle for me in the application process was that you were supposed to come up with a concept for the works. Why can't I just make cool shit? No, there has to be some social value I guess. I came up with something in about 20 minutes, and this is what my proposal was:

"Althoughmy primary interest has been figurative work, I am interested in depicting thefigure as an ecological consortium.

Welike to think of ourselves as discrete individuals, but the fact of the matteris we are communities of cells - not only human cells, but bacterial cells aswell. It is estimated that there are ten times as many microbial cells in ourbodies as human cells.

TheHuman Microbiome Project has recently identified perhaps a hundred times asmuch microbial genetic material as human within our bodies.

Ourbodies can be viewed as entire worlds, with lush metaphorical rain forestswithin the gastrointestinal tract, and stark Sahara-like conditions on regionsof skin such as the forehead.

Myintent would be to render these conditions using both cast iron and slip-castporcelain. The idea is to craft human anatomical or cellular portions in iron,and present an aura, or halo, of slip cast bacterial inhabitants of the humanhost community.

Forexample, a piece could include a larger than life size portions of molars,gums, tongue, etc. along with the porcelain bacterial denizens associated withit. Or, a life sized figure with a bacterial cloud surrounding and/or orsuffusing it. Or a representativehuman cell candidate, with a retinue of bacterial cells."

Your standard human cell

I'm going to continue to push this theme in the proposal next year, but slightly different. I suppose it had to do with a passage I read about relative size of bacteria and human cells. Bacteria can range from .5 to 5 microns in length. Human cells average around 10 microns. But in average, you typical volume of human cell to bacteria is about the same, scaled up, as a house to a person, or better still, a trailer.

Your standard trailer park trailer

So, that gave me the idea of a trailer park. I don't think I'll make the whole trailer park. I'll probably just make one trailer, but the trailer would be a morph of a ~~trailer park trailer~~ mobile home and a human cell. The resulting object would be of slip cast and hand built porcelain.


Human trailer park denizen

And then the little bacterial trailer park denizens? Pretty much as they are, with no attempt to anthropomorphize them (they'd just look like Mr. Peanut anyway), but they would be cast iron. And the beautiful thing is, I can do it all with the college's facilities. I just need to buy a clay-lined crucible and some class 25 grey iron scrap, and I can work in cast iron with our furnaces. Yay!

And then I'll have visual aids to go with my proposal to Kohler. I'll keep y'all posted.

"Les classes dangereuses"

2011-10-06T12:10:00.000-07:00

Back in the early to mid-nineteenth century Paris, the bourgeoisie considered the lower classes to be most associated with criminals. Poverty and crime go hand in hand, so the thought went, and all those of the lower orders were considered, through this piece of logic, to be considered the Dangerous Classes.

Dangerous to whom?

In the agrarian ages, the dangerous classes were the peasantry, the landless laborers, the tenant farmers. In the early era of manufacture, the dangerous classes became the vagabond mechanics and displaced cottage artisans forced into the cities. In the heavy industrial age, the laborers in the factories became dangerous. Now, in the information age, the middle class, thrown into a precarious state, dispossessed of stable careers, is dangerous. And in the post-information age? In an era of intelligent (or at least highly skilled) robots and computers, will the upper middle class, the professionals, the degreed, the certified, the accredited, join the ranks of the dangerous?

Are you seeing a commonality here? Marx would have called it "human capital". The danger element is that the people who actually do all the fucking work, when deprived of this activity, can get into all sorts of mischief.

The dangerous ones are the indispensable ones. Not individually indispensable, mind you, but as a class (unless and until you get the robots up and running) the ones who, surprise!, don't need any supervision to do their fucking job. And in the triumphalist Cold War victory message, that central planning doesn't work, that distributed, egalitarian, collective wisdom seems to work just fine all on its own without a planner, without a manager, without a director, without a chief executive officer, what are we to take from that?

The only reason to have a financier, a venture capitalist, an entrepreneur, is not for their vision, not for their directives, not for their goals, or priorities, or agendas, but quite simply, for their monies?

"Give us your monies, shut the fuck up, stand aside out of the way and from underfoot, and we will make you some more monies, motherfucker".

That's dangerous. That's a genie not following orders. That's a Titan unbound. That's a team of wild horses. That's a rogue monster, unchained, unleashed, unpredictable.

We are told, by the greasy advertisers and slick-as-spit public relations dweebs, that the natural order is for the rich to be self-servingly enlightened, and by doing so, create jobs for the rest of us. We, the idled layabouts, who, left to our own devices, would no doubt drown face down in the mud for lack of effort or thought to turn ourselves upright. These wonderful job creators provide all and everything that allow the dangerous to be productive and good and worthy as members of society.Wow, the only logical response to that is...

Fuck you.

Funny thing is, it's all about rules in the game, isn't it? As Duncan Watts argues in "Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer":

"...arguments about the so-called redistribution of wealth are mistaken in assuming that the existing distribution is somehow the natural state of things, from which any deviation is unnatural, and hence morally undesirable. In reality, every distribution of wealth reflects a particular set of choices that a society has made: to value some skills over others, to tax and prohibit some activities while subsidizing or encouraging other activities; and to enforce some rules while allowing other rules to sit on the books, or to be violated in spirit. All these choices can have considerable ramifications for who gets rich and who doesn't... but there is nothing "natural" about any of these choices, which are every bit a product of historical accident, political expediency, and corporate lobbying as they are of economic rationality or social desirability."

One thing that should be taken from all this is that solutions are dynamic. All targets are moving targets.

And those defenders of the status quo and the ruling class, by remaining inflexible, unbending in their support and beliefs, by standing still in the way of events, are, if history is any guide, sure to come to ruin.

The Fitness Seascape

2011-10-05T10:51:00.000-07:00

How Quaint!

Hell is a cold place. Ask anyone who has been cold and can't warm up. Hell is Cold. Ask my ancestors. They set Hell in a deep, dark place of ice and wet and cold. It might as well have been the bottom of the ocean. And when the end of days come, when the Twilight of the Gods is at hand, the Fimbulwinter comes, a winter that makes the Ice Ages look like umbrella drink tropical paradise, and the inhabitants of Hell storm the citadel of the gods in a huge ship made from the fingernails of the dead, scratched across the surface of ice of the now Moon-dead seas.

Heat? Heat is to be welcomed. We East African Plains Apes, having evolved with sweat glands for that parched and arid million year landscape, can handle the heat. All we need is some wind to evaporate the sweat and cool us off. In fact, look at our descriptive terms for a light current of air - breeze, zephyr, melody. A puff. A waft. A whiff. A breath. A blessing. All hold the promise of refreshment and respite. Why even the sound evokes the feeling. A cool, cool breeze. Sweet, fresh, and sparkling clean.

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

Neal Stephenson recently wrote an essay, "Innovation Starvation", decrying the slowing pace of innovation. I enjoy reading Stephenson's books, am sometimes engaged with certain of his ideas (or at least struck at how we have come to the same conclusions), appreciate his ability to spin an adventure yarn, am only occasionally disappointed in how his characters seem a bit too modern and hip and speak too often with Left Coast mannerisms, but on the whole consider him a pretty damn good author. But in this essay, I've got a lot to disagree with. More about that in a minute. Maybe.

One of the things that often struck me as wrong, or wrong-headed, was the use of the business metaphor describing all things biological. Biologists would describe the "cost" of a certain adaptation, or a "payoff" of a certain behavioral strategy, and I thought, well, they've got it all backwards. Rather than biologists using Smith or Galbraith or Friedman as their conceptual modellers in these casual descriptions, economists should be using Darwin to fathom the world of business and finance.

Biologists will often talk of a fitness landscape. The idea being that the further up on the landscape you are, the more fit an individual can be considered (given that the terrain is a metaphorical or visual aid for selection pressures). Thus, being up on a plateau is better than being down in a valley. Or supposedly so. It could be that the plateau is not the highest one. The highest one is called the "global maximum", others not so high are "local maxima". The problem with being on a local maxima, at least within the narrative of the fitness landscape, is that one must descend back down into the valley to ascend a higher peak. Well, this always struck me as a silly metaphor, but only because of the study of nonlinear population models I did in college, and as a computational hobby for years afterwards.

In the late 80s I decided that a much better term was fitness seascape, considering that models that best modeled population dynamics, competition, and cooperation, were not only nonlinear (with feedback loops), but also, well, dynamic. In other words, searching for a general solution, a permanent global maximum, was silly because, the accurate model, like Nature itself, had conditions changing over time. An individual sitting on a peak, could through external events, suddenly find itself sitting in a trough. And thus adaptations are always local. Or rather, non-local, but relative, with no absolute frame of reference. No Newtonian world view of static spaces and times.

And not just external circumstances. The fitness of the individual to local conditions changed local conditions. There is a self-referential feedback loop similar to Einstein's ideas about mass and gravity and space and time.

The classic visualization is the solar system viewed as heavy and light iron balls (mass) on a rubber sheet (space/time). The weight of the balls bends the sheet (gravity). The bends in the sheet changes the position of the balls. The "success" or fitness of an individual can change the local conditions of fitness in the same way- although not always as a bend downwards. Relativity being the key phrase here, as, in business as in biology, fitness is a relative positioning, not an absolute one.

So, on my own (honest!), I came up with the term fitness or adaptive seascape. Eventually, the world of academia caught up with me. David J Merrell is credited with coining the term, but actually, I did.

Back to Stephenson's essay, and what annoyed me. He decries the timidity and short-sightedness of private industry. Agreed. He decries the zero tolerance for risk that firms increasingly retreat to. Agreed. He claims that as a (partial) result, innovation is slowing in pace. Disagreed.

A casual glance at the numbers suggests that it is simply not so. True, less world-changing gadgetry is out there, or seems to be. But, in keeping with my ideas about the fallacy of preformationism, the epigenetic narrative, the narrative of history, we simply have not been around long enough to recognize the real consequences of our current crop of gadgets. (Just as it took some time to realize how the telegraph, and by extension speed-of-light communications, fostered the development of the modern corporation).

"Hi there! I'm Mister B!"

Besides which, if it is true that innovation is slowing down (which I don't think it is), even Stephenson himself recognizes (or so I recall) the remarkable progress of the Long Boom is owed to some extent by Mister B. Mister B (whom the Japanese called B san) pummeled the majority of the world's industrial landscape into rubble some sixty years ago. The great rebuilding resulted in a one time increase in all things gadget. Couple this with the assumption that the gadgets invented over the past 100 years are all the low-hanging fruit, in other words, the easy stuff to invent, this also may explain the perceived slowdown in innovation.

Continuing under this assumption, we have arrived that the temporary gadget plateau. However, if you look at the current crop of innovations, you will note it is less about gadgets and much, much more about materials and processes. Nanotech. Synthetic biology. Spintronics. Metamaterials. Graphene. Quantum computing. Energy storage membranes. Superatoms. The world of materials engineering is very quickly to enter its golden age - assisted by chemists, biologists, and physicists.

Stephenson mourns the world where big stuff could be done. I would suggest that he bemoans a world where the easy stuff could be done. The stuff that looked risky, but actually wasn't.

The really truly risky stuff still lies ahead of us.

This is how it starts -

2011-10-04T10:53:00.000-07:00

- with the young ones. Always the young ones.

The under 30 crowd is starting to protest again. At first I waited to see if this was just a flash in the pan, but the Occupy Wall Street movement seems to be gaining momentum. I say so not because of the increasing number of cities that are seeing demonstrations. After all, if you don't have a coherent message, the chance that a movement will crystallize is remote.

But, there is something going on concurrently with all this, it is the We Are the 99 Percent movement. They are feeling the real deal. The played by the economic rules, worked hard, studied, did all the right things, and they are homeless, bankrupt, bereft of a decent job and a dignified way to earn monies, and pissed off about it. Who can blame them?

But it's even worse than that. By not working, by sitting idle, the country is losing a vast and valuable opportunity and resource. I would think even the most heartless capitalist stooge should recognize that an idled mind and hands is a waste of both capital and labor. It is a devastating loss of time, talents, and monies - a loss to the individuals, to the community, to business, to country, to the world.

Now, you would think the responsible so-called "job creators" would be taking notice. If (ha) they actually were job creators, then they have to be thinking to themselves "God we really are doing a terrible fucking job aren't we? I feel awful at being such an incompetent fuckhead. Maybe I'd better go take a few laps in my champagne-filled Olympic-sized swimming pool and de-stress".

But no, the right wing media is instead getting both puzzled and scared. The tone has changed from sarcasm to just a bit of quaver in the voice, and perhaps a little tiny squirt of brown liquid shit in the silk panties to go with that.

One can hope.

I know the clueless assholes on Wall Street are frustrated. "Wha - well, those kids should be marching on Washington! They should be protesting Congress and the White House! Don't they know that's where all the troubles began?" God damn boys, clue yourselves in for a change. If you boneheads can't figure this out, one has to wonder why we don't have a financial meltdown every other week.

I suspect Warren Buffet has got it figured out. He seems a smart enough guy. I take him for a student of history, and being able to recognize the consequences of being on the wrong side of it.

Because, if this continues, Warren knows its his head in the wicker basket.

"Was he, like, a sea captain or something?"

2011-09-29T17:35:00.000-07:00

Or something. Close enough.

That line was my laugh for the day. I have a new student aide whom I am breaking in. Showing him how to mix and pug reclaim clay, mix up glazes, pick up and clean up around the studio, etc.

My older, broke-in student aide, Vicki, worked with him for the latter part of the day. At lunch, she said to me, "Jakob asked me if you were ever, like, a Navy captain, or, one of those other guys."

"Other guys?"

"Yeah, I asked him that. He said, 'Oh you, know, the, um... Marines".

"A gunnery sergeant?"

"Yeah".

I laughed. "Why?"

"He said you looked like one, and you used nautical terms a lot."

(laughing even harder) "Like what?"

"I don't know".

"Wow. Funny".

Interesting thing about these kids that gravitate towards me here. They are the geek kids. The ones that play chess and role playing games. They are all soft, and a little pale, and soft-spoken, and shy, and funny, and for some reason, a lot are Pagans, or pretend to be, and all of them weird and quirky and interesting. And I encourage them in their weirdness and quirkiness and dorkiness.

I think I used to be one of them. Minus the soft part. Don't ask me how I ended up being GySgt Kurman (I don't know, can I call myself that? Well, two former student aides, both Marines who served in Iraq, called me that, so, yeah, I guess it's OK).

I guess it was when I realized no one was going to take care of me anymore, adn I had to do shit for myself. And also, I realized I liked working, and collecting skills. It's the only collection I've ever had or done. Skills.

They tell me they are scared of me at first, then realize the volume, tone, cadence, and inflections of my manner of speaking isn't shouting, or barking, and I won't cut their head off with a chainsaw if they ask something stupid. And that I have a very, very deadpan sense of humor.

They realize I'm there to dispense knowledge, for, oh, I don't know, so that they can carry on just in case I get shot in the head, or something.

Are Volvo Drivers Assholes?

2011-09-29T10:20:00.000-07:00

A guest editorial today from Eldest Brother. He has a complaint about Volvo drivers. I thought they were all hippie moms listening to NPR and such. But then, ah, true, there's the old saying about utopian social engineers:

"Scratch a hippie, find a Nazi"

A quick check of the global pulse suggests he may be on to something. Many hold the opinion that the biggest asshole drivers out there own BMWs, Mercedes Benzs, etc. with Volvos and Saabs up there in the ranks. Could it have something to with Volvos have a very high survival and safety rating? Could it be that shitty drivers are suggested towards these vehicles? Wow, that seems to be the idea when you look at the Urban Dictionary's take on Volvos. "Hey, look at that guy driving a Volvo. What an asshole!"

My understanding is that Volvo Station Wagons are now discontinued.

Hmm. It may have something to do with the fact that Volvo sold only 480 V50 Station Wagons in the US last year. That, and the fact that Volvo was sold by Ford to China's Zhejiang Geely Holding Group in 2010. At any rate, here's Eldest Bro's take:

"Perhaps things are different for you in Northern Illinois, but here in Granola County of Northern California, it seems we are infested with self-righteous slow-pokes driving the ubiquitous Volvo wagon. Not the new sleek Ford-inspired ones either, but the traditional old boxy tanks. More often than not, you will find yourself trapped in the left lane behind one of these individuals whose speed is randomly varying between 56 and 62 mph and who is giving you disapproving looks in the rear view. It seems sometimes these people are "regulators" whose attitude is, I'm going fast enough, I'm going to keep the rest of you from speeding, so you should either back off or fuck off. My view: Hey, if you 're going to make yourself responsible for my behavior, maybe you'd like to pay my god damn cable bill, or figure out how to deal with my teenager, or actually make yourself useful in some fashion. OK, now I'm done".

Okay, speed vigilantes? And willing to inconvenience others in order to impose their version of reality. Yeah, I'd say that's an asshole. Kind of like Glenn Beck and the Tea Partiers.

Fuck those sanctimonious busybodies.

"1493" by Charles C. Mann: A Half-Ass Review

2011-09-26T16:19:00.000-07:00

By happy circumstance, I happened to concurrently read "Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer" by Duncan J Watt along with "1493" by Charles C. Mann. Since I have on my own (honest!) formulated a lot of the same thoughts that Watt presents, I will shamelessly paraphrase him:

The difference between prediction and prophecy is the ability to foresee not only what will happen, but also what its meaning will be.

"They" say that hindsight is 20/20. "They", as is usual with the purveyors of conventional wisdom, are full of shit.

Not only is the future shrouded in fog, but so is the present and especially the past.

In order to understand what is going on, in order to piece together the narrative of history, one has to not only apprehend every single event and circumstance, but also place these in context within future events. Thus, history is like prophecy - if prophecy is, like Aesop's Fables, providing a moral to the story.

But the moral can change, not only over time, but by whom is the teller of tale. So, with this in mind...

Mann pushes two themes throughout the book, or rather, two flavors of the same theme.

The theme is globalization - the flavors the origins and ramifications thereof.

Once the Basque ship's captain Legazpi meets up with Chinese junks in the Philippines, to trade Chinese silk and porcelain for Bolivian silver, we are on our way to global trade. Or rather, once Friar de Urdaneta figures out the return trip to Mexico via the Northern Pacific, it's more or less a complete circuit. "Pangaea stitched together again", the idea of the one-world supercontinent split asunder and then made whole, perhaps not quite the accurate metaphor geologically or biologically, but prodigious enough.

More importantly, the Columbian exchange of every variety of life, changes everything. It causes massive deaths and dieoffs which occur to this very day. It causes (beginning through the export of Old and New World crops and animals, an exponential increase in the numbers of humanity which is only now (perhaps) reaching a plateau.

I've often written of the Singularity. This is not a form thereof, more a Black Swan event, but the impact of the Columbian exchange certainly has the biggest characteristic of a Singularity - All Bets Are Off. No one could have any idea, none whatsoever, what the emergent consequences would be. Certainly nothing like it has been seen since the beginnings of Neolithic culture, and the Agricultural Revolution.

Mann does a wonderful job in summarizing the impacts, or rather, updating the narrative first put forward by Alfred Crosby in his books "The Columbian Exchange", and "Ecological Imperialism", to name just two of many, many others Mann uses. (In the acknowledgement at the end of the book, Mann states "If 1493 brings new readers to these books, I will be more than satisfied". I, for one, will provide him this satisfaction. He would be hard press to write a more engaging collection of historical goodies to set off the seeking instinct within me.

...I'm sorry, but I have to throw my dog-eared segments in here.

The Difference Between Fantasy and Magical Realism
Portugal transplanted an entire colony from North Africa to northeastern Brazil:

"The transition was eased by grants of cash, livestock, and several hundred slaves... within a decade of arrival the colonists - malarial, famished, living in wretched huts they were too poor to repair - were begging the crown to relocate them. Ultimately, almost all of the surviving Europeans slipped away. The remainder soon died. Through no act of their own, the slaves found themselves at liberty... They were free as long as they pretended they weren't. The Portuguese administration wanted to be able to report to the king that his subjects were guarding Brazil's northern flank. The slaves were willing to say they were doing it, if that meant they were left alone. Everyone was happy: the maroons (mixed descendents slaves, Indians, and the few seasoned Europeans) pretended they were Portuguese subjects in a Portuguese colony and the Portuguese pretended the maroons were guarding the border".

A Hollywood Treatment for the Conquistador/Samurai Buddy Movie
The "hidden" history of Asians in the New World is worthy of a few good yarns. Somewhere in a dark corner of my mind, this information was once planted from a book I once read. Nevertheless, once it was made known again, I am fascinated with the idea the Hollywood treatment for the following:

"Known collectively as chinos, Asian migrants spread slowly along the silver highway from Acapulco to Mexico City, Puebla, and Veracruz. Indeed, the road was patrolled by them - Japanese samurai perhaps in particular. Katana-swinging Japanese had helped suppress Chinese rebellion in Manila in 1603 and 1609. When Japan closed its borders to foreigners in the 1630s, Japanese expatriates were stranded wherever they were. Scores, perhaps, hundreds, migrated to Mexico. Initially the viceroy had forbidden mestizos, mullatos, negroes, zambaigos, and chinos to carry weapons. The Spaniards amde an exception for the samurai, allowing them to wield their katanas and tantos to protect the silver shipments against the escaped-slaves-turned-highwaymen in the hills."

The Other Black Gold
Mann spends a lot of time in the Amazon with UCLA geographer Susanna Hecht. Hecht contends that "three fundamental materials were required for the Industrial Revolution. Steel, fossil fuels, and rubber". While I'd disagree that these are needed to get it all going, I'd certainly agree that they are needed for its fruition into the electrification phase. Without vulcanized rubber, all sorts of items become extremely difficult to build. Insulation for wiring for one. Belts to transmit motion from engines to appliances for another. Tires. Inflatable tires.

"Equally important but less visible, every internal combustion engine contains many pipes and valves that channel, usually under pressure, water, oil, gasoline, and exhaust vapor. Unless the parts are manufactured perfectly, engine vibrations will cause liquids and gases to vent dangerously from joints. Flexible rubber gaskets, washers, O-rings almost invisibly fill the gaps. Without them, every home furnace would be at constant risk of leaking natural gas, heating oil, or coal exhaust - a potential death trap".

Even today, synthetic rubbers made from petroleum feedstocks do not even closely approximate the performance of natural rubbers. And rubber, latex, comes from only one tree - Hevea brasiliensis. More about this in a moment.

The Other Other Black Gold
Much has been made by various doofuses about the European expansion during (from a European standpoint) the Age of Exploration (say, 1000-1500CE) being the resuklt of European exceptionalism. There is far too much evidence in this book to suggest the huge amount of pure dumb luck that kept Europe - again and again - out of the Malthusian Trap. Without the potato, and guano, European soils would have been depleted - especially in Northern Europe where the soils and climate are not conducive for large populations. In fact, it is doubtful that (Northern) Europe could ever have escaped the cycle of famine that kept it such a primitive backwater for so long to stride upon the world stage as it did. More importantly, with the introduction of the Old World diseases of malaria and yellow fever, Europeans could never have developed the extractive systems with their own populations as the work force. For this, they needed Africans. There can be no doubt.

"...between 1500 and 1840, the heyday of the slave trade, 11.7 million captive Africans left for the Americas...in that (same) period, perhaps 3.4 million Europeans emigrated. Roughly speaking, for every European who came to the Americas, three Africans made the trip... demographically speaking...American was an extension of Africa rather than Europe until late in the nineteenth century."

Now, the interesting thing is, for the same reason that Europeans do not colonize tropical Africa, for the longest time, they do not colonize tropical America. Tropical diseases, don't you see. And the only reason Europeans dominate to any degree between the Tropic latitudes, given their small numbers, is because they were tolerated due to favorable trade. Globalization, to a great degree, facilitated both the slave trade, and European conquest.

"One of the most persistent myths aboout the slave trade is also one of the most pernicious: that African's role was wholly that of hapless pawns. Except for the trade's last few decades - and arguably not even then - Africans themselves controlled the supply of slaves"

(The reason expounded in the book is that within African systems, land, property was held solely by the state. The only form of private, revenue-generating property recognized by African law were slaves. Although, the form of slavery in Africa is more akin to indentured servitude, or monetary rather than labor extraction, somewhat similar to serfs in Russia. For example:)

"Napoleon sent his army to seize Egypt. An African Napoleon would have sent his army to seize Egyptians".

That being said, those who ended up enslaved, from an African standpoint, were criminals and prisoners of war - scofflaws, tax cheats, political exiles, unwanted immigrants, and the like. It is a wonder, in fact, given the number of ex-military POWs sent over, that more white plantation owners weren't slaughtered. In any event, the point is not to rationalize the practice, but to recognize that, quite simply the events in the New World - at least the tropical New World - could never have occurred without Africans. There's a reason I brought this up. Like the rubber thing, I'll get to it.

I have many other dog-eared passages. I wish I had time to relate them all. But, back to the idea of historical narrative. I'm going to suggest that, as in the definition of prophecy given above, perhaps not enough time ('only' 500 years) has passed to truly understand the ramifications of the Columbian Exchange. I personally think the full ramifications will not be known for another thousand, or perhaps ten thousand, years. The meaning of events then we do not know, but I have my suspicions.

Since it seems apparent that the Industrial Revolution would have been prolonged, avoided, detained, or even nonexistent without the Columbian Exchange, it follows that Global Warming is also a consequence. And since many of the various tropical diseases to which Africans are (relatively) immune and Europeans are not (unless they "seasoned" - got sick and did not die) are still very much extant within the Western Hemisphere, one wonders who will be living where once things start to heat up.

I noted, in a previous essay, the not altogether ambivalent drawing of the Mason-Dixon line with respect to the survival and incubation of the malarial parasite. If we assume the worst climate change, say, something akin to the late Miocene, when even the poles were semi-tropical, how will these Europeans fare?

It could be that the 22nd century, and maybe beyond, is an African one.

Travelling Through Spaces From Planet to Planet

2011-09-23T12:41:00.000-07:00

Sun-Ra and his Arkestra "We Travel The Spaceways"

Funny thing about memory is how recreational it all is. Things are never as you remember them because you don't store shit like a computer does. (Still another reason why Dickie Dawkin's "meme" concept is complete and utter bullshit). As I recall, I made a $1 wager with an acquaintance as to whether antimatter will fall up or down, and this would be determined by results from the Aegis Experiment at CERN. Seems to me I made the bet about six months ago, when in fact, it was only August 11th.

I had hoped issues would be decided by now, or by the end of the month of September. It doesn't look like it will happen. Meantime, CERN has found evidence that neutrinos may travel faster than light. Didn't see that one coming.

In any case, I started thinking about what if I win that $1 bet? What if antimatter falls up? In other words, what if we discover antigravity? Well, anyone remember the brief cold fusion mania from the early '90s? Fleischman and Pons' experimental setup used a little known metal called palladium (a precious metal similar to platinum) for the electrode. At the time, the price of palladium jumped sharply.

So, all the stuff used for antimatter? Multiply the palladium mania by a factor of a trillion.

Cyrano is off to the Moon!

Well, first of all, how you gonna do it? Space travel with antimatter as your antigravity dealie. Well, something quite similar to what Cyrano de Bergerac did to get to the Moon. Cyrano collected flasks of dew. When the morning sun's heat evaporated it, he would naturally float up with it straight to the Moon.

Alright, maybe a little more scientific-like, but still, flasks filled with antimatter, or better still magnetic vacuum bottles of it, would repel you from the Earth's mass, and up and away you would go!

What kind of antimatter? I'd prefer something that could be contained magnetically, so that means it's charged. Also, I would prefer it be dense enough, like a solid, or a supercooled liquid, so that I can have a small enough magnetic bottle or bucket, or can to store it. (Because I've got to assume you need a little bit more mass of antimatter than the stuff you want to lift, so if Cyrano weighs 72 kg, I need at least, say 80 kg to lift him up).

What kind of magnetic bottle? Well, one that won't fail would be good. Using Einstein's mass/energy equivalency principle, I figure 1kg of antimatter, combined with 1 kg of matter, produces an an explosion of around 43 megatons. So, a failed bottle containing 80kg of antimatter is, well, oh my!

What is this crazy scheme of mine gonna cost? Well, currently various estimates of anitmatter put it at about $64 trillion for one gram of antihydrogen. Which means getting Cyrano to the moon costs $512 quadrillion dollars. I admit, that's a little steep, but then we aren't producing it in the most efficient way.

Big Ass Van de Graaff Generator

See, what you do, at least the way Fermilab does it is you slam a proton beam into a metal target, or any block of stuff that has a high atomic number (is therefore more dense and has more particles for the protons to slam into. I'm getting ahead of myself. Firwt, make some protons. This is usually done with a Big Ass Van de Graaff generator. The protons produced here are shepherded into a proton synchrotron ring, which accelerates them up to near the speed of light, and then slams them into a metal target.

Baby Synchrotron

Typically, you will get one antiproton for around 200,000 protons slammed into the target. I bet there's room for improvement. Then gather the antiprotons into another magnetic ring until you get a whole bunch of them. Then, you would typically want to cool them down (since they are "hot" as in billions of electron volts hot) into a magnetic bottle called a Penning trap. (You cool them using magnetic fields and lasers and shit. This is way past what Fermilab does or needs to do).

So, then, you just collect them in your magnetic bottle until you have enough, and then, off you go to the Moon.

(I also forgot the part about landing on the Moon. The antimatter is going to repel itself against the mass of the Moon, so I guess, it just collects in the Lagrange points of the solar system, unless we use it up as a propellent).

Hm. Maybe, uh, maybe I need to think this through some more.

Stupid Republican Tricks

2011-09-21T12:01:00.000-07:00

Google autocomplete produces the following with the prompt "Republicans are-" evil, idiots, stupid, racist, crazy.

Google autocomplete produces the following with the prompt "Why are Republicans - ": so stupid, so hateful, against net neutrality(?), elephants, so evil.

In fairness the autocomplete for Democrats is (in succession): evil, idiots, stupid, liberal or conservative, racist
(and)
so stupid, donkeys, against a balanced budget amendment, against voter id, better than republicans

On the whole, it looks like the curious are asking equal questions of both parties, but the thing is, why are Republicans acting so dumb? I mean Democrats seem to be having fun when they are stupid, like posting pictures of their weiners, or dressing in tiger pajamas. Republicans, on the other hand, I guess, just insist on being pricks and assholes.

Look at the Honor Roll so far:

Joe "you lie!" Wilson of South Carolina. Rude asshole. Heckles the President during the State of the Union:

Randy "Babykiller" Neugebauer of Texas: Rude asshole, hypocrite. Calls REp. Bart Stupak a babykiller during passage of the healthcare reform bill. Decries government subsidies and wasteful spending, his district takes huge amount of agriculture subsidies and stimulus monies.

Joe "I'm sorry BP" Barton of Texas: Fucking stupid. Apologizes to the chairman of British Petroleum because they leaked 4.9 million barrels of toxic shit into Gulf of Mexico.

Joe "Deadbeat Dad" Walsh Of Illinios: Blowhard, prick. Just a stupid little one-term cocksucker.

Rand "Old Woodenhead" Paul: Watch the youtube videos of him. Especially his complaints about toilets, and not letting old people starve to death. Rand Paul, who claims that the market has "no confidence in President Obama or Secretary Geithner". Rand Paul, who says ""I really think we're living in a failed presidency at this point, because everyone who can vote by investing is not investing".
Apparently Paul hasn't noticed that the DOW closed at 6443.27 on 3/6/2009, and as of 11/20/2011 closed at 11,401.01. Yup. No investment has taken place. The Dow is now in negative numbers.

Here's my embedded take on him. I believe my little paper puppet is smarter than he is:


Whiny Little Asshole

And now, the latest stupid asshole to join the list: Rep. John Fleming of Louisiana. Summary for Fleming: Stupid Pampered Whiner.

Fleming complains that his businesses only provide him with $400,000 to feed his family. The reporter notes that families earning $40,000-50,000 a year may not be sympathetic towards his plight.

Here's his stupidity. His rebuttal is:

"Class warfare's never created a job"

What the fuck you talking about dipshit? What the fuck does that have to do with the observation that most people are not going to be sympathetic towards your pissy little moan that your take home pay is only $400,000 a year. (Which is a fucking lie, by the way, he earns more than that). And then to top this all off by simply parroting the current conservative party line is, quite simply, not the best display of intelligence I've seen.

This is what a so-called "job creator" looks like. Actually, take a picture of his butthole, because working in a Subway, or UPS store, is a shit job.

No actually, this may be a learning experience for Dr. Fleming (ah, a doctor, must have flunked biochem and punted) in that people can boycott his stores. Geez. No customers. No business activity. No business. No job creation. Can he figure out the syllogism?

Betty Don't.

The Minnesota Starvation Experiment

2011-09-19T16:19:00.000-07:00

I was going to write about a peculiar parameter in the whole male/female behavioral landscape. I don't really have a term for it. I'm aware of the difference between sex and gender - in other words, what you have down there and what you think you should have down there.

This is different. I've noticed, for example, that I am your standard man's man in the sense that I am orthodox hetero, have the equipment of a man, and feel like I should have the equipment of a man, and more importantly, don't really care for shopping.

My idea of shopping for a hat is to find a hat on the side of road, notice it fits, that it is in a good state of repair, and can be cleaned up if necessary. I am done shopping for a hat.

I know other guys who satisfying the above conditions for being a man's man, will easily go out shopping for two hours for a hat. A fucking baseball cap.

This is not the same as being clothes' horse. I like to look sharp. I like to dress up when the occasion calls for it. But I will not engage in this rather feminine gathering behavior of shopping the way I have seen some men do it.

This... Male Barbie Syndrome (for lack of a better term, and I am open to suggestions) is a parameter of the human psyche which I think, but am not certain, is a recent and modern phenomenon. I suspect it has a name. I just don't know it.

But that's not what I want to talk about. I recently remembered a study done during WWII called the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. A doctor named Ancel Keys brought together a number of conscientious objectors to study starvation in order to determine what it would take to rehabilitate the victims of privation in Europe. The one thing I recall was that the supposedly unique American worldview, the"can-do" spirit, the unbridled optimism, the generosity and positive outlook, pretty much disappeared when starvation is imposed.

In other words, the whole American can-do spirit is simply a by-product of being well fed.

I suspect that, there are in fact, certain nutritional requirements that, if not fulfilled, result in a radical change in behavior.

It is my hypothesis that conservatives, and in particular Republicans, and more specifically the Tea Party faction of Republicans act the way they do due to dietary deficiencies.

They are lacking in Vitamin N.

Which is why they are not Nice.

"Rick Perry believes being a Texan means being a right-wing blowhard"

2011-09-16T09:08:00.000-07:00

I'm actually kind of indifferent to Texas, although, based upon my movie choices, I always figured Texas was extensively populated with Satanists (Race with the Devil), vampires (Near Dark), and cannibals (Texas Chain Saw Massacre). I also always figured Texans as a people whose tongues was deathly afraid of their teeth, based upon the way they talk.

That quote in the essay title? So says the Houston Chronicle. They're from Texas, so I suppose they'd know. My personal opinion is, despite being so successful in politics, Perry just comes across to me as an ignorant jackass. Haven't we had more than our fair share of presidents like that? Do we really need another one?

Funny thing about Texas, love it or hate it, it is definitely an integral part of American culture.

Some positive attributes about Texans: generous, polite, courteous, hospitable, friendly.

Some negative attributes about Texans: lazy, violent, uneducated, bigoted,... too numerous to mention, but basically a distillation of all white-trash behaviors, and "blowhard" seems to sum it all quite well.

So anyway, governors of Texas can name worthy outsiders 'honorary Texans'. If you follow this linked article to Mother Jones, you can see, at the end of article, a lot of people who have been named 'honorary Texans'. The currency of the tradition is that Rick Perry has honored people like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Sarah Palin. Well, blowhards all, so yeah, I guess the Houston Chronicle is on to something.

What I don't understand at all is why Pee Wee Herman isn't an honorary Texan.

I mean, the guy really did some heavy lifting in promoting Texas in his movie "Pee Wee's Big Adventure". I've got to wonder how much the tourism industry bounced for San Antonio after that movie? How many people went looking for the Alamo's basement after that?

Pee Wee Herman has been hosted by the Dallas Cowboys. He was treated better than Bush! Pee Wee Herman has been an honorary Muppet. Pee Wee Herman has been an honorary Marine. (Well, I guess that counts for more than an honorary Texan).

I think... I think I want a cowboy hat.