Our Goldilocks Zone

At the middle of Greenland, atop two miles of ice, a drill site callled Eismitte got ice core samples down to the bedrock. This is some 100 thousand years of data treasure. Much has been gleened from the ice cores; past temperatures and air composition, and still more treasures of the past to follow. There is an article in the New Yorker (sorry, behind paywall) that puts the situation nicely.

Analysis of the cores showed, in extraordinary detail, how temperatures in central Greenland had varied during the last ice age, which in the U.S. is called the Wisconsin. As would be expected, there was a steep drop in temperatures at the start of the Wisconsin around a hundred thousand years ago, and a steep rise toward the end of it. But the analysis revealed something disconserting. In addition to the long-erm oscillations, the ice recorded dozens of shorter, wilder swings. During the Wisconsin, Greenland was often unimaginably cold, with temperatures nearing thirty degrees lower than they are now. Then temperatures would shoot up, in some instances by as much as twenty degrees in a couple of decades, only to drop again, somehwat more gradually. Finally, about twelve thousand years ago, the roller coaster came to a halt. ... Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State and the author of a book about the ice-coring project, summed up the findings as follows: "For most of the last 100,000 years, a crazily jumping climate has been the rule, not the exception"

So, the ice age was not only cold, it was stormy, with wild capricious weather and megaweather (for lack of a term between climate and weather). Very unstable, with titanic forces battling in the sea and sky. Our interglacial weather is stable and mild by comparison.

The data is harder to find, but a hotter earth also seems to be just as unstable as a colder earth. Hot stormy and shitty.

So, how much time before we fuck everything up beyond repair? Hard to say. Pumping CO2 ironically may have staved off the next ice age (it is inevitable). Perhaps the 1970s scientists were correc tand we were slipping into an ice age, but our own poopy stupidity saved us. But now it seems we've overcompensated.

Other things. I've made some more art.

Quickie

Hi folks,

At this stage my blogger entries feel like I'm talking on a barbwire network over a party line, like on Green Acres. I haven't put out a signal late summer and fall, so here I am. Still alive. Still floating, like the battleship Nevada; sunk, salvaged, shot up some more by both Nazis and Nipponese, ready to survive an atom bomb test at sea. 

My blind eye aches all the time, but hey I'm sturdy viking stock, so I endure it. I think I mentioned that my brain was sad, the visual cortex was sad. It is not sad anymore because it found something else to do.

I'm making stuff. Bronze stuff. Clay pipes, the best. 

I need to win the lottery.

If I win, I will host a class called One Million Years of Technology, all expenses paid for experts to lecture,  every last lotto dollar into this endeavor to educate in depth any era of technology. Or better still, upgrade old inventions/use 21st century tech on cool ideas of the last million years. 

Robusticalness

My right eye has been blind for over two years. I noticed that my brain was sad. The occipital lobes were not getting input from the right visual field, and that made my brain sad.

I'm not sure since when, but my brain isn't sad anymore. I guess the neural nets and associations found something else to do. What that is, I have no idea. 

In related health news, my doctor is trying to get my dangerously high blood pressure under control. I am on 4 different meds taken 7 times a day, and the BP still is up in the 170s/90s. Yikes. Stroke territory.

It's been this way for awhile and I jokingly and correctly noted that having two kidneys would fix it. They did ultrasonics on the heart and kidney. The kidney has a benign tumor which eventually could be a problem due to bleeding. My aorta is slighltly distended and I have a leaky valve, a heart murmur I've had since birth. The arteries look good no blockages thatnks to modern medicine.

I forget how much of a viking* I am. Seriously, for a guy slightly above average, I feel so much taller and bigger than I actually am, and apparently people pick up on that. I'm startled when I see a picture with my group of fellow big boys and realize I'm the shrimp. But I don't feel like that. 

I'm like the USS Nevada; torpedoed and sunk at Pearl Harbor, refloated and repaired, fought in the Atlantic, survived an atomic blast at Bikini Atoll. Sunk by practice naval gunfire in 1948. Well, perhaps not exactly the USS Nevada, but that's how I feel.

I got some welding in after casting more figures for Grandpa Weed's Funeral. I am very close to having to go to magnifying glasses as the cheaters are not good enough anymore. I do have a magnifying lens for my welding helmet. I don't know where it is. Anyway, here's some pics.

Have another.

Here's my work table in the kitchen. Never trust an artist that isn't a slob.

Way Past My Deadtime

I definitely think humans are ape shaped bugs. We go through larval stages our whole life, we just don't shed a shell in between.

I am in the silverback stage right now. I can only pity anyone that never reaches this state of - for lack of a better word - wisdom.

People lament wasted youth. Youth is to be wasted. It is the end years of accumulated effort and intellect that cannot be wasted. You feel the power.

At 67 I may be at my most powerful, although I could plateau into my 90s, but the Kurman side says no dice. So I have a limited time offer to dispense both advice and charity. Being childless, I choose my heirs on merit. I have given monies to people I am not related to but wish I was. I love my blood family, but I have chosen my extended family, through character and competence, to reward with what meager sums I have.

I will continue to do so until I die

I had a 20 year plan, now it is probably 7, before I die. My best and easiest plan is a glorious death, which will be glorious. Still and all, Always Be Recording, and therefore I will build a roadside shrine 

Grandpa Weed's Funeral. 

This is an ongoing art installation. It is a jar with my ashes, and around the jar, at not more than 1/10th scale, are my grieving mourners and curious strangers. Bronze. A fund set up to produce more figures aftyer I die, in perpetuity or the money runs out.

I've been to so many funerals where I said wow all these people show up, I aint; getting these numbers being an old curmudgeon. So I started to create my own mourners at 1/12 scale. And trhen it turned into a collection, a glazy of characters as happens when you work on personal mythology. From there, ritual, from there, science, from there, everything or nothing, the Singularity.

Soylent Green: Overbudget and Behind Schedule

But we get there. There is human food ecosystem collapse. No technological rabbit pulled out of a hat will fix this. By 2052 or earlier, no more food except at subsistence levels. The Monkey Singularity has done exactly what it promised, easy lifestyle, at the cost of eating everything in sight. Greedy monkeys. But it's not the end of the world (far from it, this old bitch Earth has been through worse than us). We are going to go through a bottleneck.

So where are we at? 11 eleven years ago, I lamented human carnage on our world:

Soylent Green predicted 7 billion people in 2022, with 40 million in NYC alone. Those numbers are a little off. We are at 7 billion now, with 2 billion more expected by mid-21st-century. Right now, 80% are at poverty level. It's true that some billion or so have been lifted out of poverty since the 1980s, but that just means an even bigger human maw to feed.

Half of the world's forests have been consumed, most since 1950. 90% of all large wild fish have disappeared from the world's oceans - all from industrial fishing. Dead zones from agricultural run off are spreading at an unprecedented rate. "Garbage patches" of floating and sinking plastics are on the uptake in size and numbers. The oceans are rapidly acidifying, and soon will be fit for naught but the most primitive life forms - jellyfish and microbes. It is estimated that humanity now diverts and consumes one quarter of the energy of Earth's biosphere. We are beyond a force of nature.

Despite concerns about resource depletion, energy is still plentiful. We will run out of fossil oxygen long before we run out of fossil fuels. Some 70 precent of the oxygen we breath is provided by underwater life. Blue green algae provide 20% of the oxygen in the atmosphere, other algeous and planktonic species, sea grasses, mangroves, kelps, provide oxygen and carbon sequestration.

All are in decline.

It is so much more worse now, I don't need 1950 as a benchmark. Insect populations are crashing. (My own anecdotal evidence is my car windshield. In the 20th century I would have to pull over and clean the bug splats off for visibility. Now, eerily clean windshields).

80% of global fisheries are in distress. People want to deep sea mine, which is the dumbest thing. The abyssal plains are not desolate. They are a fucking grocery store of microbiota. Fuck that up, harvest the twilight zone of little critters to feed farm salmon the Li'l Lisa Slurry, and you got yourself a Soylent Green, and god speed. Supply chain collapse, and thus a bottleneck. Not an apocalypse, a bottleneck.

Only behavioral change gives us a short bottleneck. Stop fucking killing things would really help.

Not that it matters to me, way past my deadtime. I've no dog in the fight unless I go all Tony Randall and have babies with a twenty-something assistant. And everyone thought he was gay.

Even then I won't care about my progeny, being dead before they reach adulthood. But Gen Z is having babies, and none too worried about the future. I mean we know and understand a world of squalor and want. Hell, this world, right now, must look like the planet Dune to our hunter/gatherer ancestors, who in their turn, decimated the world. But I would note the megafauna extinctions were after the last competing hominid had been eliminated. Homo Sapiens? More like Homo Orcus. 

Sure stinks like the Age of Orc to me. The Age of Men (Neanderthals) is long over. 

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Chris Hemswoth, who plays Dementus in this movie, observed that America has Star Wars, the UK Harry Potter, and Australia has Mad Max. Australia has the only fairy tale that can come true.

And the beautiful thing about the  Mad Max universe is it is as vast as the Wasteland, but still full of characters. It's not a franchise or iP, it is a post-apocalyptic mythology. The dregs and bottom scrappings of humanity, still have a sense of humor and gruesome dignity.  I suppose it all goes back to George Miller's emergency room days as a doctor, gallows humor, what's to do about it, mate?

Is Furiosa action packed? Yes. Hell, yes. As action packed as Fury Road? Nah, but, Furiosa is an explanation movie and I'm OK with that. How did Furiosa get to be the Furiosa of Fury Road, and where do things go from here?

At the end of Fury Road, Max goes off to wander the Wasteland. Furiosa and the Mothers now hold the Citadel*, Gas Town and the Bullet Farm**.

Miller has given us Woman the Builder in all but the first movie, in which the badass wife and kid got murdered, which drove Max mad. Ignore the fact that Max is like 72 years old in Fury Road, the characters are ageless archetypes now, ghosts drifting through stories of the Wasteland.

What's next? George wants to make a Mad Max V and I'm like absolutely, box office receipts be damned.

Kitty, I Farted

Hello Loves

In France, ChatGPT is phonetically similar to Chat, Je pete, which means female cat (kitty), I farted. New programs are worrying over jobs being replaced by kitty, I farted. 

Appropriate seeing as AI is a gas bubble. I and many others called it. The bubble won't pop until the ruling class gets their money back and unloads on the suckers. It's not going well, with Google turning into Trump, more or less advising them to drink bleach. The hallucinations will continue until we fix it, goes the publicity, so we will slap "experimental" on it.

The tech is unimportant. Or rather, the tech is important, but the business I slap onto it liek a parasite is not. Take the jet pack, the equivalent of the vaunted flying car, but for real. Turns out it was only the one jetpack all along, in all the movies, TV shows and commercials. The inventor flogged that deadly thing wherever he could. But it had inadequate tech to be other than a stunt. The minute you think of the entire American economy as a carnival, the less of a chump you are. 

Jet packs. Flying cars. Self driving cars.  Bitcoin. NFTs. AI, step right up and win a prize.  

It seems the only way to make money nowadays is fraud, but that's capitalism. Force and fraud is the salient of capitalism. The only reason it works is a thing called science. That's where the material progress comes from, the Great Acceleration we are experiencing that is undeniable. An acceleration that now threatens to eat the world.

I know such a statement is exaggeration. We humans may experience a Soylent Green collapse of the good times, but the planet won't give a shit. The quadrillions will out last our mere billions.

On that note of mortality, my current situation is now blood pressure. Eyeball is also continued fucked up, which I now realize is for the rest of my life. Each decade has tried to kill me, and my 7th secade may go the Kurman family tradition of stroke or heart attack. Given I've also inherited my maternal grandfather's weird head pressure problems. If I can sail through this , I'll hit 85, otherwise, my 18 year plan becomes my 7 year plan.

Regardless, my death will be glorious.