It's Africa, Stupid

A recent article in the Economist documents African nations increasing demand for a share of the mining profit pie, through higher rents and bigger ownership stakes. Seems only fair to me. The colonial powers managed to pull a major smash and grab operation on that continent for quite some time. Indeed, some truly shameful history has gone on down there, Belgium (Congo) and Portugal (Angola) being two of the worst offenders. These two countries by no means had a monopoly on despicable behavior, but they certainly had respectable franchises on it.

Africa may not be the last frontier in terms of resource exploitation - Antarctica still awaits - but they do possess largely untapped and undeveloped mineral and energy resources. In the book "Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil", I recall reading a passage about how, during a casual geophysical exploration of the continent during the 1950s, there was rarely a drill test site that did not run into oil. There are also vast mineral deposits still untouched. As to how all of this will be developed, it is hard to say. One cannot imagine the even more precious biological resources of Africa (plants, animals, and ecologies - all disapearing at an alarming rate) remaining unaffected by this. A lot of the mineralogical treasure is due to continental drift and tectonic churn. Much of the geology consists of immensely old craton formations, which have several billion years worth of erosion to deposit any number of heavy, rare, and precious metals throughout the continent. It is estimated that, for example South Africa alone contains some $2.5 trillion worth of gold remaining in the ground, and the magma formation that holds all of this gold extends straight on up both coasts for thousands of miles. If all of the gold were extracted at once, the price of gold would plunge to pennies per ource. But, given that currently each ounce of gold extracted results in anywhere from 20-80 tons of waste materials, not to mention soil and aquifer degradation and poisoning, one wonders what the real price is.  And that's just one of major ore deposits waiting to be dug up. And then there are all the fossil fuels...

I recently read how Norway is joining into a series of development partnerships with the Republic of Tanzania. It's nice that one of the world's most fortunate countries (ranked 2nd in GDP per capita) is providing humanitarian aid, but I also can't help but think that there is a profit motive involved as well. The Norwegians realize that, despite tapping only perhaps a third of their proven North Sea oil reserves, they will eventually run out of oil. And given their near superlative knowledge of offshore extraction, they wish to export their knowledge economy to other nations. Norway is courting places like Brazil, Vietnam, Ghana, to name a few.

I probably should not be so cynical about this, though. 

Small Doings at the College

There was a little bit of excitement here. I embed a video of an electrical fire that we had. An outside drain is kept free flowing during the 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 first thought some stupid person had fallen into the dumpster and was rather nonchalantly pounding out their distress. No, it was a short in the sewer. Was I in danger filming it? Nah, I don’t think so: 

Also, a student’s clay piece, not yet bisqued, and therefore ready to be knocked over and broken, was knocked over and broken. One of the night 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 broken English. 

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 your friends. So. Yeah. Shut up.”

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

"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

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

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 the Kraken 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? I'm sorry, Kraken Space, since they don't mind being called that? 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 Kraken 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 Kraken. 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 Kraken 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 Kraken, but the Kraken, or rather the one krake, 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

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.

You Are Here

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

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.