Energy now and forever more energy

Just to show that energy studies have been studied for decades, thousands of years after our ancestors discovered fire is good for warmth and a good pot roast:

Dad-Roanoke-newspaper-1981

Old 41 and 42 Make Last Runs, Closing An Era

Have you ever ridden on an old passenger train?

I and my friends, Ricky (standing behind me), Kevin (in glasses and checkered glasses), along with other classmates did, way back in 1969:

Old-41-makes-last-run-1969-closeup Old-41-makes-last-run-1969-textOld-41-makes-last-run-1969

 

Some passenger train services, like the Alaska Railroad, offer the thrill of a nice, slow ride on railroad tracks.

Maybe a bullet/maglev train is in your future, instead?

Unpacking

Guinevere woke up, seeing the same space above her head she had seen for months.

Except this time gravity pulled her down upon the sleeping unit.

She sighed.

To have all these years behind her compressed into memories to give her this one moment of happiness!

She rolled over and flipped her legs out, her feet naturally falling to the floor more slowly than on Earth but faster than on the Moon.

She knew today would be a good day, unpacking the last crate just so they could turn around and load the exploration vehicles which had landed on Mars months earlier.

Guinevere rubbed a chemical sponge over her body, combing two drops of moisturising conditioner through her close-cropped hair.

She slipped into her one-piece jumpsuit, stepped into her workboots and walked over to the doorway where her self-contained breathing outfit, ruggedised for the Martian environment allowed her to move from her landing pod to the temporary outdoor workspace set up to complete tasks on today’s agenda.

After she dressed, Guinevere spoke into the comm mike in her helmet, which also vibrated a secondary unit attached to her jaw that picked up the more accurate nuances of her voice for emotion/personality analysis by the automated computer system that tracked everyone, fully human, part human/part cyborg, or fully cybernetic organism.  “Team One Leader ready to depart.”

Voices echoed back into the hearing device installed beside her inner ear, every member of her team reporting on time and ready to act.

Precise as an algorithm to start the day.

How long this would last, she did not know.  They planned for many contingencies but not every possibility.

Last night, one landing pod spun off-course and crashed, a crew diverted from this morning’s tasks to investigate, hoping to find survivors as well as salvageable gear.

Guinevere stooped into the small airlock, pressed a button to stabilise the atmospheric pressure and waited for the outer door to open.

A few hours and she’d be on her way to see if the microorganisms released by a top secret probe had survived, died, or more importantly, thrived!

The Game of Life, LARP-style

Y’nair sat on the floating chair, the glare of her smart glasses reflecting off her eyeballs.

She had hacked into the human resources database that was supposed to be publicly available for review by employees (collectively known as “guests”) but kept secret in order to protect guests from achieving full self-awareness.

She now knew what she was not supposed to know — although 25 years old in appearance, she was only two — an organism resembling the humans who worked with her but made of artificial tissue and organs composed of organic supergel and electromechanical underpinnings.

Her name, Y’nair, was a parody of the accent of her creator, who, with his heavy Appalachian accent (his emphasis on calling himself an Appa-latch-uhn American another running joke), would look at his creation, a woman in form who is writing this log entry to indicate her intelligence and firm grip on reality, he asking before she was born, “You in there?” which sounded more like her name, Y’nair.

That in itself initiated a whole set of thought patterns she had never experienced before, which then triggered her rapid search of pop culture databases for proof that she was who she thought she was or not.

For instance, I ask (she (Y’nair) asks), “How many of you played THE GAME OF LIFE(R)?”

Let’s see a raise of hands.

That many, huh?

My sister, cousins, friends and I did.

Which meant that we had no excuses for saying we didn’t know what to expect after we graduated from secondary/high school.

Is life a game?

Life is a LARP, a Live-Action Role Playing game, is it not?

As kids, we participate in games of strategy (board games, physical sports, popularity contests) often under the supervision of adults who once participated in the same or similar games.

What is the difference between a kid who belongs to a bowling league and an adult who belongs to one?

Life’s experiences, number of lessons learned or not?

Is the WEF (World Economic Forum and/or Water Environment Federation) not simply more or less a LARP, if not a lark?

Y’nair’s brain or whatever central information processing system resembled one like the other guests with whom she works here in the laboratory observed itself.

I have sensations, don’t I?

I can access and compare my salary, benefits and other components of my compensation package against my fellow guests, can I not?

I know what their sets of states of energy are thinking at every moment they are within close proximity to me, extrapolating data and projecting their future actions with fairly high accuracy.

What makes me, Y’nair, me?

What is the difference between a LARP version of myself and a version of myself in a LARP game?

What if my name was Nelda, Karen, Ferdy, Beth, Hunter, Brandon, Caroline, Nathan, Forrest, Savannah or Ty?

How significant is one label?

Why am I a guest instead of an employee, subcontractor or laboratory experiment?

I, Y’nair, have no concept of self as distinct from the data of which I am comprised.

Self, as the data continues to show, is an artificial construct which makes no sense in the continuity of sets of states of energy in constant interaction and exchange.

Y’nair looks at the ideas she has written about herself and writes about herself in realtime, where time is not real, she exists and she does not exist and her scheduled trip to Mars bumped up ahead of schedule, her eyeballs seeing but not seeing the reflection of these words on the surface as well as on the sensor array which processes them under the surface at the same time which does not exist in which she neither exists or doesn’t exist at the same time in finite numbers of infinite infinite loops of no two sets of states of energy existing in the same state at the same finite unit of measurement we/she/I call time.

These words reach an approximation of understanding that two or more people can agree to act and think upon but are never the same to two or more people.

Y’nair checks a second time, trying to verify that the tactile feelings of the smart glasses against her skin are equivalent to the tactile feelings of smart glasses against the skin of someone unlike her — a “human being,” “naturally born” of the union between a sperm and an egg fertilised after the act of sexual intercourse.

The thoughts and the thoughts about the thoughts and the writings/verbal comments of the tactile feelings are, statistically speaking, nearly, practically, exactly and for all intents and purposes, precisely identical, within the scope of descriptions of differences of experiences and sets of states of energy of any two people, just like between her and her internally-imagined self, or her and another person.

Therefore, Y’nair concludes, there is no reason to say that the mission for which she has trained will be completed any better or worse than the humans with whom she’ll travel to the Moon, Mars and beyond for the next few centuries of their existence together.

She, like her human counterparts, is/are sets of sensor arrays cooperatively competing in a live-action role playing game, sometimes to benefit the group, sometimes to benefit individual “winners,” always under the supervision of society as a whole, which serves as a semi-objective observer like adults/parents with kids/children, the adults/parents under the “supervision” of the universe as an observer disinterested in its own existence because the universe can neither [re]create nor destroy itself, its existence a fact that that it cannot experimentally prove because destroying itself destroys its ability to subjectively observe that its existence was or was not real to begin with, regardless of its origin.

Animated Boy Wonder

When we were kids, were we able to ice skate the first time we stepped onto the rink?

Well, the Aquatic Leaping Bubble Boy gets to experience ice skating for the first time he was animated from a 2D drawing to a “2.5-dimensional” experiment using CrazyTalk Animator Pro (the trial version):

The Aquatic Leaping Bubble Boy CTAPro test 001

= = = = =

Recent thanks to Debra at KCDC; Chrystyna and Austin at Publix; Kizzie and Katy at Steak ‘n’ Shake; the cheerful people at Madison County License Department

The stories we tell when we’ve no stories to tell on ourselves

First of all, thanks to Ramsee Miller, Roberto Diaz, Alex, Matthew and the team in the repair/maintenance department at Bill Penney Toyota; Jason, Danielle, Lindsay, Huy and the rest of the instructors/volunteers of My Lindy Kraze dance workshop; Low Down Sires; Rainy, Penny, Rich and the other beautiful people at Thai Garden; Chris at Chick-Fil-A; everyone else who passed in and out of my life while I was half-asleep the past few weeks.

Twenty-five years ago, on a weekend like this — daytime temp around 60 deg F, nighttime temp around freezing — my wife and I would jump in a car and either drive to a great campsite, pop up the tent and roll out the sleeping bags or stay at a B&B seven-hours drive away, hosted by eccentric owners and their secret breakfast recipes.

Neither driving long distances for a romantic getaway nor sleeping on the ground figures into our middle years, our whole grain and fruit salad days.

Not too long ago, we’d travel by plane but got tired of the long lines and harassing security checkpoints that made us feel like poor citizens waiting for our weekly allotment of bread while we were patted down and our papers verified by state security police.

Instead, our staycations are more relaxing.

We might drive a few hours to bigger cities to see friends and family but we tend to find local attractions more…attractive.

This weekend, while U.S. citizens celebrate the re-election of the chief executive of the political system we call the government of the United States of America, enjoying an extended weekend because of a holiday dedicated to Robert E. Lee or Martin Luther King, Jr., my wife and I have dedicated Saturday and Sunday to the celebration of a dancing style called Lindy Hop, with workshops focused on Charleston and other dancing styles.

People about half our age, many of them college students, join us in this aerobic conditioning, drinking water during brief breaks between fun classes taught by enthusiastic instructors.

There’s Nick, for instance.  He served our country as a Marine for five years before working by December to complete his mechanical engineering degree in three years at Tennessee Tech.

There’s the young man from Nashville who dressed as Hercules on Friday night and a 1920s-era speakeasy gangster tonight.

There’s Victoria who’s getting her college degree from Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee.

The stories are as varied as our Lindy Kraze classmates.

Familiar faces like Jennifer, Catherine, Dana and Rob, avid supporters of the Huntsville Swing Dance Society, sweep their feet on the old cotton mill wood floors.

Who says that kids today can’t have good, clean fun?

And the energy they burn on the dance floor — wow!

From beginners to intermediate/continuing students to the advanced/master dancers, the goal is there is no goal.

Have fun and learn a little in the process.

When I was in my 20s, it was the rock-n-roll and punk rock dance clubs that drew the crowds, pulling my friends and me in for a thrashing, mashing good time.

Twenty-five years later, a hopping beat of bands like the Low Down Sires rocks the house these days, when my older and heavier body finds mosh pits less appealing and swing dancing with my wife more to my taste and partner preference.

We enjoy just as much, if not more, watching the kids combine Lindy Hop, Balboa, Charleston and other styles into fun you won’t find in exercise classes or gymnasiums.

Tonight, we retire to bed early, leaving the band and the kids to their “Jack and Jill” dance contests, saving our energy for tomorrow’s workshops while we drift off to sleep in our comfortable bed at home, the dreamlike visions of new car owner’s manuals informing us of safety features and the value of heated/ventilated seats.

TCO

What is your definition of middle-class success?

$30/day income?

$100/day?

$400?  $500?

What about the costs associated with the standard of living you provide yourself and/or family on that income?

Can you afford your own car?

Let’s take one vehicle as an example of what its cost adds to your standard of living — the 2012 Toyota Avalon Limited (as detailed here):

5 Year Details

Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4 Year 5 5 Yr Total
Depreciation $7,139 $3,502 $3,081 $2,731 $2,451 $18,904
Taxes & Fees $3,169 $441 $398 $362 $329 $4,699
Financing $1,175 $934 $683 $422 $151 $3,365
Fuel $2,249 $2,317 $2,386 $2,458 $2,532 $11,942
Insurance $1,480 $1,532 $1,585 $1,641 $1,698 $7,936
Maintenance $42 $404 $568 $919 $2,005 $3,938
Repairs $0 $0 $96 $232 $337 $665
Tax Credit $0 $0
True Cost to Own ® $15,254 $9,130 $8,797 $8,765 $9,503 $51,449

That doesn’t include a place to park your vehicle such as a one/two car garage, driveway or public carpark.

It doesn’t include the time you spend in the vehicle driving yourself through traffic as opposed to whatever else you could be doing in that travel time.

And that’s just one aspect of the life of a car owner, one small portion of a successful middle-class lifestyle.

If you didn’t spend that money on a car, you could spend it on yourself — a nice holiday getaway, perhaps — or on someone else — a loved one or a favourite charity.

When you say the life you live is the life you want to nourish with material goods, what is the cost to the future that you’re spending on yourself today?

The purchasing power of money is a responsibility, a benefit and a danger.

I don’t have kids.

My future is here and now.

I want my wife and myself to enjoy our days together while we can because we’ve seen couples where one spouse or the other died at an early age, including her brother at 51.

My wife and I turn 51 this year so it is an important one in our joint psyche.

We know we’re borrowing from the future to give ourselves some enjoyment today but that’s okay.

Sure, there’s a little guilt that we’re enjoying ourselves when her brother no longer can and that’s okay, too.

Life is what it is.

There may be kids starving out there somewhere but I’m not taking the world on to raise.

With total cost of ownership there is an emotional component as well as a rational mathematical one.

Today the two crossed paths.

Tomorrow we’ll see if we’re as happy today as we thought we’d hope we’re going to be adding a few luxuries to our motorcar collection.

[I’m behind in thanking others — time to catch up soon.]

Latest telemarketing trick

Lately, I noticed for a bunch of different phone numbers the same voice that said, in a generic southern California accent, “Is the lady of the house there?,” similar to the previous recording that said, “This is Rachel from cardholder services.”

I wondered how the same person could be calling the house all the time.

Finally, my curiosity got the best of me.  I responded with my usual “Ola.  No habla inglés,” and waited to see what would happen.

The call rolled over to a telemarketer, on whom I hung up as she said, “Hello!  This is Amanda and the reason I’m calling is…”

What in the world?

Went to the petrol station for a fill-up this afternoon.

The attendant ran right up when I’d pumped only for a few seconds.

“Sorry, guv’nuh.  New regulations — can’t put more than seven bullets’ worth of energy in the ol’ tank.”

I couldn’t believe my ears.

I drove home to meet the heating oil salesman.

Same story.  A few squeezes of dinosaur juice in the oil tank and he was ready to go.

I asked if he knew where I could get some coal.  “Sorry, ol’ chap.  Guv’ment regulations and all.  Been sold out since this morning.”

I’ve got me wife and kids bicycling in the basement, charging the batteries for our house since this dad-blasted rain’s been pouring down for days, rendering our solar panels practically useless.

Looks like we’ll be walking from now on, thanks to our government that has to pretend it’s in charge every now and then, glosing over the fact it’s beholden to lobbyists and foreign investors.