NOTE: Kent Blazier was my pediatrician many decades ago. Kristy Urquhart is a high school classmate.
Tag Archives: climate
Driving the Home Digital
During this morning’s nap, I dreamt I was inside a giant lawnmower, the blades of the lawnmower swirling around me.
I awoke as the sounds of the lawnmower receded (a helicopter flying past?).
In the leftover grass clippings of the dream, I heard the last bit of a talk show host and his guest discussing a pet theory of the guest — the prevalence of tattoo/ink reality TV shows was to increase a desire in the public for tattoos and thus hide the real tattooed criminal gangs from the police, gangs who had funneled money to film production studios for the express purpose of making the reality TV shows.
I enjoy my dreams for, without them, what goofy ideas in reality would I find to entertain me any better?
In the post-dream silence, the hum of an aquarium filter and the snoring of cats/raccoons serenade me.
The bright reflection of water droplets evaporating from tree leaves leaves me happy, content that blue skies fill the frame of my visions of a planet that bears me no ill will, knowing my existence is but one miniscule drop of life on this orb.
For that is all I am, all I need.
Planetary exploration is for the rest of you, if you desire your species a chance of surviving the random clanging of metal spheres hanging from a mobile attached to the ceiling of a museum containing meaningless money-laundered investments “works of art.”
Humour me.
Give me comedies and tragedies in your haste to go nowhere fast on the same planet that thousands of generations of your species have crawled and walked upon.
I will look for patterns that do not exist, patterns given to me by my grandfather and others before him who knew that repetition is frequent and originality a trick of the eye.
Alakazam! Alakazoom! إفتح يا سمسم! Let the mischievous spirits walk the earth and provide me seeds for the next serialised tall tale!
How many parsecs in par, Secretary Kerry?
The basement supercomputer has been acting up again.
Sadly, it woke me up from cryogenic sleep, where I had been snoozing for over 25,000 years, resting in SpaceShip Earth while creeping in spirals ever so slowly to my next stop on the way back home.
YAWN! Where are we?
Hmm…this looks interesting. But…what’s this?
Where are the cave people?
Where are the hunters and gatherers?
What language do they speak after we gave them a new vocabulary to go with the current (or previous, if you will) generation of central nervous system?
Looks like I’m going to adjust my future prediction algorithm slightly to accommodate the conditions that put me no longer in bottom of an anonymous hill and instead in the middle of…what do they call it? A suburban neighbourhood?
Excuse me. What is the name for this structure? A semi-d? Okay, thanks.
It’s interesting, comparing my expectations to their reality.
According to my algorithm, the newborns should have mastered their alphabets and numbering system in utero.
Instead, they’re still taking years to master the basics of innerspecies communications.
Let’s see…how is their interspecies communications?
Excuse me. What is that tree saying? ‘Go hug a root, you green environazi treehugger’? No, it’s saying that it’s hungry.
Looks like another major tweak is in order.
Oh well, the supercomputer was right. I did need to wake up just now, didn’t I?
A few twists of the dial, a few reconnections of grass and tree root networks and we’ll have Spaceship Earth back in tiptop shape before I return to the dream of dreams where I’m home, no longer managing a planet as my transportation device, quietly rubbing what you might possibly call elbows to reproduce our kind and wallowing in battery acid baths for exoskeleton rejuvenation.
Supercomputer, I’m ready if you are. The cicadas are offering their wonderful soothing bedtime music.
Three….
Two…
One..
Zzzzzzzz.
We’re Number One!
Looking back at quaint early 21st century ideas
The North Atlantic Ocean is warming? Pshaw!
It’s the steam punk future we want, not global warming reality.
How much pain are you willing to take to achieve your goal?
Looking at a map of planet Earth, Guinevere traced the ribbons, ellipses and circles of fresh water with her eyes.
Old riverbeds showed up unexpectedly.
Towns followed geographic terrain more often than not.
Military bases popped up in urban and sparse landscapes.
A single drop of water contained more living beings than could be counted in a single second.
Why does water cover the surface of the planet?
Why do we breathe air (low-humidity gas) instead of water?
Why is Russia such a large country and Africa a such a large continent of small countries?
So much water on one planet and practically none on another…sigh…
The blue orb of Earth shows little evidence of our species’ impact from the viewpoint of Mars.
Why did it take so long for us to get here, settling down to the business of putting Earth behind us and the galaxy ahead of us?
Just because of water? That’s all? That’s all there is to life?
Why is Greenland covered with so much frozen water?
Why is Mars not?
When did we learn to adapt dehydrated versions of ourselves to the Martian environment?
Doesn’t seem that long ago…
Strange Daze
Today, I let my eyes wander over to websites I rarely find interesting only to find them interesting, including this “poster” at rare.us:
Which pushed my thoughts on to other mass media outlets and their statistical anomalies, including the Saturday Night Live “Five Timers Club“:
Is there a pattern here worth analysing or simply pointing out and laughing toward?
If George W. Bush’s image can be rehabilitated, then anything is possible, n’est pas?
Can you find a correlation?
Can you find a correlation between cost of living and happiness?
First, the second:
Second, the first:
Redacted, retracted, redux
I don’t know what it is that puts me in a mood like this, this feeling of smugness, this desire not to believe in myself, to always be wrong, always chasing the perfect 100 on a test score as if I’ll never get it, running from my mistakes, fleeing into the cosmos.
Why?
Because of both my faith in AND my fear of our species’ imperfections.
I do not want to be successful.
Instead, always vigilant, looking for the crack in the veneer, analysing the pinhole leak in the dam, contemplating the lack of understanding everything going on in a cubic centimeter of dirt.
Why?
Because we can make films about our mistakes, films which contain their own mistakes, and we learn from neither, or the lessons we learn and the solutions we apply solve a different set of problems because time is irrelevant, only relative.
That is why we seek perfection in our theosophical beliefs.
Otherwise, tarnish, rust and decay should be taken as normal aspects of our impermanence.
I am chasing my tail in an M.C. Escher print.
The Contrarian’s Contrarian
Poiu spent all morning in observation of a snail glide across the backyard, grass blade to grass blade, minidirtclod to minidirtclod, and onto the sidewalk where, in the heat of the sun, it retracted into its shell and waited for the cool of evening to return.
The armadillo passed by both of them without noticing their odd relationship.
The scientist and the experiment.
Question: does an observed snail change its behaviour?
Experiment: Pick up snail from sidewalk, move it to starting position. Observe and record its behaviour as it heads toward sidewalk. Return snail to starting position. Does snail’s path deviate when unobserved the next day? Return at end of next day and see where it ended up, check its movements.
Poiu shook his head. Why did his parents decide to name him after a row of English letters on a QWERTY keyboard? What were they thinking?
Poiu looked at the list of assumptions in his experiment.
At age two, his thought-t0-text rate was slower than his older sister’s but his reasoning powers were more advanced despite his mother’s measured intelligence and intellectual output greater than his father’s.
From those thoughts alone, he deduced that gender was not directly related to intelligence, given the same number of inputs and genetic propensity for logical rather than emotional thought development.
Poiu looked at the embedded display screen woven into his optic nerve and glanced at the report detailing the results of the experiment being edited by his onboard computer assistant.
The assumptions were wide-ranging, from the lack of predators to the slight change in the snail’s body weight because of growth and/or water loss to the availability of nutrition between starting point and sidewalk to the number of unseen parasites and snail pests.
What about prevailing winds or UV radiation spikes?
A snail’s central nervous system can’t be too complicated but an outdoor environment can.
Poiu proceeded with publishing the preliminary experiment results.
Within microseconds, Poiu’s playmates provided valuable criticism of the report, some he had thought of and some he would never have guessed.
Back to the drawing board, as they said in the 21st century!
treetrunkdings 
