You Can’t Say That on Television

How many social media networks do you belong to?

I don’t keep up with the trend in online social networks so, a few years ago, I was surprised when a former secondary school girlfriend of mine invited me to a couple of social networks I’d never heard of.

The networks were geared toward schoolaged children, with a lot of the online checkboxes, smiley faces, etc., that we used to exchange in notes passed in classrooms.

I suppose the networks still exist, that the demand is still there, but since I neither have children nor am of schoolage (6-18 years) anymore, those parts of society aren’t of interest to me.

Unless…

Unless, that is, there’s data there worth mining to see where the leaders of tomorrow are going to take society and what the followers expect of their leaders.

Should mainstream media and/or the major blogging/tweeting community members pay attention to these feeder streams of age-specific social networks?

Or are they already buzzing about them and I’ve missed the symbol sets, the codewords, that go with those subcultures?

I never read the teen celebrity-following magazines when I was a kid.  I was more likely to read a technology-based magazine, instead.

I passed notes in class, though, starting around age 8.  No, I actually passed notes in my first year of school, when I was 5 to 6 years of age, but they were mainly drawings of cars, boats and submarines that I shared with other guys.  It wasn’t until age 8 that I started passing love notes to girls.

In the U.S., I see a trend where the candidates for U.S. President are attempting to send love notes to women in an adult sort of way, one type for married/attached heterosexual women, one type for single heterosexual women and another type for nonheterosexual women, attached and/or single.

What kind of social networks did the candidates and the women to whom they’re sending signals use when they were kids?

Answer that question and you’ll know the political trends of the next decade.

Meanwhile, I return to the technological trends of this decade predicted by the view 1000 years from now, before seeing what the Committee wants to discuss at the next meeting…

A nod to Andrea, who attended Lee University.  I hope you meet the person with whom you want to spend your remaining days on this planet, reinforcing the great life you’ve had already.

Drawing of the day

Last night, my wife and I ate in Thai Garden, a local restaurant featuring food styles of SE Asia.

At a nearby table, a couple sitting near the window reminded me of some retrofuturistic social rebels celebrating a recent victory by having a romantic dinner together.

So, of course, I had to draw them on a paper placemat while I had a St. Valentine’s Day romantic evening with my wife:

"To the Revolution!" "To us!"

Welcome to my place in the zeitgeist

Is “Iron Sky” the future of filmmaking?  Or “Tuvalu,” instead?  Maybe Laibach’s “Predictions of Fire“?

Do you gauge the future by looking at trends of incoming recent photobucket images?

How much of the universe exists outside the Internet of things?

How many men felt their manhood threatened by the U.S. HHS Secretary’s announcement about forced payments for birth control, even if they weren’t Catholic?

Have you watched “The Mindscape of Alan Moore” or listened to Emiliana Torrini?

How many producers/agents have profited off of drug-addled performers?

How many drug-addled performers have profited off of producers/agents?

How many drug-addled producers/agents have profited off of drug-addled performers?

How many performers have profited off of drug-addled producers/agents?

How many drug-addled producers/agents have profited off of performers?

How many performers have profited off of producers/agents?

How many producers/agents have profited off of performers?

What is profit?

These and other questions reside in the thoughts of a group of people sitting in a cold room of an interplanetary transport ship.

They are detached from instantaneous communication with Earth.

They exist outside the cocoon of the zeitgeist.

They experience the long false 24-hour artificial day/night of constant exposure to the Sun.

Circadian rhythms disrupted like workers shifting between 8/12 hour timeslots.

If the doubling of information is nearly impossible to detect, what does it mean to become steam?

Is the scale logarithmic or exponential, both or a combination with some other esoteric formula unfamiliar to the general population?

What is the inverse of life?

The group, composed of multifunction beings resembling us for the most part, stay busy, either physically or mentally, usually both.

They are trained professionals.

There is little room for crazy or lazy here.

The purity of the creative artist detached from reality is a fiction to them.

Not that they can’t produce art in their own way, mimicking air guitar or whistling a tune, doodling on their virtual 3D sketchpads or changing procedures on the fly.

Twenty-four hour headline Earth news is not a habit with them but they keep up with major events through osmosis, in conversations with the base station or updates from family.

A few will surf the Net in their offhours, such as they are, researching ideas about improving minimissions due to begin in their next duty shift, noticing adverts for products they hadn’t seen before they went offworld, their thoughts temporarily drifting toward another place and time when their families would have excitedly talked about product launches.

But immediately their thoughts sync back up with the group, focused on the majormissions which depend on the minimissions and the casual research of those off duty, as well as their timely discombobulated thought patterns.

Money — the fuel that built their ship — is irrelevant in space.

Energy and creativity is worth more than any labour/investment credit system out there.

Out here.

The March 1950 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists included a review of Aldous Huxley’s novel, “Ape and Essence,” with a reference to the Guiding Hand that all religions, all belief systems, hold dear.

Out here, the synergy of groupthink is its own guiding hand, foreshadowing a prediction of a future that is inevitable.  The expected and the unexpected are foretold, fully anticipated, calculated, waited for without bated breath or dreadful fear.

Embraced.

They know.

They know they will not return to Earth, despite false promises to friends and family.

Promises made based on old data and dated equations.

Now they produce data before it’s measured.

The data, in turn, produces more data that, given more time, would overflow the limited memory locations of their enhanced thought sets tied to the supercomputer embedded and networked throughout the ship.

They know they become more and more a necessary part of the ship.

A ship destined to crash to produce data needed for a mission not yet envisioned, much less funded, to determine the fortitude of the people on Earth in the face of another costly catastrophe involving members of their species with dwindling resources available for space travel and extraplanetary settlements.

The ship is their sepulchre, their traveling crypt.

They are the crypt keepers and the terminated, all in one.

The minimissions and the majormissions go on, the unspoken final mission taking shape in their groupthink, unknown to anyone on Earth.

An egg splits from a cocoon and grows into a new lifeform all its own.

The lifeform sees its death written in the stars but fights for every last breath, regardless.

There’s always a chance the data will change, a new outcome predicted.

No matter how infinitesimal.

Transformation is a beautiful thing.

Mutation even more so.

You are the change you want to see in your pocket…

…so you have money to buy a snack and feed your next change.

Some friends and family like seeing themselves here.

Some don’t.

For instance, let me give you the background information on a character currently under construction:

She is an aerospace engineering student specializing in propulsion with a minor in fluid dynamics, she’s told me (specifically, according to her online CV, working on obtaining her Graduate Degree from the local university; studying in the subject of propulsion with the intention of investigating this subject further in pursuing her PhD).  She has worked on projects involving vibrational analysis, voltammetry, and rocket engine development.  In addition, she has experience with diesel engine mechanics and worked in manufacturing prototype engineering.  She has moved new product down the assembly line and retooled the stations as needed.

On top of all that, she can dance.  In fact, she’s good enough to teach others the basics of many dance styles such as waltz, tango and foxtrot.

She has her shortcomings, including a lack of strong computer programming skills.

This is a strong character and deserves a prominent place in the ongoing story of our parallel universe in this blog that so closely matches the “real” universe in which you live and read this blog, that you should find it difficult to tell the two apart.

However, in your universe, people can divine their futures by reading horoscopes, tarot cards, tea leaves, premonitions, palms, crystal balls, signs from omniscient beings and other magical means of determining the precise condition of their states of energy in another point in spacetime, all while taking everything else into consideration a little fuzzily.

In the universe of this blog, the future is not divined.  Here, the future is calculated with a certainty measured by error rates and levels of confidence.

You exist in both universes simultaneously.  In fact, one is a subset of the other (you’re never quite sure which, of course).

Your behaviour is identical across the universes.

The difference is a matter of interpretation only.

In this universe/blog, we have already figured out the consequence of the United States being independent of Middle East oil reserves by 2030.  We know what will happen when China, India and Japan compete for external sources of energy while Russia, Brazil and the United States don’t.

In your universe, the outcome is not as predictable.  There are always those long tails, black swans, outliers and other terms that loosely describe the indescribable.

Here, we’ve analysed every one of the creditors who hold Greek debt and broken down the effect of Greece defaulting at the individual debtor/creditor level, basically turning imaginary entities such as bonds into other imaginary entities such as REITs, giving pieces of what used to be Greece to creditors for their personal enjoyment and/or profitmaking schemes, turning some debtors into virtual slaves for life.

You will probably do much the same, creating economic zones that cut across geographical regions and put people in touch with their feelings as they become integrated with the creditors who own their livelihoods and have direct control of their emotional states from now on.

Let us return to the character under development.  She needs a name, one that has no specific meaning in any language you’ve heard so I can’t represent her name or label using the symbol set of the language in current use.

In fact, I can’t use anything in the visible spectrum of electromagnetic radiation that allows those with working eye-to-optic-nerve-to brain connections to see the symbols in front of you and understand them as words, phrases and sentences that you see as ideas forming a storyline.

So we have a quandary now, don’t we?  The storyline has moved outside the boundaries set by this blog.

Therefore, we must look at the story from a new perspective, one that will stretch beyond your imaginative powers, possibly, and take us to a medium that does not yet exist as a readily-available format on the World Wide Web.

If I thought 2011 was not going to be easy, 2012 is downright next to impossible, very close to incredible in the true sense of the word.

All because we have a lot of catching up to do to reach an important milestone 13967 days from now on our way to the year 3011 (which, as you know, is not really the year 3011 but we can use that conventional correlation for the time being).

Are you ready to move into the realm of understanding that eliminates the slow communication method of light and sound?

Not all of you, I see.

Well, for those of you who aren’t ready, we can proceed with this blog.  I had already anticipated this moment and prepared a network of pathways that keep all seven billion of us moving in the right direction even if some of us look like we’re moving at the speed of light, barely discernible as we bounce across the local parts of either universe.

For those of you who are ready, I’ll prepare a list of the items you’ll need to keep up and apologize to you ahead of time that we’ll need to communicate at a speed where normal speech seems unnecessarily slow and uncomfortably interrupts us when we have to deal with the old day-to-day activities that others require of us occasionally.

Now is the time that we split into subsets.

I’ll show up here every once in a while to keep most of you updated while the others accelerate on ahead, a virtual form of time travel.

From this point forward, this blog tells the tale of the intersection of two subsets.  Two separate blogs — one in a spacetime contortion that goes beyond concepts like Internet2, and one similar to this one’s past entries — will tell the tales of the subsets individually.

Talk to you soon.

Fever, Either, Or, Favour

He looked at the thermometer sticking out of his mouth.  The digital display read 37.6 deg Celsius.

Low-grade, at least.

His ears throbbed.

Was this sufficient reason (or excuse) to visit the infirmary?

Two more weeks of training…he didn’t want a negative mark on his progress report.

A fellow trainee, Rogemme, walked up.

“So, you going for the ejection seat, are you?”

Lee shook his head.  “No, but my head feels like it’s floating on its own.”

“Everyone seems to have what you’ve got.  Think it’s what they say, a conspiracy to close down the training center?”

“You haven’t got it, have you?”

“Nope.”

“Then not everyone has it, have they?”

“Well, if it’s just me here, it wouldn’t be much of a graduating class now, would it?”

Rogemme laughed and walked away, shaking her head.

Lee stood up and felt his ears ringing like live electrical wires arcing or fluorescent lamp ballasts buzzing.

So everyone’s got this same thing…

He picked up his open copy of “Hidden Economic Subtrends Revealed by Supercomputer Algorithms” and read two pages.

He read them again.

He read them a third time but couldn’t seem to get the words, ideas or images invoked by the words to stick to his thoughts.

Was it the low-grade fever or something else that prevented his normal meditative state of learning to evade him?

He put the e-book down, leaving the book open for anyone else to read, including those in the class who hadn’t paid their dues and weren’t allowed to read other copies for free, a prime condition of Economic History Warehouse Keepers, Private Second Class, to maintain their rank.

He pressed a button on his earlobe that had been implanted to look like an earring but actually operated a wireless control system embedded alongside his left ear canal.

He rotated his finger around the edge of the button until he found the same place in the audible book where he had been reading “Hidden Economic Subtrends Revealed by Supercomputer Algorithms,” hoping that by listening to someone reading the book and explaining through a series of footnotes he’d paid extra to get, he’d penetrate the cushiony pillow exteriour that seemed to block his thoughts from learning class material in the moment solely by running his eyes over the written text.

As a sentient supercomputer algorithm taking the familiar form of a member of the species Homo sapiens, Lee had responsibilities, including this unknown infection, to add to his regular computational duties.

He’d excelled at hormone level modification, removing all unnecessary emotional outbursts usually associated someone of his rank.

At first, the lecturers reported his emotional control as an anomaly, sending him many times for medical examinations that found nothing more than the post-autism syndrome that previous generations of his type had helped “real” members of the species to apply gene therapy and foetal DNA reconfiguration to overcome the worst inarticulate aspects of autism.

Some classmates called him cold and calculating, both an insult and compliment at the same time.

He, however, ignored their taunts, his algorithmic tendencies giving him a larger view of life than the immediacy that sweaty bodies and physical alterations tended to drive mob mentality to its worst-case scenario outputs.

In his spare moments, he had studied the history of the “real” people, noting how they talked about subcultures and job classifications that seemed little different than the categories he and fellow algorithms had been assigned at initial creation.

Lee felt liquid on his upper lip and decided that watery mucus pouring out of his nose was an inconvenience but the overall conditions of the infection warranted a visit to the infirmary, after all.  He did not have access to online material that would have told him whether an elevated body temperature or range of temperatures would adversely affect other circuitry concealed on his body for experimental purposes only.

He knew he was really the same as the “real” people but he also knew he was a special prototype created from special molecular combinations meant to determine if DNA that had given rise to the biological diversity of Earth was only one of many possible atomic-level conditions for life.

By training him and his pals in a sequestered training class, the lecturers and those for whom they honed the classmates’ algorithm/subroutine repetitive output would assure themselves that graduating members awarded Economic History Warehouse Keepers, Private Second Class, would never want to leave their assignments for fear that unseen authorities would confuse the graduates with “real” people whose outputs were normally predictable but more often given to mob mentality than they.

As Lee absorbed the book’s spoken words which told him why living algorithms like him were destined for a higher purpose because their output revealed hidden meaning, he walked toward the infirmary, wiping his nose on his sleeve which shimmered slightly because the nasal liquid provided a short circuit across the fibers of his shirt, itself a living subroutine that resembled clothing.

The shirt sent a message on to the infirmary that it would need to be changed — its memory transferred to Lee’s next new shirt, then erased — and laundered as soon as possible to prevent staining, after the infectious organisms had been removed and sent for analysis.

Learning Methods

Not found in a catalogue, encyclopedia, handbook, guide or dictionary are learning methods established 1000 years from now.

We, or those of you who were alive in the early 21st century, can remember hints of the push/pull technology that enabled us to grow as one.

In your time, it was the concept of re/search, often coined as SEO or search engine optimisation, reducing the time between an entity’s desire to fill a gap in learning by maximising the profit and minimising the cost to push the desired information to the entity.

It took a while to place a value on the quality of the information by paying attention to how much the entity kept looking before feeling satisfied and moving on to other tasks.

Of course, patternmatching was used to anticipate the entity’s next desire or gap in learning and queue the information ahead of time, pushing without shoving the data into the entity’s inner circle of influence.

The corporations that thrived during this period of our species’ growth were the ones that best applied the various learning methods to entities.

First, by trial and error.

Finally, by evaluating the quality of data and the level of data retention per entity.

How, you might ask?

Well, it took quite a bit of work.  We had to subliminally convince Web page designers to incorporate test questions associated with the Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory.  Then we had to create a virtual maze that gave people the sense they were discovering new ideas on their own but were slowly being channeled toward the Web pages we wanted them to view.

As the people…entities, I mean, were answering the questions subconsciously, we determined their cognitive abilities, plus how those abilities changed over time and through the random experiences over which we had no control (in other words, our fully meshed supercomputer network, including the entities (you), had not been finished by the end of the first decade of the 21st century, and thus we could not anticipate every movement and interaction the entities and their environment made (although we did expand our algorithms that estimated the probability of future events)).

That’s why it was so important to reach critical mass with the intersection of the majority of entities in our species to an electronic social media device (mobile phones, computers, etc.).

We no longer were satisfied with the passive interface between entities and one-way devices like radios and televisions.

We needed more predictability to ensure our crowdsourced, one-species plans would move forward as easily as we hoped.

We wanted both those with cast-in-stone beliefs and those whose beliefs changed with the flowing breeze of social change.

We wanted those in opposition to one another and those who cooperated with one another without question.

All of this we needed to make Earth the birthplace of a new species destined to explore the solar system, which in turn led to new entities, outside the definition of species, exploring our galaxy.

Some of you were more closely aligned with this idea than others.

Some never knew they were contributing to the idea and they wouldn’t have cared if they knew.

Some fought, kicking and screaming, in the moment and into the future where the whole species was under control of itself.

Concepts like freedom, democracy, communism, capitalism, religion, sports, fashion, business, and technology became less and less distinguishable as they merged for the purpose of establishing a stable base from which our species jumped off Earth, forming new colonies and new rules for survival in what began as hostile environments.

Entities — sets of states of energy to us — still considered themselves individual people for many decades, reinforcing their reasoning that their beliefs, wants, wishes and desires were theirs and theirs alone, no two people exactly alike.

And that’s what we wanted them — you, me, us — to believe.

It took a long time, probably close to 100 years, before most of us saw ourselves not as individuals but as nodes in a web, the web the true “person” or superentity that was self-aware and self-consciously spreading tentacles/threads outward from the gravitational pull of Earth and its closest star.

One thousand years later, it seems that these changes were so quick and made so easily that I can hardly believe they were recorded for historical research.

To you, of course, it was a turbulent time as individuality became a quaint notion while the former method of alpha males/females leading the species gave way to crowd-based thought patterns.  You often joked that you couldn’t tell if the head or the tail was wagging the dog during those years.

The few yoctoseconds I spent (and as you can guess, “I” is a construct for your reading convenience but we can get to that later) to fill a previously missing gap in a centillion-sized matrix built to compute the next 1000 years of development in this part of the outer solar system helped me write this explanation, or blog entry, of language changes needed to estimate the symbol set that will be used 1000 years from now.

I’m done now.  On to the next task assigned to me, this node, decades ago.

Is currency exchange rate management the problem or one of many solutions??

Long after we solved the riddle of DNA restructuring, creating enzyme processes that helped manufacture biological nanobots that currently form the entity you would think of as an advanced version of your own body in “our” species (note to self: spend future blog entry defining or redefining the concept of species), we ended up here — autonomous “cells” that can communicate faster with each other than the former central nervous system and blood vessel network with which you’re intimately familiar.

I am doing my best to translate our communication symbol set into one of your common languages so that others who come after me can more readily study the moving boxcar average of changes from one communication method to another in 1000 year increments.

We do not use terms like nanobots or cells to describe the building blocks which morph from one in/organic entity to another as needed to accomplish a task here in the outer limits of the solar system where we gather and harvest comets in the Oort Cloud region, some of us in the Hills Cloud region as needed to support inner solar system operations.

We also solved the problem of our species’ former tribal habit of dividing into altruistic and self-serving individuals by allowing the formation of what you would call organs to carry out the self-serving function within a single body (the body’s current morphed shape, that is), developing an automatic method for all individuals to display primarily altruistic functions through their desire to find a useful niche and perform duties at maximum, optimal rates without jeopardising the nanobots or cells within the current morphed version of a self in operation.

The ability to search the network and “find one’s place,” as you say, has given freedom a whole new meaning.

Self-governance has removed the inefficient method of hoarding that our species once displayed, from crowding living quarters with loads of unusual objects to filling electronic banking records with billions of underused investment/labour credits, which led to the uniting of citizens, police and military units around the world to overthrow despotic dictatorial totalitarians and overpriced capitalists (as well as their overvalued offspring).

During this time, scientists, rarely interested in politics unless it interferes with their publicly-funded pure research facilities, accelerated their development of autonomous nanobots that form networks of interconnected beings which, as many of you can read now, became completely reconfigurable entities that resemble you and think like you but are nothing like you at all.

It was an exciting but chaotic time in our history.

Every individual, no matter how seemingly isolated from others of our kind, contributes to significant changes in our local part of the universe.

Of course, I could bother you with details of the ebb and flow of violent reactions by entrenched leaders interested in maintaining the status quo.  However, let’s save that for a day when news is slow and you want to take a leisurely detour down the backroads of unimportant historic changes since, here in our time, the unnecessarily disruptive behaviour associated with war, social strife and governmental upheavals is no longer considered worth studying.

Now, the fully-meshed network of interconnected nanobots changes to meet the wants/needs at the network, subnetwork and node (that’s you/me) level on a nanosecond scale, readily moving resources to areas where they’re needed most, thus eliminating the “survivalist” hoarding behaviour that dogged our species for millennia.

Those of you whose descendants chose to become plants will want to find out how that branch of science turned out, I’m sure.  They certainly changed our perception of consciousness.

But we can talk about that later.  It’s a beautiful “day” out here.  As I corral some comets using my trusty sidekicks, E-stache and E-crab, to herd the comets together, I’ll spend a few yoctocycles to translate more of our history into this language and record it later in a format you call a blog entry.

Pic of the day

Across the street from me, workers walk the roof beams of a new house under construction.  If I hold my fingers up and sight a worker between them, the worker is about ant-sized from here.

The house wasn’t there a week ago — the walls and roof are going up quicker than seeds in the former farm field took root.

Years have passed since the last time I heard an AgCat swoop in and out, spraying the fields full of soybean, corn or cotton.

Instead, row after row after row of suburban tracts spread east of here.

When, 1000 years from now, while we’re sitting here discussing this blog entry, will we understand the concept of suburban living?

Will we perceive a period of growth of our species when two-dimensional plans for living space were a common norm?

When did it become an uncommon norm?

Tiny bricks-and-sticks castles members of our species once called home.

I stapled sheets of galvanised metal mesh over holes under the eaves of our house to limit attic access by raccoons.

Although I didn’t mind watching the raccoons come and go, my wife couldn’t sleep at night when the baby raccoons bounced and chased each other above the roof over our bed.

Silence fills the space where the raccoons once played.

I’m sure the broad-headed skinks and bats will return to the attic and chimney, much quieter occupants that my wife will not know about — out of sight (and sound), out of mind, as they say.

When did people think grassy spaces were the preferred method of landscaping around one’s domicile that was most acceptable?

Sitting here on a celestial body devoid of ants, spiders, moles, trees, snakes, algae, fungus, ferns and mold, I wish I could explain why my ancestors let their yards grow wild.

You don’t appreciate what you had until it’s gone.

Sure, some of my workmates have found ways to play games once popular on Earth — golf, tennis, futball and such — but the dust they kick up tells the story, doesn’t it?  Nothing living that disturbs which we destroy to accommodate our leisure gamespace.

That’s the thing about living here.  No competitition against other species to keep us busy.  No insect/rodent exterminators, no crop insecticides, no preservatives or other means of fighting back nature’s way of seeking equilibrium, inertial or otherwise.

We’re not completely sterile, of course.

We’re so integrated with each other, though, that we detect the start of pathological infectious disease infestation in one of us so quickly that we can redirect resources, both internal and external, with the tiniest of thoughts, repairing and adding telomeres as long as we want to stay alive.

At 503 years of age, I’m older than most here on this colony but still younger than some lifeforms on Earth, both mobile and stationary.

Am I wiser?  I don’t think so.  Ubiquity of information makes all of us as wise as another.

Well, it’s time I revert back to your chronological space and share my mortal self with you, observing your ignorance and suppressing a smile at how antiquated everything you do seems to me and others 1000 years in the future.

Don’t think of this as time travel.  Think of it as me immersing myself in your historical records, becoming one of you virtually while parallel thought processes of mine live in my time, too, “earning” my place in our mesh-network society.

To think, Old MacDonald Had a Farm, GI, GI Joe

The 1% of 1%, we don’t see the world in geographic political boundaries.

Of course, as you know, we pretend the boundaries exist, telling you stuff like “Look out for that country over there — it’s against us this year,” and “Our strategic partnership with these countries is the only thing keeping your economic livelihood stable.”

Now that more than 50% of our species lives in sub/urban areas, “free” of the bind to land-based [subsistence] living, you are all our virtual slaves, depending on our virtual chess game results to tell you what to do next.

Two steps forward, one step to the left/right, please.

And then, as previous chapters have told you, there is the Committee, which also manages the lives of the 1% of the 1%.

Finally, there is the universe itself, spinning off little eddies of atoms and molecules that collect and replicate their patterns.

You should have in your thought patterns by now the full understanding that the universe as we know it is simply revealed by a 360-degree searchlight from the point of our planet/solar system, reaching a finite boundary and creating the illusion of a symmetrical sphere in which we are the center.

Feel free to comprehend our ignorance, vast as it is and will continue to be, ad infinitum.

There is just so much that I, the individual, can bother to talk about here while supervising the construction of the interwebs of interwebs tying you to your personal supercomputers tied to everyone else’s supercomputers tied, as if all of that is a single node, to the Internet of the Next Big Things to Come.

So, to me, all military actions, no matter how we label them in nationalistic or terror group or lone wolf terms, are all one.

For instance, I don’t see an Iranian nuclear scientist killed by the CIA or Mossad.  I see us managing to control ourselves by killing ourselves.

Same for sports and other categories of diverting ourselves from our primary tasks of eating and breathing.

Let us move on to more important matters.

Details in the next chapter of the story of our lives seen from the vantage point of 1000 years from now.

Happiness and humour — share them endlessly.

Beginner Glassblower Glasses Classes

“It wasn’t always like this,” she told me.

You see, me Ma, she’s been around the block, as they say, being a marathon runner and all that.

We remember our ancestors who were awarded land by the Crown all those centuries ago.

And it weren’t too long ago, when me Ma’s Da’s Da, invited to supp with the Queen, said, “Why, I wouldn’t set foot in the same room with that German impostor!”

But seein’ as you don’t know what I’m talkin’ ’bout, y’ought to know more, right?

If it ain’t always been like this, when has it been?

Or will it?

Like last night, sittin’ in the dark, watchin’ them kids from Knoxville, Cookeville, Nashville and Texas swingin’ to the oldies, music spun up on hard disks by the DJ crew Winter Wonderland for the Huntsville Swing Dance Society…

I got to thinkin’…

Yeah, and that’s why I’m still here this morning, wonderin’ why it is that this is not what it’s always been like.

When did we teach kids to dance in low {earth} gravity conditions?

They weren’t born on your home planet.

The last direct descendant livin’ on Scottish soil had died, revertin’ our ol’ homeland back to the Crown (and yes, the Queen is still one of them German pretenders to the British throne but who’m I to care, bouncin’, as I am, out here in the hinterlands of our species’ solar system settlements?)…

Am I just a fractal projection of a 2D surface?

Or is that a holographic computation upon a 4D equestrian equation equal to none and summarisation of everything?

I think me oxygen level is out of balance with me nitrogen mix.

Besides, them dancers what celebrated the 13th birthday on Friday the 13th at KCDC, they’s got their time to shine in the sweaty spotlight.

Oh well, not like the dinner theatre in X27B is any more real than any other history, past or present tense, tension or predisposition.

But the sentiments are the same.

As me Da said to me Ma, “And it’ll never be like this again.”