Looks like I’ve a few errands to complete this afternoon.
Here’s your million-dollar bionic man epic tale for the day.
Looks like I’ve a few errands to complete this afternoon.
Here’s your million-dollar bionic man epic tale for the day.
According to our global product marketplace tracking system, there has been an odd surge in the sales of deer antler spray over the last few hours, beating out the “Haight-Ashbury/Maui Wowee” specials that usually sell so well on late Sunday evenings.
More as it develops…
A shoutout to our friends near Tulane University — you know what we’re talking about.
Thanks to Publix; Walmart; Hardee’s; Another Broken Egg; Wagon Wheel Liquors.
It doesn’t seem that long ago, does it?
Now, though, there’s more than one settlement, with new owners coming in, redesigning the old housing units to look familiarly like ancestral homes on planet Earth.
Used to be we thought we’d start over.
Not anymore.
The humans have generally congregated into one or settlements while the exploration bots keep spreading across the planet, no need of houses or other reminders of a life they neither remember nor need to carry on for the sake of descendants.
We are one group, one “people,” but our requirements for stimulating sensory organs vastly different than algorithms designed to process sensor array input.
I am a farmer for us, making sure we have the energy sources for our various sets of states of energy.
This is my story.
I live in a small hut at the end of the hydroponic growth chambers.
I provide food and nourishment for those amongst us who eat through their mouths or mouth equivalents.
I also maintain a miniature factory that cranks out spare body parts for our robotic friends.
The medical staff handles the surgical procedures like replacing body parts for our biological friends, however much I’ve protested that I can easily handle those duties, having built a robotic surgeon from parts I manufactured myself, downloading new algorithms from my Earth-based social network of farmers, ranchers and DIYers who delve into self-sufficiency and other survivalist tactics appropriate to solar system explorers like myself.
As a farmer, my secondary duty is analysing soil samples to determine which chemical reactions I need to conquer in order to convert Martian soil into edible foodstuff palatable by crew members with a variety of tastes and preferences.
In other words, I’m an ecosystem expert, creating microorganisms from scratch that efficiently perform the soil conversions for me so I can concentrate on my main duties that feel like I have to pull a rabbit out of a hat or worse, water out of thin air.
Water, water, water.
Solar energy, though weaker on Mars than on Earth, is abundant, which makes water production easier than we first thought.
But, problems crop up all the time.
Most of us may be rational scientists and engineers but that doesn’t mean we’re always careful about conserving water.
We can talk about that later.
Lee is coming over to review my plans for tightly-regulated metabolism control which, I believe, will greatly reduce our dependence on water.
Designing microorganisms has given me insight into the mechanisms of the human body that we were just beginning to understand when we assigned humans a decade ago to train for this mission.
If only we knew then what I know now!
Redesigning a human from the inside out is my ultimate goal and will make our Mars settlements grow like weeds, if my calculations are correct (a quick shoutout to my buddies back home who let me borrow their supercomputers).
Will Lee allocate the supplies I need?
Here’s Lee. Talk to you again soon.
Am I any better today than I would have been had I no simultaneous access to notebook PC with second monitor and Internet connection, portable phone connected landline with Caller ID, and mobile smartphone with Internet connection and variety of apps?
These devices feed my brain’s wiring more than the rest of my body — I can’t eat the phone(s) or computer very easily and wouldn’t get much nutrition if I could.
These devices help generate income for myself and those with whom I communicate.
Income, or labour/investment credit, buys us opportunities.
Now that we have virtual communities with virtual money, what do we do with our virtual opportunities?
The perpetrators and victims of cyberwar don’t care about gender or sexual preference.
This notebook PC doesn’t know if I’m a cybernetic organism typing on the keyboard.
As always, the tree outside has no idea what any of this means, breathing in the air and soaking up the nutrients that we share with it in our planetary ecosystem.
If a bunch of people sat together with robots and remotely operated mining gear on this planet, the Moon, Mars or an asteroid, how do we profit?
What is the value of friendship between us, in other words?
How much material on the International Space Station is never used?
How much material on a remote mining outpost is no longer usable?
Hundreds of millions, billions, of dollars represent the investment in space probes that no longer work on the surface of the Moon and Mars.
A single drop of an astronaut’s urine has intrinsic value, does it not, its investment in research, development, training, maintenance and nutrition worth more than its weight in gold?
What is a single drop of your blood worth to society?
What is it worth to you?
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.
The neighbour down the hill from my parents’ property, Mr. Greer, stood between me and my junior high school.
He was the kind of neighbour we want — solid, upstanding citizens who care for and tend their house and grounds.
Except when you’re a kid who wants to take a shortcut to get home from school.
Mr. Greer mowed his lawn twice a week and kept twigs/sticks to a minimum, desiring little in the way of rambunctious boys trotting through his manicured grass.
I mowed all the lawns around his — the lady next-door who was elderly and enjoyed fixing cold glasses of tea/lemonade for me after I mowed; the busy father of three infants who was willing to pay the local lawnboy for basic mowing but expected grass raking and bush trimming for free; my parents who insisted that a low payment for mowing our lawn was an incentive to find other work to pay for my hobbies.
I never knew Mr. Greer personally, except with the shouts of “Hey, didn’t I ask you not to walk down my driveway?,” “Next time you mow along my property line, be sure you get the grass clippings you shot over into my yard,” or “While you’re raking the leaves of the tree in your yard, you can rake the ones that fell on my property, too, if you don’t mind.”
He was just that guy we kids talked about or made up stories to fill in blanks of a mysterious personality.
The older he got, the less he talked to my parents when they were working in the vegetable garden while he was picking up magnolia tree seedpods a few feet from them.
Good fences make good neighbours — so does the silence of respecting each other’s privacy when suburban backyards abut but do not hide meditative moments alone with our thoughts and our therapeutic yardwork.
This morning, my mother informed me that Mr. Greer had died.
She pointed out a few interesting biographical details of his obituary worth mentioning here:
[Mr. Greer] was raised in Dayton, TN. He was a young child when the Scopes Monkey Trial took place in Dayton. Part of the trial was held outside and he could vividly remember the big wooden stand outside the courthouse window.
During the Depression, Howard moved with his mom, dad and sister to Kingsport where his dad ran a lunch counter in downtown Kingsport.
In the Fall of 1941, Howard went to work in the Tenite Division of Eastman Kodak. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, young men in Kingsport were required to sign up for the draft and Howard received his draft notice in the mail August 1, 1942. After basic training, he discovered he would be a US Army Air Corp instructor on a teletype machine – a machine two months previously he barely knew existed. After the war ended, Howard used the GI Bill and took Eastman’s apprenticeship program in Industrial Instruments. He later worked for Dr. Bill Kennedy in the Research Division and completed his career with many years service in the Engineering Division.
He is survived by his wife of nearly 70 years…
Mr. Greer, thanks for being a great neighbour to my parents all these years. May others proudly follow in your footsteps!
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.
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):
| 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.]
…or taken its last breath?
What do you do if your credit score is in the top 90th or 99th percentile?
Rather, what have you done?
Living here 1000 years from now, with others who arranged it so, I ask myself if I should keep cracking jokes about this time period.
I have nearly recovered emotionally from the recent deaths of my mother in-law and father.
One estate has been closed, credit scores are in tip-top shape, and life presents many opportunities between now and 365000 days from now.
What about an event 13,622 days from now?
What will inspire me to move forward from this point, my wealth hidden from prying eyes/hands, my health in relatively decent shape and little in the way of wild-dogs-chasing-me, skeletons-in-the-closet-scaring-me or something-to-prove-prodding-me into the future?
Youth is in the hands of the young. Young adulthood is in the hands of the leaders-to-be. Leaders are in the hands of their followers.
Thus, I pause.
I do not have anyone or any subculture to compare myself against to justify my existence.
I am myself, the mix of cults and [sub]cultures which formed me.
Every person finds connection with others in one way or another, collectively called generations.
Generations of kids are led, lead and create their own mass identity.
My generation helps form world opinion from many perspectives, politically from the White House, reshaping mass identity.
The purchasing power of money buys opportunity, which may transform one’s emotions into a state of happiness.
Cultural shifts are painful to someone(s) comfortable with the way things had just become from the way they were before.
One needn’t stay in sync with the zeitgeist to be happy.
The absence of the knowledge of one’s relative poverty to another’s relative wealth may or may not make one happier than those who are not ignorant of such, including absolute differences of purchasing power.
Catchy phrases are memorable but not necessarily wise.
A pink cherry tree blooms at the end of the street on the 18th of January 2013. I am happier for seeing its blooms in the depths of winter but sad for the insects who will later suffer from the absence of its blooms when they are ready to feed on cherry tree flower pollen.
Life out of balance — where does one’s ability to adapt to change affect one’s happiness?
= = = = =
With my evaluation version of Windows 8 having expired, do I purchase the commercially released version or switch back to Ubuntu Linux on this five-year old notebook PC?
= = = = =
Tomorrow’s blog entry: the concept of total cost of ownership (TCO) and TCO’s impact on one’s standard of living’s impact on the future 1000 years from now, subtitled, “When you live in a retirement community on the Moon, who picks up your garbage and washes your windows?”
Are you familiar with Poe’s Law? From wikipedia:
Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.
The core of Poe’s law is that a parody of something extreme by nature becomes impossible to differentiate from sincere extremism. A corollary of Poe’s law is the reverse phenomenon: sincere fundamentalist beliefs being mistaken for a parody of that belief.
I guess what I’m saying is that I grew up in a community where creationism and the scientific method lived side-by-side.
So did parody and solemnity.
I quickly learned that creationism was not so much about the “reality” of a young universe as it was a set of code words we used to dupe those who made fun of creationism.
While smartypants were talking smack about the dumb creationists and their fundamentalist religion, the creationists were running the factories and businesses in town for whom the smartypants worked.
Creationism was established to delineate the true members of a subculture from the false members and/or outsiders.
The scientific method was as valid a laboratory tool for creationists as it was for noncreationists to create new plastic polymers.
But again, it was the set of code words used during coffee breaks and lunch periods that showed who was willing to suspend their disbelief in order to belong to one group or another.
Code words as ancient as our species.
So, the next time you hear someone debating just how old the universe and our planet are, remember Poe’s Law — you should pay attention to what they’re really saying, not what their words mean on a superficial level.
Outsiders and those without a refined sense of humour will miss the nuanced reasons used by those who espouse creationism as their core belief set.
Do you belong to a particular community?
What would you do to maintain your position in a social setting?
Would you repeat the community’s code words without question or a smidgen of doubt?
Not every subculture uses tattoos, piercings and the breaking of social taboos to define themselves.
Some use words and respect the boundaries that taboos provide.