Sweet Nothings

How many generations of kids whispering sweet nothings in their ears can an old man like me take and keep biting my tongue?

“Aww, leave ’em alone,” me wife says.  “They’re going to fall out of love eventually and become ornery curmudgeons just like us soon enough.”

Good thing me wife is so wise…

How does parenting affect future adults?

Ahh…the parody, of the day, if not a lifetime: “Daddy didn’t hug me” photo series.

And a look back at military humour, just to show the progress of time is an illusion:

Like Jackie Gleason said, “Ten million comedians out of work and I’ve got to compete against the absurdity of politicians to get quality air time!  Who’s gonna think I’m funny after listening to them?”

A nod to humour everywhere, including Cairo.

Maybe a little ancient air-conditioning will cool off international tensions.

Back to raising the next crop of hackers to keep our species honest, whatever that means.

Mixing hobbies

For the next project, taking an Arduino starter set, a box of servos from my old RC airplane hobby, and a robotic hand kit I received on my birthday to create…something to go along with my space buddies, E-stache and E-crab (wasn’t that their names? hmm…memory lapse due to sugar high from eating a handful of candy cane Hershey kisses…mmm…), adding more to their “family.”

Coming soon!

= = = = =

A shoutout to the road crew guys who cleaned out the drainage ditch pipes in the front yard earlier today:

BTW, Eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis), vinca (Vinca major) and marsh marigold (Caltha palustris) are blooming at the same time this year:

You can see berries of the nandina (Nandina domestica) and leaves of the surprise lily (Lycoris squamigera) in this photo:

Like molecules bouncing around

Do you ever read through blogs, look at the list of followers and likers, create a related network diagram, listen to ‘Krzysztof Penderecki and Jonny Greenwood‘ in it entirety, and see how our personalities, as represented by blogs/tweet/social network nodes, act like molecules bouncing around in a chamber, some getting attracted and forming a macromolecule, or forming locally-dense collections of similar molecules?

How often do we honestly pay attention to voices in dissent against our own?

How often do we need to?

Two data points for the moment – nope, make it your usual three:

 

You Can’t Satisfy Everyone

How many times has my agent told me, “Stop trying to write for a worldwide audience!  Pick a niche.  Any niche.  And make me bloody rich.  Why do I have to get writers who want to save the world?  Why not just save my home mortgage and children’s holidays to the Swiss Alps for once?”

That’s why I love pseudonyms.  I can write books that make me, and only me, “bloody rich,” while my agent is trying to scrape by on my novels, essays, screenplays and films that have no target audience in mind.

More like out of my mind when I write those for his cut off the top.

Life’s not fair but we can show a sense of fair play when being kind is acceptable and taught at a young age.

Not me and my agent, though.

We go way back to our youthful misadventures when school assignments were tediously simple and boring, leaving us the rest of our day to fill with torturing our fellow students, intent as they were on completing homework with difficulty.

If college is not for everyone, general primary/secondary education isn’t, either!

Do you know how much fun we had “borrowing” schoolbooks from student lockers, removing pages and substituting facsimiles with totally different questions, math equations and essay topics?

Why do you think I and my band of merry cohorts took a bookbinding class at a local print shop?  We got easy, permanent access to bookbinding and digital lithography equipment that allowed us to create awesome reproductions of schoolbooks we randomly inserted into a pile at the end of semester for the next year’s kids to mull over and get confused about.

The assistant principal at school, who was constantly reprimanding, paddling or scolding me, told me he was surprised that a good boy like me had such a mean streak.

I didn’t see myself as mean. I saw myself as trying to enlighten students to separate themselves from the indoctrination/brainwashing they were receiving.

There are more questions about life than what you’ll answer in those books.  Infinitely more!

Like the motivational speaker will often say, “If I reach out and influence only one person today, my job is done.”  Not a very efficient job, mind you, but if that’s what the market will bear, so be it…

There’re ways to increase your website traffic that have nothing to do with your target audience, but do you really want to?

Economic Data, a what-if scenario

While I turn my front yard into an art exhibit using live plants and animals, as well as found objects, I’ve got a question in my thoughts that begs for a simple answer, although I’ve yet to find one:

What is the relationship between the most common products/services and their cost and how is that reflected in the characteristics of subcultural living habits (which are indirectly related to cost of living and standard of living)?

Everyone drinks water but we don’t all pay for water by volume.

Not every subculture uses toilet paper for bodily waste elimination cleanup, but for those that do, is there a cost/volume relationship in this basic commodity?

In our breakdown of people by their economic wealth, what is the tradeoff in terms of the perception of quality?

Most importantly, for all the questions above, why?

Is there a nature/nurture aspect to any of these questions?

As the sets of states of energy reproduce themselves offworld, how do we maintain a certain level of cost/benefit analysis in every set’s thoughts/actions, such that waste/inefficiency is minimised or completely eliminated in situations where excess production cannot be avoided temporarily?

Bottom line: how will supply-and-demand mentality play into the success rate of an offworld colony’s growth?

Will scarcity automatically lead to a higher social cost?

Three types of storytelling: show, tell, ask the audience…

Two links du jour

Your bonus for the day: Parents, make time in your busy lives for your kids’ education.

And one for the road (to the nonvegans out there): Animal protein for the lean, mean machine in you…

International Women’s Day

Most days, my agenda is filled with evaluating rocket fin designs or applying “think outside the fuselage” reasoning to assess the most cost-effective means of advancing our planetary lifeforms outward into the galaxy.

I pay advisors to tell me where to put my investments to give our group the most play money for building outer space travel toys.

In a few days, I’ll spend a few minutes with half my staff to evaluate any discrepancies we have concerning gender-neutral compensation.

We have a wide variety of people involved in running the organisation smoothly, from the least socially aware to the most brash, politically incorrect loudmouths.

Hey, when you manage seven billion people, the variations are nearly endless.

But not nearly enough.

Every other year, I ask one gender and then the other to review our employee policies and practices.

Because our subcultures are sometimes incompatible, I ask the people whose beliefs are separated the most from one another to meet and talk.

During these meetings, our supercomputers are listening, increasing the resolution of their intuition algorithms substantially.

Then, a panel composed of people and supercomputers is asked to evaluate the meet-and-greet session, resulting in a summary report that is sent out to all subcultures in formats they believe represent a view from their specific subcultural perspective.

I assign one of the Committee’s subcommittee ad hoc teams to rate the effectiveness of the absorption of every report into individual subcultures.

The reports with the lowest effectiveness score are sent to a new meet-and-greet team for discussion, which is, again, overheard by our supercomputers for error detection algorithm correction and fed into intuition algorithm automatic reprogramming routines.

In this week’s yearly event called International Women’s Day, we’ll ask the female gender to pull two “opposite” subcultures together for one of the meetings — female leaders of the porn industry, such as Lux Alptraum, and female adherents of celibate life, such as members of the Focolare Movement.

Because no two people are exactly alike, we prepare the participants, asking them to listen with respect, disagree passionately, do not compromise simply to avoid conflict, and find common ground that excludes the fact we are of the same species.

We expect members of the same subculture to share discordant opinions amongst themselves, let alone with people outside the subculture.

The Committee wants progress, even if movement in one direction appears to go backwards.

After all, the larger goal of culling the species for nearly ideal representatives to colonise and breed on nonEarth premises requires both conventional and nonconventional processes.

We need people who…sorry, sets of states of energy that can adapt and survive in the harshest conditions possible for what we’ll call living beings at this moment.

After a while, offworld colonists will no longer work to complete tasks assigned from Earth.

In the changes of the colonists’ agenda from external goals to local goals as the years pass, including reactions to adverse ambient environmental changes, the Committee wants to ensure our representatives will thrive.

As the current reluctant leader, my goal is to ensure the representatives can hold individual viewpoints that will adapt and grow together, even if the people pull apart, philosophically speaking, as all current models predict is inevitable.

The Committee advocates no specific subcultural belief.

We only believe in the capacity of our species to advance life out of the solar system while we have the means and window of opportunity to do so, holding to the basic philosophy of “leave the planet in better condition than when we got it” that each successive generation is taught.

We avoid words like mission or vision because we aren’t corporate entities that have to justify our existence although most of us depend on corporate entities interacting with each other to expand our budgetary constraints.

We make mistakes.  People will and must die to accomplish some of our major goals, and many will die accidentally.

All seven billion of us will die eventually but we empathise with those who feel individual losses, anyway.

However, at a global scale, we barely sympathise, partially composed, as we’ve told you, of supercomputers that are just learning to develop intuition algorithms and getting closer to acting like us on general subcultural levels that tend to gloss over the death of individuals, except those designated to represent the best or worst of us (e.g., ruthless dictators, popular entertainers, babies who died tragically, etc.), which the supercomputers simply assign as data points that may or may not designate significant changes to the subculture and are used as triggers for recording the conditions of the subcultural data sets for later comparison.

We hope you look forward to subcultural interaction reports containing gender-based information coming to a comfortable subcultural outlet near you, if you can recognise when we send them out and what they are.