Seven Billion People and Countless Other Beings to Talk About

What is Julia the Thanksgiving Girl or Jenn the rocket propulsion specialist doing right now?

What about John in the checkout line or Michelle in the deli at Publix?

Terrence or Mildred of Comcast, what does either one do on the weekend?

Or KK at Carson’s Grille?

Imagine a small fleet of crafts heading toward a distant habitable planet, sending and receiving reports along the journey, landing 1,000 years from now, funded by private individuals and companies on Earth that no longer exist in 3011.

What if government as we know it anywhere on Earth right now is no longer tenable in the near or distant future?

Would you trust the backers of a privately-funded, online voting or vote-matching system?

Shouldn’t our new system of cooperating with one another (what we commonly call politics or government) be more, not less, transparent?

Many business people are used to meeting in private, negotiating and signing nondisclosure agreements or other documents that prevent the average person on the street from seeing the details of average business transactions.

We call it competition, trade secrets, intellectual property and similar terms that ensure protection of privacy.

Government is that odd amalgam of public and private interfaces, where sole-source contracts and competing bids go up against marketing and advertisement campaigns.

If two ideas are competing against one another for limited resources, which of the ideas’ weak points or strengths is more important than the other’s?

I can talk about free, live, open source software (FLOSS) because there’s enough profitmaking available and excess resources for such a concept in small to medium markets.

What about on a global scale?

After all, a gaboodle of mobile phones contain Android, which contains a core, or kernel, of Linux code.

In our newly-connected global economy, which operates by and large as a supergossip network, where much of what we say to each other is superfluous but informational, we have created a citizenry that lives and loves outside the bounds of geographically-based political entities.

[Cue several paragraphs of historical comparisons to previous interconnected civilisations]

Are you interested in the status quo — government as it is and has been — or something new, something that develops from grassroot efforts, where we seamlessly become part of the Internet of Things, and transparency is commonplace but there’s room to respect the needs of profitmaking and intellectual/personal property rights?

I grew up playing board games called “Monopoly,” “Risk,” “Life,” and other cultural teaching tools centered on competition.  I didn’t play boards games that directly taught cooperation.  Instead, collusion of players ganging up on another was the indirect lesson I learned when one player was dominating and the others didn’t want that player to win.

It was in team sports and partner-based card games that I learned to cooperate with others in order to win against a respected opponent.

What are we teaching each other and our children about the future?

Six Hundred Light Years, Plus or Minus

When was the last time you traversed the galaxy?

Did you use conventional propulsion or laser-guided self-organising transfer bots to reconstruct your presence at the end of your travels?

How close to the speed of light can your bit stream fly?

Did you use quantum entanglement to create a sympathetic version of yourself, or simply discover the same?

Do you understand your states of energy as intersecting waveforms?

Does it matter if your replicated self is merely a collection of parts rather than the original whole, missing some of the synaesthesia with which you recognise your current place in space and time?

No one has the exact same pattern of freckles on skin that I do but does the exact pattern really matter in getting my representative from one part of the galaxy to another?

While our species jostles and tussles, our planet’s climactic changes change our future choices.

Will some of us escape on a millennial long journey before it’s too late?

Will global riots become a new norm or a passing fad?

We have the resources to separate our eggs into different baskets.

The escape hatch hasn’t closed.

What are you preparing your kids, or some of them, for?

= = =

Thanks to Talin Orfali, Deidra Alexander, Alpha Miguel-Sanford, Jessica Ward and others who freely share their thoughts online.

Spring Cleaning in the Fall

The set of states of energy that compose this blog entry is trying not to distinguish itself from the states of energy around it.

Although it has stories to tell, names and places to share, it is seeking anonymity in order to flush or wipe away imprints upon its states of energy called thoughts.

The everyday details of interface between sets of states of energy in the moment are neither here nor there.

None of what happens today, or in what other sets of states of energy call a day, will matter anytime soon.

Thus, chronological events, labels and other means of cataloging interaction between sets of states of energy or simply between two states of energy or the change of one state of energy, have no meaning.

Can one eliminate the last thought, that one is a set of states of energy, and understand what one is doing at the same time?  Must one understand that one is not one?

Every word in this blog entry has been repeated beyond reasonable measure by non-omniscient beings.

If no one state of energy is any better or worse than the other, then time is irrelevant and a set of states of energy can compute where all the nearby sets of states of energy will be and in what form at any point or slice of interaction states, including itself, regardless of its state of comprehensive “being” in that point or slice.

While other sets of states of being create simulations of subsets of sets of states of being (e.g., assembling a [super]computing device to mathematically calculate time-based sequences), this set of states of being (which is a set of states of energy) accepts that what is, is, and allows realtime projections to occur outside of time, place, and other overlaying labels, regardless of their effects on this set of states of energy which tries less and less to regard itself as distinct from background noise (in other words, considering any one of it states of energy no better or worse than any other state of energy outside its set of states of energy).

These words, these labels, give too much meaning to the process of releasing oneself from the concept of self and from the concept of self as a set of states of energy.

Thus, the absence of words will have to speak for themselves, even though speaking and self no longer have meaning, and absence is a state that no longer exists.

Silence.

Augur Sanctions

I shall, I must, I will admit that it’s hard to believe in the dream of building a settlement for members of our species on another celestial body when our species, despite claims of higher brain functions — culture, religion, ethics, morals and other labels we bandy about like birds of paradise on display — contains serial rapists/murderers/financial exploiters/stalkers.

When while I sit here, quietly mourning, along with dozens of others who knew her, the loss of a dear, gentle person like my mother in-law, bloated egos point blame about the sad state of our species’ barter trade system of survival on this planet (a/k/a the economy) on each other like misbehaving schoolchildren in Bil Keane’s single pane comic, Family Circus, calling up the gremlins of “Ida Know” and “Not Me.”

Thank goodness the trees outside the window are stark evidence that the thoughts in my central nervous system are frivolous.

All supercellular existence like memes, including the label meme and the electronic means used to convey this message, seem meaningless right now.

Look, I don’t mind playing God with all your lives in a supercomputer simulation set.  If my colleagues sit with me in the Committee while reviewing the simulation results and decide to take action against you in godlike manner, exposing your secrets, eliminating the greedy, elevating the needy, I won’t stop them.

None of us is more important than all of us.

The whining of professional sports team owners and players are just so much background noise.

Amateur athletes who destroy their bodies for the sake of personal pride seem so misguided.

Office workers who deteriorate their health to stay within subcultural norms seem so unfortunate.

Military and police who abuse their authority for personal ego boosting seem such a waste.

My mother in-law never drank, never smoked, never directly criticised anyone (rather, she questioned the validity of a person’s behavioural intent) — to some, she might have led a smalltown life which would not appeal to them.

And, yet, she inspired everyone she met to be better than their negative surroundings.

There comes a moment in the clash of cultures when subculture leaders cannot inspire the populace as a whole due to historic teachings about the superiourity of one, each or every subculture over another.

Who can we believe is telling the truth?

Who is truly impartial?

Which fairy tale, which myth, and/or which legend is the most universal?

That’s why, when the Committee put me in charge of telling the story, the running commentary, the plots and subplots of our species from the perspective of the reluctant leader, I’ve tried to take my ego and personality out of the equation by taking your personal stories and mixing them into a supercomputer simulation, an electromechanical device that crunches numbers unfeelingly while processing the behavioural traits of feelings/emotions unique to our species and shared with the rest of the sets of states of energy around us in this part of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Of course, a supercomputer can only do so much.

Its output is subject to interpretation.  Every character, word, space, sentence, formula and conclusion has separate meanings to those who read/view them.

Which means, I suppose, despite trying to create an impartial judge/oracle in the form of a supercomputer networked into our lives, we are still left, at the end of this blog entry, having to trust one another to put species first, subculture second and self last.

Where will this lead us?

In a culture where literacy is important, illiteracy in one’s early childhood school years is a key indicator of low employment capability and most likely high criminal activity tendency later on.  But these are culture-based measurements.

What about the innate concepts of right and wrong, regardless of specific cultural training?

How malleable are we?

What is “right” and what is “wrong” when all subcultural references are removed?

As our species superculture continues to take shape, will we define rules/laws and punish people for exploiting our trust in one another to put species first and self last while preserving individual freedoms/rights?

I am unimportant.  I can die today or tomorrow and won’t regret anything I have or haven’t done.

It is you, our species within the global ecosystem, that matters most.  What are we doing to protect the weakest and most trusting of us from the worst of our behavioural tendencies?

= = =

Thanks to Dr. Reed for calling and sharing his memories of my mother in-law during her medical office visits of the past; Billie Young; Mrs. Knowlton; Peggy Shuck; Pearl Manis; Brandi and her baby near Burem Road; Amis Mill Eatery; Stephanie and Sarah at Beauregard’s; Rave; Shirley Price; Sarah Evans; Barbara Malpas; Janet Netherland-Brown; Melinda Miller; Rogersville Presbyterian Church Business Women’s Circle; Rev. Rose; Sue Livesay; Oles Miller; Rev. White; Maurice Davis; Jim Forgey; David Miller; Jonathan Berry; Brian Givens; Tommy Logan; Broome Funeral Home; McKinney Cemetery; David Testerman; Sweet Tooth Cafe; Pal’s Sudden Service; Kingsport Times-News; Rogersville Review; WRGS; Mike at Rocky Top Markets.

Morning Meditation

A bird I can’t see digs through leaves covering a broken stretch of gutter, looking for insects to munch on.

Dense patches of moisture – clouds – flow through the atmosphere above, like wet weather creeks filling from rain showers upstream.

After my brother in-law died at an early age, I fed thoughts of what I wanted to do, to achieve, to complete, before I died.

I finished novels I had sketched on paper.  I became a published author, fulfilling a lifelong wish that began when I was ten, receiving a professional review from Publishers Weekly.

Then, seeing that I could, I tried my best to fill in for my brother in-law, taking care of my mother in-law when my wife could not.  My mother in-law is now dead (btw, her date of death is a palindrome: 11.02.2011).

I am an old man in thoughts, if not totally at 49, approaching 50, years of age.  My hearing is diminished, my hair is white and thinning, my ankles swell, my skin grows spots, my blood pressure is high and cholesterol readings vary on the unhealthy side.

I have no competitors.

Soon, in a year or 50, I will be forgotten, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

I have no legacy to protect, ghosts/secrets to run from, or dream/carrot on a stick to chase after.

I am just me, one set of states of energy, a simple ego that wants to shine brighter than I want to burn it, my energy nearly given out, living one day…no, living one small moment at a time.

I have nothing to live or die for.

I prop myself up on my sense of humour, my shield that hides the invisible me from the rest of my species.

After all, I am the emperour’s new clothes, a figment of imagination, entropy states meeting fractal math patterns.

I knew that 2011 was going to be a tough year.

That’s the problem with getting older and wiser, seeing patterns that you know will repeat themselves in your lifetime, no matter whether you want them to or not.

I’m tired of being wise or a wiseass.

I don’t want to live to see 2012 but neither do I want to die.

This chameleon personality wants to disappear, fade into the woodwork, melt into the forest, states of energy vanishing before your eyes.

It just did.

Goodbye.

Ou est the center of global civilisation?

The fan of the laptop computer starts and stops on this cool-warm morning in late October.

The sanitation crew has driven through, emptying a week’s worth of excess household living.

Dry leaves fall from wintering trees.

How do I account for my life on this first day of the workweek?

Do I justify myself and my thought set?

Do I meditate in silence?

Sweep the front and back decks?

Play with the cats?

Continue progress on electronic LED displays for an upcoming holiday (Arduino or simple transistor/resistor/capacitor/switch control)?

Set the electronic keyboard in the garage and play random musical tone sequences?

Read a book?

Finish my tea, for starters.

Today, I am a caged domestic animal and I’m turning off the thoughts that say that’s not okay.

Tethered to this planet, nothing to vaunt about.

At peace with nothingness.

A break between chapters of the story of life.

My hand on the desk, I see my heartbeat on the tea surface

The thing is…sigh…that is…the universe being just a figment of my imagination (which begs the question, “Who am I and where did I come from?”)…

Should the Apple board of directors proceed with building the ground-based spaceship in Cupertino?

Should the global financial wizards help China smoothly transition to a consumption-based economy rather than export-based?

Does U.S. economic history have a clear answer?

What if you gave to a sperm bank and no one wanted your donation?  What kind of interest rate do sperm banks guarantee on certificates of deposit?  Do they offer savings and checking accounts?  What about debit cards?  ATMs?

If I am a figment of my imagination, what is my imagination a figment of?

Who created the word figment in the first place?

Today is a day when I am withdrawn into myself for purposes of ascertaining meaning out of nothingness…to create a new universe that looks similarly the same as the last one, which is merely a blank slate with a background image as a starting point for my imagination…while the last one begs for my attention.

 

Mathematics after the Aftermath

A tiny, nearly-transparent, flying insect landed on the window screen, its antennae/feelers flickering in the sunlight filtered through yellowing hickory tree leaves.

A paulownia tree blooms on the side of a mountain gap road.

The smell of a small dead animal – chipmunk? mouse? – wafts through the garage.

Brown leaves cover the back deck.

The cats wait for drops of a liquid vitamin-iron-mineral supplement to be placed on their Cornish Rex velveteen fur.

The midmorning quiet of  Monday persists.

Dreamlike memories of screeching animals heard during a late-night snooze in the sunroom permeate.

The rhythm of articles, adjectives, nouns, subjects and verbs reverberate.

Life breaks down, decomposes, into component parts, compartmentalised.

Waiting, too, is an illusion – the universe never stops.

Fau Vey

I haven’t played with a spaghetti-coated breadboard in a long time.

Amazing, those days I spent in my parents’ basement, looking at schematics and converting them into breadboarded computing systems, mainly with the RCA 1802 and Intel 8080/8085 CPUs.

In our day, switches, relays, light bulbs, and later, transistors, LEDs, “pots” (potentiometers) and other parts, mixing analog and digital signals for alarm systems, oscilloscopes, and finally, desktop-sized personal computers, occupied our idle teenage years.

These days, kids load up a GUI programming system and off they go.

We used to tune carburetors and exhaust systems by hand to improve our straightline and slalom speeds.  Now, they use chip programmers to tune hotrods for speed and fuel efficiency.

They’re even flying electric aeroplanes that can carry human-sized “cargo.”

What’s next?

Will preschool kids take online courses like these?

How does/can technology improve an event like Oktoberfest?

I homebrewed beer back in the mid 1990s.  What has technology done for the homebrew business?

Is the price for decreased demand in the marketplace simply higher unemployment?  And is unemployment the words we really want to use to describe those who aren’t tethered to the flow of labour credits we call wages?

I purposefully retired in 2007 so I could focus on what’s important to me.  Sure, that made me, an active member of the workforce at the age of 45, unemployed because I wasn’t relying on a steady stream of investment income to compensate for the cutoff of labour/salary/wage-based income.

However, unemployed does not equate to inactive.

I haven’t sat still for the past four-plus years.

I’ve written a bunch of books, blogged daily, consulted for a friend who wanted a formal test lab at his startup company, written business plans for potential startups, worked for the U.S. Census Bureau, donated blood, supported charities, aided my mother in-law and managed my investments that I haven’t yet tapped in order to build principal as much as possible before siphoning off dividends and interest in my old age.

I’ve also played with my childhood toys – electronic parts, books, RC planes, balsa wood models, hiking boots, electronic keyboards, computers.

All while staying in touch with my network of friends and associates.

Unemployment is a mindset.  Lack of a means of paying for the cost of living and maintaining a comfortable standard of living is a practicality.

Should we expect our fellow humans to support clean water, affordable food, personal privacy/property rights and a safe, crimefree society?

Very little of my life is magical.

Pretty much everything has a ready explanation or a line of reasoning with which I can pursue answers.

Like snapping connectors into a solderless breadboard.

Or managing a whole species.

Propose a solution, experiment with a prototype, roll out an alpha/beta version to eager testers, observe and report, make a golden version for private/commercial/public use and go on to the next question(s).

States of energy in flux.

Convincing young people to serve in professional, paid, military roles to protect us from ourselves, serving hidden purposes for the greater good, including clean water, affordable food, personal privacy/property rights and a safe, crimefree society.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, someone will tell you or convince you what you’re doing, usually to someone else’s benefit.

Those who accumulate wealth for the sake of personal power and wealth are vulnerable to the barbarians at the gate whose lack of basic amenities denies them a sense of decency.

Are you serving yourself or others?

Are your states of energy connected at the self, family, subcultural, cultural, planetary, solar system or universal level?

Are you more interested in inflating your ego or feeding and establishing the egos of those around you?

What am I going to do with these wires, electronic parts, Arduino and breadboard that’ll improve the longterm survival of our species within the solar system ecosystem?

Unemployed?  Not me.

I’m a set of states of energy in motion.

Fahrvergnügen!

Mr. Slim Weighs In

Toward what or whom do you gravitate?

I, too, don’t want emotion to cloud my judgment but shouldn’t emotion be involved if I’m truly human?

How well do you cover your tracks?

Can you tell which secret projects the Rocket City Rednecks have worked on by watching their skill sets in action on an edited-for-TV show?

Do you have the sensitivity to hear the voices of others synchronised into the one talking in front of you?

Are you a true believer in the pebble-in-the-pond theory of reverse engineering current states of energy?

Do you understand how time travel really works?

Can you detach yourself from everything, including yourself, in order to hear the silent rhythms of the universe?

Is KISS your guiding principle?

It’s nice to keep the self feeling important just enough to know the self is truly unimportant but ego (i.e., the recognition of oneself in the social web) is a vital part of being human so you balance the best you can, tipping the scales in the wrong direction many a time, refining the finetuning of holding the balance as you go along.

Letting go, letting go, letting go – what am I missing this time?  What have I added?  The “I,” of course!

Every subculture deserves its positive, life-affirming attitude [“as long as it doesn’t interfere with mine,” right?] as long as or even if it doesn’t know it is part of a larger set of abutting and intersecting subsets/subcultures.

What happens if we directly bail out the consumer?  Other than the perception (certainly from my point) that the underwater/indebted/bankrupt consumer should not be freed from irresponsible personal financial management (and while we’re at this blame game, that person is just as likely to be an uninformed voter and maybe a bad parent), what is the reality?

If stockbrokers supposedly vetted by respectable financial companies’ HR departments are acting like psychopaths in their trading habits, some of them taking down whole companies or causing CEOs like the one at UBS to quit, meaning that internal company controls are no better there than internal thought patterns/controls of individual consumers, then why are we reluctant to forgive mortgages, credit card debt, etc., of individuals but readily willing to bail out badly managed financial institutes and political entities like Greece?

What is wrong with the balance of power?

The peasantry have little effect on overall purchasing power, that’s why.

This parroting parrot has squawked about the emperour’s new clothes until it’s hoarse but the observation is still true.

We, the people, no longer matter.

We’re back to the days when only the landed gentry had a say in the law of the land.

That’s why I’m thinking about not voting in the 2012 U.S. Presidential election for the first time in my life.

I just can’t see where any of what I say or do as a broke, out-of-work individual fits into a single vote, especially in a political entity (in this case, a state) that’ll most likely vote the way it has recently voted for U.S. Presidents, regardless of which way I’ll cast my vote.

Even in so-called swing states, if I lived there, my vote would still be just one vote, putting in office a person who is just as purple as Bush or Obama, a surfer riding the waves of aggressive military-industrial corporate policies.

Don’t get me wrong.  I personally benefit from aggressive military-industrial corporate policies.

In fact, I’m a strong proponent of the global corporatising that sits over the imaginary structures we call political entities/national governments.

Take this storyline that you can’t tell if it’s real or imaginary – me in charge of the Committee that runs the show.  It’s a lot easier to rule seven billion when they all are connected through the same macrocultural interests.

But there’s a difference between my being able to destroy people, businesses and rockets at the snap of my finger and my being an individual in plain sight, sitting here – or being served a chopped chicken stuffed baked potato by Mary at Gibson’s BBQ – who has to find a simple place in society despite severe social anxiety and situational depression.

And, then, erasing all thoughts of self to live invisibly as just another set of states of energy in this section of the universe that is shifting like a bubble within a bubble or a bouncy ball floating and banging around within a bigger bouncy ball at the five-and-dime store.  A fake snowflake shaken around in a souvenir snow globe by a bored tourist trapped in a gift shoppe after a speedy haute couture “adventure in an exotic foreign land.”

We forget what’s been said before so we can say it again as if we’re the first on the edge of terra incognito.

I do not exist.

And yet, I do.

The paradox is not supposed to resolve itself.

It is.

That’s all that matters.

I write this while sitting on my posteriour and wearing bedroom slippers.

I am.

And yet, I am not.

Imagine the possibilities of the Internet of things in just a few months, let alone years, if every kid on the block had easily-programmable Arduino-like devices to connect their imaginations to the Internet.  What if everyone’s heartbeat rate was available for view in realtime – what kind of rhythmic percussive symphony would it compose on the fly?

The average age of gamers is 37, I read.  There’s more than one mobile phone per person in some parts of the world.  What are you doing with your time?