Meanwhile, back on Earth…

Some people prefer not to mention where they’ve been — the restaurants and retail establishments — because they assume no one wants to know.

However much I agree that we aren’t interested in knowing the minute details of a person’s day, regardless of the person’s fame/infamy, how many of us like to see our names in print?

People to thank for their services: Paul at Surin Thai Restaurant; Drew, Cynthi and Kay at Publix; Garrett at Cracker Barrel; the backdock receivers at Goodwill Industries; ticket issuers at the Living Christmas Tree; UAH men’s basketball players who beat a Division I school’s basketball team for the first time in school history; UPS package deliverers; more to follow.

Self vs. Others

While designing a simulation of our global network of members of one species interconnected with the rest of the solar ecosystem, I am, at the same time, a member of that species, a node in the simulation and an inside/outside observer of the simulation/ecosystem.

Sometimes, I forget my position.

Am I stationary?

Am I a moving target?

Am I influencing more than I think I am influencing?  Or less?

Do I see myself from any one of the neutral observer positions that others take more easily than I?

Do I exist?

Well, that last one, I know the answer to.  I do not exist.

However, as a participant in local representative government, I have a voice, do I not?

Can I not ask the same questions as these two, this one, or this?

What about this, instead?

Maybe I should crowdsource all my thoughts, including in other languages?

A cog in a machine am I, happiness just another feature, data point or attribute in an E-A-V model database.

  • Over 6000 applications for the next U.S. astronaut slots…
  • A person climbing 37 km for the highest balloon flight and freefall…
  • The Muslim Brotherhood promising not to “Islamicise” Egypt…
  • Iran pressuring India to commit to gas field production/sales…
  • Eye-tracking biometrics the latest consumer commodity addition…
  • A man chopping his two sons with a hand-axe before burning him and his children in a gas explosion at home…
  • A kid choking another kid to death just to see what killing someone else feels like…

And many people working at retail establishments to thank…

All of these, and more, to fit into a 1000-year projection looking back at us from an unemotional viewpoint, not asking why, because all the changes in states of energy led to that precise moment of observation 1000 years later.