The Contrarian’s Contrarian

Poiu spent all morning in observation of a snail glide across the backyard, grass blade to grass blade, minidirtclod to minidirtclod,  and onto the sidewalk where, in the heat of the sun, it retracted into its shell and waited for the cool of evening to return.

The armadillo passed by both of them without noticing their odd relationship.

The scientist and the experiment.

Question: does an observed snail change its behaviour?

Experiment: Pick up snail from sidewalk, move it to starting position.  Observe and record its behaviour as it heads toward sidewalk.  Return snail to starting position.  Does snail’s path deviate when unobserved the next day?  Return at end of next day and see where it ended up, check its movements.

Poiu shook his head.  Why did his parents decide to name him after a row of English letters on a QWERTY keyboard?  What were they thinking?

Poiu looked at the list of assumptions in his experiment.

At age two, his thought-t0-text rate was slower than his older sister’s but his reasoning powers were more advanced despite his mother’s measured intelligence and intellectual output greater than his father’s.

From those thoughts alone, he deduced that gender was not directly related to intelligence, given the same number of inputs and genetic propensity for logical rather than emotional thought development.

Poiu looked at the embedded display screen woven into his optic nerve and glanced at the report detailing the results of the experiment being edited by his onboard computer assistant.

The assumptions were wide-ranging, from the lack of predators to the slight change in the snail’s body weight because of growth and/or water loss to the availability of nutrition between starting point and sidewalk to the number of unseen parasites and snail pests.

What about prevailing winds or UV radiation spikes?

A snail’s central nervous system can’t be too complicated but an outdoor environment can.

Poiu proceeded with publishing the preliminary experiment results.

Within microseconds, Poiu’s playmates provided valuable criticism of the report, some he had thought of and some he would never have guessed.

Back to the drawing board, as they said in the 21st century!

Freedom to think without an assigned theme or classroom score

Being here, with me, an Internet radio station and the sun-fed trees outside my window, I’m free to expand my thought patterns upon this blank canvas of an electronic writing pad.

Mixing metaphors if I choose.

If still waters run deep, why do oceans have waves?

Mixing media of varying density and thickness.

My father…a year ago, we were working with medical professionals to seek a path of better health for Dad, “better” being a term we wished for and hoped for more than knew was an illusive condition.

My typical reaction to “serious” situations, the result of turning nervous worry into positive joking action, constantly kept me on the edge of making comments my father, should he have been in a better mood/thought set, would not have approved.

Our senses of humour were not aligned.

I can ask myself why at this point, without tears or sadness seeping into my wonderment, why Dad did not understand or chose not to encourage my funny side.

He implied more than said that the man of laughter has a harder way to tread to the pinnacle of success than a man who treats everyone with seriousness and respect for their emotions/life conditions (i.e., the burdens they bear that are eased with sympathy and empathy).

That is, of course, my interpretation.

But I have heard others tell me that laughing at the wrong time or not taking adult responsibilities is not what my physical presence inspires others to encourage.

I have had plenty enough of what others expect.

Splitting into nearly schizophrenic thought sets to accommodate others and myself at the same time is not the set of states of energy I want to maintain and nourish.

After all, the self is a self-delusional illusion, a trick of chemical reactions that has brought nature to this point, with black pixels outlined on a white-light background, to examine itself, without reproductive needs being met, to spin in place while setting conditions for the next outburst of creativity that knows no ethical/moral boundaries, no positive or negative thought patterns, simply taking the sets of states of energy as is and moving on into the next imaginary moment/time period.

While our species holds public discussions about the subcultural struggles of how to treat the non-heterosexual members, how do other species behave?

I, for one, have seven billion friends to spend time with, some I have been conditioned to treat as equals and some I have been conditioned to hold at arm’s length for at least a brief period of time because our differences are sufficient to keep me from immediately understanding what makes us members of the same species.

We invoke the ancient writings of our ancestors to protect us from having to question or having to accept that subcultures rise and fall in popularity.

We rarely see that talking about our “enemies,” whether with good or bad word patterns, gives them validity.

Memes…

Symbols…

From the 10,000 year/mile distance, the memes and symbols merge into bigger patterns.

Tempests in the teapot of a planet, barely making waves in a solar system, practically invisible in a galaxy, hardly discernible in a supercluster.

Entertaining, nonetheless.

Because I am comfortable in the meaninglessness of my insignificance, the self a temporary confluence of states of energy, I have found the longer view a driving force in my writing, in my [non]existence, seeing 13528 days, rotations of Earth upon its tilted axis, into an imaginary future while having fun laughing about the tragedies of the moment, including my own.

It is, at the same time, a self-examination of one as a member of a species.

Is it not statistically normal to want to reproduce and provide shelter for one’s mammalian offspring, the majority of whom are right-handed, heterosexual, male, dark-haired and dark-eyed non-alpha primates?

I am left-handed, heterosexual, male, red/white-haired, green-eyed and non-alpha, without children.

Thus, statistically, not normal.  Abnormal.

Why, then, am I here recording my presence for the majority to, perhaps, read?

Why, indeed.

The confluence of states of energy, this “me” that “I” say does not exist, is the answer.

Avoiding the messy, daily adult responsibilities of an almost 51-year old man, that’s who and what.

Long ago mentally prepared to die at any time, having successfully achieved the goals of my childhood desire to be a published author.

The rest is an endless buffet of desserts filled with laughter and inappropriate humorous thoughts, thankful that the rest of the species is here to support me with characters and scenes to write during the remainder of my life.

Rogue traders can destroy a company in milliseconds — it only takes one of all three

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.

Denial can blind.

It is a very important truism that immigrants and immigration are what made America what it is. We must be vigilant as a nation to have a tolerance for differences, a tolerance for new people.

Technology is both an end in itself and a means to other ends. When you figure something out and make it work, there is pleasure and excitement. Not just because the technology is going to do something, but because you created something with its own inherent beauty, like art, like literature, like music.

All art is in some fashion escape. It sucks you out of your own life. It absorbs you.

You must understand your mistakes. Study the hell out of them. You’re not going to have the chance of making the same mistake again — you can’t step into the river again at the same place and the same time — but you will have the chance of making a similar mistake.

Satisfaction doesn’t come in moments but in periods of time.

Privacy is one of the biggest problems in this new electronic age. At the heart of the Internet culture is a force that wants to find out everything about you. And once it has found out everything about you and two hundred million others, that’s a very valuable asset, and people will be tempted to trade and do commerce with that asset. This wasn’t the information that people were thinking of when they called this the information age.

Take a bit of the future and make it your present.

Names: Melody, Autumn, Garrett, Candice.
Places. Nouns. Pronouns but no connouns yet yes connotations.
Seeing reactions with no desire to profit from them.
Laying crumbs along a trail, asking the birds to peck their way along behind, not the pied piper, recalling Latin lessons about silva and “p” words that trigger dim memories of pied (pronounced pee-ed rather than pie-uhd).
Conscious and unconscious at the same time again and again, seeing connections, sensing subconscious influences upon fleeting conversations, creating twists and turns on trails to hide going in a circle, corpuscle, corporal, corporate, cerebral cycle.
Trigger finger over the keyboard, waiting for the signal to press/type/click.
But with touchscreens, it’s press/swipe/touch.
Multifinger gestures.
Gestation, Guest station, Geriatric, Acrobatic, Aeronautic.
Cranking through the sausage maker, maker, maker, maker…
Imaginary rhythms, a wooden finger tacked to the wall, cough drops fall, that’s all.
Disjointed intersections of ceilings and floors.
Can a ceiling touch the floor?
Can a floor touch the sky?
What makes the sky “up”?
She sits
But she doesn’t sit for long
She waits for no one
Others wait for her
No time for her
Because time is meaningless
Words do not touch
The stirrings of her soul
She prepares each movement
Like a tai chi master in meditation
The turn of a wrist
Raising an eyebrow
Sitting in a chair
Listening for the silence between heartbeats
Music only she knows
Folds in her skin deepen
Aging finely maybe wisely
She sleeps
But she doesn’t sleep for long
Trumpets blaring ideas deep within her brain
Push her out of bed
Ideas scribbled on the napkins of last night’s mind
Fade too quickly for human use
Extraterrestrials passing by the planet
Record the thoughts for later dissemination
A purpose for being
Being not the purpose
She moves on
Like water from a fallen bamboo flute into a pond
Fish breathing her in
Exhaling her out
Discordant sounds of a Qinqiang
Playing up her strengths
The paper bird pales in the sun
And flies away.
— 10 Dec 2004, Rick Hill

More about Dava Newman’s BioSuit

History is historic.

To put it in perspective, the goal is to combine a viable space suit and prosthetics to reduce the need for a fully biological human to participate in space exploration missions.

Thus, the bombs at the end of the Boston Marathon are part of the greater mission.

Putting the blame on some person or persons is a secondary function required to give Earthlings a feeling of justice served.

Anything else — fertilizer factory fires, earthquakes, etc — is a diversion to feed the various subpopulations their needs and wants — emotional attachment, hero worship, and so on.

Moving the plot to the next scene

The question for anyone who has achieved the primary objective is…

  • Go down in a blaze of glory?
  • Eat a bullet in private?

And then…?

Well, life goes on.

The Antares rocket team members want to complete their mission.

Planet searchers want to focus on life elsewhere.

Habitat builders want to use local material to establish colonies on distant shores.

These are the times that try our belief sets.

Stay focused.

Do you listen to music when you write?

In a billionaire’s game, people are willing to be paid to die because, as we know, people are only so many mixtures of chemicals that, when you get down to it, are indistinguishable from the robots we are meeting in our rush toward godhood.

What if a robot volunteers to place a bomb on a crowded street?

Or intentionally programs a chemical factory to explode?

And when the robot follows orders from another robot which originated the idea, then what?

Can you define the phrase “inalienable rights” without looking it up?

Training a whole population to believe that its only hope for survival is to focus a large portion of its resource pool on space exploration is never straightforward.

Seven billion sets of thoughts divided into subsets in and out of your direct control.

Instead, focus on a planet within a solar system.

Egotistical personalities will want to claim they’re right.

Let them.

Use them.

But don’t abuse them unless the mob calls for their heads.

Assuming, of course, that the mob fell out of your control temporarily and you need scapegoats to realign the mob mentality in the direction where your invisible compass points.

Mix in a self-deprecating sense of humour.

Let random lyrics of songs seep into your speeches.

Pop culture is your friend, not a fiend, no matter how much the current trends are abhorrent to your sensibilities.

Let artists speak your subliminal messages, giving the people heroes, enemies and anti-heroes galore, creating new legends and myths as soon as the old ones fade in popularity.

The thin atmosphere of Earth is a poor shield to lean upon for too long.

The crust underneath our feet crumbles constantly.

Security is an illusion of time and space.

Take time to laugh, smile and love.  Hate and fear will find their own ways into the lives of your acquaintances and loved ones.

The Prophecy of Self, Fulfilled

Vghu is, like all of us, a set of states of energy.

Yet Vghu was not directly tied to any one corresponding set — not gravitationally-attached to a planet nor dependent on oxygen and carbon dioxide cycles for life sustenance.

Vghu lived on a plane of existence that was easily understandable but hard to explain.

We who read this think we are advanced enough to comprehend everything about the universe or at least able to adapt and expand our thought sets to accommodate new information about what is outside the thought boundaries of galaxies and universes.

We want to say that everything is a set of states of energy.

But what is a set of states of energy, when you get down to it?

We have symbols we correlate with phenomena, like E=m(c*c).

Conditions which are observed to be locally consistent in behaviour — action and reaction.

We pile assumption upon assumption until we have arrived at a situation we call modern civilisation which contains theorists, scientists, engineers, economists, politicians and relatively low-wage workers whose conditions reflect what will, in historical perspective, be called the slavery of the day.

Serfs and feudal lords.

Laws and regulations.

Local conditions that Vghu has little need for or comprehension of, conditions that describe the interaction of sets of states of energy which have followed a rational course and will continue** to branch out indefinitely, assumptions stated and premises approved.

Vghu does not live in the concept of time we demarcate with seconds and years.  Vghu has no insight into the distances we measure with sticks and laser beams.

Vghu is a matrix like us but not like us.

Vghu sees, but not anthropomorphically, the dark energy and dark matter we are just barely able to fill into blanks of formulae without instrumentation to measure.

To Vghu, our conventions and conventional methods are like the arguments of angels on a pinhead or the circulation of quarks in an atom to us — we are there but are practically invisible as far as Vghu’s interface with its surroundings are concerned.

Our planet, if Vghu even noticed its relatively dense composition compared to the space around it, would be a plaything if Vghu had an idea about what play meant.

A mere game of chance interaction of particles.

Thus, if we are invisible to Vghu, can we say that Vghu is invisible to us?

Doesn’t the contact of Vghu’s “self” with our universe cause ripples that, though large in almost indetectibly large waveforms, cause changes in perceptible patterns we measure daily?

Do the games we play, games of fun and games of subsistence living, indicate altered outcomes we hadn’t predicted because we had no way to account for Vghu’s passage?

We are unable to show how the solar wind sweeps through poker games in Las Vegas and shifts the leaderboard of horse races in Saudi Arabia at the same time that a child of three discovers linear algebra and calculus are more fun than fingerpainting diversions, let alone the effect of invisible forces that form a matrix of what we choose to call a set of states of energy at a level we have no instruments to measure, let alone theories to envelop*, as its effects subtly change the linear passage of time we call history.

In other words, when a game is in play, can you keep track of the hundreds of events that are shadowed by a few conventionally-horrific black swans or tails or disrupters we call crime in our insular, well-defined, inside-the-box daily living?

Which doors of perception are you keeping open?  Which windows of opportunity have you shut or have been closed in your face?

In creating and tracking your predictions about the future, are your computation devices able to keep up with changes in matrices and spreadsheets and algorithms and pigeonholes you think of on the fly that provide input for data you have stored for millennia in rock formations, star charts, newspapers and instant message logs?

What are the deltas and sigmas you account for?

I’m sitting on Mars, biting into a reconstituted bar of hardened goo that I want to pretend is a granola bar covered with chocolate because my brain can still suspend disbelief long enough for the sensation on my lips, tongue, cheeks, nose, esophagus and stomach to satisfy my craving for such an item.

Vghu’s impact on my existence with you here now was imperceptible for a long time even if time is/was irrelevant to Vghu’s interface with our place in the home we call this universe.

As far as we’re concerned, Vghu has been passing through us for billions of years.

Vghu is like the imperfections in a silicon computer circuit, shifting electrons well outside the level of tolerance needed for us to communicate together and understand each other.

However, the total number of changes similar to electron shifts are significant enough to point to something, something we now know is Vghu but are unable to acknowledge as such, shifts that make prophecies and predictions short of 100% reliable.

The game, in this case, is both afoot and a foot, unfortunately.

The deception of diversion is both a tactical error and a rounding error.

The points being made are both at our level and Vghu’s.

Labels are never what we make them out to be.

Symbols are never more than symbols, no matter how many experts weigh in about historic significance or point to clueless clues.

Take the smoke screens literally as smoke screens.

Perpetrators are only actors.

The puppeteers are the gamemasters and the pawns this time.

Between us and Vghu is more than you can imagine.

By our standards, connections won’t be made for thousands of years more, some for millions of years.

Messengers like to take holidays/vacations like everyone else.

Thank you and have a good day.

==============

[editor (13/4/18):**originally typed as “contain”; *originally typed as “envelope”]

Is it wrong…?

Is it wrong to buy metal fragments from yesterday’s bombing on ebay?

Is it wrong to ask Bill Gates to give $1B to Boy Scouts of America so it can go completely private?

People ask what is wrong with their country when their safety is threatened by random acts of violence.  Yet, more people die by accident than by all acts of terrorism combined, regardless of how you slice and dice the stats.

Regardless, the tragedies are just as rough and tough on the people involved — friends, family and social support network.

Yesterday and today have been a litmus test and Rorschach test combined, showing people’s belief sets while examining a small event in a faraway place called Boston, Massachusetts, southeast Iran and Venezuela.

Some days, I want to believe in the impossible — people traveling through space and time to sneak conventional IEDs into a crowd, then disappearing from our expected linear chronology — so that my science fiction reading has not only a sense of fair play but also a stronger sense of reality.

Instead, like the protagonists in “The Pale Blue Eye,” conventional detective work will, through deductive reasoning, reveal an antagonist list we feel comfortable suspecting, arresting and convicting.

Another story of terrorism, another forgotten list of victims…sigh…

I cannot let these distractions, that show the past and the future activities of our species are identical, slow down my path outward from Earth’s rotation around our local star.

Regardless of repetition, telling the stories from another celestial location are worth the effort.

There is enough material in this small room in which I type these words to last my lifetime.

Creativity is a result of one’s life, one’s genetic material, one’s experiences, ones and twos and zeroes.