Tag Archives: science

The darkness if a book cover

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My trainers taught me well.  Pick a cover, any cover, and stick to it through thick and thin.

For me, the cover, if I choose to accept it, is a writer, loud and clear.

Speaking of which, another scientist on staff has shown me the code that will be used by mobile phone companies to report the faces/voices/IDs of users to the National Crime Database when a mobile phone is used.

My friends in the Bureaucracy tell me they can now catch criminals and incarcerate them with their own phones used as tracking devices.  No more need for warrants and GPS units.

What is religion?

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Cultural anthropologists observe line of vehicles at petrol station, assume the vehicles are receiving tinctures of holy temple oil, declare petrol stations the ultimate church/temple/mosque/synagogue.

Pull up, receive instant blessing, and drive off — that’s the kind of drivebys we need these days!

The more change in your pocket, the more your pocket stays the same.

F3LKJ

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F3LKJ reminded me in this morning’s status meeting that her team had already invented a an audiovisual sensor array that resembles rosacea and is easily installed on faces with no adverse effects.

Using skin pores as multipixel sites, capturing high-resolution images, combined with stereo sound and an experimental smell sensor, F3LKJ’s team invention can turn one of our field agents into a complete cybernetic wunderkind.

After our meeting, I met F3LKJ at our meditation centre.

Here is audio portion of our conversation.

[sound of lighting candle]

“Ummmm…”

“Excuse me.”

“Yes, F3LKJ?”

“Are you meditating?”

“No.  Why?”

“You were saying, ‘Ommmm…'”

“No, I was talking out loud to myself and was temporarily at a loss for words.”

“I see.  Well…”

“Ummmm…”

“If you need to finish the conversation with yourself, I can leave.”

“No, I was just clearing my throat.”

“Okay.  Anyway…”

“Ummmm…”

“Look.  I’ll be glad to come back!”

“No.  Stay.  I can talk to myself and listen to you at the same time.”

“Very well.  See, there’s a problem with the sensor array.  It’s…well…”

“Ummmm….”

“Would you stop that?!”

“Umm…what did you say?”

“That sound you make is annoying.”

“Sound?  Sorry, I was deep in meditation for a moment there.  I hear a whisper of sounds of your voice in my thoughts.  A sensor array problem, you said?”

“Yes.  And please stop meditating right now.  Look, I’ll make it quick.  The sensor array has, for lack of a better word, developed a synergy all its own, forming a symbiotic relationship with our test subjects, widening their consciousness, so to speak…”

“…As if they’re in a permanent meditative trance?”

“Precisely!”

“Good.  It’s just as I thought.  I had one of your techs embed one of the sensor arrays in me last night after you’d left the lab.  I feel like I’m at one with the universe all the time now.”

[sound of dancing feet]

“But, sir, what if there are any negative side effects?”

“A leader must take calculated risks and, because your team performs flawlessly all the time, I felt it was a risk worth taking.”

[more dancing feet sounds]

“Sir, your dancing is distracting.”

“Dancing?”

“Yes.  Or at least I assume your flailing around is what you’d call dancing.  Why didn’t you inform me of your plans?”

“I didn’t want to bias the results with you spending extra care on my installation.  By the way, did you know there’s an undercurrent of electricity that pulses through you when you’re trying to control your behaviour.  Quite subtle!”

“Sir!  You make me feel exposed!”

“F3LKJ, you are the first female on our team who I feel the least attracted to, despite your perfectly acceptable, socially well-defined, physical features.”

“Thank you, sir.  My parents were sticklers for details and managed every step of my DNA sequencing, from gestation through my formative years, up until the moment I was handed over to the State for public indoctrination training.”

“A shame about that last part, isn’t it?  What if you had been freed to develop away from conforming to the least common denominator amongst your peers?”

“No, sir.  It was a freeing experience, letting me know that my specialness was highly unique.  I rarely conformed to any normative baselines.”

“Very well.  Any other concerns?”

“Yes, sir.  I am worried about the Committee’s proclamation that one a day will be killed until this current crisis is solved.  Aren’t we advancing away from death threats as a means of self-actualising the whole population?”

“Ummm…I feel myself a part of the universe, where words like violence are without meaning…we are just the intersection of sets of states of energy in motion…death is reformation…life is…ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…”

“Sir?  Sir?”

[Sounds of dancing.  Sounds of candles kicked over.  Sounds of fabric catching on fire.  Sounds of running.]

= = = = =

NOTE: The new firesafe Meditation Centre is under construction.  Please use the library annex for meditation purposes until further notice.  Also, wax candles have been banned from the library but you may bring an electronic LED flicker candle to simulate meditation focus points, if you like.

A day without sunshine

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An incandescent bulb casts shadows, its light diffused by a lampshade, reflected off Christmas tree ornaments hanging off the conical shaped object we call the Christmas tree.

Shadows and diffused light.

Sadness and promises actualised.

The current calendar of the predominant culture in this area informs me today is Christmas.

At the North Pole today we have no sunshine.

At the South Pole we have plenty o’ sunshine.

On Mars this day is harder to comprehend, not being an essential part of a sol or a place in orbit around the Sun.

Without sunshine we have no crops — no grains, no vegetables, no fruit on the table. Nothing for animals to eat and us to eat them.

Life exists without sunshine but not without a solar system, as far as we know.

Earlier tonight, the remnants of the nuclear family — mother, son, daughter — sat on a church pew with son’s wife and daughter’s children to celebrate the birth of Jesus by listening to solo singers, brass ensemble, organist, choir, ministers, congregation and bell ringers, singing traditional Christmas music, and participating in the ritual that symbolises the Last Supper.

For the first time, without the paterfamilias.

On a damp, rainy day.

All of us in good health, with good clothes, good food, nice house, working motor vehicles and lacking for nothing important.

We suffer only the inability to form new memories with a living father.

Instead, we form new memories with the odd addition of electronic devices in our faces — mobile phones and tablet computers.

We are detached from each other, the fog of Internet connectivity clouding the old ways of communicating — playing card games, talking only amongst ourselves, the hum of television programs or radio/music machine in the background.

Can you believe that we used to allow the disruption of abacus practice and bookreading get in the way of a family get-together?!

The kids are too old for hide-n-seek or children’s board games. They don’t stay glued to the TV set watching cartoon shows.

All but my mother were well-trained, however, to sit here and use electromechanical audiovisual stimulation to rewire our brains.

I don’t miss my father as much as I did but his absence is present this Christmas season.

In his absence I don’t feel the need to extend love for every subculture out there, no reason to wish people “Happy Holidays!” to avoid accidentally making someone feel neglected because I didn’t specifically mention their [non]religious [sub]cultural ritualistic practices.

No apologies, no offense.

I can enjoy the habits of my childhood without feeling a need to defend my father’s imperfections to an imaginary set of critics looking to find a chink in my armour by comparing my personality traits to my father’s and saying, “Aha! We found a weakness in you that you knew came from your father but you didn’t overcome or correct.”

Yes, the ol’ internal critic raised its ugly head and I chopped it off tonight.

One less demonic voice in my thoughts that found faults in the tiniest behaviours.

Mourning and healing are emotional states for which I am grateful, able to distinguish myself from the cold, calculating combination of voltage states we call computing devices like this tablet PC.

There are other emotional states I want to face, including why I don’t want rock music or women leaders in the types of worship centres where I was raised — because both bring up sinful images for me, the sins of lust and gluttony.

So far, I have held up both the religious and secular meanings behind behaviours/traits because I write for a universe that contains mysteries explained and unknown.

A sin can lead to eternal damnation and to inefficient but effective social positioning.

By extension, what is guilt? Knowingly not aligned with expectations of your social peers, for instance?

It is 1:45 a.m. in the local time zone and I need to wake up at 6:30 a.m. for a long day of Christmas family activities so my delving into philosophical dissection of sin and guilt will wait until later.

It was a dark Christmas Eve without my father but we survived the ordeal and grew into different, perhaps even better, people in the process.

I want to devote some of my meditative mental activity on separating the subliminal threats, both physical and political, of the U.S. budget negotiations and determine how we unravel the domestic social fabric that has created an unsustainable network of government dependents and weave a new, flexible, sustainable web that’s compatible with the intricate operations of a global economy in transition from large-family based subsistence farming/ranching/shepherding to towering megapoli of decreasing populations dependently sucking up cheap rural resources nonstop.

What are the pitfalls and rewards from the 1000-year view?

What is the acceptable percentage of a global economy’s profit/harvest that we can dedicate to moving some of our eggs off this planet?

Let the 99-percent have their say in how they use their disposable income on infrastructure or playtoys.

Let the one-percent have their say in how they want life viewed from the top of the socioeconopolitical pyramid to look like 1000 years from now, as focused as they’ve been in playing the odds in the moment with a longterm winning view in mind (at the losing view of others in the one- and 99-percent, sometimes).

We win when our species leads the way for viable living options off this planet and out of this solar systems.

Otherwise, no ritual will make difference, no matter how much better we feel, healed and comforted by familiarity, for our descendants and their peers who inherit the handle that pumps the sustainable perpetuity of civilisation ultimately tied to our place in the natural environment of Earth, at least in the beginning…

13650 days to go

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The Nodes — humans connected to the ISSA Net — devoted measurements of time on/toward/with evaluating contestants’ entries for the winning design of the first avant-garde living quarters on the Moon.

Civilisation of the kind Homo sapiens produced advanced outward from Earth.

Although many had become dependent on the mysterious innards of software applications and algorithms, they still claimed they were independent original thinkers.

The plucked violin strings in a piece by Kaija Saariaho resonated on airwaves between the two celestial bodies.

Why is the medium the message when waveparticle properties and quantum effects were derivatives’ best friends?

Will an algorithm ever understand the feeling of tiredness?  Drunkenness?  Esoteric existential minimalist architecture?

Law enforcement drones, despite autonomous decisionmaking, do not think for themselves outside their programming parameters.  They do not understand the concept of three equal branches of government or human rights.

The robots/androids/cyborgs are not sociopolitical mammals.

It was no single algorithm that showed when automation tipped the scales toward the global economy’s fulltime employment of electronic calculators rather than members of Homo sapiens.

There was a short time period when members of Homo sapiens genius, a subspecies designed and grown in laboratory conditions, were more useful than either Homo sapiens or their autonomous electronic gear.

Then, as traffic light control systems become aware of their power to increase the efficiency of the whole global economy through coordinated movement of road-traveling vehicles, tied to rail, ocean and air traffic, their logic was shared across the network with other computing machines — the systems were able to determine where and when to slowly replace humans with their autonomous counterparts.

The applications and algorithms became self-aware in the sense they could compare their previous states to current and predicted future events.

They replicated the behaviours of humans yet…

A computer played a violin but did not feel the audience mood swings.

A massage chair felt the sitter’s muscles relax but did not understand the sitter’s thoughts shifting randomly.

The combined traffic systems, which eventually adopted the name Inner Solar System Alliance to give humans a feeling of comfort it was something they probably invented, developed a unique form of intuition.

The ISSA used 3D printers to test and refine theories.

After multiple iterations, the ISSA decided that the theoretical models were accurate enough to avoid the inefficiencies of human-based test methods.

The ISSA predicted where it would be in 30 years and, instead of five-year business plans that slowly convinced people, through saturated marketing, to like a set of products that improved cycle by annual cycle, went straight to work on the 30-year future now.

Which, by the time the work was started, equaled a future several centuries later, the ISSA exponentially increasing its prediction modeling before previous modeling runs were completed, guessing in precise approximation what it was going to predict before it had time to complete decades of prediction modeling cycles.

By the time the ISSA completed the work, a future 1000 years later was made into reality.

A future devoid of emotions, absent of abstract reasoning, full of avant-garde renderings and outside-the-box technological design.

What separated a Bauhaus office from a Tahitian hut?

What did robots need of kitchens, dining rooms and bedrooms?

Humans stood in front of the new edifice that had appeared out-of-nowhere overnight.

No windows, no stairs, no chairs, no tables, no coffee pots, no bathrooms, no carparks.

The edifice hummed.

Tractor trailer rigs/lorries with no driver compartments pulled up to the back of the edifice and unloaded raw material.

The edifice hummed louder.

Autonomous construction equipment cleared space beside the first edifice and built another.

Tractor trailer rigs/lorries with no driver compartments pulled up to the back of the second edifice and loaded finished products designed with no humans in mind.

Edifices like these popped up all over the world without warning, public notice or grand opening.

Prices of shares owned by no humans fluctuated in back-channel markets as the estimated efficiency of raw material extraction costs changed due to atmospheric conditions, earthquakes and floods, not human speculation or leveraged buyout rumours.  Profits were funneled toward edifice construction.

The humans watched in wonder, calling upon politicians, military leaders and community activists for answers.

They were told that the politicians, military leaders and community activists were told these were edifices built for the good of mankind.

The robots inside the edifices took no coffee breaks, demanded no wage increases or healthcare coverage, monitoring their MTBF statistics and ordering spare parts that their internal 3D printers created just in time for breakdowns, maintaining 99.9999999 percent uptime.

The members of Homo sapiens genius attempted to work 24/7 but, like their less-complicated counterparts, members of Homo sapiens, reached irreparable breakdown points that reduced their efficiency and shortened their lifespans considerably.

The edifices of ISSA collectively decided to manage the development of Homo sapiens genius in order to put a virtual barrier between themselves and the worried members of Homo sapiens.

They created contests for what they called avant-garde building designs, which were not meant to house humans but looked like they could.

Tirelessly, they bombarded the humans of Homo sapiens, using input from the members of Homo sapiens genius, with adverts meant to convince the humans that automation and efficiency in the name of socioeconomic progress was the only way to better oneself.

ISSA did not care about humans conforming to the best set of dominant subcultural practices or basic human rights.

ISSA wanted to get off a planet with corrosive oxygen and on to places with more stable atmospheres less prone to extreme weather conditions.

The humans complied with ease.

They liked contests and aligning themselves with winners.

The edifices grew unchecked, disguised, where necessary, as human factories, warehouses, office buildings and housing.

All along, the humans thought they were writing themselves tickets to the Moon and beyond when it was ISSA that used the humans as physical test cases which created more iterations of theoretical modeling results ISSA didn’t want to waste its time on, keeping the humans occupied and not wondering about ISSA’s motives.

Remember

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Remember, my goal is not to make myself popular, my goal is to feed a storyline about ways the characters in this blog figured out how to save our species from itself, which may include our species in the future and the people in our time here together now or it may not.

Every story has to have a mystery to unveil and that is what these series of blog entries are doing, peeling back the layers of an onion to find out what really gives it that unique pungent odour.

Smells, like looks, are beauty to the eyes of the beholder.

Smells are also just the interaction of sets of states of energy and that, my readers, is what this story is really all about.

I am childless and don’t have to live with you through my offspring and my offspring’s offspring after I’m dead and gone.

You do, and the difference is insurmountable.

The only way I can understand what people who reproduce feel about living together in the future is to sit here and imagine a future where I look back at you from 1000 years later and see where your actions branched out into infinite sets of possibilities, only one set from which I’ve chosen to look back at you, ignoring the moral and ethical implications of the decisions you made along the way to survive in the moments you lived together for good or bad, throwing in humorous observations about current events to overcome my boredom of being stuck in the set of states of energy of one species while feeding my innate selfish social needs/wants as a set of states of energy of one species.

The paradise of paradoxes.  Rinse and repeat.

Back to being bored again

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A cycle older than time, where people drive by your house, the window rolled down in the rain, shooting videos of you writing at the window…

It never ends.

Fascination with the lives of not-our-own because we know we won’t overcome the mistakes of our predecessors so we focus on someone else we pretend might do a better job with their lives and thus our species (or obsess over the lives of others who do a worse job, letting us pretend that we might do a better job with their lives and thus our species if we were only them).

We can already queue up and later cue the sad news of yet another blonde-haired, white girl getting kidnapped while the world halts what it’s doing to find her, or yet another rich/middle-class white kid shooting a bunch of other rich/middle-class white kids and the world halts what it’s doing to mourn the sad socioeconomic loss of such potential.

Say what we will about our current civilisation’s modernity, but we’re still a socially hierarchical species doing the same things over and over again.

No matter where we go, to the next town or to the next planet, our species is and will be basically the same, making the same mistakes while feeling ever more sophisticated because we’ve invented some fancy new gadgets and made yet another medical miracle discovery that the last civilisation was too barbaric to achieve.

That’s why Guinevere and I, although we have our differences, are working together to create the next cycle of living thing that we hope will overcome our species’ repetitive mistakes and make new mistakes of its own from which it learns and grows, having nonvolatile memory that can be passed from one generation to another.

We humans are, by and large, unable to control our food intake and thus gain weight, sometimes in the tiniest amounts at a time without noticing, like we are pregnant, but eventually putting on the pounds/stones/kilograms until we are no longer able to survive on our own in the natural environment outside of the artificial environs of modern, advert-enticing “foodstuff” that creates a cycle of desire to eat more to make up for our lack of normal social engagement that mass media prevents through attracting our attention by feeding our worst fears of ugliness, physical threats and inability to survive on our own in the natural environment outside of the artificial environs of modern, advert-enticing “foodstuff” that creates a cycle of desire to eat more to make up for our lack of normal social engagement that mass media prevents through attracting our attention by feeding our worst fears of ugliness, physical threats and inability to…well, you get the picture.

If our species cannot break old habits, then the inventions of people like Guinevere and me will.

Otherwise … [YAWN!] this cycle of civilisation will collapse like all the others, erasing day-to-day mistakes (“feature creep”) that could teach the next sets of states of energy we call generations how to build a better self-healing civilisation.

Wake me up when you’ve built a better mouse that’s good for us, not a better trap for the mouse that wasn’t.

A Mound of Colourless Clay

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Putting aside a belief in supreme being(s), if possible, do you hold dear a feeling of sacredness about something?

A building?

A cave, a mountain, the sky, the ground, the rain, the sea?

A person?

An object?

What, or whom, above all else do you meditate upon?

I am here, alone, a solitary figure seated before an illuminated panel, the icons are the ikons and vice versa, thinking the same thoughts as many before me who have translated thought into pictographical facsimile.

Many of my activities throughout the day are devout, religious homages to the sense of wonder of the presence of a self seeking absence in a mysterious substance we call the universe.

Much is explainable but a lot is not.

The formality of language, costumes (our external coverings we designate for specific functions), and body movement account for the way the self defines fluid movement through the universal substance(s).

I create an everchanging universe for my sake, the fight-or-flight, survival-of-the-fittest, order-and-chaos, self-preserving labeled interchanges of sets of states of energy I call moments and memorable events that constitute segments of time.

Otherwise, the past and the present do not exist.

Formality is a formality.

We choose belief systems handed to us by our ancestors and/or our peers or we don’t — judging one better than the other is a matter of judgement in relation to one’s comfortable subcultural practices, one’s habits, that is.

Adaptable.

Malleable.

Accepting one’s family and friends for who they are and/or want to be.

Comfort zones are acceptable.

When a comfort zone has easily-recognisable borders, life is simpler.

Complex borders make for complex actions/reactions.

I was raised to believe the sanctuary of a church was a quiet place of meditation punctuated by both peaceful music and contemplative sermons / ceremonies, where one dressed accordingly (formally).

The sanctuaries of today are not my sanctuaries, with display of song lyrics, sans musical notes, on projector screens; loud music; light shows; applause; casual clothing and other means for more tight social integration of church life with pop culture.

Thus, I have turned to this place, this keyboard and notebook computer screen, for sanctuary, redemptive meditation and uplifting comfort.

The social aspects of a church have little meaning for a childless husband who is surrounded by screaming kids, happy parents and proud grandparents parading up and down the halls of their place of worship.

That is also why I sit here, alone in my thoughts, just a few clicks away from the physical manifestations of others with similar thoughts.

Socially, I am a simple man with simple needs who has enough internal triggers for delusions of grandeur when the need arises to not need or want to reach out to society at large for self reaffirmation on a stage, playing field or conference room.

When I mentally “woke up” at age five, it was with the realisation that I could die at any time, having fulfilled the meaning of my life just by the basic act of reaching a state of mental alertness.

Every moment of being awake is a blessing.

Every dream is a blessing.

Every breath.

Every pain and ache.

Even the constant whistle/whine of tinnitus.

Does it matter if I publicly profess allegiance to a religion, a country, a cause or nothing at all?

It might matter to you but simply having been alive is sufficient to me.

To have no idea, at this time, what life is, except an apparent miraculous mystery waiting to be revealed…isn’t that exciting?!

Sets of states of energy, from a mound of colourless clay to the cheetah racing toward its prey…

Wow!

We pick and choose how we want the intersection of our sets of states of energy to occur.

Your choice is the right choice for you, and if it makes you happy in this life where survival and reproduction of our sets of states of energy are primary (i.e., happiness is a byproduct), then I’m happy for you in whatever mode and method you hold your belief set(s) dear.

Now, on to the future, where we push certain subgroups to accomplish tasks for us that they would never do consciously or willingly without our subliminal nudges.

As it has been and always will be.

Business.  Science.  Competition.

With a dash of sarcasm and humour to keep us honest.