Tag Archives: science

To think, Old MacDonald Had a Farm, GI, GI Joe

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The 1% of 1%, we don’t see the world in geographic political boundaries.

Of course, as you know, we pretend the boundaries exist, telling you stuff like “Look out for that country over there — it’s against us this year,” and “Our strategic partnership with these countries is the only thing keeping your economic livelihood stable.”

Now that more than 50% of our species lives in sub/urban areas, “free” of the bind to land-based [subsistence] living, you are all our virtual slaves, depending on our virtual chess game results to tell you what to do next.

Two steps forward, one step to the left/right, please.

And then, as previous chapters have told you, there is the Committee, which also manages the lives of the 1% of the 1%.

Finally, there is the universe itself, spinning off little eddies of atoms and molecules that collect and replicate their patterns.

You should have in your thought patterns by now the full understanding that the universe as we know it is simply revealed by a 360-degree searchlight from the point of our planet/solar system, reaching a finite boundary and creating the illusion of a symmetrical sphere in which we are the center.

Feel free to comprehend our ignorance, vast as it is and will continue to be, ad infinitum.

There is just so much that I, the individual, can bother to talk about here while supervising the construction of the interwebs of interwebs tying you to your personal supercomputers tied to everyone else’s supercomputers tied, as if all of that is a single node, to the Internet of the Next Big Things to Come.

So, to me, all military actions, no matter how we label them in nationalistic or terror group or lone wolf terms, are all one.

For instance, I don’t see an Iranian nuclear scientist killed by the CIA or Mossad.  I see us managing to control ourselves by killing ourselves.

Same for sports and other categories of diverting ourselves from our primary tasks of eating and breathing.

Let us move on to more important matters.

Details in the next chapter of the story of our lives seen from the vantage point of 1000 years from now.

Happiness and humour — share them endlessly.

Homeless shelters solve protein issue…

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…feed pigeon and cat meat to residents, end animal overpopulation problem at same time, fix euthanasia moral crisis.

Note to lying, cheating scum (you know who you are) – rats are edible, too.

And that’s the news this week from our offworld colony, Nua Éire, where the whole lot is used to hardship and oppression, key ingredients for successful colonisation of harsh environments.

As one colonist noted, “We don’t need no princes, princesses or prima donnas ’round here.”

Seven Billion People and Countless Other Beings to Talk About

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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

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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.

If not now, when? If not the ECB/IMF, who?

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[Personal notes – feel free to skip or ignore this blog entry]

TLA – three letter acronyms.

The redbud tree is nearly denuded of seed pods, thanks to weather, birds and squirrels.

Two women jog down the road, one pushing a baby stroller.

An automobile speeds past, the driver disobeying speed limit signs posted in the neighbourhood.

The aquarium water filter/circulator gurgles, a gear out of gear, gushing few bubbles into the flow.

Some data points stare at me from the Internet browser software tabs:

We live in the “I cannot” mode or the “I can” mode at any time.

We think simultaneously in both.

Raccoons chase one another in the attic space above our living room and bedroom, attracting the cats’ attention.

As my brother in-law noted, there is a certain thrill in the hunt, lying low, waiting for the prey to wander by, adrenaline pumping through your body.

But there is no thrill in killing raccoons that’ve chewed holes in the house eaves.  They are not worthy prey when they are frolicking on top of fiberglass insulation or wandering outside to eat.

I share this house with my wife, two cats, spiders, crickets, lizards, bees, wasps, birds, raccoons, chipmunks, snakes, mice and other living things (dust mites, bacteria, algae, fungi, lichen, tropical plants).

Most of us, in pure classification terms only, are eukaryotes (a word I did not learn in childhood science classes).  In pure numbers, most of us are invisible eukaryotes, with some prokaryotes around, to keep us on our toes, so to speak (for a description of alternate lifeform classifications, see Domain, once again).

But I digress.

A bicyclist passes by, followed by two trucks, one labeled “XFinity” and the other “Comcast.”

A few birds flit past, presumably to check if birdfeeders in the backyard were filled in the last few days (answer: no).

I, this set of states of energy, float within the comfortable confines of my ecosystem, a subculture, rarely threatened with external, immediate forms of death.

Sure, a plane could crash into the house, or a tornado whip through the yard during the next major weather disturbance, but the chances of either one happening are close enough to zero to allow me to ignore them.  There is absolutely no chance of a driveby shooting or being kidnapped by spies in my life, meaning I need not be paranoid or feed the paranoid needs of others to be wanted/desired/meaningful, no matter now negative their paranoid needs may be.

Thus, I conclude, I exist within the “I can” mode most of the time.

What can I do?

I can build verbal trails, evidenced here, that are structured within a framework of satire and sarcasm, layering a thick molasses-like glue through and through, slowing down the progress from understood word meaning to misconstrued phrase, in order to deflect incoming signals, stimuli, like the funhouse mirror I’ve always been.

There are, of course, the narrative constructs of the Committee and the Book of the Future to place within a time-based structure.

What is real or not real is unimportant to me.

Reality is no better a term to use than to say (to an imaginary extraterrestrial alien), all lifeforms on Earth are exactly like the first one you found, Methanocaldococcus jannaschii.

Perception is reality, just as religion is reality to many and atheism is reality to some.

Was the EU your idea or the invention of a person with a bureaucratically political mindset (can there be politics without bureaucracy (or bourgeoisie, for that matter))?

Can a superculture, much like the UN, but much, much more than that (yes, Star Trek fans, you may think of the Federation of Planets; no, Star Wars fans, there will be no Galactic Empire), arise and absorb the political entities we now call countries while still holding allegiance to the power/voice of the people?

In other words, when do we directly vote for representatives of the supercultural administrative bureaucracy?

When do we say Earth is the first member of the Solar System network of colonies?

Should the EU members lead the way and declare themselves members of the UE (United Earth), rearranging financial categorisation of political entities accordingly, eliminating the [old] geographical boundary method of identification?

You can guess what the combined future prediction algorithms of all subcultures processed through the network of supercomputers have said in the Book of the Future, can’t you?

Time is irrelevant.  Power shifts are inevitable.  The truth is what you make it out to be.

The clock, not my stomach, tells me to eat food for lunch – that says a lot right there, doesn’t it?

Take nothing for granted, granite included

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If I knew that our solar system was packed with living things (at least in the way we choose to define the term “living”), would I feel as compelled as I do to encourage us to devote xx.xx% of our resources toward populating the cosmos with living things from Earth?

The WordPress front page displayed a link to a blog entry titled, “Off the Couch and Into the Streets.”  Rarely do I feel compelled to comment on a blog entry but I added one to Coleen’s:

Your blog entry popped up on the front page of WordPress, and the title “Off the couch and into the streets” caught my attention because I’m looking for a fun way to lose some extra weight. Thus, my expectations were different than you might have expected when you wrote this blog entry.

The Occupy [your locale] movement, Arab Spring, and any/all protestations against the common/established social structure are perennial, which usually fall under the label “counterculture.” I encourage you to feel and act differently, supporting your subcultural beliefs no matter how much you may feel crushed/oppressed by the common culture under which you live and socialise.

Having grown up during the 1960s global counterculture movement, my perspective, as a child at the tailend of the Baby Boomer generation, has taught and continues to teach me that those who protest will encourage others to act in less obvious, newsworthy manners, to effect longterm change.

I’m glad you have a job which gave you the flexibility and courage to join those who wanted to voice their displeasure with the current state of our common culture [one] day on the streets of Denver. Hopefully, through your job and with your friends, you can be the change you want to see today and into the future.

How do we express ourselves daily?  In other words, do we carefully consider the words we use in social exchanges?

Saying I am the “99%” or I am the “1%” or any other label automatically establishes an artificial barrier.

Reminds me of taking the Myers-Briggs personality profile test as a requirement of working in a certain department at a company full of a variety of personality types, including conformists and nonconformists.  After taking the test and, with another person who had gotten the same personality profile, saying that the test results were bogus, was informed that those who received that particular personality profile were prone to say the test results were bogus.

I feel the same way about the Occupy movement.  The participants brag about how diverse and unlabelable they are — yet, they quickly chant about the “99%” and the “1%” without blinking a self-conscious inner eye.

Another commenter said, “It’s like telling a child “You just like to argue” and the child keeps saying “Nuh uh!”.”  The same goes for those who are being labeled by the diverse Occupy movement participants.

To be frank, when I hear the Occupy movement chants through mass media soundbites, all I can think is, “Well, what if I’m one of the 1%?  So what?  Didn’t I earn my place in this financial position by saving (using the old adage of “pay yourself first”) and spending wisely?  Sure, some of my Nike shoes or my wife’s Kathy Lee Gifford designer clothes were made using kids paid ‘slave wages’ but I stopped buying those items after I found out about their manufacturing sources.  The University of Oregon and Stanford University, home to some students who have protested, didn’t refuse Phil Knight’s donations nor did the students refuse to attend those universities.  Regis Philbin, a person apparently beloved by many, didn’t stop being Kathy Lee Gifford’s friend.  I don’t have all the time in the world to investigate the raw material source and manufacturing location of every item I buy but will make reasonable changes when I find out.  Some parts of me are just as susceptible to instant gratification and buyer remorse as anyone else in the 1% or 99% (i.e., all seven billion of us).”

That’s why using or not using labels is important to me.  Also why I lump us all together into the label of “seven billion of us.”  We’re in this thing as one.  One planet, one global infrastructure, one solar ecosystem.

How do we train ourselves and one another to seek rewarding goals that limit destructive and detrimental effects on others, regardless of our entrenched differences?

This time of year, I look out the window and bare trees expose the view of row after row of shingled suburban rooftops.

The mortgage on my house has been paid off.  The majority of mortgages for the rooftops out there are probably still being paid for.

Shall I blame or thank the finance/banking industry for suburban sprawl that makes my skin crawl?

Shall I adjust my view to show myself the people occupying those suburban boxes are paying taxes that support the roads that allow me to drive to unoccupied parks and forests set aside for my enjoyment via local/state/national proclamation and financial support?

If, as one person said, the rich have enough money to pay for half the population to control/kill the other half, where does that put me?

Well, I know where it puts where I want to be.  I want to be one of the rich and when I get there, I don’t want to have to redistribute my wealth unnecessarily.  I admit I like having the total population of my species at my control.  I want to be Phil Knight and say, “Yeah, so what if my products have been made in sweat shops?  My personally-directed donations are creating a whole new crop of those who will rule from the top”.  If I’m going to be labeled as part of the 1%, I want to be Bill Gates, Carlos Slim, Pierre Omidyar or Vladimir Putin, not a homeless person as part of the poorest 1%.

Tiny leaves float through the air outside the window.  A woodpecker hops up and down tree limbs, presumably looking for hidden insects to munch upon.

Both public and private money has given me the time to sit here and make these comments.  It’ll take 100% of us to improve our conditions, if we so choose.

Yes, our global economy is not perfect and never will be perfect.  It displays characteristics of both an open and a closed-loop system, subject to the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Can we show how unselfish we are and share our wealth, of knowledge and financial gains, accordingly, while some of us compete against each other in the chess game of life to make things better for our descendants?

Live happily in the fact that today’s 1% will not be tomorrow’s 1% nor will today’s 99% be tomorrow’s.

If you don’t like what’s going on, take the opportunity to change it.  If you don’t like accumulating massive debt to pay for a college education, find a company that’ll hire you for your current skills/talents despite the lack of a diploma.  I did.  But I eventually got around to completing a bachelor’s degree just to prove I can (and got my company to foot the bill – hey, I wasn’t born yesterday – which set me up for a career ladder promotion that wasn’t interesting to me, but that’s another story).

Nothing is set in stone, except perhaps your date of death, and even that fades with time and exposure to the elements.

Think the members of the U.S. Congress who sit on a supercommittee can cut over $1T from the U.S. government budget and make everyone happy?  Wanna make a bet?

If it was me, I’d spread the cuts proportionally to those who are expected NOT to vote in the next election.  Hey, it’s only fair, is it not?  The U.S. is a democratic republic where lawful citizens have the right to participate in electing legislative, executive and some judicial representatives.  Those who choose not to participate, or vote, get less of the government pie to eat – isn’t that one of the tales we learned in kindergarten?

We’ll see what we see when the time comes…

What does paleobiology say about ants’ weather forecasting abilities?

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7-Nov-2011

Am I the only one to notice that hearing aids have become fashion accessory statements?

Seems like when I was a kid, people wore “flesh” coloured hearing aids to hide them, and later in-ear filtered amplifiers to protect a person’s vanity.

These days, bright, neon-coloured contraptions sit in or over the ear with “skins” that depict a person’s favourite football team, racecar driver, musician or religion.

I even saw one that had tiny light-emitting fiber art fronds displaying a changing rainbow of little dots waving in the air like ear hairs on fire.

Another person had rigged a miniature LCD screen that turned incoming sounds into an infographic soundwave frequency “music video” dangling like an earring attached to the hearing aid.

Leave it to the Baby Boomers to make their health failings a positive experience.

= = =

BTW, the supercomputer predicts one future where former religious opponents — Christian vs. Muslim, for instance — join forces to oppose the immoral/unethical wealthy elites.  Actually, the prediction keeps popping up over and over in different scenarios, including urban-vs.-rural wars, suburban skirmishes, etc.

I’m not one of those survivalist types but the latest supercomputer musings sure make me think about clearing a space in the subbasement network wire closet for canned food and a comfortable cot for two.

Time for a leisurely walk in the woods to see what my nontalkative neighbours have to say about global warming and human warring factions.

Increase your hits by linking popular topics of the day

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So much to say, so little motivation to organise my thoughts today.

As long as officials in small countries that serve as tax havens can be easily bought and paid for, well…a supercommittee is practically useless and defenseless against such a system, n’est pas?

As long as highly-profitable speculation drives growth in one part of the world, the other parts will never succeed in corralling speculators.

Those are the problems.

What are the solutions?

See, life on Mars decades from now is no different than life on Earth today.

The full spectrum of muddied, transparent personalities exists outside of time.

Be an immigrant/artisan, you say?

Then take away the conveniences of modern life.

Until hardships or other means to provoke our competitive nature, our desire to feel alive, dominate, change is slow.

Molasses at the South Pole.

What did you expect to happen when an automated, robotised future freed us to enjoy leisure but took away our means of making a living?

Until the robots work for us, all of us, not just the automated factory owners, we live in a disjointed society/economy.

How do you spread the increase of productivity around?

My wife and I invested in the means of production via purchases and longterm holding of stocks, bonds and mutual funds.  That way, we capture some of the benefits of continuous productivity improvement.

We avoided the debt trap of purchasing objects which reach their depreciation to zero within a few years.

House paid for.  Transportation vehicles paid for.  You know the scenario – we did not leverage debt, ours or someone else’s, in order to speculate.

Yet, we have enjoyed artificially-fast portfolio growth because of speculators.  We have suffered artificially-fast portfolio decreases because of speculators, too.

That’s why our investments are spread across the globe, to capture differences in socioeconomic conditions.

Thus, our lives our intertwined with the richest and poorest of us seven billion sets of states of energy.

My wife participates in the office-style work environment.  I manage a visibly transparent network that feeds this blog/never-ending story.  Together, we, as past/present/future millionaires (in USD), have a keen interest in ensuring our global economy is relatively stable and free from control by selfish tyrants/hoarders.

Who are the selfish tyrants/hoarders?

They are the ones who gained wealth by high-risk speculating with the wealth/debt of others without providing a way to share the profit through dividends, stocks, bonds, mutual funds or other less/low speculative ways of channeling their hordes to wise, longterm investors.

What is the difference between high-risk speculators and low-risk speculators?

That, my friends, is a view that changes with the popular topics of the day; meaning, there is no easy answer to that question.

We hope you figure out how to enjoy the bounty of automation and increased productivity while some of us figure out how to define the constantly-changing difference between high-risk speculators and low-risk speculators and protect the wise investors from the wild, reckless ones.

That, in itself, is motivation to get out of bed every morning and compete in the marketplace of ideas to create a better future for all of us.