Back in the leather saddle of a desk chair

Two things I’ve learned over the weekend:

  1. Never buy a Frenchman a bottle of wine, and
  2. Never buy a Sicilian a copy of the film, “The Princess Bride.”

More importantly, I’m beginning to wonder if the recent short episodes of fever/headache/sinus infection are related to the weeks…nay, months-old tick bite places on my legs that haven’t completely healed.

Most importantly, I’m glad I have my wife.  Despite our differences (she thinks of Gene Kelly when she hears “Singing In The Rain” and I think of Malcolm McDowell, which leads to the Malcolm Baldrige award and then to Malcolm Gladwell’s pop novels), she has my best health in her thoughts, or so her actions lead me to believe without question.

If only I could blame the tinnitus on tick bites.

Most Monday mornings, I’m rather depressed because the weekend had filled me with new personalities and their busy lives to ponder and compare my quiet Monday mornings to.

But then, in the middle of a dream last night, I was at some gathering and up walked my best friend in high school, Monica, her face covered in reddish-purple makeup that I just now realise was in the style of a character named Mystique in the film, “X-Men,” who reached up, rubbed my chin and shivered, rubbing her own smooth chin, saying, “You know I don’t like beard stubble,” and me apologising, saying, “I know, I meant to shave before I got here but didn’t.”

I suddenly remembered my moonlighting job as a stringer for the Huntsville Times covering high school sports in the mid-1990s and woke up.

I cannot be what I am not.  Or I can be what I was not but then I’m not what I was.

Then I remembered where I live, a great place for technology-centred people like me who can help people of all shapes and sizes, such as Zero Point Frontiers Corp.

And I opened my iPad to a lecture by the self-promoter, Noam Chomsky, on the obvious fact that democracy is merely a word to the U.S. socioeconomic condition.

Finally, for the first time in years, I sat down in the leather office chair to start writing this blog entry and was able to push myself back against the upright portion of the chair, thanks to the months and years of dance training by Joe, with more recent massage work by Abi, with dance instruction by her and by Jenn.

I don’t know how lucky I am.  I really don’t.

I wish I knew that people are as delicate and needful as I am for social interaction, rather than assuming I am the only one who’s afraid to speak my thoughts because I might sound weird and uninteresting to the uninitiated.

How, then, do I reconcile the difference between my wanting to say out loud that a particular piece of art or the artist’s work in general is not interesting to me because I have no connection to the style or message, and my fear that everyone will say the same thing to me at once and I will feel more alone, completely lonely, than ever?

Thoughts to ponder on a Monday morning!

 

But how many women fully support the idea of a patriarchal system and want their men to rule the universe?

To get hit with the blinding headaches of a major sinus infection in the middle of summer (but during the coldest days in decades), hands shaking and body not able to sleep due to intake of suphedrine, Mucinex D and the usual cholesterol/blood pressure control medication is the least of my worries.

To be able to write stories, I must have a polyamorous and polysexuality thought set.

Being in love with the characterised versions of people I know whom I use as models is driving me mad at this point.

[Pardon me while I honk my nose.]

Rarely do the people match the characters I’ve created.

Rarely still do the people feel the way I do toward them as characters.

But sometimes it takes experimenting with the people and their emotions to give me better understanding of where I want to take the storyline.

Meanwhile, keeping two mapsets — one of reality and one of the science fiction fantasy mapped onto the reality — takes its toll on my sanity.

Throw in an attack on my body’s balanced health and the imbalance throws me off-kilter.

I am a rudderless boat caught in a horrendous storm.

Then, while drifting in and out of daydreams while my wife snores and the cats lickclean themselves while resting on my chest, a story emerges…

[NOTE: Amateurs plagiarise, professionals steal.]

My successful Kickstarter campaign for a 3D printer that’s connected to a computer program that creates a 3D-layered robot complete with 100-DOF motion and 3D built-in electronics which can repair/replicate itself using the 3D printer and eventually creates its own successful Kickstarter competitor for robots that create their own successful businesses, giving me residual revenue for copyright/trademark/patent purposes.

In my dreams, I find ways to build layers to protect me from my klutzy personality and its intersection with other sets of states of energy.

I admit that my polyamorous side is in love with many people right now and the only way to keep myself straight is to write myself a controlled situation in which we are all relatively happy in our cocooned thought sets as we encounter each other in fictional life.

Fortunately or unfortunately, writing these fictional tales here adds to the confusion when the plots seem to align with storylines taking place in what, for lack of a better phrase, I’ll call “real life.”

Sometimes, I hypnotise myself into believing that I can imagine a future which has almost completely aligned with real events and think I have made a prediction.

That is why I keep a calendar countdown which tells me sometime 13,410 days or revolutions of our mother planet from now, we will experience something that is related to our species establishing permanent colonies off-Earth.  It can be the Moon or Mars, preferably the latter, which followed in our species’ timeline of sending one of our electromechanical wonders outside of the solar system; I’d be happy with a human-populated space probe, too.

As they say, if you work hard enough on a goal, it becomes reality.

At the beginning of the year, when I weighed 244 pounds, I told myself that I wanted to weigh 225 pounds by the fall quarter.  Yesterday morning, on the 17th of August, I weighed 225 pounds.  Goal became reality because I believed I could reasonably reach the goal and worked diligently, slowly, with setbacks, frustrations and elations, to get there.

Which reminds me, why aren’t we working more diligently and telling our species about the ways we plan to capture/collect water on the Moon and Mars?

There aren’t enough water molecules in near-Earth orbit for us to capture but there are certainly places on the Moon and Mars for us to dig in the ground and/or “net” water from the air, if not generate water (or its equivalent (hint, hint)) using other processes.

Instead, using my “robotic” money-generating algorithms on the stock market, I am putting myself out of business by skipping Kickstarter altogether and going straight to the 3D-printer self-repair/replicate robot realised dream.

If only there was some way I could automate my polyamorous/polysexual storylines and get me out of the thought-mapping business!

But then, what would I do about my thoughts that pop up when I’m engaged in normal small-talk conversations with people whom I fear would not understand my verbalised thought maps in realtime, as they have in the past?

At 2:30 a.m. in the morning, I don’t have an answer to that question.  Best keep my tangentially-weird thoughts and ideas to myself and my closest friends, whom I fear more than most because their weird thoughts and ideas are even more amazingly complicated than mine!

Companionship and hugs

What if we offered hugs instead of bullets to resolve conflicts between the brothers and sisters of our species?

I stand here at the top of our driveway listening to a lawnmower, a clothes dryer, a chirping alarmist wren, and a cardinal but no insects or tree frogs and I wonder, thinking back…

I have worked on the logic decision trees of the U.S. Space Shuttle main engine controller, the U.S. Navy CASS, an infrared missile system for a Navy fighter jet, a sewer flow monitoring system, PC DSL home router/gateway system, digital KVM equipment, Zigbee-style wireless control systems and yet…

Here I am.

Am I better or worse, having left the world behind me in better or worse condition than I found it?

Have I been nicer or meaner than I could have to the people I’ve encountered in person and/or online?

The cardinals chasing each other in the woods can’t tell me.

The person mowing grass over in the next neighbourhood probably can’t say.

Dead people aren’t talking to me.

The bioluminescent fireflies aren’t signaling me any indication of the results of my behaviour that I can recognise – are there more or less of them because I don’t mow grass or don’t chemically treat the plants that grow in the front yard?

This weekend I spend time mentally reassessing who I was and who I want to be qualitatively, not just by the job assignments I completed for pay and medical coverage.

I want to finish the foundation of the legacy, the direction that my parents honestly intended for me as they struggled against my personality to raise me, and build with more loving companionship from my friends, family and acquaintances.

The time for the end of my midlife retirement, my six-year long meditative retreat, has arrived.

Managing a species

Putting aside the proposition that the ridiculous concept of a species is an arbitrary label which makes no sense on planetary scales of billion-year timelines, let us look at the Management 101 viewpoint of coordinating the activities of our species.

You see, on one hand, we have a company named SAIC that has made many a millionaire in areas around towns like Washington, D.C, and Huntsville, Alabama.

Then, on the other hand, we have the SAIC-haters who see companies like SAIC that hire brilliant (and not-so-brilliant) engineers and scientists in the government intelligence welfare program to create, protect and defend government assets around the world.

That, in itself, is a whole lot of concepts through out there in a couple of paragraphs.

What separates the scientifically-minded people who work for companies like SAIC from the scientifically-minded people who think SAIC shouldn’t exist?

In the spectrum of seven-plus billion people on this planet, where do those two groups generally fall?

I am no purist.  I hope I am a realist who writes science fiction fantastic tales for a money-losing tax writeoff against my government’s desire to earn revenue from me.

I understand the need for a company like SAIC that would create titles such as “Program Manager for Lethality and Mortality,” a job position that requires a person to manage a missile design program which ensures the most number of deaths when dropped on the ‘enemy’ [the lethality part] and the least number of deaths when used as a shield from incoming missiles directed by the ‘enemy’ [the mortality part].

In a perfect world, we would all be friends helping each other out rather than playing boy-toy wargames and killing the peasants with our war toys for fun.

Or would we?

“Come on down!  You’re the next contestant in the ‘Price is Right’!”

Is it a gender issue?  Is SAIC the result of years of patriarchal leadership?  In other words, does testosterone mixed with adrenaline drive our culture to war, spying and government/corporate control?

Is there an alternative that completely replaces our species’ need for hierarchical control?

How many police officers see the world as a sea of perps?

How many peace lovers see the world as a sea of love surrounding a few desert islands of the misguided?

Does the concept of haves-vs-the havenots have anything to do with this?

What about a global consumer economy of “I want more, More, MORE!!!!”?

Say, I am a student of the STEM disciplines and I know that my education will lead me not only to a comfortable lifestyle but a lavish one?  Would I trade a career where I spend more time in pure research, long hours and low pay for a career where I spend more time in government-supported commercial development, fewer hours and high pay?

What are my motivations?  What of my socioeconomic background?  What of my general/public education, starting with my formative years?

Am I assertive, rebellious and outspoken?  Or am I introverted, a good follower who obeys orders/commands starting with the simplest “30 MPH when road is wet” sign?

What if you’re a combination of these traits?

What would a personality profile test tell you?

And what about those of us who will decide how to give you the best guidance for your life as you transition from your childhood years to your adult years, based on your desires, motivations, skills, training and personality traits?

See, we want both the SAIC millionaire employees and the anti-SAIC haters, regardless of their socioeconomic status.

We have room for you, whoever you are, and whatever you want, spooks and nonspooks alike.

The economic pie keeps growing, even if portions of it shrink sometimes, or seems to be made of unequal slice sizes.

Your input is valuable and helps us reshape the pie based on current trends.

Keep in mind that negativity and satire have a funny way of shaping the future.  What you complaint about and make fun of often (Orwell’s “1984,” for instance) causes your opposition to move further into the business of undiscoverable dark secrets, digging deeper trenches that are harder to cross and meet your opposition halfway.

Instead of berating the cybersecurity spy business, propose a future that takes all seven-plus billion of us into account, including the SAIC millionaires who don’t want their fortunes to disappear overnight a la Enron, GM, Lehman Brothers, etc.

We can work with a positive proposal much easier than negative protesting or scathing satire.  Those of us who want to change the world have to pass the newspaper test, go home to our children, live with our friends and seek happiness as much as you do.

High school notes simmering on the back burner of life

I was bothered last evening by the lingering memory of intercepting a note passed between high school classmates 35 years ago.

Then it dawned on me that I used to work in the sewer rehabilitation industry where we were Number 1 and Number 2 in our business.

You needn’t understand what I’m joking about here — it’s just a personal thought recorded for posterity, remembering all the brown trouts I used to love to study to know the pipe shape/profile and speed of sewage in order to calculate the volume of material flowing through a sewer system, estimating any I&I and other aspects of what a municipality must anticipate when planning and maintaining a sewer treatment plant.

Don’t Fear the Robot

Boy, oh boy, was last night’s presentation a doozy?!

Dr. Goldfarb, a thin fellow, prone to blinking a lot, told us about his biomechanical engineering/science work at Vanderbilt University.

[Disclosure: I had the choice of Georgia Tech or Vanderbilt for my four-year U.S. Navy ROTC scholarship in 1980, which means I should be biased toward Vanderbilt, but I’m also a football season ticket holder for the University of Tennessee, an in-state sports rival to Vanderbilt, so it probably balances out.]

I took notes during the presentation, recording some of the technical details of the work performed at the Center for Intelligent Mechatronics by Goldfarb and dozen or so assistants (which he showed in a slide at the end of his presentation — looked like 11 males and 1 female, assuming their faces reflected stereotypical gender roles and none of them are cross-gender dressers like Bradley Manning).

After I returned home and ate my wife’s peach-glazed pork roast with sweet potatoes, I took a short jog around the neighbourhood, processing what Goldfarb’s research meant for me, a person who could, at any time, suffer a debilitating injury should a drunk/texting driver jump the curb and hit me before I have time to react.

What’s it like to lose a fully-functioning limb?

What’s it worth to put in the time to learn to use an artificial limb, one assisted by microprocessor-centred circuitry?

Goldfarb’s approach to prosthetic devices is the least-invasive — no tapping into the brain or surgically implanting electrodes in nerve/muscle tissue.

There’s a whole industry devoted to this type of technology and history has shown us that prosthetics are valuable.

We can take the humorous approach and think of Captain Hook or a pegleg pirate.

Humour is a valuable asset when coming to grips with the change in one’s physical capabilities while adjusting to becoming a more apparent cybernetic organism, cyborg or borg.

Goldfarb’s three main approaches to solving the problems of limb/nervous system functionality include prosthetic hand (Vanderbilt multigrasp hand), prosthetic leg (transfemoral prosthesis) and powered lower limb exoskeleton.

The state-of-the-art is always years behind science fiction fantasies.

I would wish our artificial limbs of today could operate mechanically as well as give complete skin/nerve cell feedback — hot, cold, soft, hard, calloused, sweating, etc.

But even more, I wish our artificial limbs could give us functions that are greater than the capabilities of our human counterparts, not just the boy-toy dreams of Iron Man or Avatar but something entirely outside of our current range of thoughts/emotions.

In the meantime, I encourage university researchers like Goldfarb to give people what they once had, including the young father who would like to walk to a bench seat and watch his son’s baseball team from the stands rather than from the wheelchair section; one who wants to walk down the aisle to marry his bride next August, perfectly happy with Goldfarb’s exoskeleton as it is today, but probably after bugs have been worked out and the design refined a little better for commercial use.

Speaking of which, Goldfarb said that the cost-benefit analysis of his designs show that the improved quality of life, active/reactive prosthetics reducing hospital visits because of falling down with the use of passive prosthetics, for instance, clearly offsets the initial cost of the prosthetic devices over time.

Do insurance companies agree?  Would the ACA condemn a person to a wheelchair his whole life or offer the chance of walking via exoskeleton?

Goldfarb thanked the NIH for funding some of the research at CIM.

There are hundreds of thousands of Americans — military amputees, car smashup victims, and stroke recovery patients — who can benefit from CIM’s research.  Imagine those in the rest of world who could also gain mobility?

I never hope to have to use prosthetics but look forward to the day I might, given what I saw and heard from Dr. Goldfarb last night.

From the home front, via email from Mom…

Church Services of The Future ?
PASTOR: “Praise the Lord!”

CONGREGATION: “Hallelujah!”
PASTOR: “Will everyone please turn on their tablet, PC, iPad, smart phone, and Kindle Bibles to 1 Cor 13:13.

And please switch on your Bluetooth to download the sermon.”

P-a-u-s-e……

Now, Let us pray committing this week into God’s hands.

Open your Apps, BBM, Twitter and Facebook, and chat with God”
S-i-l-e-n-c-e

“As we take our Sunday tithes and offerings, please have your credit and debit cards ready.”

“You can log on to the church wi-fi using the password ‘Lord909887. ‘ “

The ushers will circulate mobile card swipe machines among the worshipers:

• Those who prefer to make electronic fund transfers are directed to computers and laptops at the rear of the church.

• Those who prefer to use iPads can open them.

• Those who prefer telephone banking,  please take out your cellphones to transfer your contributions to the church account.

The holy atmosphere of the Church becomes truly electrified as all the smart phones, iPads, PCs, and laptops beep and flicker!

Final Blessing and Closing Announcements…

• This week’s ministry cell meetings will be held on the various Facebook group pages where the usual group chatting takes place. Please log in and don’t miss out.

• Thursday’s Bible study will be held live on Skype at 1900hrs GMT. Please don’t miss out.

• You can follow your Pastor on Twitter this weekend for counseling and prayers.

• God bless you and have nice day!

Setting up

image

While the doc preps for his presentation, we take you to the news in progress:

The NSA denied today that it had been hacking the radio frequencies of baby monitors for years, using subliminal messaging to indoctrinate future cybersecurity experts in their formative years.  In contradictory addition, the NSA apologised for not indoctrinating Edward Snowden at an early enough age to keep him healthy and happy within the Spookaholics Anonymous system.

More as it develops…

Now back to the Kukla, Fran and OLLI show…or is that the Laurel and Hardy act? OLLIE!  Wait, I mean the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute’s 20th Anniversary Celebration Speakers’ Series presentation on wearable robotics by Michael Goldfarb, PhD.