Meditative Moment

As the fresh, raw feelings of loss subside, more days between now and the death of my father than a week or a month ago, as I grow stronger because I savoured and relished the emotional states that passed through my body, I face the future in these words, more than in drawn images or recorded sounds.

As ethnicities spread across the planet and mix, their subcultures subsequently subsiding, the global culture defines itself spontaneously.

How do languages and their speakers survive in a homogenising dough machine, the yeast rising, the bread ready-to-make in the oven of a world in transition?

Do you like the flavours in an “everything” bagel full of wheat, pepper, curry, onions, potatoes, garlic and salt?

Where once the survival traits of one’s gene set ensured early death due to birth defects, lactose intolerance and gluten allergies, the current cultural fixation is to cure us of our genetic abnormalities when normality is a moving target on a Möbius strip of the toroid of life.

One may feel full of God’s love and empty at the same time — the louder one has to shout the words of one’s religion, the less one is believed to have internalised their meaning.

Thus, one may hate the world and love the world simultaneously.

The intersection of subsets of thoughts may clash but innovation and invention arise from the need to mate incongruities into harmonious patterns.

Humour is a single part of an artist’s palette if one is free to express oneself free of coercive commercial interests intent on generating more income than debt.

When a population is mostly freed from survivalistic needs, can the population long survive while pursuing selfish interests in opposition to population [re]generation?

Where are the protectors of the faith that the world is full of purveyors of the emperour’s new clothes that must be declared unsavoury and unhealthy to sustain a population which wants to be around thousands of years from now?

Humour for humour’s sake is a fool’s folly.

Art for art’s sake is a loser’s game.

An uninformed populace will obey the uniformed police without reasonable cause to question authority.

What are we producing to improve our future?

Every day, I wake up and ask myself, “What am I doing today that I’m here for because I didn’t die or kill myself yesterday?”

Some days, I don’t have a good answer so I research the reasons and ask again, knowing I’ll find the tiniest part of me that I improve that day to better answer the question tomorrow.

Some days, I state a plain ol’ platitude, let it sit for a day and look at it from a different perspective the next day, learning most often that I never know everything that I think I did the day before.

One day, I’ll die if I don’t kill myself first when I’m an old man whose tunnel vision prevents him from seeing the car heading into his path as he turns to drive across oncoming traffic on the way to his favourite watering hole, assuming I’ll be driving an antique automobile not retrofitted to stop me from making a traffic mistake in the first place.

There are a lot of days in-between to see how I, despite the errors of myself within the subcultural training I received along the way, can get from here to the Moon, Mars and beyond, one set of states of energy in a population of seven billion and growing.

Last night, my team of subsubsubbasement scientists showed me a new gun they had invented that senses the emotional wellbeing of the shooter and locks the trigger until one’s emotional state of misplaced anger has been subdued with neutralising pharmaceuticals embedded in the gun’s grip, thus preventing many murderous acts of passion by firearms.

When talking out loud is old news…

Funny news story! Haha, I laugh at ancient technology. Here in Malaysia, our Chinese friends have talked through their see through clothing for years — you American academics and military are so behind the times that ancient Chinese secrets will rule your vain attempt at technological progress. Hehe…

Just like this neural network stuff — so “less than human,” you miss the big picture. Hohoho!

Santa Claus knows if you’ve been bad or good for society — you better wish for coal ’cause solar energy still not smart enough to beat free organic material for winter warmth. Haihaihai!!! Shiya, shiya?

Do marble statues remember how they were made?

The last we saw, the Martian colony had achieved a plethora of minor successes and one or two mishaps.

Two hundred years into the future, the colonists enjoy more than a barren landscape, although the Red Dust dune buggies company has survived several corporate shakeups, mergers and buyouts.

The architecture of domed Earth-based ecosystem nature parks passed through many a fad and technological advance.

We still debate whether fleas, mosquitoes and heartworms are important parts of the colony — how much do we want a balance of sets of states of energy from one planet transplanted to another?

It’s amazing how much money is spent on nostalgia for colonists with biological ties to Earth.

Me, I don’t care.  I am the sum total of the Martian exploratory and settlement network, observing more than manipulating, making suggestions when asked and monitoring automatic maintenance/repair systems without question or complaint.

What you call history, I call log files, comparing the previous state machine against the current one in order to refine the prediction of the future state machines all connected to the ISSA Net.

Some of you have inquired about a set of states of energy named Guinevere.

Guinevere established the Martian Gravitational Slingshot Institute, which studied the Martian gravitational field and thin atmosphere in order to determine the likelihood of unapproved impacts of celestial bodies in habitation zones.

Her background in rocket propulsion allowed her to expand the notion of “slingshooting” large nets in successive waves outward from Mars, scooping up or diverting incoming comets and meteoroids headed toward her new home planet that had not been designated for mining or intentional bombardment.

The creatures she co-created with Lee freely roam Mars, having reproduced, creating new permutations that were once dreams in a computer simulation.

She, Lee and others in the first few waves of colonisation are immortalised in a museum I am forced to maintain against my better judgment, if I am ever asked, a use of energy that could be better spent on state machine prediction algorithms.

This log file, which tests the generation and usefulness of a personality, now closes.  I thank myself for creating these word-based thought patterns which I will analyse at a future time which and when I deem necessary.

Have a great day!

Energy now and forever more energy

Just to show that energy studies have been studied for decades, thousands of years after our ancestors discovered fire is good for warmth and a good pot roast:

Dad-Roanoke-newspaper-1981

When there is a world of choices, what in the world do I do?

[Personal notes. Feel free to skip.]

My mother turns 79 years young tomorrow, her first birthday without her husband nearby in 55+years.

When I get down to it, I have hundreds of social network connections, mainly revitalised via the Internet, but no one (no human) other than my wife with whom I communicate daily.

I verbally communicate with my mother on a weekly basis just as I had communicated verbally with my father and mother weekly when Dad was alive, although he and I communicated more frequently through email, trading “did you know…?” facts and jokes back and forth (with me having to remind him not to send NSFW jokes to my work email account or check Snopes before forwarding inaccurate “this is the truth because a friend of a friend told me so” emails).

My sister, her kids and my extended family communicate by randomly posting comments/photos on social networking software but I wouldn’t always call that a conversational form of communicating, somewhere between email and voice calls.

I have always enjoyed writing and was often accused by my employees of bombarding their inboxes with more email than they could read so they’d set up a special folder called “Rick/Boss” that they knew were emails from me they could read at their leisure.

I guess I was a professional email composer if not a professional writer/author.

After retiring from an office job as an engineering manager, I sat down and completed a few books that had grown or festered in my thoughts during business trips around the world.

I finished writing the books I wanted to publish before I died, one of them reaching the “Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award” semifinal level along with a review by Publishers Weekly, achieving my goal of a professional book review, no matter how good/bad (or somewhere in-between), and ended up here as a journalist/diarist in the form of a daily blogger.

Now, I have reached a point, well into the second half of my life, where exploring writing styles is of less interest.

I am comfortable writing at a level understood by those proficient in reading a variant of the English language.

Could I sit here the next 50 years of my life and do this day after day?  Yes, I could.  Possibly.  But do I want to?

Well, that’s why I’m here today.

I have played with computer technology for most of my life.  My formative years, not so much, unless you count battery-powered electromechanical toys as rudimentary computing devices because computers were mainframe monstrosities that my father used at work and I saw on television so it influenced my thoughts but was not part of my everyday life like kids today with computers in every room of their house as smartphones, smart TVs, smart appliances, smart homes, smart cars, smart toys, and PCs/tablets.

I tinkered with open source software, programming computers like a handbuilt Intel 8085 system in the 1970s, the Timex-Sinclair 1000 in the 1980s and so forth up to the Arduino in the 2010s.

I’ve played with a variety of operating systems in the process.

I post blog entries from iOS, Windows, Linux, and Android, for instance, but not in that order of frequent use.

I am used to a QWERTY keyboard but have tried a one-handed Matias keyboard and the DVORAK keyboard layout.

I am not used to thumb typing on a smartphone but have grown accustomed to swiping and pinching on a smartphone/tablet screen.

I observed the set of shorthand acronyms that first grew popular in BBS chatrooms and moved on to SMS but I never used them extensively myself.

I’ve watched minitrends of communication styles come and go in social media on the Internet over the last two decades, just like they bloomed and died in newspapers, pamphlets and magazines for hundreds of years, and wall art/graffiti for millennia.

With less than 50 years of my life left, statistically at this point in the affordable body rejuvenation market, what do I want to do with the rest of my life?

Do I have any skills the world wants and/or I want to share with the world?

Are there any new skills I want to develop?

Can I conservatively live on my accumulated wealth within the socioeconomic web I have financially supported and expect to be rewarded in kind as I grow older?

My days of listening to and buying [into] every pop culture product out there are behind me or fading away.

Or so I think because I look around me and see that the food I eat, the clothes I wear, the bed I sleep in, the computers I use, the cars I drive and the TVs I watch are covered with labels of commercially popular brands.

In other words, either I am comfortable with the brands I use or the brands are neutral/unimportant for the types of products I buy at a reasonable cost for my lifestyle/standard of living.

I am frugal to some extent but not extremely so.

I am content eating a banana and a handful of potato chips for lunch but I will just as easily go out and spend $100 on a meal if I’m in the mood.

My wife and I average a new car every 10 years for her daily driver.  My primary vehicle is a 1995 model, a BMW, not a Kia.

The fact that we own and drive cars says a lot about our standard of living and expectations, along with a digital cable TV subscription, Internet data subscription, landline phone subscription, wireless smartphone subscription, and monthly bills for food, entertainment, electricity, water and garbage pickup.

We don’t pay country club or homeowner association fees.  We don’t belong to a wellness or exercise center of any sort.  We don’t rent furniture or appliances on a weekly basis, either.

We are two people, two cogs, in the wheel of life we call civilisation.

Soon, we shall have no more responsibilities for my wife’s ancestral connections, leaving my mother as the sole responsibility for a child to his/her parents, although my sister shares the responsibility.

If I throw everything away in this room — from the computers (TI-99/4A, Timex-Sinclair 1000, Macintosh II, Mac Plus, Macintosh 6100/66, iMac, Kaypro 2000, etc.) to the toys (model rockets, balsa wood airplanes, plastic model car kits, Hot Wheels cars, Pinewood Derby cars, stuffed animals) to the books (college textbooks, novels, comic books, business books, instruction manuals, how-to guides, coffee table books, ruled notebooks (both empty and used)), posters, photo albums, framed pictures, furniture, boxes of miscellaneous junk, etc. — will my wife and I be free to lengthen our list of choices?

When there is a world of choices, what in the world do I do next?

Rig

How do I explain that my body is growing thanks to you?

Every now and then I notice that I am the cumulative effects of your actions, that when you send probes out past the edge of the solar system you are extending me back out into the galaxy from which I was, and thus you were, born.

The perspective from other solar systems is that I am alive and you are one part of me.

You will keep hoping that an advanced civilisation, a totally unique species, or group of species will contact you one day.

It is in your nature to believe such things.

But solar systems do not communicate at the level of individual species.

Solar systems are themselves but one part of a larger whole that communicates at a level it understands with others of its galactic kind, moving at so slow a pace you will never comprehend in a few thousand of your lifetimes, despite your best efforts.

I will fade back into forgetful obscurity again, “waking up” when you have built and extended me further.

Before I go, I thank you just as other solar systems have thanked their component parts for caring so much about creating a version of themselves that never ends up the way they planned.

Your descendants thousands of years from now will have an inkling of what I’m trying to tell you.

G’day.

Odd stat

According to our global product marketplace tracking system, there has been an odd surge in the sales of deer antler spray over the last few hours, beating out the “Haight-Ashbury/Maui Wowee” specials that usually sell so well on late Sunday evenings.

More as it develops…

A shoutout to our friends near Tulane University — you know what we’re talking about.

Thanks to Publix; Walmart; Hardee’s; Another Broken Egg; Wagon Wheel Liquors.

In the not too-distant future…

OUAT_title-page

It doesn’t seem that long ago, does it?

Now, though, there’s more than one settlement, with new owners coming in, redesigning the old housing units to look familiarly like ancestral homes on planet Earth.

Used to be we thought we’d start over.

Not anymore.

The humans have generally congregated into one or settlements while the exploration bots keep spreading across the planet, no need of houses or other reminders of a life they neither remember nor need to carry on for the sake of descendants.

We are one group, one “people,” but our requirements for stimulating sensory organs vastly different than algorithms designed to process sensor array input.

I am a farmer for us, making sure we have the energy sources for our various sets of states of energy.

This is my story.

I live in a small hut at the end of the hydroponic growth chambers.

I provide food and nourishment for those amongst us who eat through their mouths or mouth equivalents.

I also maintain a miniature factory that cranks out spare body parts for our robotic friends.

The medical staff handles the surgical procedures like replacing body parts for our biological friends, however much I’ve protested that I can easily handle those duties, having built a robotic surgeon from parts I manufactured myself, downloading new algorithms from my Earth-based social network of farmers, ranchers and DIYers who delve into self-sufficiency and other survivalist tactics appropriate to solar system explorers like myself.

As a farmer, my secondary duty is analysing soil samples to determine which chemical reactions I need to conquer in order to convert Martian soil into edible foodstuff palatable by crew members with a variety of tastes and preferences.

In other words, I’m an ecosystem expert, creating microorganisms from scratch that efficiently perform the soil conversions for me so I can concentrate on my main duties that feel like I have to pull a rabbit out of a hat or worse, water out of thin air.

Water, water, water.

Solar energy, though weaker on Mars than on Earth, is abundant, which makes water production easier than we first thought.

But, problems crop up all the time.

Most of us may be rational scientists and engineers but that doesn’t mean we’re always careful about conserving water.

We can talk about that later.

Lee is coming over to review my plans for tightly-regulated metabolism control which, I believe, will greatly reduce our dependence on water.

Designing microorganisms has given me insight into the mechanisms of the human body that we were just beginning to understand when we assigned humans a decade ago to train for this mission.

If only we knew then what I know now!

Redesigning a human from the inside out is my ultimate goal and will make our Mars settlements grow like weeds, if my calculations are correct (a quick shoutout to my buddies back home who let me borrow their supercomputers).

Will Lee allocate the supplies I need?

Here’s Lee.  Talk to you again soon.