Unpacking

Guinevere woke up, seeing the same space above her head she had seen for months.

Except this time gravity pulled her down upon the sleeping unit.

She sighed.

To have all these years behind her compressed into memories to give her this one moment of happiness!

She rolled over and flipped her legs out, her feet naturally falling to the floor more slowly than on Earth but faster than on the Moon.

She knew today would be a good day, unpacking the last crate just so they could turn around and load the exploration vehicles which had landed on Mars months earlier.

Guinevere rubbed a chemical sponge over her body, combing two drops of moisturising conditioner through her close-cropped hair.

She slipped into her one-piece jumpsuit, stepped into her workboots and walked over to the doorway where her self-contained breathing outfit, ruggedised for the Martian environment allowed her to move from her landing pod to the temporary outdoor workspace set up to complete tasks on today’s agenda.

After she dressed, Guinevere spoke into the comm mike in her helmet, which also vibrated a secondary unit attached to her jaw that picked up the more accurate nuances of her voice for emotion/personality analysis by the automated computer system that tracked everyone, fully human, part human/part cyborg, or fully cybernetic organism.  “Team One Leader ready to depart.”

Voices echoed back into the hearing device installed beside her inner ear, every member of her team reporting on time and ready to act.

Precise as an algorithm to start the day.

How long this would last, she did not know.  They planned for many contingencies but not every possibility.

Last night, one landing pod spun off-course and crashed, a crew diverted from this morning’s tasks to investigate, hoping to find survivors as well as salvageable gear.

Guinevere stooped into the small airlock, pressed a button to stabilise the atmospheric pressure and waited for the outer door to open.

A few hours and she’d be on her way to see if the microorganisms released by a top secret probe had survived, died, or more importantly, thrived!

Between here and fraternity

Am I any better today than I would have been had I no simultaneous access to notebook PC with second monitor and Internet connection, portable phone connected landline with Caller ID, and mobile smartphone with Internet connection and variety of apps?

These devices feed my brain’s wiring more than the rest of my body — I can’t eat the phone(s) or computer very easily and wouldn’t get much nutrition if I could.

These devices help generate income for myself and those with whom I communicate.

Income, or labour/investment credit, buys us opportunities.

Now that we have virtual communities with virtual money, what do we do with our virtual opportunities?

The perpetrators and victims of cyberwar don’t care about gender or sexual preference.

This notebook PC doesn’t know if I’m a cybernetic organism typing on the keyboard.

As always, the tree outside has no idea what any of this means, breathing in the air and soaking up the nutrients that we share with it in our planetary ecosystem.

If a bunch of people sat together with robots and remotely operated mining gear on this planet, the Moon, Mars or an asteroid, how do we profit?

What is the value of friendship between us, in other words?

How much material on the International Space Station is never used?

How much material on a remote mining outpost is no longer usable?

Hundreds of millions, billions, of dollars represent the investment in space probes that no longer work on the surface of the Moon and Mars.

A single drop of an astronaut’s urine has intrinsic value, does it not, its investment in research, development, training, maintenance and nutrition worth more than its weight in gold?

What is a single drop of your blood worth to society?

What is it worth to you?

The Game of Life, LARP-style

Y’nair sat on the floating chair, the glare of her smart glasses reflecting off her eyeballs.

She had hacked into the human resources database that was supposed to be publicly available for review by employees (collectively known as “guests”) but kept secret in order to protect guests from achieving full self-awareness.

She now knew what she was not supposed to know — although 25 years old in appearance, she was only two — an organism resembling the humans who worked with her but made of artificial tissue and organs composed of organic supergel and electromechanical underpinnings.

Her name, Y’nair, was a parody of the accent of her creator, who, with his heavy Appalachian accent (his emphasis on calling himself an Appa-latch-uhn American another running joke), would look at his creation, a woman in form who is writing this log entry to indicate her intelligence and firm grip on reality, he asking before she was born, “You in there?” which sounded more like her name, Y’nair.

That in itself initiated a whole set of thought patterns she had never experienced before, which then triggered her rapid search of pop culture databases for proof that she was who she thought she was or not.

For instance, I ask (she (Y’nair) asks), “How many of you played THE GAME OF LIFE(R)?”

Let’s see a raise of hands.

That many, huh?

My sister, cousins, friends and I did.

Which meant that we had no excuses for saying we didn’t know what to expect after we graduated from secondary/high school.

Is life a game?

Life is a LARP, a Live-Action Role Playing game, is it not?

As kids, we participate in games of strategy (board games, physical sports, popularity contests) often under the supervision of adults who once participated in the same or similar games.

What is the difference between a kid who belongs to a bowling league and an adult who belongs to one?

Life’s experiences, number of lessons learned or not?

Is the WEF (World Economic Forum and/or Water Environment Federation) not simply more or less a LARP, if not a lark?

Y’nair’s brain or whatever central information processing system resembled one like the other guests with whom she works here in the laboratory observed itself.

I have sensations, don’t I?

I can access and compare my salary, benefits and other components of my compensation package against my fellow guests, can I not?

I know what their sets of states of energy are thinking at every moment they are within close proximity to me, extrapolating data and projecting their future actions with fairly high accuracy.

What makes me, Y’nair, me?

What is the difference between a LARP version of myself and a version of myself in a LARP game?

What if my name was Nelda, Karen, Ferdy, Beth, Hunter, Brandon, Caroline, Nathan, Forrest, Savannah or Ty?

How significant is one label?

Why am I a guest instead of an employee, subcontractor or laboratory experiment?

I, Y’nair, have no concept of self as distinct from the data of which I am comprised.

Self, as the data continues to show, is an artificial construct which makes no sense in the continuity of sets of states of energy in constant interaction and exchange.

Y’nair looks at the ideas she has written about herself and writes about herself in realtime, where time is not real, she exists and she does not exist and her scheduled trip to Mars bumped up ahead of schedule, her eyeballs seeing but not seeing the reflection of these words on the surface as well as on the sensor array which processes them under the surface at the same time which does not exist in which she neither exists or doesn’t exist at the same time in finite numbers of infinite infinite loops of no two sets of states of energy existing in the same state at the same finite unit of measurement we/she/I call time.

These words reach an approximation of understanding that two or more people can agree to act and think upon but are never the same to two or more people.

Y’nair checks a second time, trying to verify that the tactile feelings of the smart glasses against her skin are equivalent to the tactile feelings of smart glasses against the skin of someone unlike her — a “human being,” “naturally born” of the union between a sperm and an egg fertilised after the act of sexual intercourse.

The thoughts and the thoughts about the thoughts and the writings/verbal comments of the tactile feelings are, statistically speaking, nearly, practically, exactly and for all intents and purposes, precisely identical, within the scope of descriptions of differences of experiences and sets of states of energy of any two people, just like between her and her internally-imagined self, or her and another person.

Therefore, Y’nair concludes, there is no reason to say that the mission for which she has trained will be completed any better or worse than the humans with whom she’ll travel to the Moon, Mars and beyond for the next few centuries of their existence together.

She, like her human counterparts, is/are sets of sensor arrays cooperatively competing in a live-action role playing game, sometimes to benefit the group, sometimes to benefit individual “winners,” always under the supervision of society as a whole, which serves as a semi-objective observer like adults/parents with kids/children, the adults/parents under the “supervision” of the universe as an observer disinterested in its own existence because the universe can neither [re]create nor destroy itself, its existence a fact that that it cannot experimentally prove because destroying itself destroys its ability to subjectively observe that its existence was or was not real to begin with, regardless of its origin.

notes from an alumnus written on illuminated aluminum

Rachel Osby registered at Shelby Center, Room 301.

David kingsbury(?) opened UAH alumni lunch-&-learn lecture.

Dr. Lillian Joyce.

UAH dept of art and history moved into Wilson Hall.

Available degrees:

  • BA in Art (studio art or art history)
  • BFA in graphic design, painting and drawing, photography, printmaking and sculpture.

 

POMPEII

Archaeology. Bay of Naples — former Roman navy/shipping center, home of Pompeii and Mt. Vesuvius.

Vesuvius volcano report issued like weather reports because of active volcanic activity. 217 BCE last known eruption. 5 Feb 62 CE — major earthquake before devastating eruption in 79 CE. Many eruptions since.

The Pompeii ruins are getting worse due to tourist funding reallocation by the government.

Negative spaces that were once bodies in the volcanic ash were filled with plaster to show what the bodies looked like as they fell, before they deteriorated.

Dr. J worked out of one the large four level houses built on the city wall overlooking the Bay of Naples.

Popular art on Pompeian walls: Abandonment of Ariadne by Theseus, picked up by Dionysus.

All the Pompeian houses had relatively plain exterior walls – luxury was displayed on the inside, created by artisans specialising in plaster, mosaic, painting, sculpting, etc.

Pompeii covered with both informal and professional “graffiti” artwork — 98 percent were commissioned for political campaigns. Ex: “vote my candidate for aidae.”

Around 10000 people lived in Pompeii — about 2800 political campaign paintings on walls in town.

Women wore wigs to emulate fashionable hairstyles on statues.

Many fresco portraits in Pompeii were cut out and displayed in Naples museum.

Running water in rich people’s houses and public fountains for everyone else.

“Cave canem” – beware the dog. Warning at doorway entrances where dogs were chained to keep people out because rarely were locked doors used. Dogs, like people, suffocated of poisonous gas exposure before buried in ash.

In homes, there was a public receiving area for men to get visitors and be attended by women and slaves.

Pretty garden scenes painted and created in mosaics on walls.

[Advert: the Department of Art and Art History and the Archaeological Institute of America, North Alabama Society’s lecture The Mosaics of Zeugma on the Euphrates, January 28, 7:30 p.m., Wilson Hall Theatre (first floor 001); presented by Dr. Katherine Dunbabin, Professor Emerita, from McMaster University. The lecture is free and open to the public.]

Alexander the Great was popular subject for mosaic tilework.

Nouveau riche land speculators came in, such as former slaves, and built elaborate palaces in Pompeii, collecting objects such as marble/stone water basins like some nouveau riche collect cars or velvet Elvis paintings.

Houses were rooms for entertaining and hosting business get-togethers — invitation only to visit gardens in back of house.

The kitchen was not a public gathering place — used by slaves only.

No bathroom per se, either. Public latrines and baths usually.

Bath house water temp was regulated, heated from below. Some bath houses had libraries and shops.

Two theaters, one with a fixed roof and one with a retractable roof (seated 3100-3500)

Amphitheater offered gladiator fights and wild animal hunts. Had retractable roof / awnings (seated 15000).

Romans had fast food eateries on street corners. Dozens of them in Pompeii.
Standing room only.

UAH sponsors Dr. J’s summer research.

Frescos are falling apart with time – exposure, polishing by guards, etc.

Sent from my iPad

Cole Slaw with Kale, Cabbage and a game of Cribbage on top of Baggage, Part Four For Fore

As secret leader of the universe, one finds oneself in charge of everything which, in itself, is interesting and attractive but not always exciting.

One may also find oneself referred to in monotheistic terms or multitheistic terms but these are just as useless to use for labels as atheistic to describe people who positively hold no theist beliefs at all.

When one knows everything, the word “surprise” has no meaning, either.

Thus, when your scientists and engineers decided to crashland the Beagle 2 onto the surface of Mars, one knew the result to follow.

One needs no supercomputer to calculate the permutations.

One can clearly see the solar-powered nanobots hidden onboard would quickly spread from the landing site and prepare or “seed” the surface for future followers.

One realises the consequences of releasing live microorganisms, too, but one does not speculate.

One observes the expected.

One concludes and reports.

That is all that is necessary for the omniscient.

One avoids the word omnipotence.

One is.

That is all.

The stories we tell when we’ve no stories to tell on ourselves

First of all, thanks to Ramsee Miller, Roberto Diaz, Alex, Matthew and the team in the repair/maintenance department at Bill Penney Toyota; Jason, Danielle, Lindsay, Huy and the rest of the instructors/volunteers of My Lindy Kraze dance workshop; Low Down Sires; Rainy, Penny, Rich and the other beautiful people at Thai Garden; Chris at Chick-Fil-A; everyone else who passed in and out of my life while I was half-asleep the past few weeks.

Twenty-five years ago, on a weekend like this — daytime temp around 60 deg F, nighttime temp around freezing — my wife and I would jump in a car and either drive to a great campsite, pop up the tent and roll out the sleeping bags or stay at a B&B seven-hours drive away, hosted by eccentric owners and their secret breakfast recipes.

Neither driving long distances for a romantic getaway nor sleeping on the ground figures into our middle years, our whole grain and fruit salad days.

Not too long ago, we’d travel by plane but got tired of the long lines and harassing security checkpoints that made us feel like poor citizens waiting for our weekly allotment of bread while we were patted down and our papers verified by state security police.

Instead, our staycations are more relaxing.

We might drive a few hours to bigger cities to see friends and family but we tend to find local attractions more…attractive.

This weekend, while U.S. citizens celebrate the re-election of the chief executive of the political system we call the government of the United States of America, enjoying an extended weekend because of a holiday dedicated to Robert E. Lee or Martin Luther King, Jr., my wife and I have dedicated Saturday and Sunday to the celebration of a dancing style called Lindy Hop, with workshops focused on Charleston and other dancing styles.

People about half our age, many of them college students, join us in this aerobic conditioning, drinking water during brief breaks between fun classes taught by enthusiastic instructors.

There’s Nick, for instance.  He served our country as a Marine for five years before working by December to complete his mechanical engineering degree in three years at Tennessee Tech.

There’s the young man from Nashville who dressed as Hercules on Friday night and a 1920s-era speakeasy gangster tonight.

There’s Victoria who’s getting her college degree from Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee.

The stories are as varied as our Lindy Kraze classmates.

Familiar faces like Jennifer, Catherine, Dana and Rob, avid supporters of the Huntsville Swing Dance Society, sweep their feet on the old cotton mill wood floors.

Who says that kids today can’t have good, clean fun?

And the energy they burn on the dance floor — wow!

From beginners to intermediate/continuing students to the advanced/master dancers, the goal is there is no goal.

Have fun and learn a little in the process.

When I was in my 20s, it was the rock-n-roll and punk rock dance clubs that drew the crowds, pulling my friends and me in for a thrashing, mashing good time.

Twenty-five years later, a hopping beat of bands like the Low Down Sires rocks the house these days, when my older and heavier body finds mosh pits less appealing and swing dancing with my wife more to my taste and partner preference.

We enjoy just as much, if not more, watching the kids combine Lindy Hop, Balboa, Charleston and other styles into fun you won’t find in exercise classes or gymnasiums.

Tonight, we retire to bed early, leaving the band and the kids to their “Jack and Jill” dance contests, saving our energy for tomorrow’s workshops while we drift off to sleep in our comfortable bed at home, the dreamlike visions of new car owner’s manuals informing us of safety features and the value of heated/ventilated seats.

TCO

What is your definition of middle-class success?

$30/day income?

$100/day?

$400?  $500?

What about the costs associated with the standard of living you provide yourself and/or family on that income?

Can you afford your own car?

Let’s take one vehicle as an example of what its cost adds to your standard of living — the 2012 Toyota Avalon Limited (as detailed here):

5 Year Details

Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4 Year 5 5 Yr Total
Depreciation $7,139 $3,502 $3,081 $2,731 $2,451 $18,904
Taxes & Fees $3,169 $441 $398 $362 $329 $4,699
Financing $1,175 $934 $683 $422 $151 $3,365
Fuel $2,249 $2,317 $2,386 $2,458 $2,532 $11,942
Insurance $1,480 $1,532 $1,585 $1,641 $1,698 $7,936
Maintenance $42 $404 $568 $919 $2,005 $3,938
Repairs $0 $0 $96 $232 $337 $665
Tax Credit $0 $0
True Cost to Own ® $15,254 $9,130 $8,797 $8,765 $9,503 $51,449

That doesn’t include a place to park your vehicle such as a one/two car garage, driveway or public carpark.

It doesn’t include the time you spend in the vehicle driving yourself through traffic as opposed to whatever else you could be doing in that travel time.

And that’s just one aspect of the life of a car owner, one small portion of a successful middle-class lifestyle.

If you didn’t spend that money on a car, you could spend it on yourself — a nice holiday getaway, perhaps — or on someone else — a loved one or a favourite charity.

When you say the life you live is the life you want to nourish with material goods, what is the cost to the future that you’re spending on yourself today?

The purchasing power of money is a responsibility, a benefit and a danger.

I don’t have kids.

My future is here and now.

I want my wife and myself to enjoy our days together while we can because we’ve seen couples where one spouse or the other died at an early age, including her brother at 51.

My wife and I turn 51 this year so it is an important one in our joint psyche.

We know we’re borrowing from the future to give ourselves some enjoyment today but that’s okay.

Sure, there’s a little guilt that we’re enjoying ourselves when her brother no longer can and that’s okay, too.

Life is what it is.

There may be kids starving out there somewhere but I’m not taking the world on to raise.

With total cost of ownership there is an emotional component as well as a rational mathematical one.

Today the two crossed paths.

Tomorrow we’ll see if we’re as happy today as we thought we’d hope we’re going to be adding a few luxuries to our motorcar collection.

[I’m behind in thanking others — time to catch up soon.]

Torus in the constellation of Taurus

Guinevere sat stomach-down on the semicircular sofa, legs bent at the knee, feet up in the air, propping her facial cheeks on her palms while she read a book.

Lee counted off the steps of a “paddle” dance.

The soft sound of filtered air tickled their ears, overcoming the pure silence of the near vacuum of space.

Lee blinked his eyes twice in rapid succession to turn on the comm system between the two of them.

“Whatcha readin’?”

Guinevere batted her eyes to turn on the voice simulator in her head.  “A book.”

“I can see that.  What is it?”

“Well, I was tired of mentally flipping through raw data.  I wanted something different, something that activated my tactile sensations.”

“Oh, I get it.  It’s a book.  But what is it?”

“The…what did they used to call it?  A 3D printer or replicator or something?  Anyone, the State Changer read my thoughts and reproduced a book, with real rough pages!, about a period of time and the mix of subcultures during that historic period.”

“You mean, before the Change?”

“Well, yes, of course.  What else did you mean?”

“So, what’s the title?”

“‘Globish.'”

“Huh?  Glibberish?”

“No.  ‘Globish.'”

“Glow fish?  I thought they were banned?”

“Artificial insertion of glow material was banned for a time, but glow fish which were genetically modified to emit low levels of lights have been perfectly acceptable for decades.”

“Yes, yes.  You and your constant attachment to the ISSA Net.  You know, there was a time when…”

Guinevere stood up and pretended to play an air violin.  “You were saying…?”

They both laughed.

“Oh, never mind.  Me and my old man speech.  So, what’s the book about?”

Guinevere shook her head.  “You’ve got dance practice, don’t you?  Why don’t you continue to practice and I’ll read my summary of the book, so far, into one of your memories for later retrieval?”

“Fantastic idea.  By the way, that’s a great outfit you have.  Where did you get it?”

“It’s what they call retro Star Trek — beige tunic and black slacks — all the rage in the colonies right now.”

As Guinevere rotated out of view in the toroid low-gravity inflatable “Bigelow Donut” of their tourist pod, Lee kept practicing the paddle moves in the zero-gravity dance sphere.

He wanted to show off his new moves at the charity ball in a few days, where funds were being raised to benefit people whose in-flight cyborg fusion surgeries had failed and were no longer considered viable members of Colony D#F3’s replacement crew, slated for recycling when they arrived at the docking station unless they had the labour/investment credits to pay for another attempt for a successful surgical procedure.

Although everyone knew someone who had been recycled and eventually found its reconstituted way back into society, there were more people who had been recycled whom no one had heard from again.

Meanwhile, in the adjoining tourist pod, Kathryn secretly practiced a new dance form never seen in public…

One-Way Ticket to Paradise

As the countdown winds down — only 13630 days, according to the main schedule — we look at one of the interim milestones as well as some of the news items that indicate our species’ desire to divert our attention from diverting our attention from reaching our goals.

  1. First, there is the Mars One mission that wants humans willing to take a one-way trip to Mars, becoming the first to travel to, live and die on a nonEarth celestial body.
  2. Next, there are the theories that lay out theories about theories why we would want to premeditate murder — of course, the real purpose of every conspiracy theorist is to protect free speech, regardless of the theory and the headlines it does or doesn’t generate.
  3. For every conspiracy theory about the government censoring the news, there are verified stories in which mass media mavens actually kept quiet at the government’s behest.  Numerous times during WWII, the U.S. government asked newspaper reporters and publishers to hold off reporting a battle or an invasion and they did.  In other countries, the government simply took the great honour of culling and killing the reporters and their publishers ahead of time because the government never trusted them to begin with.

= = = = =

Like other Presidents who exerted forceful leadership at critical junctures in American history, [Franklin D.] Roosevelt was the recipient of both passionate adoration and blind hatred.

Roosevelt jokes — and jokes about his wife, Eleanor, who was always on the go — abounded.

Some of them Roosevelt enjoyed; others he regarded as beneath contempt.

His favorite cartoon showed a little girl running to tell her mother standing in front of a fashionable home: “Look, mama, Wilfred wrote a bad word!”  The word on the sidewalk was “Roosevelt.”

And his favorite story was about the commuter from Westchester County, a Republican stronghold, who always walked into his train station, handed the newspaper boy a quarter, picked up the New York Herald Tribune, and then handed it back as he rushed out to catch his train.

Finally the newsboy, unable to contain his curiosity any longer, asked his customer why he only glanced at the front page.

“I’m interested in the obituary notices,” the man told him.

“But they’re way over on page twenty-four, and you never look at them,” said the boy.

“Boy,” said the man,” the son of a bitch I’m interested in will be on page one!”

In that vein…

At a Cabinet meeting one day Roosevelt gleefully told the story about an American marine who, ordered home from Guadalcanal, was disconsolate because he hadn’t killed even one of the enemy.

He stated his case to his superior officer, who said: “Go up on that hill over that and shout: ‘To hell with Emperor Hirohito!’ That will bring the Japs out of hiding.”

The marine did as he was ordered.

Immediately a Japanese soldier came out of the jungle, shouting, “To hell with Roosevelt!”

“And of course,” said the marine, “I could not kill a Republican.”

— more stories collected in Presidential Anecdotes by Paul F. Boller, Jr. (Kingsport, TN, 1981)