The World Question Center 2008
A collection of essays from people who know things about things they thought they knew but later figured out they didn’t. For instance, I like Martin Seligman’s essay about the probability of ET because he basically independently came to the same conclusion I came to, but with the added distraction of being Carl Sagan’s friend.
There are constraints written into the fabric of the world which we do not see but are nevertheless there. It’s fun to talk about planetary, stellar, and galactic civilizations as if we will inevitably progress to them; it’s fun. But where’s the evidence of civilizations that came before us? The universe should be lousy with their leavings, the inevitable shitpiles that gargantuan projects always produce. Of course, some say the reason we don’t see any of these things is that we don’t know what to look for. They say it’s like asking a marmot to find a contact address in Outlook; it’s something completely beyond its (and our) ken and ability.
I suspect that the real reason we don’t notice these stellar shitpiles and .pst files is that they aren’t there. I suspect that there are good, unknown reasons that make it virtually impossible for a civilization to spread much beyond where it originated.
We establish the importance of an event or idea by mashing and smashing it, kicking it around, to see where it ends up in the community’s Big Ball of History and Importance. “9/11 goes here; pet rocks go here.”
After the thing has found its spot on the ball, if it’s deemed important, it takes a lot of effort to move it. That’s why no one wanted to hear what Galileo had to say. It would involve a lot of digging and heavy lifting, and everybody was already sitting down comfortably in easy chairs.
These elections are going to be put in the Ball’s juicy center. It will be decades before a historian offers a different view of what happened than that which the winners will dictate: “We’ve agreed to bury it here; we’re going to bury it right here.”
Nobody in the United States is untouchable by the law. Everyone has done something that could have resulted in fines or imprisonment. Everyone. It almost goes without saying, except that I had to say it in order for the next paragraph to make the right kind of sense.
The inculcation of patriotism into every one of us at a young age is identical in form to the inculcation of a sense of religion into church-goers. People have used processes of religion such as this one to set up this thing that behaves like a god: it demands reverence; it demands tithing. It has the power to make your existence miserable, should you incur its wrath.
And, again, everyone has given it cause. There is no one who obeys all the laws or scrupulously calculates his taxes. He does not drive 35 in a 35 mile-per-hour zone, nor does he come to a complete stop. The person who does that would be a saint: The Saint of Traffic By-laws. What kind of crappy saint is that? It’s the crappy saint of a crappy god.
Government and the government are constructs of human imagination and need. They are an attempt to make a real, live, actual god. A drunken, lurching, real, live, actual god, but a real one nonetheless.
Government is not now omnipresent or omnipotent, but we’re trying to improve this god by allowing it to learn how to keep better track of where everybody is, for example, by satellite tracking of our stuff. And if you know where our stuff is, you know where we are. That’s key for a god; You have to know where Your people are. And people are fine with that because they don’t really know what kind of power they’re giving this drunken thing. People aren’t ready (yet) to put computer chips in their bodies, so the chips are going into the cellphones for now.
We can almost pay 10 dollars online to find out where any person is within an error of fifty feet. And I see a day when we can almost pay 5 dollars.
Did the founding fathers know what they were doing? That they were replacing one god by another? I think so; I think the founding fathers knew that they were setting up a substitute god when they separated church from state. That’s practically a smoking gun. And I think they thought of it in just that way: that it was time to change gods. And they knew their new, stupid god would never work if the older gods were allowed to bind to it; without that separation the substitute god would never have taken hold.
And the fathers had reason to do what they did. The old gods hadn’t ever seemed to work out. Why not create a new one? Things couldn’t get much worse.
In reality, things got much better. For a long time. Because the substitute god was consciously made to be crappy, and was meant to stay that way. But now, because engineers–the priests of the crappy god–are able to build things with the potential to allow the government to know where we all are all the time, the god is becoming less stupid. It’s getting smarter, taking on more of the qualities of gods. This is not a good thing. This is not what the founding fathers wanted.
I’m not ready to watch the crappy god evolve and grow; to become less crappy. The reason this god is tolerable to me at all is precisely because it is so stupid. I’m not ready for the government to know where I am all the time. So the more ways I can keep actively bothering the record-keeping function of the government while keeping a low enough profile that I still adhere to the American Compact, the longer I can keep the lurching god off balance and dumb.
That’s the curmudgeon’s goal, even if he doesn’t know it.
Simply point the SkyScout at any star in the sky and click the “target” button.
The SkyScout will tell you what object you are looking at.
A lot like what I wanted in this post, only without having a village elder to feed. I could get this for free, for all intensive porpoises. The only reason I know about it is that my AmEx ‘rewards’ program lists it as a reward. I have just enough points to get it.
I probably should, shouldn’t I? It’s an expert village elder, very reasonably priced.
Jury nullification - Wikipedia
Jury nullification is a de facto power of the jury, and is not normally disclosed to jurors by the system when they are instructed as to rights and duties.
This totally changes how I’ll behave if I’m ever on a jury. Not that I’d tell the judge that.
I enjoy how grand and metronomic the stars are, and I enjoy how chaotic the clouds are. And I enjoy how they inhabit the same bit of real estate, as far as I’m concerned. I can imagine what it would be like if their roles were reversed: there would be no fixed constellations; the stars would be in different places every time you looked at them. And the cotton candy/man on a roof/Abraham Lincoln’s head triad would float over my house every day around 4 o’clock.
It’s probably best the way it is.
I think my best bet is to chuck it all and become a wise elder in a jungle tribe in Sumatra. I could totally do it. I’m probably older than 90% of wise Sumatran elders, and I’ve noticed several things about the stars and the weather. Probably more than enough to put other elders to shame. I’d have to bone up on which berries are poisonous and which tentacled things positively melt in your mouth, but that’s where the internet comes in.
I’d totally own that tribe, as long as I could learn the language prior to being beaten senseless and eaten by those I aim to replace. Ideally, they’d never see it coming. One day a friendly white stranger comes into camp with bags of potato chips and cotton candy, the next day the entire tribal intelligentsia are out on their asses looking for work as tentacle dowsers in the next valley over.
“comic strip” cursing symbols - Google Search
I think this is the first comics cursing that I’ve ever seen to use “pi” in its symbology. Which is blog-worthy enough for me. But then I wondered if comics cursing symbols had a name, so I wouldn’t have to keep saying “comics cursing symbols.” I don’t think they do. Let me know if I’m wrong. But in the interest of brevity and the all-consuming desire to be first, I want to propose a name: “cursicals.” If that doesn’t work, perhaps “cursiphors.” Or, to introduce a little irony into the mix, “fucksicals.”
There, I’m first.
I thought of it first. If my computer hadn’t exploded last month, I’d have proof.
The major difference between this product and the product in my head is that the product in my head is much cheaper.
Do you tire of fishing dead toads out of your pool day after day?
Do you fear that your pet might fall in one day while you are busy elsewhere and drown? Your pet, I mean?
Perhaps neighborhood toddlers climb your backyard fence from time to time to gaze into the pool’s enticing but deadly waters.
Well, fret no more! McNeely’s Amazing Toad Ramp could well be the answer to your various nightmares!
Merely clamp McNeely’s Amazing Toad Ramp onto one of the poles of the ladder in the deep end of your pool, and kiss unwanted dead toads, dogs, frogs, hogs, hamsters, and children goodbye!
The secret lies in the gentle-angled, non-skid surface that rises out of the dark waters and curves neatly to the dry pool edge. With McNeely’s Amazing Toad Ramp ratcheted firmly in place, toads and frogs now might conceivably drift into a position where they could grab the rough coating with their nimble froggy hands and haul themselves out of the chlorinated water– before the various chemicals degrade their nervous systems to the point that they seize up and float lifelessly into the skimmer! Boisterous puppies, cavorting perilously close to the pool edge and falling in while their master is inside drinking beer or shitting, perhaps, could extricate themselves from certain watery death merely by keeping their cool and swimming to McNeely’s Amazing Toad Ramp before they drowned from panicky exhaustion! And the same goes for toddlers, except for the froggy hands part!
You owe it to yourself to audition McNeely’s Amazing Toad Ramp. More than that, you owe it to all the little creatures around you which would otherwise die unspeakably horrible deaths if you don’t. Best of all, it’s guaranteed!*
McNeely’s Amazing Toad Ramp is only $49.95 (ratchets, non-skid surfacing, and surface sold separately).
What if the world was constructed in such a way that, at some point, you were required to make a decision about how you would experience pain? I mean, you have a certain individual allotment of pain you are ordained to experience in your life; you are asked to decide how you want to experience that pain. Do you want to take it as it comes? Do you want to get it all over with in a day? Do you want to spread your pain out evenly over all the days of your life?
I imagine that spreading it out evenly would result in some kind of low-grade malaise, an out-of-sorts kind of feeling, that would be with you always. At the other end of the spectrum, you could elect to take it all in over a 24 hour period: a pain nova, but after it’s over, physically you’d experience no more pain during the rest of your days. I know there are sound physiological reasons that we experience pain, but I imagine that alternatives could be put in place. For instance, if a person who never has to experience pain again touches a hot stove, instead of pain, he experiences a sudden winter freeze in Fargo, or cows mooing. Something of that nature.
I imagine that I would pick the pain nova. I imagine also that the election would be a big deal, like getting your driver’s license or having sex for the first time. Friends and acquaintances would dissect your decision. Those that elected to feel out-of-sorts for the rest of their lives, I imagine, would be few, as would the 24-hour electors.
I would like to live in a world wherein that decision could be made. I’m not in pain now; I’m just sayin’.
Orgasm is to Little Death as
1. Pain is to Little Sphincter
2. Love is to Little Crime
3. Thought is to Little Sphincter
4. Sleep is to Little Oblivion
Answer 4. Sleep is to Little Oblivion, because the other three are stupid.
I’m reading a top “worst tech products of all time” thing on pcworld.com…it’s not important why…and it reminds me, again, of how out-of-touch with peripheral crap I can get. Which is of course a good thing, I like to think, but disconcerting all the same. It’s mostly disconcerting because the article is obviously intended for a target audience that cares about such things, and I like to think that I *do* care about computer evolution. I like to think I *am* the target audience. I’ve owned several several computers in my life, have done the homework that’s necessary to acquire several several computers, and have learned the idiosyncracies of all those computers over months and years of happy interaction and berserk fury when bad things happen.
But I’m not really the target audience. Apparently I don’t have the necessary staying power. For instance, with this ‘top bad products’ article, I find myself agreeing with some of the entries, like pricelinegroceries and the PCjr. I remember those debacles. For other entries, though, I have not the slightest memory of debacle or fiasco. In fact, if it weren’t for this article, I would assume these companies from Yore are still doing business with someone, somewhere. The example is ‘dBASE.’ Yes, I’ve heard of it in the last few decades. It occupies an odd spot in my head devoted to business…devoted to business that I couldn’t care less about. My brain long ago decided there was a program called ‘dBASE’ that some businessmen used for obscure fiscal reasons; it decided that it would never be called upon to be an advisor to a person of that type, therefore it had no further use for that knowledge or that word, therefore it would be filed away permanently. Now I find that dBASE is synonymous with ‘fiasco.’ Not only that, I find out that that is common knowledge; common enough for the offending company’s name to place highly in a ‘worst of’ list.
So I’m not really the intended audience here. And you may or may not know of this fiasco, and know that dBASE’s place in this list is well-deserved. That’s not my point, really. My point is that no matter how clever you are, you can’t pay attention to everything. You can’t even pay attention to the things you pay attention to; something huge will always slip by.
Strooth!
Rolling Stone : The RS 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
I linked through to RS from somewhere else for some reason; doesn’t matter. What matters is the awful, awful things they’ve put in their top 500 albums chart.
Everyone has his limits. “No U2 album shall be above every Who album,” for instance. Or “No ‘Greatest Hits’ album shall be in the top 400.”
Rankings are a combination of opinion, mood, timing, and probably 10 or 100 other factors, only one of which measures what the scale is supposed to measure. And when RS or SI or the Sun Herald or anyone else puts out a “Top x” list of anything, they anger or perplex every single reader. Every single one. There’s no one at home saying “Wow, they got it exactly right again, Alice.” No one. Not even Alice’s idiot husband.
This is what I want: the reader at home can peruse a list of 500 albums, can see a blank interspaced every five numbers, and can say something like “Well, obviously Hambone Lardstump’s seminal Bloodpuppy album comes in at number 15.”
And they can’t cheat. They have to come up with, say, a top 500 albums of all time list, then remove every fifth album. In other words, they can’t just come up with a top 400 list, then shoehorn blanks in there. Because I’d still get mad at them, that’s why!
No angst, no fuss, and everyone stays happy. Even Lardstump’s rabid followers.
I’ve been thinking a lot about David’s eye-thing (see the comments on this). I’m pretty sure that it will happen eventually, at least for people with a lot of disposable income. It’ll be another marker setting apart the Haves and Have-nots, which is an issue all by itself, but it will also have giant applications that I would love to have access to if I can ever get over the Big Brother ramifications of the thing.
It’s obvious that a thing we put in our eyes that allows some kind of graphic to be projected into our visual space, so that it looks like it’s ‘out there’ with everything else we can touch, would change the way we live our lives. Like computers, like the transistor, like the automobile and jet airplanes, it would change everything. Consider this an example of a billion uses: I’m outside at night, looking at the stars, and I’ve forgotten what the bright one on the southern horizon is called. I would think or say “Info” while I’m looking at it; words would appear in the sky, along with an arrow pointing at the star. “Antares, right here. More?”
Or I’m at a party, and somebody I haven’t seen in years comes up to me and starts talking. I think to myself “Info,” and a name and an arrow pop up next to this person: “Johnny Fumedecor, right here. More?”
I’m assuming a level of informational access and pattern recognition that we probably don’t quite have yet, but it’s coming.
There are a billion other uses, and as long as we individuals can control our own records of accessing it, it could be wondrous.
Sooner or later, televisions and monitors, big ones, will be so cheap that everyone, even the holdouts like me, will have one.
Right now, webcams and monitors are fairly primitive. When engineers solve the problem of framerate at a high-enough definition at a low-enough price, sooner or later (and there’s no reason why it won’t be sooner), monitors will become gigantic and just like televisions in their ubiquity.
Then, some other engineers will co-locate the camera lens with the monitor. The camera will capture a scene from the middle of the image that the person is watching on his big tv. In other words, the life-size image I see of the other person will be looking right at me as I look at it.
One more reason to leave the house will be gone. I will leave it only for food or work or sanity.
As technology stands right now, people with webcams can’t stare at the lens without stopping all other action. And the camera lens contains zero information; it’s inherently dull to look at. To do work or interact, a person with a webcam has to look away from the lens to his monitor. So most of the time, the people he’s interacting with see a profile of his face. That’s not only awkward, it’s disconcerting and a little bizarre.
With a lens embedded in the monitor itself, the normal view of a person on a webcam would be from the front, just like in normal life.
It’s gonna happen, and it’s gonna make the instigator very rich. It won’t be me, because I’m not a capitalist, and I can’t be bothered. My job in these situations is to point at it when it happens and say “SHIT! I could’ve made a million dollars!”
I’m comfortable with that.
update: Carole seems to think she’s heard this idea before. I seem to think she’s taking a page from the Man and is bent on harshing my buzz, for her own inscrutable ends.
I propose another year of middle school for kids. I propose that kids go to school 13 years before they graduate.
When I was a kid, we didn’t have homework in elementary school. Nothing except the odd project or reading. Today, second graders come home with two or three pages of homework. They’re putting in overtime, and that’s just not right.
If we added another year to middle school, the younger kids could concentrate on the basics of learning. The middle schoolers could regain study halls, so they wouldn’t have to take as much work home. The quality of children’s lives would go up.
We live longer now. We can afford for childhood to last a little longer. Graduating high school as a 19 year-old could be the last good thing we do for children against their wishes. It would be the last night of having to go to bed at 9:30, or being forced to eat vegetables.
They’ll thank us when they get older.
I live in a very safe neighborhood. Nobody leaves their backyard lights on at night.
I think I can make a case that the safety of a neighborhood varies inversely with the number of houses that leave their backyard lights on at night. I think it’s reasonable to believe that if a man’s house has been burgled, he’s apt to want his backyard lit up. It stands to reason. I would. Just give me this one.
I think, because you allowed that as a given, that nobody’s house in eyesight of mine has been burgled anytime recently. And I can see if a light were shining in eight backyards next to mine. Nine out of nine houses that I can observe from my backyard have not been burgled.
The only backyard that’s ever lit up (it’s not now) is the vacant house’s directly across from mine. And I can find it in my heart to believe that that is a kindness the owners are bestowing on their neighbors, for safety’s sake.
So there’s no crime here.
One reason, apart from being Long Beach, which hasn’t really changed much in twenty five years, is that this particular neighborhood has only one entrance. Bad guys don’t like that. So this neighborhood doesn’t cater to criminals. Green Acres doesn’t either, maybe less so. That neighborhood is a confusing warren unless you know it.
On a larger scale, though, when you get down to it, there aren’t that many bad guys. We live in a society of few bad guys. I base that statement on my assumption that bad guys have to be related to good guys, and I can count on two fingers the number of relatives I have that have been in trouble as adults. I have a lot of relatives, most of whom I don’t see except at funerals, but even so.
So there aren’t that many bad guys. If you put them all together, the whole lot of them, they’d make a stadium or sixty’s full of people, true. But when you spread em out over the whole country, every little burg you’ve ever driven through, every enormous city, there’s not really that many of them.
Which is good; it means we don’t live in a Bladerunner world (here’s where the word “yet” would be, if I were in a less optimistic mood).
* which, if not the name of a towering novel by a dead Russian, should at least have been the name of a Fox Network docudrama, but it googled empty.$
$ “googled empty” also googled empty.
Bowing to popular pressure, I have decided to describe my performance art idea in the blog. Everyone I’ve described it to agrees that it surpasses all other performance art ideas they have ever encountered. Almost everyone. Okay, the only person I’ve described it to, Brian, immediately denounced it as the single worst thing he’d ever heard of, but I could tell he was only being brutally honest. Here it is:
1. 4 folding chairs, occupied by 4 people.
2. the folding chairs are placed in someone’s yard, right next to a 4-way intersection, facing it. Could be Brian’s house’s yard; let’s pretend it is so.
3. the performance has a beginning, a middle, and an ending.
4. the beginning is at 2 in the morning, when the 4 people drag the folding chairs to the corner of the yard facing the intersection. The chairs are in a row. The 4 people sit in the chairs, facing the intersection.
5. they don’t speak to each other.
6. any time a car comes to the intersection and leaves it, the people comment on the adequacy of the driver’s stop.
7. hours drag by.
8. the middle of the performance happens at 3 or 4 in the morning, when no car has been by for a long time.
9. it is permissible to comment on a pedestrian’s choice of dog breed if one walks by, but only if the comment is loud enough that the pedestrian hears it.
10. the end of the performance happens around 6 or so, just as day people begin to enliven the mind-numbingly boring event.
11. at the end, around 6, the people get up, fold the chairs, and go back inside the house, which we’ve already agreed for the purposes of this blog entry, is Brian’s.
Sliced bread, move over!
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