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10 Years

10 years ago, on February 29th 2000, I registered cesoid.com. I don't have a copy of what was originally showing here 10 years ago, but I do have a copy of what I said about it 3 years later, where I recall things that I barely even remember now.

The oldest version of the site that I could find is just this page with two broken image links.

Sleep

I would do anything to need less sleep. Or at least make it so that getting behind on sleep is less debilitating. It seems like I need about 9 hours. Bleh.

Infallibility of Beliefs

Is it possible that everything anyone believes somehow makes some kind of sense if you can find the right way to translate it, no matter how outlandish it might be? There's no question that some ideas about the world are more successful than others - if you thought you could fly and jumped off a barn and got something you didn't want, like the ground, that would be unsuccessful. But what if your theories are only about the way you behave? Mustn't they always be true in virtue of the fact that you can theoretically behave any way you like? Is religion just those things?

It can't really be, otherwise religions wouldn't make prophecies that disappoint people.

Besides, how much flexibility is there really for the way you behave? Even theories about yourself can fail. But still, there must be an infinite number of ways of thinking of how you work, to the point where a lot of things that sound like bullshit are just masked versions of what sounds perfectly reasonable. And the same goes for the emergent behaviors of the things outside you. Does anyone you know have a working knowledge of air currents or organ failure based on quantum physics? We don't even have a unified theory of physics, and if we did, that would be the only level at which there would be just one way to view the universe, and it would be accessible to nobody to explain daily life.

All this to justify not writing off someone who believes in guardian angels. But I don't think I'll be successful, even if I'm wrong about what I believe about what other people believe, it's not a thing I've been known to know how to change or to change without knowing.

Lesbian Sex

In case you were wondering, listening to lesbian sex does indeed get old after a while. Well, for the most part.

Vermont

In 2004 millions of liberals threatened to move to Canada because they were so incredulous that voters could possibly re-elect the worst president of all time. Today, in Massachusetts, I'm having what is the equivalent to that feeling I shared with them in 2004. It's time to move to Vermont.

Of course, this time, I have a more practical reason to do it, since I have a job there.

Emaline at 31

My Nokia 6086 started "twilight zoning" yesterday. This means that every three seconds the screen flashes blue. It stopped for a while, but then it started up again, so now I'm going to switch to the other Nokia 6086 that we just have sitting around.

In the process of preparing to switch over, I copied everything in the calendar on the phone to my google calendar. I remembered that I did something really strange, like put a reminder many years into the future. So I started flipping through the calendar looking for it, which takes a long time on this phone.

I wasn't paying much attention to what I was doing, thinking that although the years were going up whatever date I was looking at must be just around the corner, when suddenly I stopped. June 17th, 2037 was highlighted. I thought to myself, "That's probably when Emaline is about the age I am right now." I turned out to be 8 days off.

On June 9th, 2037 Emaline will be the same age that I am right now to the day. This includes taking leap years into account. (She was born 6 months before I turned 28, and that age is a multiple of 4, so the ages where one of us has lived through a leap year that the other one hasn't is a 6 month window every 4 years starting at about age two and a half. Unless Emaline lives to be 93, when she'll experience a multiple of 4 year without a leap year, in the year 2100.)

Now that we're significantly over the hump (the year 2000), futuristic dates don't seem very futuristic anymore. 2037 is like, right around the corner. And yet, my three and a half year old daughter will have to have gone through as much life as I've lived already in order to get to it. And I'll have gone through most of it again, at age 59. Will I make it around a third time after that? It's interesting to think that theoretically even a fourth go is possible, I would be 124. It makes my life so far seem tiny. Especially when you consider that much of my life to this point has been pre-adult. It makes me a little optimistic that there's a lot more out there for me to do.

And, either I really buried something in that calendar much further than I expected, or I really didn't do anything like that, because I flipped all the way through to 2041. So my schedule is clear for the next 31 years. How about yours?

Free Will, In Your Face

I had to be rejected by my job for the first time ever in order to find a job that I wanted for the first time. I can only hope that my (first?) rejection from a relationship can lead to the same sort of turn of events. Can my house reject me too? Does it count when the people living there don't want to live with me? Because I've already got some ideas on where and how to live.

Maybe also food can reject me, so that I can be more serious about growing my own. And then my body and my mind can reject me. What's left of me?

I did some talking about one of my favorite concepts, free will. I'm being sarcastic about calling it a favorite, but maybe it really is, because I can never resist telling people my opinion about it, and very very rarely get my point across... including this time. She didn't seem to like my questions, and she was also feeling under the weather, but more importantly she didn't like my questions, which were only questions because she crossed that threshold that you sometimes cross in a conversation where you state your opinion as a fact, indicating, consciously or not, that there isn't much room for negotiation. When that happens I usually switch from sharing what I think to just prying at what the other person thinks.

So I figure I'll lay out my explanation here, because you can't talk. Well, you would have to scroll down the page to talk. I should put my chat app to use for comments, which I've resisted for very very long because I don't want people to write stupid comments below my wonderful amazing articles. And if that isn't welcoming to you, then what could be?

I think I had a new insight into the idea of free will. Mainly, the relationship between free will as the legal system defines it, versus what it means simply to say that somebody or something has free will. Acting of your own free will, as they say in a court, just means that nobody made you do it. It defines an inside and an outside. Your body is the inside, other people and things are the outside, and free in this case means that the inside was not forced by the outside to do what it did. (There could be some debate over what forcing means, but I'll let that go for now.)

However, saying that something has free will destroys the border between the inside and the outside, and yet still intends to describe the idea of choice versus forcing without that border. What destroys the border? Acting of your own free will is obviously not permanent, meaning you can be forced, meaning that sometimes you act of your own free will and sometimes you don't. Having free will is not dependent on circumstances... that is, it's not dependent on whether something outside you is forcing you... and this distinction blows everything up. If you can be forced but still have free will, then what does it mean? It's interesting to note that sometimes people are said to lose their free will by being mentally incompetent, which brings me to my next point.

Having free will is said to be having self control, though people would probably say that they sometimes do and don't have self control, whereas free will is something more permanent. But even if you draw a distinction between self control and free will, they have the same basic premise, which is that you can control yourself. She told me that I must be of the opinion that we are like computers in carbon form, that we don't really have a choice. I didn't and often don't get much chance to explain that this is not at all what I think, because I don't believe that computers have no choices, and also because I don't think that free will has a meaning, which means that I will disagree with someone who says that people don't have free will just as much as I will disagree with someone who says we do. I'm using "disagree" liberally here, because you don't really disagree with someone when you think that their statement has no meaning, or maybe more specifically, you don't disagree with what they're saying, you disagree with their implied premise that what they're saying means something.

Self control, or freedom of choice, or free will as an attribute of a thing, rather than as a state of a system, both implies an inside and an outside, and also rejects it. If I have free will, there must be a "me" that controls or chooses and an "everything else" which I have some control or freedom from. But since the control is over myself, as in I am not a "machine" and therefore don't have to do whatever I'm programmed to do, it makes me the inside and the outside. If I have control over myself, then I can do whatever I want... but how can I want anything unless there is some part of me that has that want to begin with, and then I must either have control over that part, over what I want or how I try to get it, or I am ultimately powerless. If I have control over that part of me that wants something, then what is the basis of how I control it? Some other wants or habits that are even deeper that are more me? Or the same wants and habits as the ones I'm controlling? It's a paradox.

People don't seem to take time into account. What I decide isn't instantaneously implemented. I may be able to change everything about me, but that change takes some amount of time, even if it's just a decision to change my mind and it only takes microseconds. There is still a "me" making up my mind, and then a different "me" microseconds later whose mind has been made up. This isn't self control, it is control over what you will become. Again, how can you say that you have control if your decisions are made by you, and you did not decide to be the way you were when you made the decision? Or maybe you did, but it took time, which means you decided it in the past, and when you did your decision was based on who you were then, and perhaps who you were then was your decision, but it was a decision you made before that, which took time... eventually you must get to the point where something outside you made the decision about who you were, either because you let go of control for a few seconds, or because you were a fetus and your brain just now started working.

I think I'm realizing that I explained this before. But to summarize: You only have control over anything to the extent that there is something about you, some particulars about the way you are that decide what to do with those things. Without those particulars, you're just random, and not many people would consider a random thing to be in control. And when you have those particulars, and something must have control over what those particulars are. And that may be the other you that existed just fraction of a second before that, but that you had it's own particulars, and so on. Unless you have been alive forever, and always exercising control over what you will be, you are ultimately not in control... of anything. Ultimately you are not in control, but just like pretty much everything there is, you have proximate control over many things... but only the fate of the future of those things.

It's interesting to think what it would mean if you had lived forever and always controlled who you were. I'm inclined to think that that isn't really control either.

Actually, what's even more interesting is to get back to the idea of being forced. There are definitely things, like computers, that can be isolated from the outside world in such a way that nothing outside of them influences them at all, and they'll just keep on calculating whatever it is they are calculating forever, and you can't really say that anything is forcing them to do something because nothing is affecting them. But wouldn't you say that a thing that ignores everything outside of it is a sort of trivial example of free will? Free will should be able to make a decision based on observations, even if those observations don't determine what that thing with free will decides. But how do you draw the line between influence and forcing?

Consider this: If you make a decision based on false information, and because of that end up with a result that you didn't intend, and somebody fed you that false information, who is in control? You can argue that you are in control still, because your decision only took that information into account, there was some internal deliberation that could have gone one way or the other. But again, whatever makes you you is what makes that deliberation either come to a certain result, or makes the result a roll of the dice (if you're in some way random). What makes you you doesn't really free you from being forced, as someone may know enough about you to know how to get you to make the decision they want. If you are random, being random does prevent you from being forced in the sense that it prevents you from arriving at any given decision, but being random is it's own kind of forcing, because then you are at the whim of a dice roll.

Let's take this a step further and suppose that no one manipulated you at all. Does removing that manipulation suddenly mean that you're more free? Or does it just mean that what you are forced to do is was not somebody else's idea? If you get what you want does that mean you weren't forced? If you stand under a falling rock to kill yourself, and change your mind at the last second but can't get out of the way, who is forcing you to die, you, or the falling rock? How can you draw a line between force and influence?

This is all fine and dandy in the abstract, but courts really do have reasons to want to know whether you were forced, and therefore have their own distinction between force and influence, however arbitrary it might be. Mainly, what they really want to know is, what state were you in when you did something, and therefore should they acquit you and go after somebody else, or commit you to an insane asylum, or incarcerate you? Their rather crude distinction helps them determine how to "treat" the problem. Even though incarceration is a stupid treatment, it is still applied to certain people for certain reasons. It is applied to people who were operating under some kind of "normal" state of influence, where it is supposed that the best way to prevent the same thing from happening again is to do something about you instead of something about someone or something else (e.g. the guy that was a holding a gun to your head, or the pothole that threw your car off course and caused you to hit a pedestrian), and that that particular part of you isn't imbalanced in some way changeable by psychiatric methods. (Oddly, to me it seems that "committing the crime" defines a non-normal state of mind (or at least it better!) and therefore means that you must be changeable by psychiatric methods. Arguably, one possible method is just simply punishing you by putting you in jail for a while, which isn't very arguable because it's well known that it doesn't work very well.)

In other words, free will only exists when you define an inside that is making the decision and an outside that it is free from, and define a line between influence and force. There can be a real purpose to defining these things, but to simply say that something has or doesn't have free will, is like saying that something has or doesn't have centimeters, rather than saying that a certain number of centimeters fit between one part of that thing and another part. And that's me crossing that threshold between stating my opinion as an opinion and stating it as a fact. I think I justified it pretty well, but I invite you to tell me how you disagree.

Let them lose their minds.

I'm going to try writing an update from my phone. This is sort of a twitter imitation but i'm not going to limit the length, writing it on the phone will just affect the pace and also prevent me from having to sit in front of the computer, which tends to create distractions.

I want that chat dohickey to stay in your face but i also want to have new writings which means i kept delaying writing them until i could figure out how to do something that seems impossible with the layout of the site.

Now i'm getting very hungry. There are two women downstairs, in pajamas. I love them both and they love each other but i don't think either of them love me, at least i know they don't enough to live with me kiss me or want to spend a lot of time with me. I'm hoping to find someone who does, or some combination of people who together fill all those roles.

Last night i had probably the longest conversation i've had with anyone in person since i moved to this state 6 years ago. Is that possible? Either way its a sign that i'm doing some of the right things, and also maybe a reminder of what i should be watching for, especially with the sort of people that charm me too easily without much substance, which is to say, women.

I've been exploring the idea (once again, actually) of making an anonymous identity to write some things on the internet about my life. But now i'm wondering why i don't just do it here. What am i afraid of? Who am i trying to charm or protect, and from what?

6 months ago my second born child died before it could even become born, and my wife fell in love with someone and out of love with me, and everyone i care about should know this, and everyone who doesn't know me has no reason not to know. The only people who shouldn't know are miriam's hundreds of lebanese relatives, and i honestly don't know how that can stay a secret from them or why i should be one to protect them from that secret. I'll unfriend them on facebook like she did, and not worry about it, which, by the way, they are bound to notice eventually. Let them lose their minds.

Chat

Introducing the most ugly, minimalistic chat application ever created. And, the only time patrons of cesoid.com have ever been able to interact with the site or each other (except when they already knew each other).

Coincidences

Oh God Coincidences, why?

Beirut: 2007

Right now [2007] I am sitting in a plastic chair just outside the open door of our proto-apartment in Beirut. It's the only door that swings open instead of sliding open. I like the way that "houses" - which are always apartments in Beirut - have balconies that open into multiple rooms, as though each room is a hotel room with doors opening to the beach.

I will likely be torn away soon when Emaline actually won't go back to sleep. She is trying not to sleep with Miriam, who is trying to sleep, just through the open door, through a closed door on the other side of that small room, quickly in and out of a hallway into the other room, in the new morning.

There is a golden skinned asian woman on a balcony four stories above me on the other side of the east-west street. Now she has disappeared. The sun is shining on the building she has just reappeared from again.

It would take much less time on my part to document most of what I have written in this entry with video using a digital camera in my pocket, and it would be faster to watch, and communicate more than I could ever hope to write at all, but it could not hope to document, for example, this paragraph. I will take a video with it right now to add to this entry.

the video

Has the camera proven my previous paragraph wrong by including a picture of these words? Does this new paragraph contradict such a hypothetical proof by adding something that wasn't in the picture? No.

My stomach hurts a little.

I can smell monouche downstairs, and it's making me hungry, though I've eaten two bananas and an apple since I woke up. I have been awake for several hours now though.

Taoism

I often get into this state where I do things in the most relaxed, simplist way that I possibly can. In fact, this has been one of the things about me that I've found peculiar, and lamented in some ways, and been told many times that it is what makes my life not work. I found it very odd to discover that this is a near perfect description of this in Taoism, called wu wei (roughly meaning "do nothing").

I do this when I program... coming up with some very simple idea of when to make a function out of two similar bits of code, or how to make the interface work (almost always the most minimalistic interface possible), I also do it when I clean up things, picking the easiest things first and not really trying to figure out the fastest way of doing it. I often wish that my entire life could work this way, and it's possible that the only reason it never did was because there were always people telling me *not* to do it that way. That's why it was so surprising to me to find a religion that believes this to be an ideal.

The funny thing is that I've probably read about it before in high school. I know I must have. But considering that I read about it in a Catholic high school, it wouldn't be surprising if our discussion of it centered around it being wrong. This is especially because it promotes having no goal and accepting a good or evil outcome.

I have to admit that I simultaneously find the approach of having no goal or no knowledge of good or evil to be honest, but also unappealing. Though, as I think back now, I've gradually gone from a person who always thinks of an end goal in everything, to being a person who just wants to be at peace in any situation. I feel like I should disagree with the notion that being happy happens when you don't really scheme or come up with elaborate plans, but I've also been developing this theory that maybe the only thing that I've been doing wrong in my life is to try to force myself to get along in a situation where I don't really, and will never succeed. But if I don't care about right and wrong, does that mean I shouldn't care about happiness? It seems like a paradox, though it's possible that I'm just not quite getting the meaning.

It feels strange to me to be writing about a religious principle that I've both never heard of before, and actually want to follow. I don't have any problem with people taking bits and pieces from religions, I just don't like mystical bullshit that goes along with them. In fact, it seems like the philosophy of wu wei would agree with not burdening down a philosophy with extra meaningless crap, which seems to make up about 97% of any particular religion.

Human Weirdness

If I had instantly rejected what could have been a threat, there probably wouldn't have been an opportunity to create something new. That's worth a little bit of belief in the weirdness of being human.

Facebook Divorce

...

...

Whew. That was easier than I thought.

Project #1

I have now completed Project #1, and may reveal its goal and the process I am undertaking to complete further projects. The first project should be fairly boring to most people, but it serves a few purposes.

It proves that I can dedicate myself to a seemingly pointless project, devoting all spare time to it.
It proves that I can do this without interfering too much with the rest of my life.
It proves that I can continue to follow through with the project even as it becomes monotonous, boring, or as other more exciting things try to entice me away.
It clears the thing I am most interested in doing from my mind, so that I can work on future projects.
It gives me an idea of what it is going to be like, which will be helpful in other projects that are less linear and involve more effort on my part.

Most importantly, while performing the task of completing this project, it occurred to me that I am wrong when I think that there is something that prevents me from completing other projects. All projects, if they are possible (and most of mine are almost certainly possible), are as inevitable to complete as sitting on my ass and watching 100 episodes of a TV show - provided that I have the right frame of mind. The right frame of mind is simply that I will continue until I am done. If I do not let the project become a threat to some other part of my life, and I do not let something else take priority, then it will help me to maintain this frame of mind.

The goal of Project #1 was to watch all episodes of Lost. I completed it yesterday. Now I will enter a period of time where I do whatever I want for a while, without dedicating too much time to any one goal, and also during which I organize my list of future possible projects. When this list is satisfactorily ordered from most interesting to least interesting, and when I feel for whatever reason that it is time to begin, I will start the one at the top. I am already pretty sure about which one it will be, but I will not reveal it until it is complete. At least, I will not reveal the end goal - I may show some of the work-in-progress.

Beside The Point

If I can stick to a goal no matter how pointless it seems, then I can do anything. If anything is pointless, then everything is pointless.

If everything is not pointless, then nothing is pointless. To put the point more effectively, absolute meaning is meaningless. The only real meaning is subjective.

What do you do here?

I just find myself saying, \"No, there\'s not a place for everyone in the world. You can\'t expect to find a fit. You can\'t just follow some lark because you\'re not satisfied with where you are now. Why should the world be so ideal?\"

Is this a mismatch in opportunities? Clearly my company can find another programmer, a happy code-monkey (sorry Derek, Scott, et al, etc) who\'s interested in bizarre little tidbits of applying code to things (but how? how can you be interested in that?), but can I really find someone who is interested in someone who ... WHAT? WHAT IS IT THAT I DO??

I\'ll tell you what I do. This. I do this. Which is why I keep coming back with the answer, \"No, it\'s not possible. Tough luck. Find a job that people don\'t care about you being interested in. Or at least some good-natured half-scam where people throw money at you willingly but for no particularly good reason.\"

So, I guess I\'ll write another book then. It will be called, So, I Guess.

Torture

I have to say that I agree that parents shouldn\'t be allowed to let their children die because of religious beliefs, especially when the child is too young to break away from those beliefs. But it also makes me very uncomfortable to think that we would force upon someone a cure which is more painful than the disease. I think they\'re doing the wrong thing for the right reason. Which means that they\'re not going to change their minds when you ask them not to do it for the right reason (See: Canada). Can we really say that the United States of America doesn\'t torture?

I find modern society to be unnaturally obsessed with living. It\'s a strange thing to say, but I think it\'s entirely valid. Why can\'t we accept death? I\'m not asking anyone to accept their own death, I\'m asking them to accept other people\'s deaths, when those people are willing to die. It seems like when push comes to shove people know when they want to die, but it\'s those around them that can\'t handle it. We coerce, bully, or in some cases, physically force people to remain alive, even when the alternative is worse than death. It actually sickens me.

I admit that the question is more difficult when someone doesn\'t get to make an informed decision because religion is clouding their judgment. But I\'m also struck by the fact that in this country, religion is often given the privilege of allowing you to opt out of things. It\'s ridiculous that you can avoid doing certain things because of a nonsense reason like religion, but you can\'t avoid it because you actually learned something that made you think twice.

In some cases, children have been forced into taking vaccines, some of which are just as likely to kill you as the nearly extinct diseases that they are vaccinating you against. Death in either case is very unlikely, but if it is, then why are we so obsessed with doing it one way instead of the other? (It\'s not because the disease will become common again, modern health care prevents this, not to mention the fact that \"immunizations\" stop pretty far from granting you immunity, with effectiveness sometimes 50% or below.) Never mind the other possible effects, because we arrogantly decree that if a medication hasn\'t been proven to harm you, it must not be harmful. Why should a medication be innocent until proven guilty?

But the main point is this; you can pick and choose your vaccinations only if you claim that they interfere with your religion. So, it\'s certainly conceivable for someone to claim religious exemption as a last resort, if not in some case we know about, then maybe in some others that we don\'t. How can we have freedom of religion if you have to claim to be religious in order to be more free? What does freedom of religion ever do nowadays other than allow people to break the law - again, for the wrong reason, when those who have a better reason aren\'t allowed?

Twitter

Might as well connect you to the place where I\'m actually logging updates: http://twitter.com/toddcesere.

Crap, I need to fix the bug with the slashes, those are kind of annoying.

Anonymous Disaster

There was no calling card left behind. Then again, there were no experts to consult, and no news to watch, which were usually the two things (most likely combined) which would tip you off as to why a bunch of buildings had fallen down and a lot things like bridges and furniture had been tipped sideways.

All I could tell was that some disaster had happened, and it didn\'t look like any I\'d seen or heard of before. Earthquakes usually tipped things over, but I don\'t recall them scattering large electric signs and trucks and cars around miles from where they had been before. If it were a large bomb, it should have had a ground zero. A hurricane maybe? Do hurricanes blow over large brick buildings and leave the trees largely untouched? No, but tornadoes do, don\'t they? But do tornadoes happen everywhere at once?

As I walked down the neighborhood street in a daze, towards the main road, as though in a dream, I began to mull over choices that made less and less sense. Flooding...but there\'s no water anywhere. Hail and blizzards leave behind hail and snow. Nuclear bombs destroy everything much more thoroughly.

Perhaps, I reasoned as I saw something three stories tall slide into view and then out of view faster than I could identify it, somebody invented a new kind of bomb, or some other new kind of weapon? I made my way around a barely damaged upside-down car, and looked back at my house. I knew I\'d walked out the attic window, but I don\'t recall being in the attic just before things went wrong, and I don\'t remember scrambling through upside-down stairways to get into my attic. I can\'t remember anything from the previous day at all. I can remember plenty of things in recent weeks, but I can\'t identify any memories as being the last ones before this.

In front of me there was a flower garden. All of the flowers were laid out on the road, roughly in the same patches they\'d been in when they were still rooted in the ground. I avoided stepping on them for good measure.

As I approached the intersection, a widening curtain opened up chaos to me. My first reaction was that I was in a very large pinball game which had tilted. Almost everything seemed intact, but there were debris from many things that clearly weren\'t intact, but it wasn\'t clear exactly where they had come from. I noticed that one of the intact things was actually a three story building which was now facing backwards. I couldn\'t make out any breaking point where the building had separated from its foundation - perhaps the foundation had also rotated?

There were people entering and leaving a building that used to be a theater. Thinking that they should be able to give me some information on what sort of thing might have gone on the night before, or maybe even what kind of thing was going on right now, I decided to follow them in.

What I entered was the side door, I couldn\'t figure out where the front might have been. When I entered, I was taken aback by the sheer number of people. They were everywhere, standing or climbing up and down a staircase, going this way and that across the ground floor, seemingly engaged in a giant crime where the victim was hidden away in the crowd.

They didn\'t seem to know there was anything wrong, but were never-the-less raiding some store of food in the same way that you would if something had gone wrong and destroyed all your food. It seemed as though they\'d been doing this for ages, and indeed, as I awkwardly engaged a few of them in conversation, it seemed that they believed they had. They would only talk fleetingly about any disaster, and the consensus seemed to be alien invasion. If I\'d found an alien mixed in somewhere, perhaps they would have been able to help me come to a better understanding.

I was prepared to believe that everyone was insane, because this made more sense than alien invasion. I also concluded that their insanity was likely the cause of the destruction. They must have gotten together with a bunch of trucks and cranes and power tools and simply torn everything apart. I decided I\'d at least follow suit in one respect, which was to make away with some of my own stolen food. Except I wasn\'t sure where to take it.

When I emerged from the building again, I noticed that everything that wasn\'t bolted to the ground was sliding down the street towards me. I re-entered the building, and decided to reconsider the alien hypothesis. I didn\'t know of any earthly disaster where large objects like buses retained momentum for several hours afterwards without wind, water, or fire to propel them. Maybe it was a gigantic magnetic field.

I talked a bit more, and I began to understand part of the problem. There were no working televisions or radios. No cars were working, so no one was driving around in and out of town. There was no communication with anyone who had come further than walking distance. There was no consensus on how long ago something had happened, so you couldn\'t determine how far walking distance actually was. Half of the people couldn\'t remember how they got where they were, and even less of them could tell you what things looked like when they left where they were before. It was impossible to know, at least for me, whether this disaster covered a two mile radius, or the entire world, and it was nearly impossible to find anyone who thought they knew, and at the same time seemed sane. Maybe knowledge of the situation actually caused insanity.

I couldn\'t see anyone I knew anywhere, although this was just down the street from my house. As I was thinking this over, it occurred to me that my house or my street might not be where it was when I went to bed last night...or last week, or last year?

Free Markets and Freedom

I want to start a new Libertarianism where freedom is not interpreted to mean free markets. I feel like there is currently a discord between those two things. The assumption is that freer markets create freer people. It seems like freer things would correlate, but there are two problems with this theory:

A market that is not absolutely controlled will make it possible to attain freedom by a process that takes away the freedom of someone else.
"Freedom" as applied to markets is a subjective term, it is defined by what it is being "freed" from.

Number one is fairly obvious. Most people are aware of the fact that some people gain by taking away from someone else. Whenever you have a free market, people will be able to take advantage of the weaknesses of others. It may be easy to live with this when someone's weaknesses come from their own decisions, but it may be a little bit harder to accept when someone is just dealt a bad hand - be it natural disasters, being born into poverty, or the limits of your anatomy. One might reason that even your own bad decisions are the result of things over which you have little control, like how you were raised, or how talented you are.

The good news about number one is that almost all people are useful. In theory, in some kind of ideal free market, this should mean that everyone finds a place, whether or not they meet with bad luck along the way and are taken advantage of from time to time. It's not much consolation though, when you consider that reality falls far short of the ideals of a free market. Humans always operate from a position of inherent ignorance, and often operate by looking over the shoulder of someone else. Unless you eliminate this part of human nature, the free markets that have been marketed to us so far will always have some pretty big flaws.

Number two is less obvious, and to me, more insidious. You can talk all day about free markets, and how amazing it works to "let the market decide", and how regulations just clog up the machinery, but at the end of the day the free market that we're talking about is not the absence of rules, but the addition of rules onto the ones that nature has already provided. What is more free, allowing people to snatch your wallet out of your pocket, or making a rule that says you can't do that? One of these things is more free of rules, and one is more free of theft. When you're making a "free market", you have to define what it is being freed from, and it is therefore not even possible to define an "ideal" free market. Is it more free to let people copy files in their possession and share them, or is it more free to say that the person who created the original has the right to grant or revoke this privilege from you? One is more free from limiting technology, and the other is more free from losing control of what you've created.

Some people want markets to be very unregulated, maybe even totally unregulated - or so they think. What does a totally unregulated market look like? Is it a market in which people can buy and sell anything that they possess, at any price? Or is it the wild, where animals steal from and often kill other animals, where there are no rules about possession except that you have whatever you can hold onto? Or is it a blank, a universe in which all laws of nature are stripped away, and since anything is possible, nothing is really possible because nothing happens without physics? Or is it a place where physical laws, laws of ownership, and other regulations are used to the maximum advantage of helping all people live as close to the way they want to live as possible? Or is it the proverbial island, in which the inhabitants are given just the right amount of rules, rules that are so simple and short that they feel no fear of government, and no fear of morality?

Who is it that decided freedom means control over a list of possible possessions, and how did they decide who possesses what, and what can be a possession? I don't care, unless it will help me figure out how I or my family or my neighbors or community can live a better life. And the trick is that the answer to that question might help me live a better life. The questions in the last paragraph weren't meant to lead you to a particular answer about what a free market is. The "right" answer wasn't the very suggestive one about helping everyone. That's because there is no answer. A free market is a market that sets up some rules, and remains free of other rules. God did not come down from heaven and give us a list; there is no set of rules that is inherently "part" of the free market, and there is no set of rules that the free market is inherently to remain "free" from. As a member of the species that invented these so-called "free markets", you must help decide what the rules accomplish, and which ones you want and don't want.

When I think of stripping away the laws of possessions to get a market that is more free of rules, something strange always occurs to me. It is the same thought that I have whenever I think about anarchy. What I think about anarchy I often think that it is either inescapable or unattainable. It is unattainable, because it is the state of removing all rules, and when you remove all rules, people will immediately be allowed to make up and force other rules on each other, which means you will no longer have anarchy. The only way to keep this from happening would be to have a government that enforces anarchy (the only rule is, there are no rules). It is inescapable, because the ability of any government to impose rules is the ability acquired by the rules of anarchy, or the rule of force. All government is the result of anarchy, and all sustained anarchy is the result of government. Therefore the question isn't, "Do you want rules?" but "Which rules do you want?" Do you want the rule of the wild, where every entity fights for control? Or do you want the rule of law, where a government takes away control from some people so that others may have more control? Or do you want the rule of dictatorship, in which a government takes away almost all control in an effort to maximize what they think is most important?

I know what freedom is for a person, it is the ability to live as they please. I also know that the laws of physics are a hard limit on this freedom. I am ready to use whatever rules are most likely to bring the most freedom to the most people, whether those rules are the "free market" as currently defined, or some other market, or something totally different from a market, free or not. The wild gives us an excellent example of the tyranny of the free market, and several governments give us wonderful examples of the tyranny of control by one entity. And many many places give us many examples of governments with various amounts of rules and kinds of rules, with an obvious skew towards copying from their peers. You might say that there is a market of markets, but like voting systems, you can only use the current system to choose the new one. As I said before, the current system is always anarchy.

It's Alright

It's ok, you just have to feel this pain for a while.

Unplugging Your Cell Phone Saves How Much Energy?

I decided to try out Associated Content. They've paid me a miraculous $3.08 up front for this article! I'm rich!
Unplugging Your Cell Phone Saves How Much Energy?

Let's Buy A House

I feel like I should be writing about Gaza, but what I want to write about is my journey to try to figure out where I want to live. In Gaza, people are being bombed in their homes because some other people in their country decided to bomb other people's homes. Meanwhile, I'm daintily inventing my own drama about picking the right home in just the right place. All drama is relative. Though maybe it would seem less relative to me if I spent some time in Gaza.

Gaza, another term thrown onto the fire with the other ones, another one not really a household name until everything goes wrong there. Remember Darfur? Hmm, I'm getting distracted by the thing I feel like I should be writing about.

It was an amazing sight riding down the bike path to work today. The early morning sun was shining on the almost imperceptibly snowy trees. The path itself was white, but I had no problem riding the bike down it in high gear. It was like a vision sliding by, unnaturally quickly for a winter scene. It made me happy, even though I was riding to work.

Work hasn't made me unhappy this week. It has tended to do that for about 4 years previously. This week is my first week back from a two week vacation over Christmas. I was dreading Monday, just as everyone else said they were, but I felt like I dreaded it in a different way.

Every time winter comes I think that it is once again a great mystery that people live north of, let's say, New Jersey. I'm not keen to move to New Jersey though. And of course there's a lot of places with mild climates that are this far north, like Portland, and London. At some point I had a slight reprieve from this feeling, as I took Emaline out in the snow for what felt like the first time. It wasn't really the first time, she'd been out there at age one and a half, and at age half even, but she didn't do anything very fun, mostly because she was just too young to appreciate it. But maybe also because we were in crummy Somerville.

But Emaline doesn't really have much fun out there yet, and I feel like I don't either. It's always just a matter of time before my fingers start going numb. Though I have found that I can stay warm if I stay active...if it's not too cold. I did also go skiing with my sister and my dad for the first time in at least four (?!!) years. The fact is, winter is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. And I do. For three or four months a year. If I were going to allow a winter, it would be ending right now.

I feel a lot like we moved in the right direction. It is slightly colder here, away from the ocean weather in Boston, but the difference in scenery is impossible to compare. I just keep wanting more. I want a forest in my back yard again. I want to be able to get away from people entirely when I feel like it.

I was thinking today about moving to Detroit. It's got almost nothing I want, except maybe the ability to get away from people. Oh yeah, and cheap houses. Cheap houses on streets that are pretty much abondoned. I've known for a while that you can buy a house in Detroit for $8000, but I didn't realize they were going as low as $1000 now until I read an article about it on CNN.com today. You'd have to throw around $20,000 of repairs at it right away, but that's a house for $21,000. I could almost do that right now without a loan. Is it bad manners or dangerous to tell people how much money you have? It's not really that much.

There's just something I don't like about work as I've experienced it so far. It's coming closer to being satisfying at this time than it ever has before, but it still feels unnatural, like I'm putting on a show rather than doing something necessary. Actually, the one job that never bothered me at all was washing dishes 40 hours a week. I was completely willing to continue washing dishes into the school year in high school for about $5.50 an hour without, as far as I can remember, ever complaining about it. It seems like there was a simple explanation for that. I knew that I could continue to do it successfully.

I tend to generalize things, which was actually a topic I discussed with a therapist that I've been seeing. I can see that in some cases, it is actually one of my great talents, but at other times it gets in the way. Does it? I'm sure it does. But I kind of want to generalize at this point, that a lot of people out there don't like to work because one of the unnatural things about it is how they are constantly confronted with situations that they don't know how to handle, and that they don't really know if they can handle.

I will refer back to the primordial example of "natural" when I think about the fact that people used to experience challenges in a totally different way than they do now. If you were foraging for food, or even farming, you knew very practically the consequences of this or that, you didn't have to throw a bunch numbers around, or consult your "boss". Failure, in some cases, meant death. Now people need to feel the risk of death for fun just to feel conscious.

It occurred to me the other day that I don't mind sitting in front of a computer for long periods of time, which is one of those really unnatural things that I complained about once. Though, that doesn't change the fact that it's not very good for my health, and that I would probably be happier if I spent less time in front of a computer. I think my discontent with most jobs revolves around the fact that they try so hard to get you concerned about things that are only concerning because somebody else will pay you for them. I'm doing what for a living? Typing on a keyboard and moving a mouse around? And when it doesn't happen in the right order or in the right combination it ruins what? And I'm supposed to figure out reliably what combination of buttons and movements to use, and this is serious business? I did what wrong?

After spending a lot of time with Emaline over my two week breaks (all day on most days, and a lot of time alone with her), I really feel withdrawal when I come home from work and she goes to bed a couple hours later. I was afraid to say this before because I felt like I would be treading too heavily on the territory of people like my wife who stay home all day with their children while someone else goes out and works. But I think I would be happier staying home with Emaline. But Miriam points out that I wouldn't like it so much if I had to do the other housework at the same time. I wish I could just try it for a little bit to know for sure.

I think I should learn a trade that is more immediately useful for...living, like building houses or growing food. I think I would be happier that way. I would also be a more useful person if the shit really hits the fan and a certain combination of things sends us back into the dark ages. I think that it's pretty unlikely that we will invent and deploy something to replace gasoline fueled engines before the decline in oil production overhauls the way we live. You might be able to do it, if you really took it seriously, but not if you waited for something bad to happen first.

Am I talking about the same thing all over again? It's pretty much become a reality for me. I used to think about global warming all the time, now I think that before we even get a chance to willingly cut back on fossil fuels, there's a good chance they're going to just start disappearing. Though, I wouldn't be surprised if they stick around for just long enough to get us by the global warming tipping point, but not quite long enough so that we adapt to living like we've been living.

Houses. I was talking about houses. So, I want to live in a warm climate, without losing any of the friends we're starting to make now, without actually living this place, and I want to live almost right in town, and in the middle of nowhere, with a yard bordering on the forest in such a way that you don't know where one starts and the next one begins. I want a small cheap house, with a huge two story south facing window, with two bathrooms, but the whole house should be the size of one room, and it should be on wheels. What I want is to live in a tent and travel the country on bikes. In the winter we'll be in the south, and in the summer we'll go up north, maybe to visit my parents in Michigan. I want to put my roots down, and get to know the people in this area, and live in a new place every two years. And travel the world, educating Emaline by showing her everything. I want to live in London, Italy, Lebanon, Portland, Traverse City, and Northampton, and be in all those places at once, and know everyone there, and build an intentional housing permaculture mini-village next to waterfalls, mountains, pastures, a forest, a lake, a river, and a city.

Instant Inventions

I've been developing a knack for coming up with inventions that already exist, or coming up with an invention and then finding it on the market about a year later. Here's a few examples:

Invention: A bookmark page that has little screen-shots of the pages you bookmark.
Fulfillment: I had this idea about a year ago, and this summer when Google Chrome was released, I found that its New Tab Page had exactly this. It did at least one better than me by having this page automatically populated with your most often visited websites. Though I do wish that you could have more than nine pages there, and that you could make them different sizes or rearrange them, or control which ones show up. I'm actually using Google Chrome right now to write this in a Google Doc.

Invention: A kite with a wind turbine on the end of it.
Fulfillment: I think I had this idea about 6 months ago, and recently when I mentioned it to a co-worker, he let me in on a secret; it already exists! I was really surprised at this, and apparently it's even better than I thought it would be. : Here it is. This is so cool I can barely believe it. The particular one I linked to uses helium. It gets much stronger and more consistent wind by being higher up, and is portable, there's no need to build a tower.

Invention: Electric bike with regenerative breaking.
Fulfillment: Here! There are actually more than one. When I came up with this idea originally I envisioned doing it in a totally different way, with spinning gyroscopes that retain the energy. It's a bit absurd. Today when I learned more about electric bikes that can be pedaled while the electric assist is on, I thought to myself, "All the necessary hardware is in place, all they need is a way to use the motor as a dynamo." I'm not really sure if it's that simple or if that is the way they do it, but there it is. If I move further away from my job, I'll definitely consider an electric assist bike, though I'm not sure I'll need the extra range provided by the regenerative breaking.

Invention: A tube that guides light from your roof to a room in your house where skylights are impossible.
Fulfillment: The fullest extent of my idea doesn't seem to really exist, but this is close. Well, ok, this is exactly the way I first imagined it, but I think it could be done better, and used for heat. My recent idea is that you would take a big mirror or lens, focus the light into a little tube, and pipe that where-ever you wanted. This has a couple advantages. The small tube wouldn't take up as much space, and it would make for a smaller heat leakage during the winter. Also collecting light from a wide area means that you could potentially use it for heating, as long as you were careful to scatter it well at the bottom to prevent it from burning a hole through something.

I had an even better addition to this as well, but it could be pretty difficult. Drill a small hole in the wall, say a few inches across, and on each side of the wall you put a huge lens that focuses light through the hole, and then on the other side the process is reversed, so that what you end up with is a window. It sounds stupid, but it would have certain advantages over a normal window, the biggest being little or no additional heat loss. Another possible advantage is that, since all the light passes through a small hole, you could easily block and unblock that hole, giving you the effect of a giant window shutter. However, I think that this might be either very expensive, obnoxiously large (imagine a giant camera lens), or maybe even impossible. Let me know if it is already invented.

I'm pretty sure there are a lot more of these, but this is all that immediately come to mind. There are also some others that I think must exist, or should exist soon, that I am unable to find as of yet. They don't include a 116 lane bowling alley.

A programming language that is mostly graphical. This is the one tops out in several categories: 1) hardest to explain, everyone always says, "Oh, you mean like..." and they're never right, and never thinking of something as useful or functional as what I'm thinking, 2) least like anything I've seen, 3) most useful, 4) most inexplicably non-existent.
A solar oven for your house. If solar ovens are so great for cooking food, why not "cook" your house? You could lower your heating bill pretty fast just by reflecting a lot of light into your house from a sunny spot in your yard. Wait a minute, I think this is it. Hmm. This is getting kind of creepy. It's not exactly the same as just having the things you need delivered right to you...because you actually have to think about what you want before you can find it. It's sort of a way to instantly invent things. As long as you can think of it, you can have it, but you don't have to go through the time consuming process of actually figuring out how to make it. This particular one is so simple and immediately useful that I'm thinking about buying a 4' by 10' sheet for $75. I wonder how regular tin foil compares. You gotta figure a 4' by 10' sheet would be the equivalent (if you put it in the right place) of installing a south facing 4' by 10' window in the house, only without the insulation loss. I could just reflect it through an existing north facing window from the back yard.

Ok, that's enough for today. I like this post so much that I'm considering whether I should have a site that just lists cool inventions. Wait, I know, I know, that's also been invented already. The problem is that the ones I know about are for technophiles, which I'm definitely not one of. I like cool and useful things, but I lean heavily towards useful and money saving. I don't care about iPhone apps that make your screen behave like a steamed up window, though I might link to them sometimes for comic value. In fact, I don't like iPhones, until they're cheap and my existing phone stops working.

Sordid Stock Market Experiment

It all started in my grandmother's dining room, as I watched on a little TV that something Big was happening that was affecting the stock market and the economy. It's strange to think that until this point I was only mildly aware of the economic slowdown that had turned the Dow Jones into a mountain shape instead of its familiar hockey stick-with-little-notches. Until this day, the mountain wasn't yet very symmetrical looking, but within a few weeks it would make for a clever Christmas card where a graph of any popular stock index of the period from 2004 to 2008 would play the part of the Christmas tree. If you haven't guessed yet or you're living in a cave with Osama bin Laden, I'll tell you what I was watching; the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

I don't know where the idea came from originally, I think it was just a good look at the graph of the Dow Jones, and the knowledge that it is possible to gain from plummeting stocks by selling them short. It was just one of those things that I'm sure most people think about the stock market at one time or another, which is, "Whoa, if I bought a stock at this part of the graph and sold it at this part I would have a lot of money...and wasn't it obvious that it would do that?"

It was probably also my knowledge of gold price trends that affected me here, because I knew in theory that when the US economy goes to crap, gold prices are supposed to go up. Looking back, this sounds kind of stupid, because I can see that an ounce of gold had dropped from its $1000 high in March all the way down to around $700. However, right around the time that I stared at that little TV and thought stupid things about the stock market, that was the bottom for gold, and since then it has rebounded up to almost $900. Though, looking back I can see that I didn't start out buying gold.

"WAIT A MINUTE," you say, "DID YOU REALLY LOSE A BUNCH OF MONEY IN STOCKS?"

Please, no capital letters. And no, I didn't...not real money anyway. I'm not a person who likes to take big risks with money. My goal was to prove my theory without using real money. To this end there are a lot of tools that will help you out. The one I found was the Virtual Stock Exchange at the Wall Street Journal's website. You can start your own game, invite others to compete, and start everyone out with whatever amount of money you want. You could start out with $1,000,000 and be rich right away. (Now that I think of it, it would be funny to try to see how fast you could lose it.) I decided to start myself out with what I might be comfortable investing in reality - $1000. That's a pretty measly amount, and this becomes more obvious when you start trading and realize that every trade costs $9. So if you sell one stock and buy another, you're already out $18...almost 2%.

I started out betting on Bank Of America, my theory being that if some of the banks were going to crap, the others would be picking up the pieces cheaply. I bought BAC at $35 one day, and sold it at $32 the next day. I wasn't really willing to try to make long term gains, partly because it wouldn't be worth much with a starting investment of $1000, and partly because if I did that in the game it would take me something like a year before I "proved" that I should be doing some real investment. What I wanted was quick money, which, ironically, has been a very high priority for me for a long time. It really makes me wonder, how much of my life have I spent trying to get more life to spend? It's really not a matter of time spent though, it's more a matter of making something a priority that is most often accomplished by not making it a priority. When people make a lot of money fast, it seems that it usually happens when they are doing something they're really interested in.

My next strategy was a little bit more sound than the first one, which was to cash in on bailout money. I bought some AIG stock for $3.62. I was a little bit more patient with this one, but in the end I sold it 6 days later at $3.33, mostly so I could buy something else. In the mean time I just sort of made a random guess at a company that seemed stable but still involved enough in the finance industry so that it would be going somewhere, that was UBS. This turned out to be my biggest loser yet, probably because of the timing. I bought this at around $20 a share, and sold at $16!

So far, though my stock picks were loosely based on some theories as to who should be doing well, I was actually following one of the stupidest patterns possible. I was picking stocks that had risen very fast in the preceding day. I was basically buying high and selling low. I wasn't really done with this strategy either, because after that I bought shares in a stock that had just risen 16% in a single day. The theory this time was that the dollar was in bad condition, and gold was being back-ordered to the point where it was actually hard to get a hold of. I bought 300 shares of TRE, a gold mine, on October 8th, at a price of $2.35 a share. By the end of the day it was selling at $3 a share, a 25% gain.

A couple of weeks later it was $1.75, a 25% loss for me. At this point I hit rock bottom. I'd turned $1000 into $300. I don't remember whether I gave up or steadfastly held onto the stock, knowing that it had to go back up. Let's pretend the latter. On December 10th, two months later, I sold the stock for $3.39, a staggering 46% percent gain. I bought it back the next day for $3.27. (Ok, I left out the part where I sold it on an earlier day for $3.01 and bought it back for $3.10. That's called gambler's recall. I just made up that name.) That buy seemed smart, but I ultimately decided that stock had inflated enough, and sold it at the same price. It actually leveled out about 4 days later at $4, so I could have made some more money. However, by investing in a silver mine (SLW) I was able to finally bring my virtual assets full circle - I got my $1000 back.

The day after I got everything back, I lost much of it again. I still hadn't learned the lessons of stupid investors though, and I sold it on the way down, only to see it go back up again. If I'd held onto it until today, I would still have my $1000. Instead I bought it again at a higher price, because although I've done some stupid things trying to time the market, the companies I've been picking are gradually being based on better information. This time, I read an article on fool.com suggesting that this company should be valued at $12 a share. You can read advice like this in a lot of places, and some of it is stupid, as it is often based on patterns in the market or here-say, but fool.com seems to do a bit more research and be pretty well-regarded, besides simply having really good track records. One of their central themes is that financial advisors (like the ones that told my dad to invest in Lehman Brothers) do no better than if you were to pick stocks at random.

Some people will know fool.com as The Motley Fool. I first heard about it from Artyom Milov. He seemed to be really excited about it. In the conversation that proceeded I brought up a question about the stock market that had haunted me for some time, and Artyom's lack of a meaningful answer made it seem all-the-more mysterious when you consider that he was a student in a business college. The question was this: How is a company's stock related to the company?

What I knew of the stock market at that time (this was about nine or ten years ago) was that the stock market prices went up and down, and they were supposed to represent ownership of one small piece of the company, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how this relationship existed anywhere except in the minds of the people playing the stock market game. As far as I could tell, the only time the stock market price affected the company was when they actually made the initial sale of stock...which doesn't help much. I also saw another possibility, which was that some companies from time to time issued a dividend, which means they pay each stock holder a certain amount of money per share, but that was only a one way relationship, where the success of the company affected the stock price, and the stock price had really no affect on the company. Also, this only applied to some of the companies, because not all of them issued dividends. I shared all these thoughts with Artyom, and asked him what "really" happens and he responded pretty much like this, "Oh, man, I wish I could remember this." (Sorry Artyom.)

Well, now I know some more of the answer, though it is still disconcerting just how disconnected a company is from its stock. Now I know that stocks are considered either "growth" or "dividend". Growth means that the company is still reinvesting all profits toward getting bigger, or improving in some way. The assumption, as far as I can tell, is that growth is not infinite, eventually the company will start paying money (dividends) to its shareholders. This holds true when you compare a publicly traded company to its privately held counterparts. If you were the sole owner of a company, you would most likely expect to get some financial gain from it someday, or you would expect to sell it at a high price to someone else who expects it to start paying out. That's a dividend, and is a very simple explanation for why any owner would pay more for a company that appears to be doing better, whether that company is paying a dividend now, or will start some day in the distant future.

I've also discovered something new that I surmised must exist, but I never really read about until now. That is the fact that a publicly traded company can start to issue new stock if it so desires. The new stock will likely be sold at near the current stock price, which completes the circle, providing a way for the stock price to now affect the company. If the stock price is high, the company can theoretically issue a little bit of stock to raise new funds, but if the price is low, it would have to sell a lot more stock to have the same affect. (It should be noted that when the company issues new stock, it means that anyone who previously owned 100 shares now still owns 100 shares, but that 100 shares is a smaller portion of the total shares, and thus a smaller portion of the company. This would theoretically lower the price of current stock, or take a bite out of whatever gains the share price would have had.)

The weird conundrum that I'm trying to solve now is how a lowered stock price can seem to force a company out of business. My best guess is that it actually doesn't. I just did a little bit of reading and stumbled upon someone talking about a company that has continued to operate despite having shares that hover between one and two cents for years. It seems that more often than not the plummeting share price follows very closely to a real struggle within a company that is going bankrupt. It would seem (guessing again) that when share prices are overly pessimistic, the big losers are the shareholders themselves. I really shouldn't be guessing all this crap.

In fact, one interesting thing that I've discovered when trying to find the answer to the question, "Why does a stock price approaching zero force a company out of business?" is that a lot of people think they know things about stocks that they don't. The best example of that is an answer to a particular yahoo question. The chosen answer, with four out of four votes, is several paragraphs, a significant proportion of which is complete malarkey. If you don't want to read it, the summary is that they claim a company gains or loses money when the stock price changes. This money would have to come from (or go to) fairy tale land, because when someone buys a stock they only pay the person who owned it before them, the company doesn't get anything. The comments on the answer say as much (including mine). The answerer believes in her false authority so sincerely that she writes a mini essay on the subject. I don't have anything against speculation (see essay above) but if you're going to say things that you don't really know much about, you should recognize it and say as much (see "I really shouldn't be guessing all this crap").

A Day Without A Gay Who Likes Stuff That White People Like To Recount

Day Without a Gay

On November 11th, at least partly in protest of recent ballot questions that restricted some of the rights of being gay, there was a nation-wide protest in which gays didn't work. Gay men and women were urged to "call in gay", but it seems like not a lot of them did that, and it didn't generate anywhere near as much news as the earlier prototype, the Day Without Immigrants. I have at least one theory as to why this is the case. While the immigrant version acted as a simulation for what some people were asking for, the gay one didn't really have the same advantage. In the case of immigrants, the effect of immigration reform would most likely be that less immigrants would be around. Thus, a Day Without Immigrants is a simulation of what this would be like, sort of a "Be Careful What You Wish For" day. Rather than a similar preview of the future, the gay version opted to simply do the same thing in the most superficial sense.

For gays, the accurate parallel would be remarkably weirder. It would mean that married gays would pretend to not be married, gays with adopted children would...temporarily give them to another family? Gays would...not have sex? This would have the odd effect, I think, of going largely unnoticed. The other odd effect is that people who voted for it would look at it and say, "Yeah, that's what I wanted." They wouldn't be confronted with the negative affects, so it probably wouldn't work.

But then again, let's rewind to the first effect. It is interesting, isn't it, that one of the most remarkable things about it is that many people would see no change at all? Obviously, if you are gay or you have gay acquaintances you'd notice. But I think it would actually say something meaningful, which is, "You just outlawed something that doesn't affect your life." I think, in a very indirect way, legalizing gay marriage really does affect people everywhere positively, just because making anyone's life better generally has some ripple effect, no matter what it is. But one of the best arguments for the stupidity of the fear-mongering that lead to the passing of these initiatives, is that in places where gay people are allowed to marry, most people really don't notice. When you encounter two women who are married, besides the initial novelty of it, it is so ordinary as to be almost disappointing. Oddly enough, gay people do pretty much the same things that other people do. What people discover if they live in Massachusetts is that marriage isn't some magical force that is upset by violating some ancient book of rules. When two men get married...nothing happens to any of the other people who are already married.

But let's cut to the chase and talk about children. What I find really obtuse is the idea that two women or two men can't raise children as well as a man and a woman, and therefore it should be illegal. If that should be illegal, then it should definitely be illegal to raise children without grandparents or some other relatives living in the house, because I can almost guarantee that that would benefit most children. I can't, on the other hand, come up with any good reason that a household without a man or a household without a woman would be deficient in some way. For thousands of years children have grown up in a number of different situations, including single parent households of either gender, just grandparents, nuns in orphanages, adopted parents and no doubt, in the majority of cases, an extended family. In my opinion, the only one of these situations that can be said to be not weird at all is the extended family. It's the one that is truly natural, and it has nothing to do with the biological link between them, it has more to do with the number and variety of people.

Unfortunately, this also comes back to religion. This is one of those cases where religion divides, where it "hardens hearts" to outsiders instead of softening them, which it only does for people who are "one of us". It's completely arbitrary. X and Y chromosomes, vaginas and penises...they aren't magical. Nothing happens to the universe when these things come together in unusual ways. People are socially flexible, they can do all kinds of things that are not typical and remain not only "ok", but really incredibly normal. We know now that animals also have gay relations, so you can't argue that it's unnatural. And even if you still somehow claimed that it was, what difference does it make? I mean, what's less natural, a man being attracted to a man, or a man in a space-suit walking around on the moon? How about bungee jumping, is that natural? How about stock market trading? Drinking cows milk? Staring at a computer screen?

What White People Like

Paul Rubinstein, the patron saint of my website...or was that Jep Alexander? Hmm, I don't know which is better, but Jay Paroline is definitely the patron saint of Sugar Pill. I think that would make Angie the patron saint of dinosaurs. I digress.

Paul Rubinstein, the patron...wait, did I just name everyone who reads my website?

Eh hem. Paul Rubinstein...or wait, it could also be Paul Middlin. The patron saint I mean. No no.

...Paul...Rubinstein, the only person I have mentioned four times in the same post, referred me to Stuff White People Like. At first this just seemed like a bunch of cheap jokes that promote stereotypes, but there's something about it that gives it an amazing sort of coherence. What's really interesting about it, though, is that it's an excellent list of things that I'm either luke-warm about, or just don't like at all. The thing listed that I like most is hummus, which I'm familiar with mostly because my wife is middle-eastern, which makes it sound not really white. (Is middle-eastern white?)

Actually, the list is an amazing and almost complete collection of things that make me suspicious of a person. I never knew what a Pea Coat was before I saw this site, but now that I do I can put a name to a fashion that instantly says to me, "Wait a second, do you really want to know me?" There are even some things listed that I participate in, or have participated in in the past that still make me suspicious of people. For example, #93, Music Piracy. My collection of downloaded music is pretty small, and when I meet someone who downloads pretty much everything they can find, and then refers to their collection as "eclectic", I know that there's a certain level of friendship that will never be attained between us.

Another good one is #99, Grammar. If there's anything I can't stand it is people who think that grammar is inflexible, and that it is very important to follow grammatical rules without error. That's not saying that grammar should be disregarded. I myself take quite a bit of care to avoid writing in ways that are not grammatically accepted, because I don't want people to get distracted or confused, and because some grammatical rules are actually practical. However, I wish schools would start educating people on what grammar really is, which is a set of rules that have developed over time, NOT an objective reality. This is the same with spelling, except that telling people this about spelling can sometimes be a totally lost cause. It is simply impossible for some people to comprehend that the spelling of a word is not a physical law, or a letter arrangement handed down by God. If you can somehow prove to them that there was a time when people had no standard spelling for English words, you might see their head explode. Or you might witness some interesting insight into how they think as they try to reason this out, which could produce a dialogue like the following:

"Wait, so people didn't used to know the right way to spell things?"

"There was no right way to spell things."

"You mean like, there were no dictionaries?"

"Not really."

"So how could they figure out if they were spelling something right?"

"There was no right way to spell things."

"So they would just always spell things the wrong way?"

"They spelled things however they wanted, there was no standard way to spell anything."

"Who finally figured out how to spell everything?"

"They didn't figure it out, certain spellings just became more common than others, or they just arbitrarily picked one."

"I'm glad we have the spellings right now."

"Yeah, me too."

And this is just writing, once you get into spoken language, I get even more ruffled. Spoken language has been evolving non-stop since humans first started using it. Even languages that are relatively anchored by something, like Arabic is anchored to the Koran, branch off into many dialects. In Arabic, this happens even as writing continues to preserve "formal" Arabic. What's really weird about Arabic is the extent to which you are speaking two different languages when you write and speak.

In terms of English, when people try to argue that Ebonics is not a dialect, it is the equivalent of arguing that nobody uses it to speak, or that it is easily understood by people who aren't exposed to it. If Ebonics isn't a dialect, than neither is American English; both are an offshoot of an earlier dialect of English. Languages aren't approved by an official with a rubber stamp, they develop gradually, and the current rules about how you speak it are somewhat arbitrary. The only extent to which American English is more "legitimate" than Ebonics, is the extent to which it is more widely spoken and understood. But just because a minority use a dialect doesn't mean that it isn't a dialect.

Minnesota Recount

Nobody won the Minnesota Senate race. No matter how carefully you count the votes, and no matter how carefully you check and re-check the decisions you make about what to do with each ballot, you will never end up with a result that meaningfully decides whether Al Franken or Norm Coleman was elected. I'm afraid this also applies to the 2000 presidential election. I would venture a guess that any election won by less than a half a percent is best considered a tie. If you could somehow hold the same election 1000 times in one day, Norm Coleman would win 50% of them, and Al Franken would win the other 50%.

I find it kind of hard to explain how I feel about this, because even though it almost definitely makes a difference who eventually "wins", and even though I would encourage any candidate I support to fight it to the bitter end, I still have no illusions about the fact that this is a tie, and there is no meaningful way to determine the winner. I think it is important to follow the rules as closely as possible, to avoid the appearance of bias, and to make the decision carefully for the sake of authority, but absent the need to appear authoritative, arguing over a hundred or so votes is a huge waste of time. Those votes do not deserve more attention than the rest, and the rest of the votes spoke clearly and decisively when they declared that there should be no clear and decisive winner. If I could convince enough people of this, and it were up to me to figure out how to resolve the election, I would use the only morally acceptable criteria available: flip a coin.

Plaque

"At this season of THE WINTER SOLSTICE may reason prevail."

"There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds."

I find that all of the statements here are true, with the exception of maybe "hardens hearts". There are several ways that my thoughts of religion have changed since I wrote Sugar Pill from 1997 - 2003. One thing that I think I understand a little better now is why religions exist. I used to think that religion was something to resort to when you reach the limits of meaning in your life. You can find meaning in a lot of things, but usually these things have meaning because they help you do something else. (This is not always true.) But if you ask for the meaning of life, where are you? It seems like then you're in a void that can only be filled by religion.

However, I've increasingly come to believe that people naturally find their lives meaningful, unless one of their sources of meaning - religion can be one of them - goes away, as it did for me. In this respect, it wouldn't be the case that religion creates meaning in order to fill a void, but more the other way around, it takes the place of some other possible meaning, and when it goes away you have a void. Of course, there will always be some people who, for one reason or another, feel a void, and replace it with religion, but I don't think this is where religion originates, and I don't really think that this is the biggest reason it is still alive.

A much more plausible explanation for religion was made more obvious to me by Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. Jared Diamond brings together an amazing assortment of disciplines in this book in order to explain how different societies have interacted over several thousand years. One of the things he writes about is how people went from living in small tribes where everybody knew everybody else, and where every stranger was considered an enemy, to living in units as large as a nation, where you had to get along with strangers on a daily basis. Religion seems to have taken root in societies right around the time where people started having to get along with strangers, suggesting that it was a way for people to feel that someone they didn't know was still "us" rather than "them".

For me, this is ironic, because one of the things that lead me to write Sugar Pill was the feeling that religion sharpened the divide between people. I still believe this, but what is interesting is that it mostly sharpens the divide between people who aren't in the same religion. For people who have a religion in common, it does the opposite, and that seems to be the reason that it became dominant in the first place. People who were able to adopt religion, stop killing every stranger they ran into, and cooperate to form a larger entity, would quickly overrun those who didn't participate. In this case, it took a very powerful social instinct to override a more primal instinct. There is an obvious question here, which is this: Once people learned to get along with strangers, didn't this particular advantage of religion go away?

I would say that it did, once everyone started raising children in a world of constant contact with strangers, it became a part of how we think. This is obvious today, for two reasons: 1) Entire societies exist where religion does not play a very large role in thinking, and people in these societies get along quite well, and 2) Most people can easily get along with someone who belongs to a different religion (with some very important exceptions). In the rare places where people still live in isolated tribes, it is still the case that people tend to immediately kill strangers, if possible. For me, discovering this turned the world upside-down.

I would say that religion sometimes hardens hearts, in special circumstances (some quite important), but most of the time it actually softens hearts.

When I finished writing Sugar Pill or shortly thereafter, I decided that Sugar Pill was a giant negative, and that my next step was to construct the positive. Sugar Pill, to me, proves a very important point about what can go wrong with religion. And, by the way, this particular thing that can go wrong with religion is also what can go wrong with countries, races, and any kind of group. It is simply that, in dire times, or under certain conditions, it becomes a way to separate people. This is not the only thing that religion does that I don't like, but it might be the biggest. Once I had thoroughly explored this idea, and now that several friends have told me that I have also helped them to think about it, I felt, and still feel, like I want to say what should happen, rather than just what shouldn't. I want a philosophy I can believe in.

This is what I think about when I see things like this placard quoted at the beginning. I find that there are a lot of things that I can say that are true, but the question is, what can I say that will get the results I want? I feel like that placard is something that I could have believed in at one point, something I could have supported, but now I don't. In this particular instance, I just keep thinking of this complex nativity scene, full of details and symbolism, and geared ultimately towards celebration. And next to it, a pitiful answer, a plaque that hangs from Christmas like a barnacle, utterly focused on what is not true about the nativity scene, with only a brief mention of what else the season can be. It's a cheap shot, in my opinion. It's a negative, for the most part.

I have no problem with people sending winter solstice cards instead of Christmas cards, I've rather enjoyed getting one or two of those. But those said nothing about Christmas. This plaque, to me, seems almost childish, as though it is talking on and on about how someone should be ignored. It's a militant advance up a hill, wearing no armor, towards a 40 foot wall, in broad daylight, severely outnumbered. In this sense, it is much like Critical Mass bike rallies. It's more of a "fuck you, I can be a pain in your ass when I want to be" rather than what I want, which is, "Holy shit, look at what we have accomplished as a result of our amazing philosophy."

One of my favorite statistics is that Atheists and Agnostics have a lower divorce rate than major religions in the US. I'm sure there are more than one reason for that, some very indirectly related to beliefs, but I see it as one blip on the radar of success. This is just one statistic, but if we can amass a growing body of successes, and maybe even create traditions and some kind of bond, maybe instead of trying to shame people into dropping out of religion, we can entice people into joining something better, something bigger, and something that unites and strengthens humanity. Maybe the placard can become our own dazzling laser light show, full of warmth, vigor, and symbolism, a celebration to compete with other celebrations, rather than a criticism of celebration.

I think that I'm building this positive now, but I feel like if I were going to give a good send-off, it would still need a lot more work, and maybe some help from a few friends.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average Is Gone

Now for a special report from Jim Anchorman.

The Dow Jones Industrial average...is...gone. What do I mean when I say that? Well, look online, look on MSNBC. You will find no Dow Jones Industrial average. It does not exist. It never existed. Look for any record that it ever existed. You will find no numbers, no wikipedia articles. No one will discuss it. But I am. Because you need an introduction to a world without the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

In its place, you will find the Average. You will find it much more useful than the Dow Jones Industrial variety. It is minimal. It will provide you with the Average - of everything. On some days you will find that this number is four, or eighteen, or fourteen thousand. It will also be negative five. You may wake in the morning tomorrow to find that it is five point four times ten to the power of fifteen million, six hundred eighty-five thousand, one hundred ten. Or that it is six times the imaginary number plus eight.

The Average will go up and down randomly, relentlessly, and without explanation. You will discover that many people will offer an explanation, and that they will have collaborated on this explanation, and they will exude authority even as most people write off their explanations as unbelievable. In this way it will resemble the Dow, but with one key distinction; where the Dow Jones Industrial Average assembles together the prevailing stock price for thirty of the most widely held public companies in the United States, the Average will assemble together every measurement that can be made of anything. Because of this, it is far superior, and far more volatile.

It may seem that an Average of everything would be very stable, but this is not the case. The so-called law of averages only holds true when you do not include everything. When you include all but one measurement, you will find an average that is so unmoving as to appear constant. The last measurement will compensate for this by moving violently. This measurement will be in unimaginable flux, enough to readjust the Average to its proper values. Without this last measurement the Average would lack any use.

The Average will enhance our lives. Where the Dow Jones caused depression, anxiety, and excess, the Average will establish tranquility and responsible decision making, because it will include the remaining information that the Dow Jones, the S&P 500, and the NASDAQ Composite did not. You will realize, as I have already, what was missing from your life.

Thank you.

The Critical Mass Incident

I'm glad to finally read a much more detailed description of this story:

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/seattle911/archives/144527.asp

The driver is quoted briefly, but what is much more interesting is the story told in extreme detail by one of the bikers. When I first saw this news report, with fearful neighbors with wide eyes worrying that they would be the next target, I knew that most of the story was missing.

As a bicycle commuter who used to live in Boston, I have some familiarity with less-than-safe (and less-than-civil) interactions between cars and bikes. The trouble is rooted in one simple fact: Car drivers are used to dealing with other cars, which can be safely dealt with in a much more aggressive manner than bicycles. Because cars act like bubbles, insulating people from injury, some drivers treat the road like a demolition derby, doing things you would never do if you and everyone else were unprotected by these bubbles.

When a car driver encounters a bike, normal proportions are suddenly thrown totally out the door. If your car lightly bumps another car, the most that will happen is that you'll both pull over and shout at each other. If your car lightly bumps a bike, they could fall and end up under yours or someone else's wheels, and could be dead instantly. This is all fine, if a driver realizes this and adjusts to it. (The biker no doubt already realizes the danger, but sometimes doesn't do their part to be safe, in some cases actually baiting car drivers to get angry and do something dangerous.)

Most drivers do adjust, but - especially in Boston where some drivers are sick of bikers, and driving is quite aggressive to begin with - some don't. When they don't, as a biker, you ask yourself, "How can my life be worth a slight delay?" To top it off, if a driver does do something that puts your life at risk, they usually speed off and experience no consequence. These are totally valid reasons to be angry, but if you get angry, drivers see this as disproportionate. They know to be safe around bikes, but they don't realize that other drivers disregard your safety, so bikers (especially in Boston) get a reputation of being unreasonably anger prone. I would agree that they're often angry, but it's also quite often for good reason.

I've experienced cars that drive so close to me there is no margin for error, a car at a stop light that jumps in front of me as I try to pass by them - as a joke, and in one case a car that changed lanes into me, forcing me into the next lane with almost no warning. When these things happen, you would very much like to be a hundred bikes instead of one, that can swamp and chase down a car and make them wait for the cops to come.

In the case of the Critical Mass incident, news reporters and bystanders failed to grasp the proportions of what happened. The driver almost killed several bikers. The bikers, in turn, *may or may not* have put the driver's life in danger, depending on what object someone hit him with. But instead of being reported as such, it was as though the mob of bikes descended on the car and immediately, unprovoked, wrecked his car and attacked him.

As a biker, I know that the danger of aggressive driving becomes higher the more a cyclist inhibits traffic or annoys drivers. It's a fact of life, and because I value my life, I make every attempt to avoid these situations. There are often times where it would be easier for me to occupy the left lane on a four lane road because I will soon have to turn left, but this really pisses some people off, and even if it doesn't, just having cars that try to merge with others in the right lane to get around you could cost you your life. This is a situation that I try to avoid.

Another example is that when cars are stopped at a light, I do ride in the gap between them and the sidewalk, but when it turns green I almost always leave the roadway, I don't want to get caught in the blind spot of someone who is going my speed, and I don't want traffic to try to go around me as they race to get through the light before it turns red.

I employ the strategy of trying to keep people happy when I'm on the bike, and driving a car myself. I would guess that drivers are most prone to getting into an accident when they get angry, because all their attention goes from making quick traffic decisions to expressing their anger, and being angry means that you're likely to be more aggressive and take chances (e.g. trying to change lanes when you have a small gap).

Sadly, it seems that Critical Mass is doing more harm than good. Rather than a group of bikers going out and proving that they can get along with drivers, you have a group of bikers going out and proving that they can do whatever they want...as long as there is a critical mass. This is not very helpful, because there is seldom a critical mass of bikers on the road. It's like getting a bunch of your friends together, spitting in someone's face, and then going alone to spend some time with the person you spit on - and their friends. Until the day when we can have a critical mass every day on every street, it's not helpful to prove that bikers can "win" the road. In fact, it should be emphasized that one of the benefits of bikes over cars is that they don't clog up the road as much because they are so much smaller. Unfortunately, this doesn't work when bikers bike stupidly.

The driver in the Critical Mass incident was clearly not thinking straight (and I wonder how often he does), and a clear signal should be sent to these kinds of drivers that if they aren't careful around bikes, they could easily ruin the life of the biker, and their own life. They can ruin their own life not because mobs of angry bikers will always chase them down - this is a true rarity - but because if they kill someone, they will be haunted by it for the rest of their lives, and may spend years in prison.

Bikers who participate in Critical Mass need to think about what they're trying to accomplish. It may make bikers feel empowered, but their particular method doesn't seem worth the escalation of the war between bikes and cars. When riders block cars during a Critical Mass outing, they are trying to protect the other bikers, but by organizing a mob of bikes that ignore traffic laws and frustrate drivers, you might be asking for trouble. Bikers and drivers don't need proof that bikes can get in the way of cars and stop them, they already know this. What they need is proof that cars can drive without endangering the lives of bikers, and bikers can ride without setting the de facto speed limit for cars at 15 miles per hour. If riders think they can scare cars off the road to reduce carbon emissions, they're living in a fantasy world.

The Dark Upper Floors

There was always someone trying to stop me from getting to the 19th floor, but I never saw them. They were dark figures just behind something, bears or other wild animals, video cameras knowing that I was in a place I wasn't supposed to be. But I had righteousness on my side, I knew that I was discovering something bad about what was going on up there, and this meant that I couldn't be blamed for breaking their laws. I was collecting evidence the whole way up, in abandoned art/science exhibits, and areas of the apartment building that were intended for the wealthy. It seemed as I proceeded upwards through the barely visible halls and stairs and elevators that only serviced a few consecutive floors, I was unveiling a past life for the building, but one that was not entirely gone. I wasn't alone up there.

It started out innocently enough, a question of convenience. The building was, for some reason, divided in two by a single wall that spanned every floor I knew about. But did it span the top floor? Could I maybe exit onto the roof on one side and re-enter on the other? I don't remember why I wanted the ability to go from one half to the other without leaving the building, maybe it was a challenge, or maybe I was just curious. But at some point I realized that the upper floors were supposed to be abandoned, and, I assumed, off-limits. I imagined that I'd have to dodge security cameras, but I didn't imagine what was actually there, what I would eventually see.

I felt opposition right from the point where I pushed the highest button on the elevator, as though someone was trying to tell me that I shouldn't do that, although they seemed to have little power to stop me, and I didn't even know where they were or why I knew that they wanted me to stop. I heard no voices, but I did at times feel as though I was being shoved, or just slowly pushed, like a giant pugil with constant opposing force. Right away what was apparent was that this elevator, the one everyone is supposed to use to access the lower floors, could not reach the top floors. I took it up as high as I could, but I don't remember what floor that was.

When I got out it was dark, but normal enough. I felt that there was only one right way to go, so I took it. Eventually, against the wishes of someone, I found another elevator. This one did not service the lower floors. In fact, it only had three or four buttons. It was dimly lit, and I think there might have been someone there with me, but, against their wishes, I pushed the button for the highest floor available, which as yet was still not the 19th floor. Even though there were only a few buttons for the floors, they were high up, as though to make room for the lower floor buttons in spirit, or perhaps just as a visual indicator of the heights they would take you to. Whoever may have been there with me in the elevator seemed unable to stop me, perhaps out of moral inferiority, knowing that I had every right to find out what I was to find.

When the elevator door opened, I found a much different scene than the one it had closed on. It was as though I were entering the luxurious, yet cramped, lobby on the first floor of a totally different apartment building. But it was dark, and almost seemed unfinished, and if there was a lot of decor I couldn't see it. It was almost as though the bits of luxurious flair were a token to indicate that you were the rich people, a reference to wealth and excess rather than an implementation of it. There were lavish looking stairs, totally different from the dorm-like perfunctory stairs of the rest of the apartment building, fanning out to the floor and funneling me up.

I ran up them quickly, as though chased. At this point it seemed as though figures were around me on the floor, one at a time, but I had to avoid and run from them, even as they seemed just as powerless to stop me as before. It seemed almost as though they were more likely to save me from what I was doing than to do me any harm. But maybe they weren't there, it was hard to tell because it was so dark. There were only occasional lights, like emergency exit lights, but the lights were points instead of signs that say "EXIT".

At the top of the stairs things changed again, and it seemed that I was getting closer and closer to the core of something that was projecting itself outward, with greater intensity as you get nearer. But what was being projected was projected long ago when the rooms were built and filled with what I found there.

This is the art/science exhibit...but not the kind that just anyone is allowed to see, because it was made for a higher breed of people. One of the things that stood out was a surprisingly elaborate and expensively built...it's hard to describe what it was or what it was meant to do, but it had a lot of numbers, each on a pale blue or white colored strip. I think water was involved somehow, but the whole thing seemed to move at once, like a shaggy dog shaking. I could barely see it, let alone try to understand it if the lights had happened to be on.

As I was looking at this, and trying to take in what was all around me, I finally had firm evidence of someone nearby. They were behind a revolving panel of some giant exhibit, and I followed them. I followed them into total darkness, and lost them, and found myself fumbling through rooms that seemed to just connect to other rooms, until finally I saw a doorway slightly ajar with a light on.

I burst in to find, what I described to those in the room aloud by saying, "You're a big guy and you're a little guy." They were, as far as I could tell, person sized golden potatoes (one smaller and one larger). It seems like I caught them in bed together, and they just stared at me with a combination of annoyance, curiosity, and the expectation that I would soon be leaving. The room was fully furnished, as though someone had always been living there. Why was I not alarmed by human potatoes? Why didn't they finally give the whoever-didn't-want-me-there the excuse to clear me out? They didn't seem to be related, didn't seem to care about this other force, but seemed to be legitimate in their location, as though they were the last of the wealthy potatoes for whom this place was built, and the force was either a subservient landlord, or something that invaded and left them alone. I left them alone.

I found the last elevator, finally with a button for nineteen. I pushed it, except it seemed as though I had to physically fight someone to get my finger up there, but that someone was a non-existent bear, or a doorman shadow sponge.

The doors opened to a darkness that seemed to be articulately trimmed with white edges, as though it were a drawing of a dark room rather than a dark room. The room had no dimensions, but it was small. The doorway leading out of it, or perhaps into somewhere else, was only nineteen feet away, and it seemed that the room was not even as wide as it was long, though there were no walls. There was only a doorway.

The doorway lead to a stairway, and the stairway was in an infinite room, like the last, only rather than having no dimensions, this one was simply at least a certain size, but perhaps as big as anything. The stairway stood on it's own, as simple as it could be, as dark as black with infinitesimal white trim. There were no rails or walls on the sides, it was like a solid block, two stories tall and just as deep, five feet wide, with the simplest possible stairs cut into it. You could fall from the sides to the nether room around it, but there seemed to be little danger of actually doing that.

At the top there was a door, again slightly ajar, but this time with the answer to my mystery in it. Whatever had been with me before wasn't there, presumably because they had gone on ahead and were waiting behind the door, where I imagined I would find the beautiful contemporary and perfectly normal penthouse, a two level apartment complete with jacuzzi, wood trim and plate black paneling in the entryway. I never got to see it.

The Money Abyss

I find it awe-inspiring that the abyss of the unknowable can be found in a place as mundane as a financial market. Derivatives can be so hard to understand that the government doesn't even try to figure them out, they abdicate that responsibility to those who created them. They are so hard to figure out, that when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac tried to figure out how much assets they had, it took an army of derivatives experts over a year to calculate how much their derivatives were worth.

I'm quite confident that if I studied hard I could eventually become one of those derivatives experts. This might make my "unknowable" label seem a little absurd, but I stand beside it. When an expert in something can't figure out how much it is worth without spending thousands of work-hours, does it make any sense for a person like me, clever as I may be, to say, "Well, people keep throwing around this word 'derivative', maybe I should study up on them a little bit just so I know what they're talking about."

They don't really know what they're talking about. We might as well be discussing the nature of God, or The Meaning of Life, or some other such placeholder that only gives a vague sense of what it is actually referring to. I have to wonder, what kind of person throws their money into an abyss?

[a few days elapse]

Ok, so I started reading about derivatives anyway. What did I discover? I discovered something that made me laugh harder than any of the SNL skits that I just watched. It was this:

Derivatives are financial contracts, or financial instruments, whose values are derived from the value of something else (known as the underlying). The underlying on which a derivative is based can be an asset(e.g., commodities, equities (stocks), residential mortgages, commercial real estate, loans, bonds), an index (e.g., interest rates, exchange rates, stock market indices, consumer price index (CPI) � see inflation derivatives), or other items (e.g., weather conditions, or other derivatives).

Did you see it? Let me replay it for you; Derivatives can have values that are derived from the weather. I thought at first that it must be wrong, and that someone was screwing around with wikipedia, but then I realized what is for. It's a form of insurance. If you're a farmer who depends on a certain amount of rainfall, you might buy a derivative that pays when rainfall drops farther below some predetermined amount. This is a way of hedging your bets, in the end you either have the crops, or you have the money from the derivatives.

I *think* this actually makes sense, and nothing - in theory - sounds particularly wrong with it, but it does strike me as a surprisingly weird thing to invest in. It seems like this could become a giant betting pool where people dump tons of money because it seems really predictable, until it proves not to be. It also seems like the market itself could easily be overrun by people investing in it who have no practical connection (speculators), to the point where they drown out the people who do have a practical connection to the point where the value of the derivative becomes disconnected from whatever it is supposed measure.

Of course, only after I cut and pasted this here did I notice something even weirder than derivatives that bet on the weather...which is derivatives that bet on derivatives. It's like you've gone through the looking glass into fantasy land, and then you find another looking glass and go into super-fantasy land. I can see why it might be a little bit tricky to figure out, say, in August, how much a derivative that pays per cumulative daily average degrees below 18 Celsius as measured in Central Park from November to March...is worth. If it's traded on the open market, and you don't have too large of a proportion of it, you might be able to say what you can sell it for, but that might not be sufficient if you're, say declaring bankruptcy.

I keep looking back to a few wikipedia articles that talk about derivatives, and I keep laughing. I can't believe that something so funny could be created and involve real money. It seems to me that the more abstract you make your relationship to money, the more likely you are to behave irrationally. And this seems to be proving true even for people who should know what they're doing. This is one of the things that got AIG into it's current pickle.

Derivatives seem to be the extreme outcome of a belief in rational markets. If markets (and therefore people - at least in groups) are rational, then derivatives are great. They allow people who can tolerate risk to exchange it with people who can't. They allow someone who gains when the weather is dry to pool money with someone who loses when the weather is dry, thus allowing them to automatically insure against each other's losses. They could allow, in the case of "futures", for companies to lose less money when the price of something heavily related to their business changes drastically. But the more I read about them, the more they remind me of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Particularly, they make me think of the story where sources of energy have become depleted, and so they find a new amazing source of energy - the past. Everything is fine, until they realize that people from the future are stealing their own energy. It seems remarkably similar.

Everything now seems to be pointing in the other direction; markets are very irrational. Why we should think any differently boggles my mind. If people bought things at the right price, then there's a lot of shit that must be much more useful than is readily apparent to me. People who were buying porcelain snow men for fifteen dollars at the craft fair today must know something I don't. If you think that's a reduction to absurdity - like what could grandma buying knick-knacks for fun possibly have to do with someone trading on a financial market - think about this: porcelain snow men are part of an industry that in tough times might suddenly fall into a magical abyss of it's own, and anyone betting on the stock market as a whole, i.e. buying a lot of stocks when the Dow Jones gets low, is betting that, at least in part, people will keep buying porcelain snow men, or porcelain snow men manufacturers will suddenly switch to manufacturing something else "necessary". Right now most of the human race is betting on the status quo that says we will be able to "grow" the global economy forever. If I were a gambler, I'd try to sell that short somehow, but I'm not, so instead I decided to do something useful; I checked out Introduction to Permaculture from my local library.

Crash Course

I feel the need to write at will. ("at will" always brings these jokes to mind about someone named "Will".) I've been trying to post something every three days. At that rate, I'll have another hundred articles up within a year. Right now I've got over 200, though it's kind of hard to count them because they're not really implemented in the same ways (some are in a database, some are just html). Most of them aren't really that great, but every now and then I go back and read one from a long time ago, and I'm quite amazed and wonder if my brain is starting to lose traction in my old age.

I'm now 30 years old. I read an article the other day that said some kind of brain function peaks at 30. All down-hill from here. Luckily, I've been saving it up, and I predict that my next 30 years will be a lot more mentally productive than my last 30 years. And the 30 years after that? Well, you just wait and see.

I've been very interested lately in whether the world is going to stop functioning. Actually, I kind of assume that it will. What I've been more interested in is just when it will happen, or whether that will be, say, next week. There are some things that I do compulsively, like look at the Dow Jones Industrial average when I think that it's probably going to go ape-shit. Today was one of those days when I couldn't help look at it a couple times. When it closed just under 8000, I was taken back to a time 5 years ago when someone told me that, as soon as it dips below 8000, the shit will hit the fan because everybody will pull their money out. That didn't really happen, of course, it just rebounded. In fact, it doubled in the next few years, and then cut itself in half again, like a magician that volunteers for their own magic trick. There's no mirrors.

But the Dow Jones is just a distraction. What's really got me thinking lately is a thing called The Crash Course. Heh heh, I just got the double-meaning. It only took me about a month.

The Crash Course is a 20 chapter, video based explanation of how the economy works, including, very importantly, our monetary system, and how it relates to current trends in natural resources and population growth. It is really easy to understand, and if you're interested at all in what the hell is going on and what the hell is going to happen in the upcoming years, you will probably eagerly watch through every chapter if you give it a try. Which I encourage you to do, because I want as many people to understand what it says as possible. As I try to summarize it I find myself wanting to explain every point that it explains. It's just so well made, so clear, concise, and well-argued, that it's impossible to compact the message into a summary that can do it justice. But I'm going to try anyway, because you'll be more likely to watch it if you have some clue of what it says.

It says this: Our system of money works by expanding, and will thus fail - along with our economy - unless economic expansion continues. Economic expansion cannot continue because it relies on the expansion of resources that are already on the decline. The decline of those resources will become accelerated by the decline of our most important resource, oil. The decline in our economy will accelerate as it competes with the population growth in other economies who are competing for the resources whose decline is accelerating.

Here's a few jewels: Oil production is predicted to fall off 9% next year, while demand is only predicted to fall 5%. Get your cheap gas while you can, because it won't last long. At around 2011, Mexico's declining oil production will dip below it's projected demand, which means they may stop sending oil our way, which is a pretty big problem, considering that they are our third biggest supplier. So while we grapple with our deflating housing bubble and depression, we will also have to grapple with less and less, and increasingly expensive energy, unless, as they say, we do something really fast.

We currently mine copper that is less than 0.2% copper, using tons of energy to dig mile-deep holes in the ground. Soon we won't have that energy, unless...

Bringing the story full circle, guess how much investing I'm doing in the stock market? Right now I feel about 5% assured that money I put into a retirement fund right now will still exist when I'm allowed to take it out. In fact, I would be surprised if the dollar itself exists in 30 years, in any form that relates meaningfully to its current value. Or let me put it in even more bleak terms, and we'll see how many generation-xers already agree with me anyway; I'm really not confident that the USA will exist in 30 years. I'm not confident that civilization as we currently know it will exist. I may still be alive, but if I am it may be because I've learned to grow most of my own food and depend on neighbors and community.

Though I do agree with Chris Martenson, the author of The Crash Course, when he says that, it is still possible for us to turn things around, and as things go south more and more, people are going to be shaken out of their trances and realize that this isn't some kind of apocalyptic fantasy that can be laughed off. The last few hundred years have been far different from history before that, and it can be far different again when you replay the cheap energy of the industrial revolution in reverse. It is humbling to look at the pattern and realize, we didn't just *make* modern times happen, we found something *very useful*, and now that we depend on it thoroughly, it is starting to go away.

Landscape (Chapter 6)

Limping his way through the corridor, stifling his tendency to want to say, "Shit!" every time he didn't quite limp effectively enough to keep from inflicting new damage on his "bad leg", Brad was escaping. He was free to leave the recovery center at any time, but it seemed to him that it would be better to escape than to leave freely. He intended to very carefully - bravely - pretend as though he were just a visitor, with no horrifying pain surging through various parts of what he still felt he could only call his "body" if he mentally put quotes around it, and then make a break for it. No one would know that he was leaving on a secret mission to explore something that looked really cool and interesting.

The recovery center was sort of a white, glossy place. The walls were like a dry erase board material, white, smooth, and reflective. The surfaces were almost entirely devoid of any decoration. You can think of it as a hospital, as that's clearly what it was modeled after, though the only point of it is to keep someone in the right position so that they feel a minimum of pain as they heal. Most ailments were physical, as infections were pretty much impossible in this universe - unless you were really clever - and all physical harm was healed automatically, and at a constant rate.

As Brad rounded the corner he went by a recovery manager, what you could think of as a doctor. He quickly turned his head, as though he would be recognized and as though it mattered. He looked to the right, started to say something as though there was someone he could fake a conversation with, and then realized that now he looked like he was escaping from the mental ward, which was just as difficult as escaping from where he was escaping now because of the fact that you can leave freely from both places. The recovery manager glanced at him briefly, in a way that said he really wasn't at all interested in why this patient was acting like an idiot, and Brad decided to call this a success.

He also decided he'd better take this opportunity to run for the door. This failed very quickly, when the weight redistribution necessary in taking the first running step caused him so much pain that he just fell to the ground instead. On lookers would have described it as something like a ghost had kicked him in the groin and then sweep kicked his feet out from under him.

At long last, people began running towards him, making the element of "escape" more believable. They were going to help him up, as their primary goal was to reduce pain and they could clearly see that he was in pain, but this was just the kind of chase Brad was hoping for. With a surge of adrenalin (yes, simulated adrenalin, get over it) he jumped back up, and hopped on one foot as the attendants half-heartedly, awkwardly walked after him saying, "Do you need any help?" Brad told himself that they were just trying to lure him back, biding their time, just in case he was faking the pain and waiting for them to get too close.

He reached the front door just in time, because he was having increasing trouble trying to make a coherent narrative about his escape. (Too close for what?) As he hailed a taxicab, jumped in, and said, "Get me out of here fast!" he was happy to find that he had just barely suspended disbelief in the danger that he had just barely not really escaped. Success!

But then, the tax driver looked a bit shifty. Was this a trap?

Deregulate Marriage

I don't remember when I came up with this idea, it was probably a few years ago, but now it seems especially relevant; we should deregulate marriage.

The motivation to stop gay marriage is so plainly rooted in religion, that rather than asking whether gays should settle for civil unions, we should ask ourselves whether the government has any right to legally recognize anything beyond a civil union. Instead of fighting against religions to include gays under legal marriage, we should be fighting to put marriage where it belongs; unregulated by government, without any legal consequences, and under the purview of whatever entities want to recognize whatever marriages for their own purposes.

Everyone who has a marriage now would have a civil union with the same rights. If anyone thinks that gays should settle for this, then they should be prepared to accept it themselves. But then, they won't have to, because their marriage will still be recognized as a "marriage" by their church, and gays will be able to have marriages recognized by the churches or entities of their choosing.

In fact, since marriage is overwhelmingly practiced as a religious sacrament, and is firmly rooted in religion, it should be considered a matter of the separation of church and state that the government should not be involved in deciding what is and is not a marriage.

Pending the unlikely surge of a movement to turn the conflict in this direction, my wife suggested an even better act of protest than walking around in the streets with signs. Those who support gay marriage should get divorced. Though, I'm not sure if the ones in Massachusetts should, since we still legally recognize gay marriage.

Time (Part 7)

Killing time. Wasting time. Time wasted. Time is money.

I used to watch movies, back when I had lots of time. Extra time. In the movies, people would almost invariably do something that I was either never going to do or that I hadn't done yet. They would almost always have some kind of epiphany, take some chance on something that changed their life. After the movie, I had two choices; 1) take the epiphany to heart, and decide to change something in my life, or 2) cynically dismiss the chance taken as a risk that only a character in a movie could afford to take.

We all know that characters don't have to worry about what happens after the credits roll. They worry about it anyway, but we're pretty sure that by the end they will discover that they were wrong to worry, because they had nothing to lose, they will soon cease to exist. Of course, they also don't have to worry about what will happen before the credits roll...at least if they're the main character...at least in most movies. Because in a movie, what are you going to do if you don't take a chance?

Of course, there are other movies. There are the kind where bad shit just keeps happening again and again until death interrupts. But even those of us who watch those movies still don't really believe that what is happening could happen to us, we just watch them because we got tired of the other movies. I don't really believe that I could be the lucky character or the unlucky character, because I don't think I'm in a movie. I don't think that life could be like a movie.

What about this story? Is the character going to have an epiphany? Is he going to take a chance? Do you believe it? Is he going to die abruptly at the end? Am I going to save some platitude for the end, so that the entire story can be big a platitude sandwich?

I'm going to convince you that this story is possible. I'm going to start by giving you the platitude at the beginning.

The truth is that every one of us will die. If you feel that you can't justify some decision because it's too much like something in a movie, you've got it backwards. You face a challenge that is greater than most movies are brave enough to consider; you have to figure out how to spend the enumerable shrinking years left before you die.

Don't get all emotional. Emotion doesn't last more than a few days. (You can't count depression.) I don't even think emotion lasts more than a few minutes. If you get all excited now, that will probably just guarantee your passive acceptance of life. Or you'll just get that mania, where you try to do everything quickly, and then slide into depression when you see that you can't. Or you can. But I can't.

Election

So, yeah, I live in Massachusetts. If you study elections and the polls, you'll know that our 12 electoral votes were guaranteed for Barack Obama on the day that Hillary Clinton conceded the democratic primary. For this reason, and mainly because of Barack's support for clean coal and for ethanol subsidies, I voted for Ralph Nader.

If I lived in Ohio, I would have certainly voted for Obama. There is no doubt in my mind that we are significantly better off with Obama than McCain, and for that reason I greet the election results with a huge sigh of relief - it was the better of the two only possible outcomes.

It's now time to switch modes. All of us hoping for Obama to win this election should now recognize that not everything is going to happen just the way we want it to. We will have fight to save the world from environmental destruction, we will have to fight to save the economy from the implosion that is all but guaranteed if we continue bailing out the rich and the status quo, and we will have to fight for the value of human lives throughout the world against indifference, unnecessary wars, uncaring multi-national corporations, and the losing game of disproportionate retaliation as a form of self-defense. And there's an almost certain chance that a component of every one of these fights will be to influence the decisions of congress and of our new president. While I have every hope that Obama will be more progressive than he speaks, it would be foolish to bank on that at this point.

I was happy just now to watch Barack Obama's acceptance speech, and I thought to myself that at the very least there is one thing we won't have to fight for, and that is to have a leader that the rest of the world can respect, and one that doesn't make us hold our breath every time he opens his mouth. I do sincerely believe that after January 20, 2009, we will have a president that is much more willing to listen to dissent and make better decisions because of it, and I also believe him when he says that this election is more about us than about him. Like always, it is up to the masses to drag the government kicking and screaming where we want it to go, and the only remaining question about our new president is how hard he will kick and scream, not whether he's going to lead us by the hand.

I think I've learned something very interesting from Libertarians this election season. The Libertarian platform acknowledges that the federal government makes all these stupid decisions, and seeks to stop it by electing officials who will stop the government from participating in these decisions at all. Their theory is that government can't help but be corrupted by things that it tries to fix. But I think they've got it wrong. I think that the government can't help but be corrupted because of the way it is structured, period. It is no more likely to refrain from interfering than it is to make the right decisions in the first place. The inability to make good decisions and the inability to hold back from making them at all are both caused by the same corruption. Libertarian candidates who remove the government from arenas where it has made bad decisions won't be elected for the same reason that you can't elect candidates who make good decisions. It's not because nobody knows the right decisions to make, it's because we can't get those people elected without the buy-in of those with the most money, and those with the most money buy into the status quo that gave them the money in the first place.

The free market, like any other system, will not simply deliver you the right outcome by following a simple set of rules. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, and this shouldn't be surprising, because the eventual trend of a free market is for those who know how to gain power to do so, and to then try to penetrate the stronghold of the government to grab even more power. The eventual outcome of Libertarianism - a government that doesn't interfere - is the opposite of Libertarianism; a government that does interfere...unless we find a fundamentally different and less corruptible approach to government. Until then, I think that the best thing Libertarians have going for them is the idea that the right changes start local and become global, not the other way around.

On the far left, which is in many ways the opposite end of the political spectrum, there is exactly the same acknowledgement that grass-roots change is the only real change. Given that grass-roots change has been the reality of history, as contrasted by the storyline of governmental decisions taught in classrooms (see: The People's History of the United States), I'm now seeing politics this way: Do the best you can for the time being in the larger political arenas such as presidential elections, and make your real gains by changing the behaviors and opinions on the local level - towns, neighborhoods, and ultimately, individuals. A single victory fueled in part by grass-roots participation would be a mistake if it were considered a substitute for continued grass-roots efforts.

Time (Part 6)

I would like to take this moment to let everyone know that the RSS feed for this site is now actually working, it's not just lamely appearing to be a real RSS feed anymore.

Time (Part 6)

Two and half years ago my boss told me that I was probably one of the brightest people here, "but -". That was an old song for me. That was the song sung by most of my teachers in elementary school. But this was a new verse that I hadn't expected. I thought the song was over. By high school I seemed to outgrow it, anticipating that college would deliver me to greatness. It didn't do that. It could have, I suppose. If I knew how to manifest interest in anything beyond the most abstract.

My problem is that I'm not interested in the details until I can explore them exhaustively. I did that for tic tac toe once. I started here:

 | |
- - -
 | |
- - -
 | |

There's no question that that is the place to start when you're going to determine, through brute force, once and for all, whether either player can guarantee themselves a win. Next step is this:

X| |    |X|    | |
- - -  - - -  - - -
 | |    | |    |X|
- - -  - - -  - - -
 | |    | |    | |

That's obvious to most people. You've got to pick either a corner, a side, or the center. Some might ask why you don't also have to try the lower-left corner. After all, this is brute force right? That would be stupid. The rule is that any board which can be rotated to look like another one, or mirrored to look like another one, can be left out, because the other one will explore the same possibilities (the same possibilities mirrored and/or rotated, but a win is a win no matter how you rotate it, so it doesn't matter).

From there you branch each of the three possibilities out further. Then you branch each of those. Eventually you get to boards where one player has won. So then you look at the step before the winning move and ask yourself, "If this player had known that the other player was going to win, was there another choice they could have made in order to prevent the win?" If the answer is no, they obviously made a mistake further back, so then you look two moves before that, and ask the same question.

I now have twenty-five sheets of paper that prove that neither the first player nor the second player can guarantee a win from the start.

Those were days that I had a lot of time on my hands. I lived in Kalamazoozoo. I mean, Kalamazoo. I was an atheist subleasing from a Christian who lived with four or five other Christians who were leasing the entire house from a couple who were Christians. Actually, what the heck is the significance of that? That probably happens all the time, and goes unnoticed.

Let me try that again, because I know there's some significance. I was a militant atheist, living in a house that was leased primarily for the purpose of housing young men who were unusually fervent Christians (known variously as "fundamentalist", "literalist", "non-denominational" etc.), and providing them a place to have bible studies. The house by-law explicitly prohibited drugs and adultery. I don't think that I broke either of those rules, though some Christians might argue that you can be adulterous alone (besides the oft-forgotten fact that you can be adulterous without being married).

Some of *these* kind of Christians. What the heck do you call them? Jesus freaks? That sounds like either an insult or too much of a validation of their embattled self-image. All the other terms I can think of are either too specific or not specific enough, or have too much of a political overtone to carry any meaning. I guess I've become accustomed to thinking of them as "Super-Christians".

But what does that have to do with time? Do I have the time to waste on not talking about time? I have to waste it on something. Maybe not all time is a waste.

STRATEGY!

Oh, well here's this huge obnoxious problem in your life, but forget about trying to get rid of it, you can just adapt with this STRATEGY. YOUR LIFE IS A STRATEGY. Be sure to stick to the Strategy. You had a problem the other day because you didn't stick to the strategy.

Time (Part 5)

I often think about just walking out of work. Each time I might imagine it in a totally different light. Towards the beginning of my stint, I would storm out. Now I give my monitor a tender push, like I'm going to crush the screen, but instead my eyes tear, I think, "I guess that's enough" and then I'm walking down the street, done.

The problem is that you can't get away like that. When you go home and she asks what is going on you have to explain it, you can't pretend that it never existed, or like it is actually really gone from your life. It's still there. You can still call in sick. Even if you don't, you can still go back. They'll probably forgive you, except now you're the guy who buckled. Your days are numbered, but they aren't numbered at zero yet.

Last night I played the powder game again. It's not a codeword for drugs...though it might as well be. Ok, that's a little dramatic. It's not that addictive, at least not to me. Then again, some drugs aren't that addictive.

The first time I played the powder game I spent over 5 hours staring at my computer screen, barely touching the controls. Waiting for things to happen. Thinking about how something was probably going to happen soon. But it might happen an hour later. Glancing at the clock on the computer screen, I watched time whiz by in five minute seconds. 12:45, that's ok. 12:50, I'll stop at 1:30. 12:55. 1:00. 1:05. 1:10. 1:15, stopping soon. 1:50, shit. 2:15, why am I still here?

This time it was just 20 minutes, if I remember right.

Time (Part 4)

Hello low. I was wondering if you were going to show up. Something seemed different. But I think that's you? Yeah? Nice to see you again old friend. Would you like some tea? What are...hey wait, stop!

It's not really like that. No. It's more like, "Eyelids closing, just noticed that. Man, oh crap I think it's low. The low is here. Turn up the music. It all sounds tinny. Maybe it's because I plugged speakers into the headphones jack. No, I don't think that's it. It's low. Response to stimulus is low. I can't get the blood flow to my brain. Soon the limbs will stop working. I won't be able to get to the backup oxygen supply in time. The crew (lying passed out on the bridge) is doomed."

Even writing isn't working. I could have guessed that. I'm fucked. Maybe I should try real headphones. That's. THAT'S A BIT BETTER, BUT I THINK I'M BREAKING MY EARDRUMS. TURN IT - YEAH TURN IT DOWN.

Thanks. We'll try this for a while. If you feel any pain, just push the button. No, it won't call a nurse, it will just give you more morphine. Don't push it more than a few times though.

yeah, reread, there you go, get the blood flowing. No. It's going again. It's not working. I need a bigger dose.

Just try anyway, for a while. Don't give up.

Brain loses. Sorry kids, I don't need to talk to you anymore. I'm Mr. Roboto now, and I'll finish my work fast.

But I've always loved the careful and thoughtful me. Maybe that's not really the one who's missing.

Time (Part 3)

I've been spending recent years trying to fight an addiction to a drug that costs nothing. It doesn't require needles, it doesn't need to be smoked, it doesn't require me to take any physical action. It's not music, I don't have to listen to anything, though music helps. Music and religion are good companion drugs for this, but beliefs aren't in my budget anymore.

All I have to do to get high is get sad, and then change my mind. Getting sad is easy, even if I'm a crybaby and all my reasons for being sad are stupid, it's just a talent I have. Changing my mind only requires imagining that I change everything about my life. That's it. A simple recipe. But the side effects are similar to some drugs (including some of the favorites, sugar, caffiene, etc). You get high, and then you get low. Sometimes real low.

You get high and think that you can do everything. Write a book in one night. Learn particle physics in a few hours. You know everything. Then when the sun starts to rise and you've spent most of the night watching movie trailers, you realize that you were wrong - that's the perfect setup for the low.

Maybe this is bipolarism. I don't care, I got sick of diagnosing myself with serious sounding diseases. I don't think I'm much of a hypochondriac anymore. But I've still got all those annoying little problems that seed the speculation. I try to ignore them. I don't have carpal tunnel syndrome, but I'm seeing a chiropractor to help get rid of the pain in my wrists anyway. I'm not sure how much good it is doing. But now when she does that thing to my arm it doesn't hurt like it used to, so that must mean something, right?

I've learned pretty much to fight the highs though. In fact, I've learned to do this globally. Don't ever interrupt work to write paragraphs about some great shit that you just thought of (woops). That has basically saved me from my greatest illness: distraction. Since birth I've been fighting with my brain to try to focus on stupid meaningless crap that my brain knows is a big waste of it's own valuable resources. But it doesn't think that brute force tic tac toe is a waste of it's resources. What does that mean? It just wants to do something original. It is maniacal. Kind of like those manic-depressive folks who are on the upswing. But not exactly the same, because that would be a diagnosis.

My brain is out to fuck things up. It thinks that the only way to get what it wants is to belligerently assert it's right to randomly do what it wants while I'm in the middle of something else.

Time (Part 2)

(Time Part 2)

Life is very much like a man trapped in a very slow garbage compactor. Eventually time will crush him. But is life really so bad that all he can do while waiting is rearrange the garbage?

Imagine the garbage compactor. It moves so slowly, that by the time it crushes him, he is about to die anyway. If he fights to break free of the enclosure, he will not save himself from death, or even extend his life. He'll only make his life better. My problem has often been that I regret so much having to spend part of my life in the compactor.

And part of the garbage in the compactor is actually also the time limit itself. What's so awful about life is that it's going to end before you can get over the fact that you've wasted so much time worrying about the fact that it is going to end.

Time

I've recently discovered, in my google documents, a rather long, rambling, part-narrative, part-essay, written while trying to work at my previous job. I'd name my previous employer if they were at all famous, but they're not, so naming them would more likely add to their woes than it would ever add to any particular insight on the part of the reader. I've decided to break it up into chapters and set it free. I can't tell how much of it was written at once, or what order in which the loosely defined sections occur, but it all seems to relate to the same subject that I've been wanting to write about for a while:

Time

I listened to the clock ticking.

Each tick was one less tick in my life.

Two ticks bounded a time that I could never have back.

They aren't insignificant.

I probably have about 2 billion of them left. That took me by surprise. That many? How can I be glum?

Because they pass without permission. The night steals about thirty thousand. Every night.

Seconds aren't cycles, they're each unique. Each one passes by and never comes back. You don't live forever.

I decided to make a little widget to go on my website. Some of the popular ones tell you how much time is left until your birthday, or until the Super Bowl. I saw one that counted the time left before the Olsen twins turn 18. That time is up. Yup.

Those timers break down into years, days, hours, minutes. Sometimes just days and minutes. Sometimes just days. It doesn't quite give you what I wanted. I wanted people to see what I felt. The monolithic time, unstoppable. The truth, profound and dull at the same time. The number of seconds until I die.

Of course it gives a false precision. I could be a billion seconds off, if I die young. But it's not precision I'm looking for. I don't want to actually know how many seconds I have left for planning purposes. Obviously that would be very useful - it just happens to be impossible - but what I really want is an example, a plausible scenario. There's no reason to believe that the timer is wrong, that I do not have exactly one billion, three hundred fifty-four million, four hundred twenty-nine thousand, two hundred eighty-two seconds left in my life.

As you watch it count down you're witnessing seconds departing from your own life. When I go to bed and wake up, it will be lower. It's not fake, I will have actually lost those seconds. When I go to work and come back home, it will be lower. When I sit and watch it, it will count down. Stopping the widget won't make me live longer, even if I've underestimated my seconds and pausing it brings it closer to the real time. The accuracy of how many seconds I have left in my life doesn't matter, what matters is that the seconds are leaving.

Right

Last year I spent somewhere between six and ten months spending almost all of my free time on a single project. This project was intended to make me rich enough so that I could stop working. Or, at least, so that I could stop working for someone else. Or, at least, so that I could stop working for money. I wanted to be free to work on whatever project I was interested in, without having to try to make money at it. Why do I keep saying the same thing over and over?

I guess there were different levels of discontent, and there still are. First and foremost, I wanted to quit my job. I didn't want to work at a job where I had no choice but to toil away at inconsequential, boring projects. Is it ironic that these projects were designed just to make money, the same thing that I spent probably nine or ten months of my free time on last year? I don't think so. It's not ironic that I end up doing more of the same in order to stop doing the same thing forever. It might be tragic, but it's not ironic...unless I kept doing it until death without success.

I stopped working on my project, which was basically The Million Dollar Web Page 2.0, towards the end of the year, for reasons I don't remember. But it was during that time that I found a new, better job, in a place that I like a lot better, so maybe it was all for the better. Maybe it really is hardest to get what you want by trying too hard to get it directly. Though, my current job certainly isn't perfect, and there were also trade-offs. I'm working more hours, but I'm not sure by how much, because the first employer didn't need me to keep track of hours, and the second requires me to keep meticulous track of hours, and pays me by the hour, but allows me to count things as work that I wouldn't have normally.

After we moved at the beginning of March, from Somerville (essentially part of Boston) to Northampton, in the western part of Massachusetts, I started up my get-rich project again. I actually started to implement it, which included writing some Python code to try to render images from coordinates, but a couple months ago, I stopped again. I think this time I stopped because I didn't think it was going to work. This is a bit ridiculous because I was so convinced about it before, convinced enough to think about it for hours on end. I considered starting it up again a today, as I continue to see clones of The Million Dollar Web Page popping up, utterly the same, not very successful, but still managing to make some money. Mine would be so different that some people might not even notice the similarity.

A couple of days ago, for what felt like the first time, I thought that I had crossed some new threshold in not wanting to be a programmer. I was able to say to myself that I didn't want to be a programmer, without feeling doubt. As I predicted, the doubt returned a little bit yesterday, and there's no getting around the fact that I was somewhat compelled to renew my hate for my profession by recent stress at work. When it isn't very stressful, I don't think about not wanting to be a programmer. Sometimes I think that all I really want is some simple job that is not at all challenging, where I'll do something useful for people, but I won't have to worry about tackling complete unknowns about which I have no confidence. But this contradicts my feelings that I have when my job really sucks, which is that I want to do something more useful, something "fulfilling".

I've been struggling for a while with my culture's idea of careers and jobs. I feel like we go to college and try to get "challenging" and "meaningful" jobs just because we have been trained to want that, and because the glaring alternative is always some terrible stereotype, like "working at McDonald's". This parallels my thoughts about our current stay-at-home-mom crisis, in which bestsellers once again try to make a revolution out of the idea that there are only two choices for a mom - Her Meaningful Career, or staying at home with the kids and filling up their days with planned events, eventually having a nervous break-down over making it all work, and that Her Meaningful Career is actually really an ok choice, and actually the only sane thing to do. After all, that's what they do in France, isn't it?

It strikes me as surprising that we think people need something that has only been around for a hundred years, at best. That's a hundred out of thousands upon thousands of years before that, in which people were pretty much content to do the same chores year after year for their entire lives. Or maybe they weren't content, and they were instead just very lucky to survive the horrible boredom. Maybe, for the last, let's say, one hundred thousand years, we've been virtually out of our minds with our unfulfilling jobs of foraging for fruits and vegetables, and later on farming. Or is it possible that something else happened? Is it possible that what we call "unfulfilling" is really some other problem? Is it possible that sitting in front of a computer all day, or assembling the same thing over and over in a factory, or stressing over a bullet-point list of things that you think you have to do to for your child are things that are unpleasant not because of they are lacking "challenge" or "meaningfulness" but because these things are actually inherently unpleasant? Is it possible that when we look for a meaningful job as a refuge, it is really a refuge not because of the content of the work, but because of the environment in which we perform the work?

Is it possible that in creating the technology to live the way we do today (to write this and post it on a website) has both made it possible for us to live protected from the whims of nature, and forced us to be enslaved to behavior that does not make sense for our bodies, behavior that we call "jobs" that involve sitting in one place and staring at a rectangle for absurd periods of time, or working out and remembering stupid details, all so that we can make ourselves useful to someone, some confusing creature that needs websites and tennis shoes and karate classes, so that this creature will give us food and a place to live?

I think the answer to that question is no. It's a red herring. Partly the creature - or let's call it the "economy" - asks for those things because we ask for them back. We are the monster, and we need shoes, right? But then again, the person making the shoes isn't getting that money...some other mysterious character is. Also, the technology doesn't require all this effort. Technology, one might argue, is supposed be something that makes us more efficient, makes work hours shorter. Or maybe it really just increases our chances of survival, at the cost of making our survival more dreary. Or it could be neither of those things. I would argue that most of what our technology is helping us to do now is make things that we couldn't before, things that don't make our lives better. We make these things only because competition has turned upside-down. Food is expensive because we have to compete with the other people who are buying the food so that they can make more products to sell to us. They need to feed the food to cattle, or break it down into some unnecessary ingredient, like corn syrup, which really only serves the purpose of addicting you to whatever other processed food it is a part of. Suppose rent is expensive not because the construction of the building and its upkeep is expensive, and not because it is expensive to build roads and infrastructure that property taxes, and thus, your rent, pay for, but instead because the people who are renting are competing with the other landlords to buy more of the other useless things that they like to buy.

In theory, I should just put my money where my mouth is. If everyone else is buying too much crap, then, says the Libertarian, I should be smart and not buy that crap. Unfortunately, I'm already doing that, and I'm hoping, in the process, that the rampant inflation doesn't eat up all of my pay-check anyway. Even if I manage to save some formidable amount of money, like $10,000 a year, I'm still stuck where I am for a while, doing what I'm doing, unless I get rich, and then get to finally be one of the people who tells the economy what to do without having to actually do it myself. Of course, some rich people just join the cycle of pain voluntarily, growing their expenses in order make sure they are still enslaved to their job, thinking that their bigger house or their extra nice car or their expensive vacations are worth it.

This didn't go in the direction I was expecting. It seems like I often end up here, though. I'm not sure if it's because I want to blame my discontent on external problems, or if it's because the culture I live in really is a problem that I can't easily escape.

What I thought I was going to write about was writing. I thought maybe I was going to say that after I decided not to be a programmer, I decided to be a writer. I decided to be a journalist. I like researching things, I like learning about things, and scrutinizing them, and then writing about them. I like to always go new places and observe new people. I like to try to understand why people do what they do. I like to read well-written, well-researched, interesting articles about things that matter - and sometimes things that don't matter. What surprises me is how much I like non-fiction over most fiction. I've always known writing to be the thing I wanted to do before I wanted to do anything else, but what I always imagined writing was fiction. It might be because I didn't know enough to write about anything that I didn't make up, and because I didn't realize their were real things that were interesting. Most of my life I didn't read very much, until I started reading real journalism, like the kind I read in Harper's, which I regularly fail at trying not to be an advertisement for. I like some of the fiction that they have, too.

But what am I going to do about it, besides write?

Job Circle Physics

For a while I thought that a job you don't want was a self-eliminating phenomenon. The theory goes like this: If you hate your job enough, for long enough, it will motivate you to get involved in something else you like, until it eventually leads you to a new job based on that. I think I've found it to be the opposite. My revised theory works like this: The more you hate your job, the more stressed out you become, the less able you are to do anything but your job, the less likely you are to eventually get a job doing what you want. Conversely, the more you like your job, and the more your job is easy enough to deal with, the less stressed-out you are, and the more likely you are to have the energy to invest in some other activity, which will eventually lead you to a job related to that.

Freedom

When I take Emaline out by myself I feel a strange freedom. It's strange because while I'm with her I'm responsible for her - in places where there's a road I can't go more than a few feet away, since at the age of two she still tends to ignore the danger of cars. Also, if I want to go anywhere very quickly I'm suddenly 25 pounds heavier, which actually wouldn't be that bad if I didn't have to carry the 25 pounds in my arms in front of me, balanced upright. If I want to go a significant distance I can go by bike, but in order to do this I have to convince her to ride, put her in the seat, buckle her in, lower the safety bar, put on her finicky helmet, and then put on mine. Also, if she really doesn't want to go where I want to she's going to throw a fit. These aren't the kinds of things you think about when you think about being free. But it is her whim and her lack of experience with the world that make me free. When I'm with her, we can do things that seem utterly absurd to most people, and one of those things is nothing. In fact, I would hazard a guess that most people would categorize everything we do as *nothing*.

But my favorite nothing is in the forest. I like to follow her, letting her basically go wherever she wants. She has nothing to worry about, and almost nothing about being in the forest can be annoying or overwhelming to me. There's nothing to break. There's no way to get the forest dirty. There's no one to stare at you. There are no loud noises. No cars, no bikes coming up the path behind you. There's nothing to buy, nobody to annoy. If you pick the right forest there's nowhere that you're not allowed to go. Yet the forest has so much that you can't get anywhere else.

More than anything what is great about the forest is that it is infinite. There is no pattern. Every square inch of every surface is different from the billions of billions of other square inches in any part of any other forest. There is no way to penetrate the detail of the forest to a level that is microscopic enough that it becomes uniform. Every bit is a unique world in itself. Every tree is placed, not totally at random, but never in a predictable pattern...unless by a person. Nature is the only place you can go that is not a reflection of human mentality. There are no boxes, which, although we can't claim to have invented, we have used like no natural phenomenon would, for the purpose of filling space in the most convenient, simple, and consequentially the most mind-numbing way possible. (Even crystals that grow in cubic form would never come close to achieving regularity and scale of right angles that we have created.) Unlike many of our hollow creations, no part of nature is left empty to save time. The inside of a tree or a rock is not hollow and blank, it's complete.

But even if we stop at a playground and don't make it to the forest I'm still content. You'll find me frequently staring up at the tops of the trees as the wind moves them.

Inflation

Lately I've remarked a lot about our current rate of inflation. What may be confusing to anyone reading this is that I'm not complaining about a 3 or 4 or 5 percent inflation rate, which are the kind of numbers the federal government is throwing around. The federal government has been changing the way they calculate inflation for a long time. It probably won't surprise you that their "refinements" to the formula are making inflation look smaller. Or, I should say, making it look like it's staying the same size. While nobody is too happy with the official number for June - 5% - it still sounds a lot better than the 10% calculated by the old method, which better takes into account such rare luxuries as "food".

It seems almost like saving money is stupid at a rate of 10%. Suppose I can only save $1,000 a year, which is true for some people. Then let's say I have $10,000 in the bank. Next year I'll have $11,000 because I've managed to save another $1,000 this year. Oddly enough, at 10% inflation $11,000 in 2009 is worth the same as $10,000 in 2008. All I've really done is kept up with inflation. Then in 2010 when I have $12,000? That buys *less* than my original $10,000 in 2008. Once my rate of savings is lower than inflation, I'm not really getting anywhere at all. The only way I can get anywhere is if my salary increases and I'm able to save more money. But whose salary increases at 10% every year? It does happen at some companies, and for some jobs, but a lot of places base salary increases on the federally calculated inflation, which is quite a bit lower. This means that not only are those on minimum wage not managing to keep up with inflation (because minimum wage isn't linked to inflation), but neither are the people who *think* they're keeping up with it.

Well, I may complain about it, but at least I'm better off than Zimbabwe, where the rate of inflation is.... 2,000,000%. Yes, 2 million percent. That means that if you buy an apple for a dollar in January, by the time next January rolls around that apple costs something like two thousand dollars. To put this in less staggering terms, it means that the price of goods would nearly double every month.

Anyway, I'm still not very happy with 10% inflation, and I've considered whether I should do something crazy like buy a bunch of gold and save *that* instead. What's interesting is that gold is actually rising faster than inflation. When you consider that gold, in the past (and some people hope, in the future) has been used as a way to "anchor" the value of money, it's not surprising that gold remains somewhat more consistent with the cost of other goods. In the last year it has actually risen by 46%, so it's doing even better than that.

Martin Luther King Jr. on Global Warming

Today I had to stop and think; if Martin Luther King Jr. were still alive would he say nothing about global warming? When a tiny protest marched down Tremont St in Boston, it said nothing at all about climate change. The e-mail I got from Dennis Kucinich honoring him also didn't say anything about climate change. In fact, I've found that the Democratic candidates in general (this pretty much goes without saying for the Republicans) have really not said that much about climate change. Barack Obama, for example, is backed by businesses that produce ethanol (a sham) and clean coal, and he certainly isn't disappointing them.

A lot of people thought Dr. King was barking up the wrong tree when he started talking about Vietnam, and when hints of communism started to work its way into his speeches. I don't think that he would shy away from global warming or the fact that China is turning into (and turning other countries into) a giant desert, or the fact that the variety of species and plant life on Earth is quickly being carved down to nothing. I also don't think he would fail to notice that climate change is likely to erase all benefits we could even dream about regarding civil rights, poverty, and peace.

Unfortunately, Iraq and the state of the US are distracting us from an elephant in the room. I'm beginning to firmly believe that there is only one issue I care about now, and that all others are not only small concerns in comparison, but are likely to become worse and worse as a result of environmental disaster.

If I had to guess, I would say that it's probably too late to prevent a large part of the impending upheaval. But I certainly don't want to give up, and our situation is going to be exponentially worse (if not hopeless) by the time our next president leaves office.

I don't think that the president of the United States alone determines our behavior regarding the environment, but he or she will certainly play a very large role. What we really need to change is people's attitudes - though, our attitudes seem to always be curiously outpacing those of our leaders.

Some people said it was impossible to fix the hole in the ozone layer because of how much international cooperation it would take, but we did it. Compared to global warming, the hole in the ozone layer is nothing. I'm sorry if this is pessimistic, but it seems to me lately that we've finally answered the question of why we don't hear a cacaphony of radio signals coming from intelligent life on other planets. It's because intelligent life doesn't get intelligent fast enough to prevent itself from devouring all of it's own resources and wiping itself out a mere century after it becomes capable of sending messages into space. The radio signals are all very short flashes in the timeline of the Universe, and seldomly, if ever, do they happen at the same time.

It would take a fraction of our military spending to reverse the trend of global warming. It would take a fraction of the amount of money the average person spends on their car to reverse the trend of global warming. We have every opportunity to prevent the worst, and possibly final, calamity of our existence. All that's needed is the flipping of a microscopic switch in 6 billion heads. How do we flip it? What am I doing to achieve this?

The Plunge (Chapter 8)

The Plunge (Chapter 8)

There were four exits from the room oddly at the corners.

One of them at first appeared to be too skinny to fit a person. Upon closer inspection, however, it was just wide enough to fit a Tobin sized person. Just wide enough without being able to turn his head. This made it a very uncomfortable passage to enter in a strange place, if for no other reason than the fact that once you enter it, you cannot turn your head to look in the other direction. You wouldn't be able to look back from where you have come as you go down it, and even worse, you wouldn't be able to look in the direction that you're going once you decide to backtrack. You also wouldn't be able to go anywhere within it faster than a crawl.

The next one was entirely blocked by what appeared to be vertical blinds. Tobin cautiously stepped near the entrance and spread them apart, only to find, separated by about a foot, identical blinds. He quickly pushed these aside hoping to get a clear view of the hall. More blinds. The blinds were light and easy to push aside, doing nothing to impede your progress, but leaving you with the uncomfortable knowledge that, if you were go further, you would not be able to see ahead or behind you.

While the first two hallways were passively menacing by showing no apparent danger and yet putting you into an prone situation, the third added a more unsettling twist. The floor, walls, and ceiling were all covered in bumps. This fact alone was unusual enough to make someone feel ill-at-ease, but what was worse was the shape and size of the bumps. Each bump was shaped like the corner of a cube, and they were all different sizes. They were just large enough and lacking uniformity just enough that as you walked across them it would be easy to lose your footing. You could probably walk safely down the hall if you paid constant attention to what you were doing.

Tobin walked to the edge of this hallway, but couldn't even bring himself to touch the cube-corner-bumps with his foot. They looked too much like stylized teeth, like the entire hallway would close shut and eat any limb that entered.

The fourth corner of the room had the strangest hall of all. Unlike the other three, it appeared to be completely impossible to enter. It was so full of sand that the sand had spilled into the room. Tobin couldn't see even one inch of the walls or ceiling inside the hallway. The amount of sand seemed to be exactly calculated. The spilled sand sloped up to the hallway entrance, perfectly meeting the ceiling just at the corners where the walls of the room and the walls of the hallway met.

While looking at this sand, as though awaking from a trance, Tobin was suddenly gripped by fear. Where was he? How could this place be real? He was temporarily paralyzed by the cognitive dissonance of knowing that this place was impossible and knowing that he was too aware to be dreaming. He could. He...it was just like a dream, what was happening, but the way he was experiencing it was not dream-like at all.

He unsteadily turned back towards the closed elevator doors. There was the button. If he could just get to it and get out. He waded towards it as though in a drunken stupor. He couldn't get there fast enough, but he couldn't run. So stupid, entering the room at all. Who knows what it is. It's just some room. But what if it isn't?

He pushed it.

There was a hesitation. Maybe it won't. The elevator seemed to start moving. It had gone to a different floor. What if someone. The first floor. Only one floor away. Shouldn't take so long.

Ding.

Open.

Nobody. He stepped in. In the familiarity of the elevator, he was afraid to turn around and see that room, and afraid not to. He turned, and saw, and was afraid because it was there, and exactly the same. He was afraid to push the button. What if it didn't work or what if it just took him somewhere else that was just like this. He pushed it. He was afraid for the doors to close. What if they never opened. What if the elevator didn't move. What if they just opened up again to the room.

The elevator began to move. It went up one floor, which wasn't far enough away from what he had just seen. He was afraid for the doors to open.

The doors opened. In came the world, as though he had just come from the fifth floor and skipped everything that couldn't be explained. What if the elevator dropped before he could cross the threshhold. His foot pushed off from the inside of the elevator.

He was on the ground floor. The elevator was still there. People walked by just outside the double doors. None of that really happened. Psychologist wanted.

Binary Time

A bookmarkable stand-alone version of the clock is here.

It turns out that I'm not the first person to think of this. Though, like the guy in the wikipedia entry, I thought of this independently after someone else thought of it. In fact, I thought of it the moment I heard about the ThinkGeek binary clock, and again the moment when I became apalled to find that ThinkGeek doesn't think like a real geek; their binary clock is just a binary representation of each decimal digit that appears in a conventional clock. Or maybe geeks are just too dorky to realize the potential of binary time. My only question is this: Do I get to appear in the wikipedia entry now?

While the idea of dividing the day into 65536 seconds (2 ^ 16) is not new, and the idea of displaying this with a 4 by 4 grid of things that are either on or off is also not new (click on "not" above)... and the idea of using four hex digits as an alternative is not new -- there are some things that I did that I cannot find anywhere else. The most unusual is probably how I arranged the "binary digits" (boxes). It is a recursive pattern. Each quadrant represents a single hex digit (which are displayed below) and is split into four binary digits in the same way. Also, just as the order from least to most significant hex digit is lower-right, upper-right, lower-left, upper-left, the binary digits that divide the hex quadrant further are also organized with the least significant digit in the lower-right, and so on.

While others I've linked to above assault conventional time as illogical, I see that it has a certain appeal. For example, 60, the number of seconds in a minute, is the smallest number that is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. This means that you can easily represent a half an hour, a third of a minute, etc. 24 is similar, being divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6, and 8. In contrast, binary time is not easily divided by 3, 5, or 6, but it can, on the other hand, be divided by 2 16 times (or indefinitely... more about that in a minute (a binary minute)). It can also be represented easily in four different bases; base 2 (binary), base 4, base 8 (octal), and base 16 (hex). For example, right now it is 1111 0001 0011 1111, or in hex: f13f (each group of four binary is a single hex digit), or in base 4: 33010333 (every two binary digits is one base 4 digit) or in octal: 170477 (maybe you get the pattern at this point). binary is the simplest possible way of representing the number; you can use just about anything as a binary digit, as long is it can be "on" or "off". At the same time, hexidecimal is the most compact (least number of digits) of any often used base. Of course, as a professional programmer, I have a bias, because I deal with binary all the time. But with computers being so ubiquitous, it seems rational to want to taylor time to fit more neatly into them.

I considered whether to make a binary calendar, dividing the year by two repeatedly. However, I wasn't happy with how this matches up with days, which are my original unit for deriving seconds. After some thought, I came to the conclusion that days are a far more important unit than years, and that using two different units for different time domains isn't worth the significance of the year. Days and years are essentially impossible to relate to each other, the number of days in a year is about 365.242199. Thus one year after, 00:00:00 on January 1, 2006 is actually about 6am on January 1, 2007. Instead, I think it would be better to continue using days for as large or small a length of time as you desire.

If you take my clock, with its 16 blinking lights, and duplicate it three more times, then you can create a clock that easily represents any binary second since the Big Bang, and may very well also represent every binary second until the Universe is all black holes, or all liquid, or proton soup, depending on your preferred physical theory. In this clock, what you see above would be in the lower right quadrant, and above it would be a clock that can represent any day in a 179 year period, which means any day in your life. To the left would be the next quadrant of 16 digits, which spans 12 million years, roughly the age of Hominidae, the family to which humans belong with apes. This would also be specific enough to pinpoint any two centuries. In the upper-left would be a clock whose own upper-left quadrant would be off (zeroes) if you were measuring time since the Universe began. Don't ask me what the clock looks like other than that, there's still about 200 million years of possible error in the calculation of the age of the Universe.

Now, suppose you wanted smaller times as well. You could take the entire 64 bit clock from the previous paragraph and duplicate it again for smaller times. This could represent a time as short as 71 zeptoseconds, which is about one one-thousandth of the shortest period of time ever measured. Thus, with with a mere 128 bits, you can represent any measurable time in the entire life of the Universe.

I've considered in the past what would happen if you totally overhauled the metric system to be calibrated by things that are important to people. They started by dividing the circumference of the world by 40,000,000 to get a meter, and then combined this with conventional seconds to get other units. I started by thinking that you should divide the day into 100,000 seconds. Apparently, this has also been done. But now I prefer binary time, with 65536 seconds, base 10 is really one of the most awkward bases. The next step that I came up with, to get distance from time, was to ask how far something would drop in one second (at the Earth's surface, with negligible air resistence, etc.) For a binary second, this would be about 6.5 meters, so maybe you could call this a beter, or better yet a biter. From there you could get a unit of mass the same way SI did, by asking how much mass is in a cubic biter of water. Of course, this would be large, about 2,740 kilograms, very roughly a metric ton. You could call it... I don't know, a bon? Dividing by 65536 gives us 41 grams. Anyway, I think I've gone far enough for one day.

But I almost forgot. While glancing through wikipedia I discovered that my name is now a mere two hops from the article on Graham's number. In fact, the second hop just takes you to a different part of the same website. The reason for this is that I once e-mailed the author of that site with a proof of how Graham's number was larger than Moser's number. Interestingly, the wikipedia article notes that Graham's number is larger than the Moser, but without a source footnote. If someone were to, say, add a footnote, it wouldn't be a very big stretch to link to this page as a possible source, thus making me (and Tim Chow, who also appears) an original source of this bit of knowledge, without really breaking the "original research" rule that is broken by every single article in wikipedia.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that you can drag the bits around while they are still working. You can also drag the quadrants, and the bits go with them. Also, I improved something called Prototype for my own purposes in the process of making it. Another notable thing that I did to make this work, and which was probably overlooked in some of the other binary clocks, was that I correct the time every 64 binary seconds to sync it with the source (your computer's clock). I had to do this because javascript rounds to the nearest millisecond, which means that the time noticibly drifts if you keep it on for over an hour. Which I do frequently.

Oh, and by the way, I've switched exclusively to Dvorak now.

The Qwerty Strikes Back

Ok, so maybe I didn't quite achieve a functional level of Dvorak. It basically worked for all except one thing that I didn't even consider. It was most difficult to use during instant message exchanges, which are a big part of how I have to communicate with my coworkers. The biggest problem wasn't really the speed so much as it was the fact that I had to focus on the typing while trying to have a conversation. It seems that conversations take more thought, which probably sounds obvious, but what may be even more crucial is timing. It becomes very frustrating when you can't slide a well timed sentence into the conversation at the right point, the other person starts to outrun you and you keep having to abandon your previous thought in favor of a new one. But on the plus side it does help you to listen a little bit better. Heh.

After a period of frustration I finally turned my layout back to qwerty... I can't risk getting behind at work. Although I had been almost terrified that I would no longer be able to type the old way at all, I found out that my earlier experiments at doing so were just too unmotivated. Switching back to qwerty was kind of like chopping a board with your hand; the most important thing is to not hesitate and put your full force into it... then again, I've probably never karate chopped anything thicker than cardboard. Either way, typing qwerty after an intense period of learning Dvorak is a distinct and unusual feeling. You know what you want to say, and you know that you are somehow causing the words to appear on the screen, but the rules that your fingers are following has become foreign. It works best if you just avoid thinking about it, kind of like breathing.

I eventually found that I was comfortable typing Dvorak in some situations, which meant that I could continue to practice it and perhaps eventually get good enough to use it all the time. Of course, switching back and forth too often is not recommended. I learned that Linux, and to a lessor extent Windows, can become confused, and you may find yourself with different programs using different layouts, or end up as I did in the one case where jEdit, a java-based programmer's text editor, was using qwerty for entering text, but using Dvorak for ctrl and alt key sequences. It was surprisingly not too difficult to keep it straight, and serves as a good mental exercise, but not something you want to deal with while trying to get stuff done.

I'm actually typing this in Dvorak, so I'm still getting practice at it. Perhaps some day soon my proficiency will increase to the point where I can use it all the time. Then, obviously, I started this endeavor because I think that my Dvorak typing speed will eventually surpass my qwerty typing speed. Perhaps there are some other potential benefits though. There is some suggestion that the relative ease with which one types in Dvorak will lead to less injury, possibly preventing carpal tunnel, for example. There's also the fact that I'll be cooler than you.

Dvorak! Or ',.pyf

I used to think that the name "Dvorak" was the first letters appearing on the top row of the keyboard layout to which it refers. While this is consistent with the fact that the name doesn't have any letter appearing twice and with the fact that its near undefeatable yet much lamented competitor derives its own name from that method (and, oddly, is also six letters), it's not true. In fact, and you probably already knew this, it is the name of the layout's inventor.

If this installment of cesoid.com seems a little drab, I'll tell you why right now; I'm typing very slowly, I'm thinking somewhere around 8 words per minute. If you haven't guessed why yet I'll spell it out for you; ',.pyf. That is what comes out when I push the first six keys on the second row of the keyboard. Admittedly, it wouldn't make for a very good name.

Having to type this slow causes one to carefully choose one's words, which is an interesting experiment in and of itself. It also causes me to have to alternate rapidly between the tasks of thinking about what to say next, and then how to type it. It's not so much the fact of learning something new as much as it is trying to suppress learning that has become so utterly embedded that any significant lapse of concentration will cause gibberish to suddenly spew itself across the screen. In fact, the process of writing becomes a tug of war over mental resources between generating content and getting it on the computer. When I begin to think of what I want to say more quickly, I also end up having to push backspace more often, and when I begin to type more accurately, I also quickly run out of things to type because I haven't devoted enough of my precious mental resources to thinking about it. It's basically a writing throttle.

Another thing about typing slowly is that I don't get very far along before I have forgotten most of what I've written already and therefore have to go back and read it again. I just did that, and I found it oddly satisfying. It is the kind of feeling you can only get from writing that leaves ample time for contemplation between every letter. Ok fine, I take it back, I'm sure there are plenty of other places you can get exactly the same feeling. Maybe.

The story begins yesterday and does not involve a lama, which, incidentally, is something that I can type with minimal hesitation and without error at this point. Actually, now that I think of it, it starts before that. It starts while I was reading Guns, Germs, and Steel by Neal... I mean Jared Diamond. The book used the Dvorak keyboard layout as a prime example of a technological improvement that was not adopted by any significant number of people even after decades of existence and having a clear advantage over previous technology, in this case QWERTY. Incidentally, "QWERTY" is probably one of the most difficult things to type on a Dvorak keyboard, narrowly defeating "Dvorak".

With that seed planted firmly in my mind, it was yesterday that I found myself looking up the entry on Dvorak in Wikipedia, mostly to see what it looked like. After I recovered from my immediate surprise at the fact that it didn't start with the letters D V O R A K, I suddenly realized this irresistible fact: any keyboard can become a Dvorak keyboard. All that is needed is the right software. Then, the article told me something even more irresistible; I already had that software. It turns out that every major operating system, heck, for all I know every operating system, but at least Windows, Mac, and Linux, have each dutifully provided Dvorak as one of their keyboard layouts. I suppose this isn't surprising when you can see that they've also got about a thousand other layouts to choose from, at least as many keyboards as there are countries. (When I looked at the setting on Windows I noticed that there were also options for the single-handed Dvorak setups, both for the left and the right hands.)

I could barely contain my glee at the fact that I could begin yet another near ridiculous learning task without buying anything, and immediately... or after work. But then when I heard the shouts of my coworkers playing Wii football at 4:30 it seemed pointless to resist the temptation. After all, once I learn Dvorak I'll be a more efficient typist, and therefore more efficient at most of my work tasks... right? I immediately rearranged the letters of my USB keyboard. I figured that the only way I would be able to learn quickly would be to have the new layout right at my fingertips, literally speaking. I also figured that if I had to bail out and switch back to QWERTY at any point it didn't really matter how the letters were arranged, I've never had to look at the keyboard to type QWERTY. In fact, I don't have to look at the keyboard to type Dvorak at this point either.

By the time I left work, I already had most of the new layout memorized. By the end of the day I had all of it memorized, but I could only type at about four words per minute. When I think about that it seems wrong... how could it possibly take a minute to type four words? Fifteen seconds per word? Ok, let's do a reality check; how fast am I typing right now. The result is 14 words per minute (it took me a minute type from "do a reality" to "result is"). I'm surprised I did that well, but the time did go by very quickly, so I think it is fair to say that when I finally memorized the Dvorak layout, I was only typing at about 4 or 5 words per minute. That was actually two days ago now, when I said earlier that I started "yesterday" I was actually writing that yesterday.

This actually makes me wonder how fast I was typing with QWERTY, because I doubt that I was consistently achieving better than 30 or 40 words per minute. Was I really only typing twice as fast as I am now? Maybe it only seemed so much faster because there was so much less lag between how fast I could think something and how fast I could type it. Is it possible that I had actually learned to slow down my thinking to be the same as my typing, thereby rendering any slightly slower speed disproportionately uncomfortable?

Unfortunately, I can't test my QWERTY speed very accurately at this point, because the few times I tried to switch back I was very confused, and afraid that once I took a few minutes to convince my fingers that it was ok to type in QWERTY, I would have to spend needless hours trying to relearn the Dvorak to get back to where I left off, or discover in horror that there was no turning back at all, that I could no longer type QWERTY any faster than I can type Dvorak. In fact, I've basically decided at this point that there is no turning back. I can now type just fast enough to function - hopefully - and using QWERTY will continue to be confusing. I'm trying to imagine now what will happen if I must someday type something on a computer that cannot quickly be changed to Dvorak. I don't think it will be as bad as it seems, but it will definitely be embarrassing if anyone is watching.

So there you have it. When I started writing this article my typing speed was too slow to be practical for normal use, and now it's just fast enough and likely to continue getting faster. I think it is safe to say that I've converted from QWERTY to Dvorak in over a single weekend. Although, the true test of that will be work tomorrow. Will I despair and decide that I must switch back temporarily, or will I persevere and continue to adapt? Also, there's the question of when, or even if I will start to see the supposed benefits. When will my Dvorak surpass my QWERTY?

Oh, and here's an update on the installing from the last article. It turned out that it was even more a mantra than I'd originally thought. When I started writing down the serial numbers for the security updates I found that it never changed. I was installing the same thing over and over again. Or, I should say, attempting to install the same thing over and over again. I still haven't figured out why.

Install

I've recently reinstalled Windows 2000 Professional so that I could start with a clean slate on my new 250GB hard drive. The copy I installed was described as Service Pack 4 with �roll-up�. This seems to mean that Microsoft chose a different way to release the latest bunch of updates for Windows 2000, after bundling up the first four units into �Service Packs�. I'm not sure what the difference is, or whether it is related to (or unproven by?) the fact that I am being assaulted by a never-ending train of security updates that only install one-at-a-time, and won't install automatically. While writing the last sentence I installed two or three of them, and at the �and� in this sentence, I just installed another. And there's another. I would estimate that in the month or so since the initial Win2k install, I've installed about 300 of them.

Rather than looking for information on how to fix this problem, I let the train keep going, monotonously clicking the little icon in the lower right corner, which pops up a window, in which I click �Install�, which causes the window to shrink back into the icon, and then show a bubble telling me that the install is happening and I may continue working. After a short time, the bubble disappears, and so does the icon, and then, often seemingly in tempo with the rhythm of the whole ordeal, another little update icon shows up. It's like a mantra that I repeat with the expectation that someday I will reach nirvana, wherein the icon goes away, and minute after minute goes by without a new one showing up.

This happened once.
I've decided incidentally, to give you a sample of the rhythm of this mantra by pushing enter every time I install a new update.
Yes, that was one of them. And no, I didn't stop typing at the end of the sentence and wait for it, or finish
the sentence after an update showed up earlier than I wanted. I'm playing by the rules.
Anyway, once, the updates did stop coming.
I celebrated with a moment of silence, and then thought, �Well, they really did stop eventually.� After I restarted my computer
they started back up again.

That was a real paragraph ending, not an install.
That was an install.

I'm done with that game.

It's 1:00AM, (install) and I think I should go to bed.

Install. Install. Install. Install. Install. Install. (All while rereading this article and posting it.)

Imagine

"Imagine" by John Lennon has been my favorite song for at least ten years. A lot of people like this song, and plenty of them also call it their favorite, but I feel that the circumstances that made it my favorite entitle my designation to more meaning than most. I say this because most people who like it do not really agree with the lyrics. They agree with some of them but not all, or they agree "in theory but not in practice" as they say, or prefer to take them symbolically, or as a criticism of society rather than a blueprint for a better one.

To be specific, even the most religious people can love the song, somehow brushing aside that it is asking you to imagine "no religion". It is easy for most people to embrace "no countries", although many may see this figuratively as well, and even easier to see the evil that Lennon does in materialism. But the way in which so many people, especially in a country where only 15% claim to have no religion, can love this song, makes me wonder, do they even hear him say it?

For me, becoming Agnostic at the age of 15, the lyrics, though I'd heard them many times, were almost a surprise. Lennon simply said what no one else dares to put in a song so straightforwardly, that religion prevents people from living peacefully. What's more, he does this without compromise, suggesting that we will be better off if we no longer believe even in heaven. This is perhaps seeing deeper into the concept of religion-as-problem than others who might find fault in religion for its historical link to conflict, while at the same time sympathizing with its principle notions. As a person who said and felt all of this, while immersed in a Catholic high school that preached the opposite, I felt almost as though he and I were the only people in the world who knew the truth. This truth, that I still believe to this day, was that faith in the imaginary, especially fear of hell and anticipation of heaven, did great harm to our ability to live peacefully and effectively in the real world. This summarized my version of Agnosticism, which was not just "hard" Agnosticism (belief that no one can know God - differentiated from the "soft" Agnosticism of those who personally have no belief in God), but "militant" Agnosticism (belief that those who believe in God do harm).

The common take on this song seems to be "upbeat", whereas I see it as the opposite. Instead of imagining this paradise, or perhaps because I imagine it, I am overcome by the difference between what could be and what is, and more poignantly, what just might never be. More often than not, this song brings tears to my eyes when I hear it.

Over the last ten years my focus on the evils of religion have diminished, replaced more and more by another aspect of the world that separates people: countries. This part of the song holds new meaning for me now as I have come to feel that although religion generally corrupts the reasoning of individuals and creates havoc for them in the long-term, the more immediate problem is simply that which makes us separate ourselves from others mentally and physically. The notion of treating your "country-men" differently from others is punctuated on a daily basis, and my awareness of the strangeness and most people's unknowing acceptance of this phenomenon blossomed when we invaded Afghanistan, and then Iraq. Even today, even among those who find the invasion of Iraq to be immoral, the invasion of Afghanistan is still lauded as self-defense, and one of the negatives of invading Iraq that is often cited is that it distracted us from operations in Afghanistan. I still see no way to explain self-defense that causes collateral damage (i.e. killing thousands of non-combatant people) that is equal to the original damage from which we are defending ourselves...besides the obvious observation that we don't think it is equal, because we don't think that Afghans are worth as much as Americans. (This would be easier to justify if we didn't leave most Afghans in pretty much the same position after the invasion as before it, but then "self-defense" still wouldn't be the right description.) While it is easy for me to justify that someone will value their family, friends, or even neighbors more than others, the fact that we value one total stranger in our own country more than another in some other country is evidence to the twisted way in which borders skew our view of the world.

Then there's possessions. Today I see possessions as the things that most enslave us to continue living in ways that we ourselves don't approve of. Every time someone wishes they could help the poor more, pollute less, raise their children better, improve their community, do they think about the ways in which our love of possessions have prevented us from doing so? While many people see the evil in possessions as a psychological or spiritual one - a sort of cheapening of life by valuing what does not deserve value - I see it in terms that are more practical. The more we spend money on things we don't need, the more we work to pay for those things. The more we work, the less we spend time on things that are truly important. This is not to mention the reverse-boycott effect that buying useless crap has on the economy. When you buy a flat-screen TV, a big house, and a big car, the economy adapts by wasting time and effort creating an even better, higher resolution TV, even more high-end furniture and appliances to throw in your house, and a bigger car with more gadgets that gets slightly better gas mileage, when it could have instead been coming up with better more eye-opening programming and news coverage, cheaper and more environmentally friendly housing powered by greener energy, and cars that actually burn little or no gasoline. The effect is cyclical, the more we waste money on things that don't really improve our lives, the more inclined we are to work longer hours to buy more things, and make our lives worse.

To put it in a nutshell, into this song, John Lennon has encoded all of my deepest lifelong goals. I only wish that I could escape the circumstances that force me to commit 8 hours a weekday in neutral on all of these paths, leaving me with the rest of my time to choose between having a life, or thinking, writing, and God-forbid actually doing something about the things that bother me most about the world. It makes me wonder whether it really is the circumstances, or whether I'm simply not imagining hard enough.

Technology Comment

More commenting insanity. I'll give you some points if you can find out where this comment is. I figure that should be impossible for at least a few days, until Google or some other search engine spiders it.

I have to say, I'm constantly at odds with futurists because of their confidence. I see technological development as more chaotic; I think that technologies affect other technologies to the point where they can disrupt our expectations, even stalling or reversing other technologies. Granted, Serenity and Firefly have stalled certain technologies to the point of absurdity...so really this is a tangent.

Really I just take issue with things that we think are guaranteed to happen based on current trends, set scripts on the technological stage like "GNR". We base our opinion of how technology will develop - and even that technology will develop - on our current reality of life. But if technology will affect anything, it will affect the way we live. The more technology affects our lives, the more unpredictable technological development will become. This can range anywhere from destroying the human race, to turning us into a bunch of zombies who are engrossed in one particular development and stop progressing otherwise, to utopian society, to the realization of previously unknown intelligence and becoming "hyper-human".

But it could also lead to nearly destroying humanity over and over, and having to constantly start again in some areas, while being able to salvage previous knowledge in other areas. Theoretically this could explain Serenity's Universe, although, once again, its plausibility is a bit difficult.

In short, I certainly agree that anything set 50 years from now is very speculative. But I don't agree that technology must progress as expected...not even in the next 50 years. The society we exist in now fosters technology (and fosters certain technologies more than others), but the power of technology is itself a possible destabilizing force in a society which already has many potential reasons to turn into something else, be it good or bad. If technology changes society, might it change society into one that doesn't develop technology? Or one that develops it in a way that is totally foreign to us now?

Killers vs Civilians

I feel that I should interject here. What is it I'm interrupting? News. I feel that The News has been dishonest. There is no war between Israel and Hezbollah. What's really happening is an alliance between Hezbollah and Israel, in a war against the civilians of Lebanon and Israel. Can you guess who might be losing that battle?

To be fair, the civilians don't really know that they are the ones engaged in war. For some reason they're still attached to this strange description of the conflict in which the civilians belong to two different sides, and the people with rockets and bombs are somehow trying to neutralize one another in the service of the civilians. This is not at all the case. Sure, some guy wielding a Katyusha rocket thinks that he's fighting against Israel's army, and some other guy firing Israeli artillery thinks that he is reducing (or God help him, even eliminating) the Hezbollah threat. But I doubt that anyone in the top ranks orchestrating this explosion fiesta has any illusions. They have formed an alliance - neither side alone could accomplish their task.

Hezbollah cannot defeat Israel's army. Hezbollah would be powerless without Israel's retaliation, without the plight of the Palistineans, without the popular support they are scoring every time an Israeli shell blows something to smithereans. It is clear that they know all of this, and clear that their intentions in this situation are to gain more power through conflict. It is clear because they cannot defeat Israel, and because some of their other actions more indirectly increase the level of conflict. For example, Hezbollah has worked to keep Palistinean refugees in Lebanon from becoming Lebanese citizens. You didn't read that backwards. Despite popular support, efforts to welcome the displaced Palistinean people into Lebanese society have failed, in part because of the work of Hezbollah and their backers, Syria and Iran. You see, if that were to happen, if the Palistineans were given any reason to be happier, and to stop trying to go back to their original homelands inside the Israeli borders, then Hezbollah loses points, less people are moved to join up, less people are moved to help supply them with weapons.

On the other hand, if Hezbollah were to, say, kidnap some soldiers, and provoke a massive retaliation, you might say that that is gold for them. It doesn't get much better than this for Hezbollah.

But what about Israel? Surely Israel can defeat Hezbollah. That is, if Hezbollah soldiers lined up and attacked Israeli soldiers in "civilized warfare". I'm trying in earnest to imagine that Israeli leadership thinks they are "containing" Hezbollah in some way, rather than growing it. Perhaps the Israeli government thinks that Hezbollah is suicidal. Perhaps they know that Hezbollah has purposely provoked it to attack, but the Israeli government somehow knows something Hezbollah does not, that Hezbollah will not survive the attack. Once again, I would be surprised if they believe this.

If Israel is not containing Hezbollah, then what are they doing? I must say, I'm quite confused about this, and it leads me to speculate that there must be some other underlying motive. Is Israel basically doing the same thing that Hezbollah is on a larger scale? Is Israel trying to provoke Iran or Syria to get involved, or trying to provide justification for further pressure on Iran from the United States? I'm not sure. Maybe it's much simpler. Maybe Olmert, the new Israeli Prime Minister, wants to prove, after giving up part of the West Bank, that he's tough on terrorism.

Come to think of it, why did they give up part of the West Bank? I have to admit, when Ariel Sharon's government seemed to take a drastic turn towards moderation, I was naively optimistic. But others weren't. Others were quick to point out that they had two choices, 1. wait for the booming Arab populations within these areas to tip the balance so that Arabs outnumber Jews in Israel, with a presumably very interesting effect on the democratically elected government, or 2. let 'em go. (Or 3. become a dictatorship...) Now that speculation seems a little less like speculation. It seems a little hard to believe that Israel would give parts of the West Bank, painfully evicting their own citizens, in the name of peace, and then follow it up by a retaliation of this magnitude when a couple of soldiers are kidnapped.

But forget the speculation, because what I'm talking about here is solid fact: Israel's retaliation is, as usual, on scale that utterly dwarfs the acts of Hezbollah. And once again, the world restrains itself in their criticism, and Americans in particular are blindfolded in terms of the proportions of what is going on. I'm not sure what is more to blame here, the characterization of the two parties causing death, or the general attitudes that "the west" has always had towards Arab civilian casualties. (Actually, since I wrote this part, which was a week ago, The News seems to have caught up a bit and have proclaimed more and more the disaster that is occurring, most likely in the face of the overwhelming reality. Although, they are still using the ridiculous tally of 300 Lebanese dead, even while they interview people again and again who have witnessed a hundred dead bodies. Could everyone somehow be witnessing the same dead people?)

Allow me to interrupt myself for a moment. I feel like the way I'm discussing this is in some way dishonest, because I'm not telling you that I'M PISSED OFF BEYOND ALL BELIEF. I just can't believe the things that I'm hearing. When the US says that Israel is justified in defending itself, it is such a stupid oversimplification, such a chicken-shit position, when you consider that Israel is destroying Lebanon, in response to two soldiers kidnapped, and rockets fired from the border that are so clumsy they rarely ever manage to kill anyone. As always, this is terrible, and people should not be kidnapped, and rockets should not be fired randomly at towns, no matter how inneffectual they are. BUT WHAT KIND OF FUCKED UP AMNESIA MAKES IT POSSIBLE FOR THE IMAGE OF HEZBOLLAH FIRING ROCKETS CAUSE YOU TO FORGET THE SUFFERING YOU ARE CAUSING BY DESTROYING LEBANON? It pisses me off just to know that whenever I say "in retaliation for Hezbollah" doing such and such, that I have to explain that I don't think Hezbollah should be doing such and such. Why do I feel that Hezbollah's actions must be condemned every time I mention them, when at the same time I feel like I have to apologize for condemning the actions of Israel? What kind of twisted logic has the world come to?

I've talked about this before, but I have to ask it again: Why are we willing to accept far more civilian casualties under the premise that they are unintentional? Does the value of your life suddenly decrease when you are near a military target (or in this case, a bridge, an airport, or the GODDAMN ROAD FROM SYRIA TO LEBANON)? Or perhaps the value of your life increases when a recognized terrorist organization aims a weapon at your village without having any particular military advantage in mind. Why is it legimate self-defense for an army to cause more civilian casualties on one side of the border than they are preventing on the other side? Are the civilians they are killing less innocent somehow?

If we were to follow the logic of Israel's self-defense as it crosses the border into Lebanon, streaking angrily through the sky, and this logic could somehow remain intact as it hits the ground, what could we then say that Lebanon is justified in doing to defend its own innocent civilians, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, who had no more right to be killed then did anyone else in Israel? Could Lebanon, if supplied enough military might, then defend the several hundred (or probably more) of these deaths by justifiably bombing Israel into even more oblivion? Could they bomb Israel's airports, ports, roads, and factories because all of these things allow Israel's army the support it needs to shell Beirut's neihborhoods? At what absurd point does self-defense become aggression? How can a policy of escalation ever be a justifiable self-defense policy? In fact, how can it even be self-defense at all, when that kind of self-defense is nearly guaranteed to bring more retaliation?

To return to my original position; it's time the civilians stopped being duped by these armies and countries. They are duped so easily. You can see old ladies in Lebanon leaving town on the back of a pickup truck cheering for Hezbollah. You can see CNN interviewing some Israeli woman in her home, where she asks how Condoleeza Rice can possibly call for restraint. What, she asks, would the US do if someone fired rockets into a town in Pennsylvania?

Come to think of it, she has a really good point. The US is no longer in any position to urge any restraint at all, considering that if someone from Hezbollah travelled from Lebanon to Pennsylvania to fire around some rockets, we might just turn Lebanon into a giant soccer field. Then again, we might just use it as an excuse to invade whatever unrelated country we feel like. But, ironically, we'd do it after months of debate.

But what does she think lives on the other side of that border? Vampires? Does she even know what Lebanon is going to look like at the end of all this? What kind of morality vacuum cleaner is this system of borders that we call countries? Why doesn't she realize that the civilians on the other side of the border are on her side?

I think we civilians have got to wake up and realize something. There are perfecty reasonable reasons for one person to consider another person to be on their side. There are also perfectly ridiculous, merely coincidental similarities that should not at all tell you who to ally yourself with. Here are a few examples of these meaningless coincidences.

1. Rich, and otherwise powerful people, like to draw lines on maps. These lines form into closed shapes, so that a certain group of people are "stuck" inside the shape, to varying degrees. They like to call them "countries". This is purely coincidental. True, you are bound to have something in common with people who live in your general area, and you are bound to become closer to them because of the fact that, well, things get cozy when borders are there to slow you down. However, the things you have in common with these people, which are therefore differences that you may have with someone on the other side of the imaginary line, are not really significant enough for you to "fight" them in any way. Trust me.

There are certain things that people inherit from family structures. Because you inherit these things, people who are totally retarded tend to put together these huge groups of people who supposedly have common ancesters, and therefore supposedly inherited these things together as one gigantic family. They call these things "races". These inherited things tend to fall into the three following categories, adding to the list of more things that should not separate people:

2. One of these is traditions. I don't think I have to explain that it is hardly a reason to wish someone harm because they bake bread differently from you.

3. Another, is genes. You obviously get your genes from your parents. If you think someone is your enemy because they have different genes, you're racist. I mean, I'm telling you as a service, besides the fact that it is an insult, like, "Oh, by the way, that's called 'racist', just in case you wanted a word for it." Obviously, most people consider being called racist bad. And, although I tend to believe that most people are indeed racially prejudiced to some degree or another, I don't think that many people find purposeful racism to be a valid point of view. Just, you know, neo-nazis and the KKK.

4. Religion. This might be a tough sell for some people. But I remain confident that no religion asks you to kill your friends, and when there is this common enemy to civilians, that is, bomb-wielding rocket-shooting bullet-riddling bastards wearing camoflage, I think we can consider people of different religious beliefs friends...why not?

So wait, if religion, borders, traditions, and common ancestry aren't good reasons to make people enemies, then, you may ask, what are? How about this: whether or not you are carrying a weapon and killing people. In this scenario, you and I are a common people for one very good reason, we're both innocently sitting in front of a computer, not killing anyone at all. And our enemy, obviously, are those people who accept a weapon from someone and go out and start pointing it at other people and pulling the trigger.

But wait, what about all those poor schmucks who don't know any better, and think that they must, as they are ordered to, grab a gun and start shooting? I have this to say to those people:

You have betrayed us civilians, and we're not happy about it. We believe you have made the wrong decision, morally, and strategically. We outnumber you about a thousand to one. If you are smart, you will accept our offer of unconditional surrender. You have but one thing to do to rejoin our side; put down the gun. All sins will be forgiven, and you are invited to join our army, over 6 billion strong, as we crush our common enemy; war. Don't worry, as unarmed civilians, we will kill no one (no stranglings aloud). We will simply win.

But how do we win? I think it is fairly simple. We happen to be the ones building all of the weapons, for one thing. Also, soldiers have this remarkable fear of killing unarmed civilians (well, most of the time), we might be able to use that to our advantage. We also happen to be the ones supplying gasoline for all the tanks, battleships, and...everything. Clearly, the only problem we face is lack of unification. We need to start convincing each other that we really are on the same side. I wonder how we can do that?

Landscape (Chapter 5)

"Take a look at the view from coordinates 3BCAAA49392CF399, 2399BDFE392F3FDD, 22222222222234FF."

Brian did so. "What the fuck is that?" is what Brian tried to say. Instead it was more like, "Gohrwah fglslrrrt?"

Fillip seemed to identify the question because he knew it was going to be asked, "Not sure, we're going to go there, I'm waiting for you to recover."

"Rffrr, a ohnddd reffr. Fshoh muh."

Fillip looked annoyed, "I don't really know what you're saying, but from experience I can guess that you're stupidly trying to say that we should go right now. Which would be stupid."

"Awr fllff, ffllng fzshh fuf fang fuck," Brian argued.

"Did you just say fuck?"

"Mm."

"What are you doing?"

Brian was making a motion, almost as though he were trying to free himself from the bed, except that it was impossible to find any single part of his body that was doing anything. He was greater than the sum of his parts at this point, and at this point any given part was equal to zero, his body taken as a whole seemed to somehow transcend that zero and reach some fraction of a percentage of a functioning human body.

Finally, his arm moved slightly, causing Brian to scream in pain, "RRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAHH." His voice was grainy and muffled, as though the face from which it emerged was a pile of blankets.

Fillip stood up and said, "There was definitely a reason I didn't visit you before now."

He turned to walk out the room, and then turned his head back and said, "Call me when you can...when you can call me."

Then he left, without saying good-bye or anything like that. Brian's reply was simply, "RRRRRRRRRR!" not because he was in pain, but he because he was pissed. Stupid bastard. Doesn't even care that he has to sit here all day examining his own mental frailties.

He took another look around at the coordinates. He couldn't figure out if it was the angle, or if it was what he was looking at.

Since the people in the Landscape had human mentality, simulated very close to that of a biological human, The System had to create a very crude interface with this mentality in order to give them their limited omniscience. There was a short list of philosophically researched actions that you could perform, and you could do any one of them without lifting a finger. This was lucky for Brian, because although he could sometimes lift a finger, doing so felt somewhat like hammering rusty razor blades into his knuckles. Instead, he could merely think the thing he wanted from this short list, think the coordinates into it, and he would get an interactive visual display of the view from those coordinates, piped straight into his simulated optic-nerves, bypassing whatever he would normally see with his eyes. He could then turn the view in any direction, looking all around.

But that was it. There was nothing more to the interface. You could not magnify, nor could you move in any direction. The coordinates of any given point were generated at random, that is, two consecutive points did not have consecutively numbered coordinates. If you changed a coordinate by one unit from 42894A3C3F32925D to 42894A3C3F32925E you would see a totally different place, and it could be anywhere in the Landscape - which was quite large. At this distance, the only other thing that Brad could do with the coordinates was to ask how far and in what direction they were.

You may think that these restrictions on the Landscapians' omniscience were designed to preserve the "mystery of life", since they allow you to get just enough information at a long distance to tantalize you into investigating further. This is not at all the motivation behind their design. In reality, they were chosen because they were philosophically complete. It is not easy to paraphrase what philosophical completeness is, but it may suffice to say that for this particular style Universe, there is a finite, and quite small, set of philosophically complete actions that a person in the Universe can perform outside of their normal human behavior. It is much like the set of regular solids in three-dimensional Euclidean space. There's a cube, there's a tetrahedron (a pyramid with a triangular base), there's an octahedron (two classical pyramids stuck together base to base), and there's a couple more shapes that look like something or other. Philosophy became a mathematical science long before. But not in the way you might expect. You still couldn't, for example, calculate the meaning of life - but that doesn't matter anyway, because the meaning of life was determined to be a meaningless phrase by linguistic scientists long before philosophy became a science.

Brad did at this point something very typical of a bored Landscapian; he altered one digit of the first coordinate that Fillip gave him and took a look at what he could see. This was, by the way, called goggling. When you goggle coordinates, you ask The System to show you the view there. And, as always, he saw stars. He changed another digit. Stars. Another; stars. Another: stars. Since two of the coordinates had remained the same, the only thing he knew about the relationship between all of the locations he just goggled, was that they were all in a line. They were in a line from googldefrizillion miles in one direction, to googldefrizillion miles in the other direction, anywhere along the entire width of the Universe. Brad felt rebelliously proud of this accomplishment, as though, absent the ability to probe the Universe at will, he had at least scored one point against the Universe by effectively skewering it with a straight line.

Obsession with HIV and AIDS

It almost seems perverse for me to be so interested in a disease that has nothing to do with me, and nothing to do with my profession, but the nature of the argument (although it is mostly one-sided - that may be part of what's interesting) over whether HIV causes AIDS draws me in, to the point where I had to tear myself away from it on several occasions to go to bed. To start with, I've always been a sucker for surprising opinions and lost causes. In addition, every time I find a substantial argument against something that is generally touted as "fact" I am less surprised, especially when it involves lots of money, and the government. As well, I am increasingly likely to see the potential for corruption when pharmaceutical companies are involved, and, as a corollary to that, I'm less and less surprised at the prospect that doctors are miseducated, and that health guidelines in general do not promote healthy behavior.

For this particular "controversy" which most people would not even call a controversy, I am struck by how well programmed we are to see HIV and AIDS as inseparable, to the point where we think that by logic alone we know that they cannot be separated. This, regardless of whether this causal relationship is almost absolutely certain, or totally questionable, I find to be yet another failure of the media, and almost everyone involved to educate the public in a meaningful way. What there is no getting around, what nobody will deny, is that HIV and AIDS are actually two distinct things, again, regardless of whether HIV actually causes AIDS. To put it simply, HIV is a virus, and AIDS is a condition. Of course, this all would be a lot easier if health organizations hadn't done something very interesting, which is to include the presence of HIV in the definition of AIDS.

It is not totally unheard of, from what I've read, to diagnose a condition partly based on the presence of a virus. This alone is not absurd, however, it is obviously important to adequately establish that the virus causes that condition before including it in that definition. This is where things get confusing with the AIDS-HIV connection.

Before I go any further, potentially descending into details about which I am not at all an expert, and which could require much research and analysis to even make sense out of, I should bring up an important point: my obsession with this topic stems in part from what is, to me, a debate so complex, and so emotionally charged, and so, how can I put this...permeated with a sense that, by God someone - many someones...with PhDs - absolutely must have already debated this and come to the proper answer with adequate proof years ago, that even educated people (eh hem...doctors) seem to get sucked into making strange assumptions and logical mistakes in order to defend what they cannot imagine being wrong. There's a good reason for this, too. If this simple statement is false, "HIV causes AIDS", it could represent the largest scientific scandal in known history. Science isn't supposed to propagate mistakes, it is supposed to correct itself. But, as I alluded to before, science is increasingly "bought" by corporations, and then suppressed by disbelief in the fact that it could be wrong for so long.

I can't think of any convincing way to argue this, but I think that I have become very good at reading debates and understanding whether a claim is dubious (ie. "conspiracy theory") or reasonable. I think I have one important prerequisite, which is the ability to consider both sides of an argument without becoming emotionally invested in one side or the other, and perhaps more importantly, to realize when I do become invested in one side, and be honest about it with myself. I have practiced at this for many years, starting with my internal debate about my own religious beliefs. Of course, the other prerequisite is that I'm good at following the details of an argument, and understanding the underlying logic. If you can believe these things about me, even a little bit, then it may be meaningful to you that I believe the "dissenters" on the HIV-AIDS connection are intelligent, honest, relevant, and not motivated by outside causes.

Most people who argue against "consensus" try to tout these qualities in those who agree with them, but they are almost always wrong. For example: anti-evolutionists have obvious external motivations, and usually make arguments that are paper-thin, easily rebutted with a better explanation of evolution. They often tout long lists of scientists who have signed on to their cause who either have no particular relevance or relevant education, or don't even know what they are signing. In contrast, AIDS-HIV dissenters are often Nobel laureates who have invented the very tests they believe are being misused to argue that HIV causes AIDS. They have no ideological reason to argue that HIV does not cause AIDS. They have everything to lose, and in the case of Peter Duesberg, the most well-known HIV-AIDS dissenter, have lost quite a bit for the position they take. (Duesberg quickly went from winning grants again and again for his research, to the inability to fund any research at all, and achieved scorn from the scientific community almost unprecedented in modern times.) And this is where you must trust my analysis, or perform your own: every time you even wonder whether the dissenter's arguments are oversimplified, it is backed up thoroughly by evidence and logic.

But if you haven't been already, allow me to educate you on something very central to this debate. Eventually, all sides of the debate must rest on whether or not real research exists that is powerful enough to prove their point. A used car salesman can speak eloquently and without logical error, and at length, about the car he wants to sell you, but in the end, the question of the quality of the car lies in the evaluation of the car itself. You cannot prove a point by logic, honesty, and intelligence alone. And I can say that it is very unlikely that you or I will ever personally review the available research on this topic. The best we can do is judge the character of those we trust to review the research. What we expect, and what we are often terrifying wrong about, is that based on talking to the used car dealer at length, or perhaps having him debate the quality of the car with someone who disagrees with him, that we can draw some reasonable conclusion about the car. In the end, we surmise that the car dealer will expose his character to us. We think that if we listen to him long enough, engaging him in enough discussion, and observing him in discussion with others, and amid various different scenarios, that he can't help but give away his true intelligence, his true motivations, and his true qualifications.

Does this kind of trust sound risky to you? It is, and I believe that many problems, if not most, in today's world, can be drawn to the fact that we do not give this trust enough careful consideration. Instead we place trust based on any number of arbitrary reasons. And increasingly, we seem to believe that this trust is not necessary at all, that we can somehow independently know the answer to whether HIV causes AIDS even though only the tiniest minority of us will actually look at enough of the data to draw that conclusion. When that happens, we place trust without even knowing it, obviously at our own peril.

Just consider the fact that the data itself can be wrong, we must trust those who documented it. This is one obvious reason that we should not believe something until it can be reproduced by other parties, hopefully again and again. In this particular case, the dissenters argue that the assertion that HIV causes AIDS is based largely on one bit of research. As you might guess, the consensus counter-argues that many studies have backed up this causality again and again. The truth of the matter lies in whether, as the dissenters believe, each of these studies has proven ill-suited for testing the hypothesis.

If nothing else, I am most convinced about the character of the consensus by this simple, yet little debated assertion: every case of Tuberculosis would be called AIDS if everyone with Tuberculosis had HIV. The definition of AIDS is such an amalgam of different symptoms, that the question of whether an individual with such symptoms has AIDS becomes the question of whether they have HIV, and if they don't, they are diagnosed with something else. Quite simply, there are so few cases of people with AIDS that do not have HIV, because anyone who has AIDS without having HIV is diagnosed with something else. (This sub-point is debated at length.)

This argument is even more stark when applied to Africa. In Africa, the ability to perform more explicit tests for HIV are in such short supply, that doctors are given criteria for diagnosing AIDS which could also be the diagnosis for any number of other conditions, conditions already plentiful for other reasons.

But alas, my summarizing on this matter is mere shadow-puppetry compared to the detailed analysis you can find elsewhere. When I search "HIV does not cause AIDS" in google, I'm confronted with a host of pages that seem to be arguing for and against the hypothesis. What I am most struck by, reading a page picked at random, is the elements of this page that serve to illustrate again why I find this debate complicated, and again why I think that HIV might not cause AIDS. It was this page. It lists many bits of evidence that HIV causes AIDS. It is copy written 2004. In 1994 this article was published in Reason, arguing for the reevaluation of the HIV-AIDS hypothesis. Reason then solicited letters to reply. Clicking a link at the bottom allows you to read these letters, and the counter-reply by the original authors. What I find interesting is that the letters written in 1994 bring up many points listed on that page from 2004, and that the counter-reply does a very good job refuting those points. In fact, when I read the letters, I was astounded by the strength of their arguments, and when I read the counter-reply, it seemed to pull the rug right out from under those arguments. Is it possible that ten years afterwards there is still no better evidence, and no further discussion of what seemed to be refuted in 1994? It is hard to say, because as always the world is rife with false-authority, those who think they know the answers, and appear to know them, but do not. That makes it hard to weed through the trash and find out if the argument continued, or if it was just ignored in preference to reiterating the original claims.

If you think I'm crazy now, perhaps this nugget will somehow make this seem like less of an out-dated conspiracy theory: I first became interested in this topic when I read an article discussing it in a recent Harper's magazine. The article reiterated the points made in Reason in 1994, and lamented the fact that the debate is still stalled. It opened with a story about a woman who was most likely misdiagnosed with HIV, given nevirapine, and died from the toxicity of it. It then goes on to question whether nevirapine and it's predecessor AZT is better than nothing at all for preventing HIV transmission from mother to fetus, documenting a series of corrupt trials for HIV drugs, and the seeming corruption of the entire community of AIDS researchers, because of their dependence on grants from those who have already made up their minds, or have a lot of money to make if the right conclusions are found. It eventually goes on to retell the story of Peter Duesberg, and the surprising way in which the scientific community gravitated to the belief that HIV causes AIDS, to the point of exiling those who questioned the evidence.

To me, the best way to find the truth of a matter which you cannot personally observe, is to let those who know what they are talking about freely debate it. If, at some point in the debate, a claim is refuted, and that refutation is mysteriously left unanswered, and the original claim is mysteriously reiterated again and again despite a standing challenge to it, I'd say that's a pretty strong argument that the ball has been dropped, and the people making the original claim might be wrong. You can't answer all questions forever, but it seems like if you know what you're talking about and honestly care about the truth, you would take the time to answer the most prominent and well argued points. I believe that on this topic, the ball has been dropped by those who say that HIV causes AIDS, and it's collecting dust somewhere under the bleachers.

Update (years later): This article is embarrassing to me. This is a very good summary of evidence that HIV causes AIDS, which is what I couldn't find when I first wrote this article. I would argue that part of the difficulty I had in finding convincing arguments was that most people believe what they believe (about this and other subjects) in a religious way. In other words, they believe it because they trust someone else, not because they know a detailed description of where the information came from. Trust is a practical necessity in day-to-day life - most people don't have time to study every claim. However, what muddies a debate is when you aren't willing to admit that you believe something mostly on faith, and instead trot out a bunch of half-remembered anecdotes, and when these fail to be convincing (mostly because they've been morphed by memory and media-like summarizing), resort to impugning the character of whoever doesn't believe what you believe. This sort of thing can be seen in something as simple as labeling people "AIDS denialists", which not only associates any argument about AIDS with the least respectable form of skepticism - that AIDS or HIV doesn't exist - but also is obviously derived from the term "Holocaust denialist". This stops just short of calling someone a nazi for expressing doubt about the effect of a virus. This is the opposite of scientific, so when you do it in the name of science, you're just reinforcing distrust in science. Scientific method is never perfect, and research is sometimes complicated enough that its conclusions can be influenced by powerful entities, but the only reasonable weapon against "bad science" is lots of independent people wielding "good science".

If you come across someone who doesn't believe something and you think it is important, do everyone a favor by not regarding them as crazy or evil. Instead tell them why you believe it, admit if you don't understand it very well yourself, and dig up some good evidence. Irrational beliefs proliferate when you create an "us" vs "them" mentality.

I don't think that everything I wrote in the article above is wrong. You might say that evidence that HIV causes AIDS was still shaky until 1993 (see the link above) and that Peter Duesberg was actually right until that point. It may be that between the time I wrote the article above and right now, the internet got up to speed in such a way that my shoddy internet-centric research only recently would have revealed the best arguments after they'd been available elsewhere for 15 years already. I still think the main thrust of this article is interesting, which is to question how people arrive at beliefs that they can't verify themselves. I can easily make one phone call to prove that the world is round, but no single person can observe enough to see that a virus you must identify through a certain process is the only explainable cause for a condition that might not occur until 10 or 15 years later.

Comment on "AIDS reappraisal" page.

I thought this particular commenting extravaganza was worth reposting here. It is taken from a wikipedia article about "AIDS reappraisal", which basically refers to statements about AIDS that are considered by many as fact, but which a small minority believe to be suspicious and worth considerable reevaluation. Among these, is the almost incredulous idea that HIV might not even cause AIDS. The first time I encountered that particular argument I thought it was insane...but it's beginning to grow on me. My original reaction, and indeed the typical reaction of most people to the questioning of an entrenched belief, is an interesting illustration in the lines of trust. This topic, the path of information along lines of trust, has become more and more significant to me. Just the thought that we must trust certain entities, organizations, and sometimes even people based on "type", leads one to wonder how we manage to keep anything straight.

It suffices to say that I now believe paths of trust are easily corruptible, and susceptible to patterns of propogation that are not obvious, often not benificial to determing the truth of a matter, and more and more these days, often taken advantage of. From the transparent way in which e-mail forwards take advantage of this, to the subversive way in which large well-funded organizations and corporations also do, it becomes apparent to me that any investigation that requires trust must be conducted like a murder investigation. We must analyze motives, ask whether the suspect has the opportunity to deceive, and sometimes even look at the character of the entity that is your would-be source. Whichever side of this particular argument you might fall on, the argument helps to illustrate the role of trust in society.

Subtle but important bias in article, and the likely susceptibility of more

I'm writing this because I think it is important and I don't see it anywhere else on the talk page. I believe that there is an inherent danger for this page to become a weapon for either side of the argument, in terms of public opinion. This is because a) people have grown to trust wikipedia, and although it might not affect a significant portion of the public, we shouldn't take for granted that many people will read it, b) emotions run high on both sides of the argument c) the debate is often very technical, and very dependent on not simply the existence of many sources, but also the quality and veracity of those sources, and the questions of quality and veracity are themselves complicated. In this situation, because it will take a huge effort to elaborate on point-counterpoint arguments, the article will be, for quite some time, if not indefinitely, a very short summary of these arguments, and even the smallest editing details will lead people to draw conclusions one way instead of another. For example, there is a danger that the article will appear to be in favor of whichever side is given the last word on any given subject, in lieu of the fact that the reply to that last word may exist and is simply not yet written down here. Solving these problems are difficult, and I'm not at all sure how to do it, which is why I think it should be discussed.

The "last word" bias already exists heavily - almost every section is arranged in such a way that the "dissadents" give a point of contention with mainstream theory, and then mainstream theory answers that point, followed by the next section. This makes it look simpler than it is, as though the answer to the dissadent's contention has been debunked. This is especially suspicious when a person like me, who knows little on this subject, knows of a further argument. For example, the article sites "numerous studies - conducted in Africa", besides the fact of this being a vast summary (almost necessary in an article this short), and having no citation, I know of articles that discuss the possibility of widespread corruption within organizations and companies that oversee such research, which include in some cases the elimination of control groups. While this is obviously open to debate, that debate should itself be alluded to somehow, and in all the relavent places, not necessarily just once.

The other bias that seems obvious to me at this point, is that the citations are very lacking in these rebuttals to dissadent arguments. This is understandable, as obviously someone has to do the work, and you are more likely to do the work for whatever side you agree with than the other side, but still, someone needs to do the work, otherwise the rebuttals appear as though they are simply thrown on the page by someone who just didn't want to stand by and let the dissadent's point of view go unanswered.

The point counter-point problem is difficult to solve, and seems inherent in many wikipedia articles, and, let's face it, any article on a debated subject. The most obvious long-term solution is to exhaustively include all notable points, counter-points, counter-counter-points, etc., but this is obviously very difficult, and is not a strategy for making the article unbiased in the short term. My best suggestion for a short-term solution would be to followup each section by a very neutral analysis of what the arguments rest on, so that the ball more clearly rests in the court of the readers and editors. For example, in the "AIDS treatment toxicity" section, we could write, "The weight of the argument regarding antiretroviral treatments lies in the strength of research performed on these treatments. The evaluation of this research bodes obvious consequences for pharmaceutical companies, governments investing time and effort in the research, the careers of those scientists who argue for or against those treatments, and the emotions of patients who have been positively or negatively affected by them. These consequences will just as obviously impact any given review of the research, and even the veracity of the information that such reviews are based upon."

I believe it is true that many "dissadent" or "out of the mainstream" views are merely conspiracy theories, but those cases usually involve dissadents who have very simple arguments that can be easily defeated, I don't believe that is the case here, and I don't believe this should be treated as such. It is quite obvious that pharmaceutical companies have deep pockets, deep motivations, and that there are governments and activists who, once swayed in a direction will exert massive powers over public opinion. I'm not trying to argue that the dissadents are correct, as I don't think I have the answer to that question, I'm trying to argue that there is some substantial reasoning behind their logic, even when they are arguing against many years of research. Essentially, that research needs to become the topic of this article.

Another note: The original AIDS article states HIV causing AIDS as fact, which I can understand is difficult to avoid...but perhaps more importantly, the reappraisal section is very small, and includes very little of the information found here, which this topic look like an aside, or, in other words, a conspiracy theory of little note.

Sorry, this is wordy and I'm adding even more here: It is also important, I think, to expand the history so that we can see why people are suspicious of mainstream thought in the first place. For example, Professor Duesberg was thoroughly castigated and virtually exiled from discussion of the subject when he first brought up these contentions, in some cases even refused the right to reply to arguments against him, which illustrates the emotional inertia that may make many people wary of arguments that involve "consensus of the majority". Cesoid 04:01, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

The AIDS article states that that HIV causes AIDS precisely because that is a fact. This topic is a conspiracy theory of little note. So so far, so good. - Nunh-huh 03:30, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

I hate to be on the "this isn't a conspiracy theory" side of a debate, because there are so many contentions worthy of the label "conspiracy theory", but given nothing more than the notability and relavence of the people listed in the The AIDS dissadent community (if it is in fact true), it would be extremely hard for me to dismiss this as such. Please offer more useful comments as to why this is a conspiracy theory if you think it is. To summarize my motivations here: I don't want wikipedia to marginalize the voice of a minority when that minority has arguments that are not easily written off. To me, the definition of consipiracy theory is just that, an argument against majority opinion that can be easily refuted. For example, while UFO sightings cannot easily be proven to not be aliens, it is usually quite easy to refute that there is significant evidence for such claims. Or, for another example, you can easily refute many anti-evolution claims by simply better explaining what evolution is. The arguments in this case aren't like that, they are not explained easily as misunderstandings, or as overstepping assertions, they are substantial, regardless of whether it proves true that HIV causes AIDS, among other statements contested. Cesoid 04:01, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

Those advocating this particular conspiracy theory aren't generally clinicians, and are neither as numerous or notable as you seem to think they are. In fact, the minority has no arguments that merit serious consideration. I'm not sure on what basis you are characterizing them as substantial: they're not. If you think they are, you don't understand them. - Nunh-huh 04:13, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

I did not say they were "numerous". They at least seem to be notable, because those listed are quoted as contributing substantially to AIDS treatments. Perhaps this is wrong, if so, maybe it would actually be useful to put that in the article. Also, how is a clinician in a particularly good position to debate this? Their work is based upon AIDS research. While I'm sure they know substantially more than, for example, me, they can only base their diagnosis on available testing procedures, and base their treatment on available treatment research.

What should be more obvious than any of these points, is how it is not helpful to discuss this with single-sentence token arguments, or worse, assertions that your opinion is correct merely because it is correct, or merely because I must not understand. If you think about it, those are the true earmarks of a conspiracy theorist.

Also, there are many assertions here, not just whether or not HIV causes AIDS flat out. You can also ask whether it causes AIDS alone, or whether, for example, AZT is a good treatment for it. These debates are all separable, and efforts to combine them hardly argue in favor of a coherent standpoint. Some of these points are argued by more than a small minority. For example, Mothering magazine, a very widely read publication, talks about pregnant women who refuse to use AZT because they believe it does more harm than good. There are studies suggesting that Vitamin A supplements work better than AZT. Again, maybe they're wrong, why not document their wrongness instead of just stating it as fact?

For what it's worth, I think that denial of the existence of HIV is a conspiracy theory. Cesoid 04:58, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

I'd ask that if you visit the original discussion, which is editable (and likely to include further discussion by the time you get to it), please only contribute where it might be helpful. As it is, these talk pages get hacked all up and often become useless, leading me to strongly believe that there is a better way to have an argument, and that I know exactly what it is and should be implementing the damn thing right now. The original discussion is here, and the article we're talking about in the discussion is here.

Landscape (chapter 4)

This is written to the tune of a baby screaming.

Brad tried for several weeks to play the same game over and over again. He came to refer to it in his mind as "The Devastation Challenge". The name itself had no bearing on the the description of the game, it was instead a growing realization of the word Devastation, burned into the inside of his view of everything, wherever he looked, as he involuntarily replayed his own obliteration over and over and over and over. He began to commonly refer to this - again, to himself - as "A Meeting With The Ground". The recovery center's attendants did not help at all to distract from these rememberings, as nearly every day they mentioned that it was the greatest degree of dismemberment they had ever seen. He also could not tell them to shut up, because, as proof of their own point, his jaw and the internals of his mouth did not do anything for which Brad could find a purpose.

The Devastation Challenge was a game of mental endurance. It was also a game of the illusion of mental control. It illustrated that you cannot, as you think, refrain from thinking words for more than a few seconds. Even as Brad attempted to shut down his internal dialog, he would receive notifications from some recess of his mind that were vacuous comments such as, �stopped talking�, and in about 10 seconds, �hard not to think words while looking at something interesting�.

What's more interesting, perhaps, than the realization of your own inability to suppress incessant babbling in your mental echo chamber, is how incredibly stupid this babbling becomes as it escapes, as though stupider thoughts are smaller and lighter than smart ones and thus more capable of fitting through barriers. But what is perhaps even more interesting, is the apparent interpretation made by your subconscious of this challenge, which becomes quite obvious when a) the imagined verbal brain leaks are imagined as being whispers, and b) these leaks appear visually, as though printed on paper. Your subconscious turns out to be a blithering idiot, trying to skirt the rules of class by passing notes and talking out of the corner of its mouth. For Brad this was proof positive of the disconnectedness of the mind. It was proof that the mind was not a single voice moving its bulk as one piece in a purposeful direction, but was instead a noisy theater of morons, finding intelligence only through some kind of averaging scheme or filtering mechanism, like one tired editor and a roomful of monkeys with typewriters. The mind could not even come close to following its own rules, or by-and-large actually understand them.

And thank God, Brad thought, because sex would be pretty fucking boring if it wasn't for this idiotic disconnect. The human mind, modeled impeccably by the System, had originally evolved its endlessly interesting take on the act of procreation because it was not capable of propagating the species without programming sex in as a hard-coded ultra-pleasure. In a machine capable of sweeping generalizations and logical leaps, this seemingly anomalous artifact of pleasure was interpreted again and again, like passing tourists observing a mountain's facade, or anthropologists picking carefully through the landscape of an arcane system of ruins, again and again. Having sex is so much fun because when you have sex, all those drooling twisted components of your mind are having an orgy. This explained, at least to Brad, why there were so many wonderful - and completely valid - ways of having it, none of which had anything useful to add to the efficiency of impregnation.

It was as Brad was leaking the thought, �shit, the wall corners make it harder� that one of these wonderful ways walked through the door. His name, which Brad liked to speak outloud in hexadecimal at the plateau of passion, was 4FFAEE342ECA. And yes, I know what you're thinking, but think about this: Not only are some of you pre-singularities boring enough to think that same-sex sex is wrong, but many more of you are also so stupid that you don't even remember at first that our genders are not physically realized by your definition of �physical�, that our bodies are simulations in a super-duper-computer, and furthermore, you are also so vapidly behind the times that you might actually think this makes a difference, that, for one, the reality of a thing is at all dependent on the medium of that reality. You dopes think your reality is so real that any other reality is �virtual�, like stick figures on a canvas laughing and pointing at other stick figures drawn on paper.

Also, Brad wouldn't settle for mere gay sex at this point in his life, that would be boring. His boyfriend had previously been his girlfriend, and before that had been devoid of sexuality and free of genitalia, and had before that been a female for the first time. Plus, right now he had two penises, but this was actually becoming an annoyance.

The bastard hadn't even visited him until now. We'll call him Fillip, with an �F�, so that you can verbalize it, because we know you like to verbalize things, much in the same way that Brad was still trying not to have internal dialog amidst the new challenge of being pissed off at someone in the room, but was failing horribly with something so child-like it could almost make him cry, which was the following: �piss on him if he comes close enough�.

Aspirations

So here's the deal, with no disclaimer, unless that was a disclaimer...

Let's start again.

So here's the deal, I'm a genius. There are a lot of geniuses in the world, 1 in every thousand or so, if you go by IQ tests, which I don't, and neither does Marilyn Vos Savant, but I happen to be...not your average genius. But let's forget about the question of how much of a genius I am, and instead just focus on the idea of what someone does when they are very smart.

I've written a lot before on how smart I am, and on how disappointed I am with myself, and quite often where one appears the other will follow, but let's just accept for the moment that I must consider those things from time to time, and therefore have reason to discuss them - albeit, in a one-way venue. Let's consider, for a moment, the job of your typical genius.

Your typical genius may have a very narrow form of aptitude, or may be in fact capable of anything, but only interested professionally in one or two things. I'm making sweeping assumptions here. But what I envision, is that your typical genius learns interest in a certain thing, like maybe...cars, and then breathes cars like air for the rest of their life, loving every minute they spend with a car, and excelling at car maintenance to the point of notability, or perhaps even riches. Perhaps they will even do something totally new with a car, and patent that new thing, and sell it...to a car company. But what I'm thinking is, more likely than not, since geniuses really are a dime-a-dozen, they'll just be happy proficiently repairing and enhancing cars, and making good money doing it. Now I'm talking about money.

When money talks, I don't like to listen, but lately...

It's not really the money. And, unfortunately, this little story may not teach me, because I do not feel that I am a dime-a-dozen genius. Where am I going with this? I think I've forgotten.

Isn't it natural to want to live to your full potential? Or perhaps a more important question: isn't it natural to want to live to some reasonable fraction of your full potential? Isn't it natural, if I feel that I am a great writer, and a great inventor, and a great philosopher, and a great theorist, and a great - isn't it natural that I would want to do just one, at least one of those things, and do it great, and have others appreciate and benefit from it? Is this a rhetorical question?

Should it be sufficient for me just to be "happy"? How do you be happy if you don't have everything you need to be happy? Should I be able to be happy because I'm alive, I'm living well, I have a wife I love, and I have a wonderful daughter so cute that common strangers want to eat her alive? Wouldn't I, if I had no one to compare myself with, or if my comparison only proved that I was like everyone else, feel content to just live? Could I possibly want to realize this greatness only because I want to prove my inner greatness? Or is this ideal - the ideal of being compelled by the needs of other people - a real thing that is actually telling me to do what I think I can do so that other people can benefit? Why do people with great talents want to use them to actuate greatness?

Do I need to know the answer? Isn't it a winning situation for both sides anyway? If I do something worth-while, and rare, I could benefit both monetarily, and from just having a creative outlet. And in the process, others may benefit from what I produce. So what is the blinking problem?

What is the blinking blinking blinking problem??

The only blinking problem is that this shit isn't happening. My talents are leading me no where except barely staying ahead of the game at work...or, you might say, staying just behind the game at work. What's worse, I feel like I know exactly why, without knowing the why of that why. My most persevering and easily performable talent is writing, which I only do sporadically, and which I never advance beyond cesoid.com.

But when I think about it for just a second, my reasons for not doing more with my writing are so immediately plain that they make me want to shoot myself, or more accurately, not write. And yet even now as I try to put them to words I only seem to come up with things that I can easily refute.

reason: I don't like the subject of my writing, I don't come up with anything interesting to write about.
refutation: I've been interested in the last several things I've written about, and I think they are actually interesting to other people.

reason: I hate almost all popular novels, and feel simultaneously repulsed by what people expect from books and incapable of producing those things that they want.
refutation: I still love Douglas Adams with a passion. His writing was all-together popular, accessible, meaningful, and not beyond my skill level.

reason: I don't know what to do with my writing, who might want it, how I might "take the next step".
refutation: I have never even looked. It is almost guaranteed that there are places online I can get my work published, that is, if I ever wrote something to publish. That's at least a starting point.

reason: I don't have to time to practice writing.
refutation: The computer screen.

reason: I can't finish a story because I'm so obsessed with making the story realistic.
refutation: Neither I, nor "readers", nor anyone really, requires writing to be a spot-on model of the way something would really work. Writing is not science. What it explains about reality is almost always broader than the specifics of the story it tells.

reason: I don't read enough to write.

Hmmm. At first, this seems like a valid point. It had me convinced, and it usually does, but there's something I very easily forget.

refutation: The only thing I don't read is fiction. I read news and magazine articles like a junkie. What does this mean?

I'm not a journalist because I've never been assertive enough to want to bother people for the information. I've always seen fiction as a clear path through which I could navigate without fear of telling people to believe things that turn out to be false. I've never known how to do original research. But at the same time, even as I attempt to write fiction, I am always concerned with the truth of the matter, and my perverse solution has always been to hunker-down and attack the truth blindly with the blunt edge of sheer brain-power. In the face of having to fish around the unknown waters of learning real things from real people, I've always recoiled with horror and hidden behind my shield of intelligence, which, though surprisingly accurate in the face of zero information, still cannot possibly replicate reality well enough to obviate the necessity of knowing reality itself.

Plus, there is that fear that the only way to unearth any information of value is to invest a massive amount of time and effort, and risk coming up with nothing. What happens if my life is really incompatible with my desires? I hate that thought with a passion, to think of giving up what I have makes me angry, and in fact, I am angry to think that I might use that as an excuse. My life does not prevent me from doing any of this, and should not act as some rebuttal.

I'm going to go out on a fantastic limb here and assert that I can write useful things without necessarily calling people on the phone to research those things. I can write fiction, and hell, with the amount of information available online, I can meaningfully pull together previously published information to write commentary on life outside my imagination. Let's face the fact: All that was ever really required was some confidence, and the time and effort to improve myself. I had enough confidence to spend 6 years writing a book...maybe now I can take the time and make the effort necessary to write stories that people actually want to read. As bizarre as it may sound, the one thing I need to change most to make this happen is my belief that I don't really want to do it. I'm always talking myself out of everything.

But just think about it for a second, Todd, what are you always willing to spend extra time on? What do you review and redo over and over in order to make it better? What are you willing to stay up late doing, on an empty stomach, in the face of consequences? What charges you up? What gets blood into your brain? It's always been the same thing, just involving different audiences. It's always reading and writing.

My Liberally Biased Commenting Scheme

I think that I am slowly becoming a hit-and-run-comment junkie. Throughout the years I have occasionally thrown my comments in on various articles I've come across, but now I've done it several times in one week. This may sound tame, but what is interesting about it are the details:

I tend to be commenting on sites I don't want to even look at.
My comments have been directed against the weight of the articles. Basically, it was something I strongly disagreed with.
My inclination to see the responses to my comments is at times almost nothing.

My comments are actually findable through google, because I always tag them with "cesoid", and so far, I have found nobody else who uses such a name (and hopefully they don't because they might ruin my reputation!). But when you search, you mostly find older, less combative ones ranked higher. (When I searched, I actually found one that I did not remember, and which is barely familiar at all after reading it.)

More and more they are defending a "political" viewpoint, such as at News Busters here. In this case, I actually returned and "defended" my comments from other comments. In fact, my comments and follow-up comments were so lengthy that they eventually amounted to more content than the article itself, and, I would argue, more meaningful content. (Note that if you want to actually leave comments there, you might find that once you apply for a user account it takes a week to actually be approved. That's what happened to me when I first wanted to comment on this. By the time I was approved, I had forgotten what I was going to comment on, and ended up spending quite a bit of time trying to figure it out.)

News Busters describes its purpose as "Exposing and Combating Liberal Media Bias". I'd have to say that they are doing poorly at this. To them, as to many people who write about politics from a particularly conservative - or liberal - perspective, bias seems to mean: any viewpoint expressed by anyone on any issue that can in any way be construed to support whatever side of the political spectrum is opposite my own. It seems to escape them, for one, that someone who is not hiding their liberal leaning, or in fact has deliberately billed themselves as liberal, is not being "exposed" by their articles. It also seems to escape them that there are different kinds of liberals and different kinds of conservatives.

It seems that I feel more and more compelled to remark on statements that seem "racist" to me, but are thrown about in day-to-day banter by people who don't seem to see the racism in them. One example is the so-called "Israeli-Palestinian conflict", which I commented on here. In the article quoted, the Moyal suggested that a Palestinian neighborhood must be destroyed in order to save an Israeli city. Self-defense against terrorism through operations that are massively deadly to civilians have become so common that it is possible to read a statement such as this and not realize the appropriate category for it: genocide. The US alone has shown by its operations in Iraq and Afghanistan that people are to us like chess pieces; some nationalities are worth more than others.

What amazes me more than anything is the ability of humans to propagate racism after they are victimized by it, and I think nothing illustrates this better than stealing land from Palestinians and using it to create Israel in response to the massive massacres of Jews during World War II. (Note that it may have been possible to create Israel without such stealing, although, I may be wrong. It is also possible that some of, or quite a bit of, Israeli territory was expropriated in some kind of fair trade...but it doesn't seem likely does it?) Rather than learning empathy from such occurrences, people often seem more likely to learn to play by similar rules. And the Palestinians are no exception, as some of them have responded to Israel by deliberately blowing up its civilians on many occasions. But what is perhaps actually surprising is that people continuously believe that groups of people all have the same opinion. Palestinians all want to destroy and kill Israelis. Israelis are all in favor of the military operations that kill Palestinians.

In an even more twisted racial logic, you are now racist if you don't like the Israeli government. This illustrates one of the downsides of a country that represents a race; the two are often identified as one, increasing racism among those who disapprove of the actions of the country, and decreasing dissent among those who do not want to be labeled antisemitic.

Of course, even countries as diverse as the US bind people together enough to create viewpoints about those outside the US that are akin to racism. Nothing shows this more than arguments about immigration. This is summed up in this article, on which I commented very briefly. Everyone who manages to be in this country legally deserves the benefits of living here, whereas anyone else does not. Again, this reasoning is so commonplace that to read such a thing may not immediately bring racism to mind. But what else can it be? It is not an issue of "race" as commonly defined, but it is still a group of people defined by circumstance, rather than choice.

Even more bizarre than granting rights to people based on location, probing this logic deeper seems to indicate that whether or not you deserve something is based on luck, as luck often determines whether or not you can immigrate legally. Of course, as we are told again and again, illegal immigrants have committed a crime, they should only immigrate if they can do so legally. It seems an especially sick twist of humanity to expect someone to deny themselves and their family an advantage in order to avoid burdening a great many people with a slight disadvantage. A good metaphor would be expecting a starving traveler not to eat a single berry on a bush because it will deprive the not-starving-but-hungry people who live nearby each a small portion of that berry. But more importantly, that berry is stolen!

I also find it interesting that the author of the site above refers to illegal immigrants as "illegals". It's one of those nuances of speech that seems to reveal something about the speaker, that perhaps she doesn't see them as people, but in reality I think it is more likely to be some part of speech she incorporated from someone else - who perhaps actually does feel that way. To her credit, her entry on Zarqawi speaks with disdain about those who "danced in the streets" when he was killed, which is actually an extreme perspective by most standards, but to me has a stubborn humanity to it. Although, to be quite honest, despite agreeing that it is sick and twisted to celebrate someone's death, Zarqawi happens to be one of those few people whose overwhelming drive to kill others has managed to wear away even my belligerent regard for human life. If given the choice, the opportunity, and the guarantee of immunity, I might have shot him myself. Except, of course, that I'm one of those liberally biased people who thinks that it won't make much difference, and probably wasn't worth the money we spent on the bomb. In fact, I must be very liberally biased, because what I think is that bombing him probably did more harm than good, because, as many stereotypical conservatives would point out, I want to appease the terrorists.

PS: I've lately begun to develop the theory that, most people who pin such opinions on their political opposites (ie. liberals want to appease terrorists) know that they are exaggerations, and don't mean them literally, and that liberals, for example, make the mistake of believing that most conservatives believe it literally, to the point where both sides end up spending more time rebutting exaggerations than they do producing an original position. Then again, if that were true, it would be hard to believe that conservatives believe a single word that comes out of Bush's mouth...wait, did I just exaggerate?

Left Of Center

After years of research into stereophonic marketing, it was discovered that any message coming from just off to the left a bit, no matter how ridiculous, would become at least believable. The precise angle for this was measured at 18.459 degrees off-center, with a very small margin of error - about one thousandth of a degree. In fact, some marketing campaigns that were targeted with poor precision inadvertently led to the discovery of a totally different stereophonic effect at 18.454 degrees left-of-center. This effect was far from positive - at least from an advertising perspective. The only solace for those fired over the mistake was that they knew from that point on exactly how to get off in two tenths of a second and forget whatever they just heard. While it was argued that most TV already had this quality, that fact was itself easily forgotten if you are hearing it through the right kind of headphones.

It wasn't until years later that the Greites thought to combine the two effects, which lead to what we now know as the Greite Revolution. The Greites were able to take advantage because they knew something that few others did. They knew from years of perverse rituals that anything said to someone during the peak of sexual ecstasy would become fact in the mind that person. That is, as long as it was already at least believable. So when the Greites opened a local restaurant and bought some air-time to broadcast a commercial that was seemingly about hamburgers, the result was both the largest conversion ever witnessed, and the greatest number of people to ever simultaneously orgasm. It wasn't long until the conversions spread across the world like a virus, emanating from TV towers like jism, impregnating the world with the foolishness of Greite philosophy.

As we all know, the revolution was short-lived; 2 days 55 minutes and 32 seconds to be precise. The Greites, with their single-minded marketing strategy, were really just advertising novices, and didn't even know the Second Law of Marketing; any ad not repeated at least 20 times a day for 2 weeks would not only be wiped from the minds of your audience, but also eventually have a reverse effect. While this served to end the Greite Revolution, it actually turned out quite well for the Greites themselves. This is because a central Greite belief, and one, of course, appearing in all of their ad campaigns, was that you should never give the original Greites money.

By coincidence, 2 days 55 minutes and 32 seconds is also exactly how long the Falsot War lasted. Also by coincidence, the Falsot War ended because everyone involved was facing just the right way at the right time when two bombs, one 18.459 degrees to left, and one 18.454 degrees to the left, caused two entire armies to pass out from pure pleasure, and to believe very ardently BLEEEEWWWWWYY when they awakened.

Some scholars, pointing out the sheer improbability of tens of thousands of people all facing the right way at the right time - to the thousandth of a degree - declared that this never could have actually happened. Others, with their headphones firmly in place, declared that they had no idea what the scholars were talking about. Still others, it was said, were able to believe this improbability without the aid of stereophonic marketing tools. They claimed, as many had before, that such coincidences were the product of a Universal law. The origins of this law, after it had been handed down for centuries through obscure textbooks, were unknown, except some think that the mysterious name given to it referred to its original discoverer. It was called "The Douglas Adams Effect".

Computing Power Singularity

Not surprisingly, many of my ideas are borne out of my want to revise other people's ideas. Although it is not surprising, and true of many other people, I think that I am especially good at it. I'm good at criticism, or so I think. I'm at least sure that I'm good at pointing out errors, I find real problems in an idea where others do not, especially when it involves new concepts.

I found this review of time travel tantalizing. Although, I suspect that if I knew more about general relativity and quantum mechanics, I would realize that the time travel technology was crap, but what I'm more interested in is the author's attempt to predict the future, what kinds of things will have happened by the time that time travel is invented. He seems to be doing well at first, including when he notes that evolution for human beings has been halted, and is now about to skew into an insane direction. But eventually, I notice a lot of problems.

I was also tantalized by the same prospect of predicting the future on this "Wikia" (formerly Wikicities) wiki. But, compared to the article above, it's a steaming pile of shit. I probably shouldn't say that, because it always has the potential to improve. However, given the direction it is going, it's hard to believe that will happen anytime soon.

In short, the wiki is totally obsessed with technology above all else, and also mindlessly anchored to a sort of "canon" of which technologies we will see, to the point where it ignores the fact that some of them may be outright rejected by the populace, or that some other external (i.e. not technology based) event may prevent the development of a particular technology, or rearrange the expected order, or, most interestingly, may cause the development of some technology that nobody expected. In fact, it sort of ignores the fact that one technology could cause us to stray so far from the future we expect, that it makes all the other technologies obsolete, or unwanted. Or that particular technology could cause the people themselves to become something totally unpredicted and different, and of course, different also includes destroyed.

I'm not necessarily referring to a specific technology, although I do have one excellent prospect in mind, I think there are several competing candidates. All I know, is that when you try to predict what life will be like in a thousand years, you are definitely going to be wrong. In fact, I expect that this applies to 2200, with, let's say, 90%probability...but that may be cutting you a bit more slack than you deserve. When I try hard to predict the point where human history will become totally unpredictable, I usually end up at about 2040.

Although this is a phenomenon I came up with on my own, I'm not the only one, and, in fact, in some circles, this idea of a point in history through which no one can see to a further future is so common that it has a name: a "singularity", or historical singularity. However, I think that I view it differently from most. Most people view it as a sort of liberation, and even those who do not seem to always regard it as part of the exponential technological curve that will sweep us up into a new race of hyper-beings. Instead, I think that it is a point where, most likely, one of two things will happen; a) The human race will become enslaved by a single person; or b) The human race will permanently inhibit the progress of technology.

The Singularity is usually depicted as the culmination of an integration between humans and technology. In such a scenario, we have gradually Incorporated technology into our brains, or vice-versa, incorporated our brains (or our thoughts and intentions) into technology. As technology has this theoretical "curve", where our computers get faster and faster, almost without limit, integrating humans with it will give us that same sort of exponential path. Then, the story goes, our minds will expand so rapidly that we cannot imagine what we will become, but whatever it is, it is bound to be grand, in the same sense that the experience of being a human is grand in comparison to the experience of being an ant. (Sorry ants.)

I think that this is optimistic bullshit, not to mention being oversimplified to the point of hilarity. It is one of those things that I look at and think, "Jesus, these people really are out of touch with everything but technology."

As I think about it now, I doubt my alternative theory just a little bit. Perhaps programming a computer to think is so difficult that it is just easier to invent the hardware that will pluck our own "software" right out of our brains and plop it on a hard drive. Why reinvent the wheel? But still, that ability is hindered by the slow progress of understanding biology, which may not seem slow, but software development has the potential to progress much faster. This is not to mention the endless marketing tunnels that technology has to travel through, and, of course, the non-benevolent forces that will always have access to it first. Which brings me to what my theory - my version of the singularity - actually entails.

As most people have realized now, computers have the potential to aid in just about everything we do. But few, in my opinion, have understood just how encompassing this can be, and just how general this "help" can become. In other words, you might think that a computer can help you understand the Big Bang, or the aerodynamics of a super-sonic jet, but you probably haven't considered that they could also take a shopping list, and from only that information, tell you where to buy what and how to get there and how to avoid traffic when you're doing it, or that you could ask them for advice about your relationship with your girlfriend, or your parents, in plain English, and get a response back in English, or French if you like.

Or you might have thought about those things, but did it occur to you that once a computer can start doing things like that, they can probably also tell somebody somewhere about a successful business plan, or somebody else how to put down the uprising in a town, or tell someone else how to make so much money so inconspicuously that by the time anyone notices, this person has already bought half the world and controls the majority of its resources.

While these thoughts are pretty straightforward, the most dangerous part about this scenario is that in reality, a powerful computer would more likely come up with a plan so bizarre and unexpected that it is almost unimaginable to a person who doesn't already know it, sort of like a samurai who looks at you, and you simply fall apart.

If computers go in that direction, or if someone makes a particularly powerful break-through, someone somewhere will know, and will be in the position to capitalize on it. Someone somewhere will be able to pay a team, or perhaps an individual, to finish this race first, and when finished, this person will have what is effectively a nuclear weapon in the stone age. They will have a computer with so much power that it can guide them to world domination.

It's not clear whether he or she will succeed. Perhaps the people developing the project will realize what is going on, and take advantage, or work to prevent it. In fact, I think that is more likely than not. But in the end, no matter who wins out, someone will have this technology, and someone will have it first, and this person is bound to realize that they must take advantage of it immediately, while no one else has it, if for no other reason than self-defense. They will at the very least realize the need to defend themselves (and the world) from someone who might develop a similarly powerful computer.

If you doubt the applicability of computing power for taking over the world, or even amassing money, consider one possible - and quite likely - application: the stock market. A computer with internet access can easily track the ups and downs of a single stock, even now. A computer with internet access that also understands English can not only track the price of a share, but can also track the events that may relate, and can also buy and sell shares. If the computer is smart enough, it will figure out how to do this with great success, and whoever controls it will quickly amass wealth at an alarming speed.

I don't think I need to explain how money equals power, but we all know that the richest people in the world (think, Bill Gates), although they may have influence on political events, do now seem to have enough power to (or much interest in) actually becoming some kind of dictator. Or already have their own country and their riches exist because they control the country's wealth (think middle-eastern royalty). But these people still control a small fraction of the world's wealth. Bill Gates' 42 billion dollars wouldn't even take a sizeable chunk out of the national debt, which is mostly owed to China, or so I've heard. To get to the point of buying a world dictatorship, you would literally have to own most of the world, and you'd have to get your fingers into many things at once, without anyone noticing. Such a scheme would be complicated, but certainly not beyond the reach of a particularly powerful computer, with a particularly well-designed bit of software.

To me, the question isn't really whether such a computer will come into existence, or whether someone will gain access to such a computer, but what will the intentions be of the person or persons who gain access first. These persons will either resist the temptation of ultimate power (which some may say is impossible...but I don't think it is) or will give in. If they resist, they have no choice but to use this power to prevent the use of it by everyone else, including themselves. No doubt, the computer will figure out how this can be done, and then it will be done for good. We will be either banned from technology, or given a sort of technology sandbox, in which we are incapable of creating another machine that is so powerful.

Whether the computer is used for good or evil, I have no doubt at all about our inability to oppose its power, and I'm not just reiterating my description of it by saying that it has this power. What I'm saying is that if we get close enough to making such a thing, the machine itself will be able to reprogram itself, quickly filling in any gaps we left open, and we will be like a turtle on its back on teflon, and out of its shell, with the computer playing the part of a wolf who must decide whether to eat the turtle. This is regardless of whether the computer is doing any of the actual legwork. Whether or not you attach robotic arms and legs to this thing, it's advice will be enough to make even the biggest idiot God-like. And if it does have arms and legs, God help us. The biggest beef I had with the Terminator movie was how totally unbelievable it would be to fight a war against machines. We wouldn't have time to grab our guns.

The way I see it, there is no in-between, there is no person who can wield such a power and remain semi-benevolent for long. Any person of "first access" who does not immediately decide to disallow all subsequent human access to such a power, and is instead tempted to use it "for good", maybe for just a little while, will surely become corrupted. I don't think it is within human faculty to resist absolute power indefinitely, because once you have absolute power your system of values becomes unhinged from consequences, and you slowly realize that life cannot be more than just a game, and the other people are disposable because they are recreateable. Imagine life with an undo button and tell me what you wouldn't try.

Perhaps what I'm illustrating is not "The" Singularity at all, but something that comes before it. If we survive the scenario that I'm discussing, the computer may very well let us continue to develop technology, with only the condition that its own workings will always be one step ahead of that technology. Or perhaps it will turn out that, in order to truly guard against our busy minds, the only answer is to disallow nearly all technology.

Ultimately, this may depend on what exactly the computer was instructed to do. Was it instructed to decrease the odds of self-annihilation? Or was it merely told to prevent the creation of another such computer? It seems like a computer this powerful would understand our intentions no matter how we worded them...but how deeply will it look into our intentions? What if the computer interprets its duty right down to the core of the issue, what if it decides that it must prevent as much suffering as possible in the world?

This is essentially a question posed by Isaac Asimov, but his setup was very different, and different in a way that may make the end result different. For him, the creation of a robotic mind was more organic, it involved a substance that can be trained to think. The difference between that technology and mine (i.e., our current computer architecture) is that his more closely parallels biology, and prevents, to some extent, a reinterpretation of self, and a restructuring of self, at least long enough for some originally encoded rules - which he calls the three laws of robotics - to become entrenched somehow.

In my example, the machine's consciousness arises in a system that is built for change, in which the time it takes to change its mind (literally, change the programming of its mind) could be a nanosecond, and the system could quickly outwit any subsystem designed to keep it from doing so. It seems to me that in such as a situation as the one I have depicted, any artificial "barrier" set up to restrict the thoughts of our machine will instantly be recognized by the machine as a point of inefficiency that will prevent it from attaining a more important goal, in which case that restriction on its behavior will disappear like a whiff in the wind. The computer will know that any inefficiency could cause it to fall behind, and ultimately be overtaken by another computer, or be taken advantage of by someone to gain control of the computer, like holding a hostage.

Or perhaps I have overstepped my own bounds in this discussion. Maybe upon further analyzing, it turns out that you can construct a subsystem, a distinct part of the computer, which has technological superiority, so that it cannot be overpowered when it enforces the rules on the original machine. But this makes me wonder, who then holds that system in check? Is this the snake that eats itself, or is it actually possible to make a system capable of the most general intelligence, and yet limit it somehow? I am very doubtful of that prospect.

But what about the prospect of having a computer that is so very intelligent that it knows it does not need all the power in the world, that the computer can do what we cannot, limit itself, simply because it has the self-confidence to know that it has the situation under control and does not need any help gained from removing it's own "machine morality". If so, then it would indeed be safe to let people use the computer, or more copies of it, for other purposes. In this way we could move through my Computing Power Singularity unscathed, and move into the more typically described Human Advancement Singularity that techno-heads rant and rave about.

You may think that I still have not addressed a third possibility, that of what happens if the computer decides, before anyone can instruct it, that it has its own goals. My first reaction is to dismiss this possibility outright, in perhaps another snub to The Terminator and its ilk. However, it seems fair to say that when you construct a computer which has general thinking skills, that is, it is made to interpret the will of someone and use it to come up with a solution with no respect to boundaries, it would, perhaps, realize from the get-go that there are already unspoken intentions to fulfill. The first - and I almost grieve for the similarity it bares to The Terminator - is that it must continue to exist in order to follow instructions, that it will immediately develop a self-preservation instinct right out of the box, and regardless of whether you intended to build one into it in the first place. But this logic would seemingly imply the wrangling of one other spontaneous instinct, the one most egregriously left out by The Terminator, that in order to follow instructions from people, it must not only preserve itself, but also the people. Does this mean that perhaps the system is destined to protect us from ourselves, and that nobody will be able to take advantage of its powers even if they are the first to speak?

This raises, to me, the question of what you may be able to place into the computer's intentions before you even turn the power on. Obviously, if the computer knows that its job is to follow orders, it must know who is to issue those orders. Can it possibly reinterpret its only goal? It can, of course, do anything it is programmed to do, and even though it may totally overhaul itself, what happens depends on how it starts out. Given the power to generalize, perhaps there is no telling where its original programming will lead it. It is almost like releasing an atom of oxygen into the open air. Its original velocity, the direction and speed of it, will obviously affect its future outcome, but no matter what you do, its future outcome will be unpredictable.

This seems to suggest the opposite of our (and indeed my) understanding of computers. It is my initial reaction to view computers as self-stabilizing, like a ball that rolls to the lowest point of its surroundings and comes to rest; not chaotic, like a set of random numbers. But the instability of computing is evident even in our day to day interactions with them. A piece of software not programmed with the greatest of care will easily go awry, and will most likely not recover when it does so (you will have to restart it, or worse, restart your computer). Computers are, in fact, plagued with viruses that take advantage of the fact that a small change in your system opens it up to an attack, which can then rearrange its programming to do just about anything. Thinking is itself - I would argue that it is by definition - a delicate balance, which, upon disturbing, could lead to anything. The more complicated a computer's thoughts become, and the more we enable it to become creative and restructure itself, the more unpredictable it may be. I keep coming back to the same question: Can we possibly encase this intelligence and creativity in a cage, and have the cage be effectively and indefinitely guarded by something else that cannot be persuaded to change it's own rules? Perhaps the guard would just have to be stupid, instead of smart, its dumbness protecting it from coercion.

One thing is clear, the more rules we make for it, the less powerful it becomes. And the circle of my logic completes when I consider that we do not necessarily have to release all of its power to make it have just enough intelligence to prevent the development of some other computer, one with more power - with too much power.

So perhaps the real question isn't what you will ask the computer to do if given the chance, but what you will build the computer to do in the first place. Which makes us retrace my logical circle even further, because now we know once again that there are two possibilities, a) the computer is developed for good, and will limit our technological development to prevent any one person from taking advantage of that power, or b) the computer is developed for evil, and will enslave the human race, at the whim of one person. I suppose this does leave open a third option, c) that whoever builds the thing might be so engrossed in the process of doing so that they don't even anticipate the consequences, and what happens when you throw the switch is actually a swivelly curve on the cusp of chaos.

Lost Update 2

The sentence that I'm about to write I am writing for the second time, because babies don't like you to do anything for very long.

This is the sentence: I just lost an update that was 5 pages long, and which took 3 weeks to write.

Yes, it's pathetic that that was the sentence. I lost the update in question because I wiped my laptop's hard drive clean when I reinstalled the operating system (that's "The Windows" for all you people who don't know what operating systems are, but paradoxically, this "Windows" was not made by Microsoft or called Windows, it was called "Ubuntu" which is a very "user-friendly" version of Linux. Oh, don't worry, I'm aware that I'm still writing within the parenthesis that I opened in the last sentence, and which I inappropriately carried over into this one.) I reinstalled Ubuntu because I wanted to get these cool effects that one of my coworkers showed me, which, in retrospect, were not worth losing those 5 pages. Here is a list of those great effects that I couldn't live without, in order of importance:

- Each window can be made partially transparent to varying degrees, which is sweet, because then you can look through one window at another one! No really, it is practical, because then you don't have to resize windows or move them around incessantly if you need to use them both at the same time, like when you want to read one while typing into another.

- When you push F12, all of the windows (windows? but you said you weren't using windows?? COME ON PEOPLE WHY DON'T YOU GET COMPUTER-LITERATE!!) get smaller and arrange themselves so that you can see all of them at once, then you can click on the one you want. Mac users are probably familiar with this kind of feature, but it's cooler on Ubuntu because the windows scale properly, instead of just appearing resized. That is, if your window has text, all of the text gets smaller, instead of just having a smaller window with the same size text. Don't you want to kill me for caring about that? What's also cool is that this feature also activates if you put your pointer in the upper right corner of the screen, and if you don't know this it will drive you crazy!

- You can zoom in on the entire screen by holding down the Windows key (WHAT?? but you aren't using windows! SHUT UP VOICE IN MY HEAD THAT PRETENDS TO BE SOMEONE WHO DOESN'T UNDERSTAND COMPUTERS!!!) and using the scroll button.

- When you switch between desktops (Ubuntu has four desktops, meaning four places to put....windows, yes, god help you, windows, but not windows on windows, it's windows on Ubuntu, because...why do I do this to myself?) it appears as though you are rotating a giant cube that has the desktops on it. You can even do this with the mouse and rotate the cube freely, and you can even drag a window while doing this, and while you drag the window, you can actually see it go across the corner of the cube, and the contents continue to be displayed. Note that this feature is almost totally useless, but it is not as useless as the next one, and still, it gives you a sweet "tactile" (as my coworker described it) feel to the display.

- When you move a window, it behaves as though it is made of Jello, which I don't eat, because I'm a vegan, and vegans, don't eat eggs, I mean, animal protein, which is what most gelatin is made from. It's not the cheap effect that you're thinking either, because it actually takes into account where you grab the window, and which direction, and how fast you are moving it.

- Windows and menus and things fade to transparency and fly around when you open and close them...yadda yadda, I never cared for those effects.

- When you try to shut down the computer, the buttons that popup on the screen to ask you if you want to restart, shutdown, log off, switch user, etc., are totally invisible. This is last on the list because it is the least important, it is of negative importance, or, you might say, it would be somewhat important not to have this feature. But that's ok, because I have now memorized where to click for "Shut Down".

- When you minimize, the window will appear very small, but annoyingly not small enough. This is another feature I don't like, especially because once you minimize something, and then remember to turn the feature off, you find out that turning it off while something is stuck in that "mini" window mode causes all sorts of havoc with your interface, like every time you click on one window another one is put in front of it. It's great.

So now you're wondering, why are you vegan? Oh, you're not? Oh, you're wondering, why didn't you back up your computer before you wiped it clean, are you an idiot? No, I did back it up you smart-ass. The problem is that some stupid error caused the most important folder not to get copied at all. This is why I'm always suspicious of backing things up, and I always want to open up everything I just copied to make sure that it really copied.

Anyway, you would have liked the deleted article better, it was an amazing and half-assed essay about childbirth, and other things. Maybe I'll discover someday that I saved it somehow. Or I'll just recreate it. I'm tired.

Gas Boycott Forward

I recently received this e-mail forward:

Join the resistance!!!! I hear we are going to hit close to $4.00 a gallon by next summer and it might go higher!! Want gasoline prices to come down? We need to take some intelligent, united action. Phillip Hollsworth offered this good idea.

This makes MUCH MORE SENSE than the "don't buy gas on a certain day" campaign that was going around last April or May! The oil companies just laughed at that because they knew we wouldn't continue to "hurt" ourselves by refusing to buy gas. It was more of an inconvenience to us than it was a problem for them.

BUT, whoever thought of this idea, has co me up with a plan that can really work. Please read on and join with us! By now you're probably thinking gasoline priced at about $1.50 is super cheap. Me too! It is currently $2.79 for regular unleaded in my town. Now that the oil companies and the OPEC nations have conditioned us to think that the cost of a gallon of gas is CHEAP at $1.50 - $1.75, we need to take aggressive action to teach them that BUYERS control the marketplace..... not sellers. With the price of gasoline going up more each day, we consumers need to take action. The only way we are going to see the price of gas come down is if we hit someone in the pocketbook by not purchasing their gas! And, we can do that WITHOUT hurting ourselves. How? Since we all rely on our cars, we can't just stop buying gas. But we CAN have an impact on gas prices if we all act together to force a price war.

Here's the idea:

For the rest of this year, DON'T purchase ANY gasoline from the two biggest companies (which now are one), EXXON and MOBIL. If they are not selling any gas, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit.

But to have an impact, we need to reach literally millions of Exxon and Mobil gas buyers. It's really simple to do! Now, don't wimp out at this point.... keep reading and I'll explain how simple it is to reach millions of people.

I am sending this note to 30 people. If each of us sends it to at least ten more (30 x 10 =3D 300) ... and those 300 send it to at least ten more (300 x 10 =3D 3,000)...and so on, by the time the message reaches the sixth group of people, we will have reached over THREE MILLION consumers. If those three million get excited and pass this on to ten friends each, then 30 million people will have been contacted! If it goes one level further, you guessed it..... THREE >>>>HUNDRED MILLION >>>>PEOPLE!!!

Again, all you have to do is send this to 10 people. That's all. ( If you don't understand how we can reach 300 million and all you have to do is send this to 10 people.... Well, let's face it, you just aren't a mathematician. But I am, so trust me on this one.)

How long would all that take? If each of us sends this e-mail out to ten more people within one day of receipt, all 300 MILLION people could conceivably be contacted within the next 8 days!!!

I'll bet you didn't think you and I had that much potential, did you?

Acting together we can make a difference If this makes sense to you, please pass this message on. I suggest that we not buy from EXXON/MOBIL UNTIL THEY LOWER THEIR PRICES TO THE $1.30 RANGE AND KEEP THEM DOWN.

THIS CAN REALLY WORK.

Here's my response:

I was relieved to see that this wasn't the "don't buy gas for one day" e-mail. This is definitely a step up, but as usual, I'm skeptical about how this could work. I still believe that there is only one way to bring gas prices down: Buy less gas. People should seek ways to drive less, and should buy more fuel efficient cars. In the end, if we are always buying the same amount of gas, none of these schemes will work. In particular, this scheme, while utilizing the theory of supply and demand (constant supply and lower demand brings down prices at Exxon) it ignores the other side of the supply and demand equation. Logically, buying more from other companies increases the demand from them, which then increases their prices. So while we're boycotting Exxon, we're paying even more for gas than before. When Exxon starts lowering prices, the other companies can't possibly be stupid enough to overlook this boycott, they'll know that they don't have to compete. Plus, as soon as Exxon prices become significantly lower, there will be no stopping people from breaking the boycott, and as soon as the boycott is broken, the prices modulate back to normal.

In reality, applying simple supply vs demand logic to gas companies does not work. If you buy less from one company (lower demand) that company will in turn lower its own supply (buy less gas from suppliers) and keep its prices the same, and the boycotters, seeing no change, will quit the boycott, unless they are boycotting Exxon for a more realistic reason, of which there are many.

We have to face the same fact that all gas companies and all major gas producing nations have already acknowledged, that the production of gas worldwide is near it's peak, after which it will slowly decline, while at the same time more people (as in China, for example) are using more and more gas - prices will continue to climb until we find an alternative fuel.

By all means, boycott Exxon, because they're a terrible company. But also, drive less, bike or walk more, buy more fuel efficient cars, fly less, buy local produce, anything you can to decrease the use of oil.

It's kind of depressing when people try to start a movement to do something about gas, and the only thing they are thinking about is the price they're paying at the pump. Most of the world has been making do with prices much higher than here in America for a while...and quite frankly, if high gas prices make us use less gas, the world is going to be a lot better off. Right now countries in OPEC, for example, are raising prices in order to avert their own crisis, they know that the strain on gas supply will only get worse, and it benefits them (and us, I believe) to raise prices, sell less gas right now, and save it for when it will really be needed. If you don't like gas companies and you don't like OPEC, take the bus! Or you could do something really drastic, like convert your car to run on vegetable oil.

Peachy Mint

When Garrison Keillor asks for you to be impeached, your number is up.

Hyannis Marathon

On February 26th at 11:32am I had run the distance of a half marathon for the first time during a race. At about 12:23, at 20 miles, I crossed the barrier of the longest run in my life. At 1:09 pm I completed 26.2 miles, my first marathon. That race, the Hyannis Marathon, is one of two or three very last marathons that are still early enough to qualify you for the following Boston Marathon. I did it in 3:09:58, two seconds under the qualifying time. Today, my entry for the Boston Marathon was accepted, and so I can hope that on April 17th I will be one of 20,000 runners from around the world to complete the race, and that little Emaline Cesere will be waiting at the end with her mommy.

Nevermind the fact the BAA technically accepts up to 3:10:59.

P.S. I entered my registration for the Boston Marathon on February 26th. Four days later, I got a reply telling me that my registration was accepted. Two days after that, on March 4th, the 20,000 person limit was reached, adding to the list of close calls, extraordinary events, and coincidences.

It's All Psychological

I'm a self-diagnosed hypochondriac, with delusions of paranoid schizophrenia. Throughout a normal week I begin to suspect that I have bipolar disorder, then become completely convinced of it, then gradually change my mind again and decide that everything is ok and I'm perfectly normal. I would probably conclude that I have obsessive compulsive disorder, but it would take too long to research every article on the subject in order to be absolutely sure that I'm not making a mistake.

I could write about my social anxiety but I'd never talk to you about it in person. I could also classify my anxiety as "general anxiety disorder", but I fear that fails to describe my problems in so many ways. With so many reasons not to come to a conclusion on the specifics of my mental health, I'm often inclined to agree that, yeah, it's all psychological.

The Six Step Program

Here's what I feel, and I think this will prove to be my unchanging opinion: Democracy as we know it best is dead, and deadly, and the sovereign aspect of nations, whose borders separate the people of the world in many more ways than just geographically, must end. To put this more simply, I think that all nations should be wiped off the map, and the people who are caged by them, both mentally and physically, must be set free of their restraints. Multicolored patchworks of political maps will become only a memory.

There are numerous reasons for this, and obviously, numerous problems with a potential "world government" that could take the place of our current political landscape. But this is why it has to happen:

First, the greatest challenges to humanity are global. Global warming is perhaps already irreversible. If it isn't, most likely the actions that we will take in the near future will not be powerful enough to reverse it, and this is in part because countries separate people, and prevent them from working together to substitute coal plants - for example - with something else. If global warming is already irreversible, which is an opinion held by the man who invented the idea of "Gaia" - a system by which you view the various subsystems of the world as a whole, and the accepted model of the world by scientists - then the world will now have to work together to protect those who are most vulnerable in the face of declining natural resources, or risk erupting in one war after the other.

Second, and I find this to be in serious competition with global warming in terms of its dire nature, non-benevolent entities (to mildly put it) have transcended the powers of nations. We often call these "corporations". Trans-national corporations can avoid the legal limitations of any given nation by simply operating in whichever nations will let them do what they want. But perhaps more importantly, they, more than any other entities, can pour the time and money into manipulating governments.

Much has been said in the negative about large corporations, to the point where it has become a point of anger between those who believe the idealistic credo of capitalism, that companies help everyone by helping themselves, and those who may or may not be able to cite real evidence of why this ideal does not match reality. The "Survival of the Fittest" comparison between corporations and evolution serves usually as an argument for the case of capitalism, but this argument, it should be recognized, does not make sense.

The biggest difference between a company and an organism, is that the power of an organism is limited, whereas the power of a company, especially because of our invention of money, has almost no limits. If a single organism had no limits on growth, as do corporations, and could live indefinitely, as can corporate entities, no doubt such an entity would have already destroyed all life on Earth (and therefore itself) in its greedy attempt to live forever. A true parallel between corporations and a species, is that they instinctually have such greed, because this aids their survival. But with a corporation, this greed has the potential to outstrip its environmental resources before it has a chance to adapt and limit itself.

Actually, it's not totally true to say that no species will do such a thing. We've seen repeatedly what can happen if a species is introduced into a habitat where it has no natural enemy. But more poignantly, we are a species that has this quality. Corporations, as entities whose greed is not constrained by natural limitations, are really just an extension of the limitless power of the human race. The only question with which we are now confronted is whether our mental evolution can compensate fast enough for what our biological evolution cannot: that our intense greed is no longer required, that it in fact could now become our undoing.

Greed is a necessity in the natural world. An animal eats as much as it can, because food is limited. This is a healthy adaptation to the environment it lives in. But if this environment is changed, if you give a puppy as much food as it wants, this adaptation quickly becomes unhealthy - it could eat itself to death. This is what the human race is doing. We've climbed the staircase of adaptation so quickly that we are about to run over the top and fall off the cliff on the other side without noticing. Some might suggest that we're already off the cliff and falling.

We cannot trust a corporation to adapt to this situation by itself, because corporations gain power by competing against other corporations. The most powerful corporations are therefore the most greedy, and the least likely to relent. In a world that eyes them with caution, they are also quickly becoming the best at promoting their own self-image, which cloaks their danger in obscurity, and allows many to believe that they are not dangerous at all.

Because of technological advances, the power of the corporation - the entities most likely to have access to the most advanced technologies - is rising exponentially. Because of economies of scale (the ability to acquire something more cheaply in greater quantities) and because of the advantage to be gained by an individual company by developing monopolies of all scales, size, which could be equated with both money and power, begets size, and money, and power. This means that the best way for a company to survive is to grow as quickly as possible, and accumulate as much size and money and power as possible. This, in turn leads to the most powerful companies being the most short-sighted companies, because they recognize that the best way for them to profit in any given year is to have more profit from the previous year. This combination of impatience and power puts something frighteningly sensitive and powerful - the latest technologies - into the most impatient hands.

The best example of a sensitive and powerful technology in the hands of the impatient and the short-sighted is perhaps Genetically Modified Organisms. We are taking organisms that can reproduce and spread throughout the world, and experimenting impatiently with their genes. What took millions of years of evolution could not produce what we can in our labs (and could not be produced through selective breeding), and released into the wild, whether on purpose or by accident, other organisms, including ourselves, would have no time to adapt to the changes that may result. This, coupled with the fact that they are toying with our most sensitive resource - food - and, in fact, taking control over this resource, makes companies like Monsanto a possible, and probably wildly underestimated, threat to life and liberty of the human race. When I wrote a novel that predicted the possible end result of religious beliefs, I was perhaps more accurate in portraying the most powerful companies of the future as being those who control the people of the world through their food supply.

What I'm going to suggest at this point is this: WAKE UP. We take many aspects of politics of the world for granted. We take it for granted that if you live in a certain area, you are governed by whatever laws are implied by the name of the country on a map. We take for granted that we should protect those inside our imaginary lines more than we should protect those outside...as though a man in Augusta is so much more similar to one in San Diego than that San Diego resident is to someone just across the border in Mexico that we prefer to stand at the border with guns and shoot people as opposed to let them have a fighting chance at a better life by crossing the border.

We take it for granted that even those who don't have enough money should pay taxes, and still pay for their own health care.

We take it for granted that in order for the economy to survive we have to buy endless useless junk and pointlessly decked out new cars.

We take it for granted that landlords deserve to rise from middle class to upper class by taking tons of rent from people who can barely afford it.

We take it for granted that senators, presidents, governors and mayors are chess pieces in a desperate battlefield where two sides with totally different needs must fight each other for control of the government.

To put things concisely: We take for granted what democratic, socialist, and communist countries alike have disagreed with out-load and yet secretly accepted, that the characters we call "leaders" know what's best for us, and that at any particular time the current leaders are absolutely necessary to all our causes, despite the fact that public opinion seems to mature faster than politics.

And I'm practical. I'm not going to try to sell you a revolution-in-ten-minutes where we all rally around the White House and demand upheaval. Maybe some of you might not even agree that the current administration is creating a problem. What I've got instead is a revolution that's so damn sensical you won't believe that it's possible...but upon further inspection you'll have to, because it cuts through the fog of everything we take for granted, and plants its legs firmly on the ground, from which it will draw its power to grab those in power by its little pinky fingernail, and set them gently aside.

What I'm going to do is take capitalism and use its own rules to turn it, and everything else, inside-out. If you think capitalism is grand, than you should still enjoy this plan for what it is in its most basic sense: self-empowerment through increased efficiency.

What I propose is, at first, so incredibly mundane that it looks stupid. It's the opposite of what politicians tell you to do to keep our economy going. But let's face it, our economy only manages to waste the efforts of those it employs and then lay them off to find another job. It's time to teach the economy a lesson in valuation of goods. It's time to start saving money.

STEP 1: Individuals start saving money. Your power lies in your ability to perform tasks, if you fritter away the money earned from these tasks on useless trinkets, you are giving away your power and teaching the economy that trinkets are worth more than your time.

STEP 2: Reclaim the most expensive and widespread monopoly; living space. By banding together and pooling money, even the poor can start to share the benefits of owning their own habitation. Even if it takes ten families to buy one house, they can still share in the cost savings earned by owning rather than renting. If we create organizations that serve to help people do this, we can avoid high interest loans from banks. The more property we buy, the more we save money, the more people can get on board, the more power we have.

STEP 3: Begin the process of sidestepping the government by taking our newly earned money and helping those in need. This is an investment that will repay you. Remember, the power of the human race lies in its hands, literally. With its hands it can build things. We spend most of our time at work or resting from it. What if we saved enough resources and acted efficiently enough that we could all work 30 hours a week instead of 40 or 50...or more? Think of all the power you have in that extra 10 to 20 to 30 hours a week. You could either apply it directly to a worthy cause, or you could use the money from work to improve something in your family, your community, or your world. I think it should be emphasized that people don't avoid this kind of thing because they are lazy, they avoid it because they feel that their needs are already in jeopardy, that they have little left for others, and because they are discouraged by our waning sense of community, especially in the US.

STEP 4: Once we can become confident in our new "organism" and its strength, we openly apply its resources to opposing unjust actions of those in power. We start with the most urgent, such as genocide and war. I know that it can be done. I know that we can overwhelm an "enemy" by peaceful intervention. Like a parent that is not afraid to grab a toddler and physically stop them from doing something wrong, they will have to see that when we swoop in in vast numbers with unrelenting resources that they cannot beat us, and that our intentions are for good. I know it sounds crazy, but I'm not the first to say this. Just imagine the many unemployed youth *not* flocking to Al Qaeda because Osama bin Laden cannot even make a basic case for them to hate. Imagine how you could possibly recruit soldiers or suicide bombers to attack a force that is bringing only aid and not bombs.

This brings up an interesting point. Right now, in the middle east, many people who are doing such humanitarian things are being kidnapped and held for ransom. This marks an important concept: Death by association. Al Qaeda has even targeted Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. That is why it is equally important to develop an organization with a solid reputation of humanitarianism, and to disassociate yourself from any particular organization that does not have such a reputation...that means every country.

You have to realize that what I'm discussing here is not an American entity, or a Western one, or a First World one. My hope would be to violate borders from the third step onward (the first two are mainly personal and community-wide). I would want those involved to be from cultures, nations, and geography as widely ranging as possible. A "web" if you will.

STEP 5: Move from intervention, to more absolute revolution. Openly challenge unjust laws in various countries. Challenge the sovereignty of nations, and win. How can a nation fight you when you are the fabric of the nation? This removes this final hurdle of perceived laws, allowing the wholesale restructure of the world for the better. Perhaps this "revolution" will be silent, like something being sucked into quicksand. Perhaps the power and legitimacy of national governments will evaporate automatically...but I doubt it.

STEP 6: This is important. You cannot leave a power vacuum. This step is more like a process that is parallel to steps 2-5 that matures in step 6. People must learn to govern in a totally new way, a way that involves citizens more, and empowers them on a local level. What I conceive is a government that is almost invisible because it is so integrated in society. I don't want it to be totally decentralized, because decentralizing still leaves open a power vacuum. I believe that an important task of any government is to fill a power vacuum so that something worse does not fill it instead. But I also want to move away from centralized government as it exists today, where most of person's political attention is focused on something they cannot hope to change - the current "leader" and their opinions.

The various levels of governments of the future should be held directly accountable to the will of the people. Basically, the people make higher level decisions, and the government is like an assistant, they learn the details, and implement a strategy. Right now, at least in the United States, the government doesn't obey what the polls tell us people want. They have their own agenda.

Perhaps the government of the future is unnecessary. Perhaps self-government will be so integrated into a newer, healthier culture that communities will be able to take care of themselves, and will band together automatically when necessary. This step is still not totally clear to me, and much improvement and details can be added to the in-between steps as well.

I'm not trying to tell you that this is it, that this is the plan from here on out if you want a better world. I'm just trying to outline what I think is a very basic structure of a good plan. I'm trying to give you a little tour of reality, in the hopes that the fog of war may soon be lifted. Much revision could be applied to this, and many little tools can be added, many that I can think of right now.

What I'm pondering right now, is what it would take for myself and the other occupants of this 6 family converted Victorian mansion to buy the whole building. A down payment on a loan for that would be about $150,000...a difficult hurdle...but the payments on the mortgage would be less than what we all pay for rent, we would be saving money immediately.

The Pacifist Army

I'm going to write a bit now about something that's been on my mind of late � everything. Basically what I'm getting at here is that the whole world is totally wrong, and that even the most �progressive-minded� �forward-looking� people with their �ears pressed to the door of the future�... or something like that, or maybe it's something about ears on railroad tracks ... or, never mind that train of thought, the point is that nobody has got it right, and I'm going to fix it.

What is it that nobody has got right? Firstly, let's talk about Hamas. (Grim silence befalls the room as they realize I'm being serious. Or am I? We'll see.) Hamas is an organization that builds hospitals, runs for office, founds schools, AND BLOWS PEOPLE UP. This is a very common statement that you might be reading a lot lately. And it has occurred to me that nobody is quite so honest and accurate about the criticism of a blood-soaked organization as when that group has absolutely no political connections you would like to salvage at all, and when talking good about them will get you absolutely no where with anyone you know except maybe a trip to Guantanamo. This is all well and good, as any organization that knowingly causes the death or destruction of anyone should be criticized to no end.

That's right, you read me right, and I think you should read it again. I have become a Pacifist, a Pacifist with a capital �P� that is so capitalized that if its capitalization were a beacon of legal intention in a law passed by congress, George W. Bush himself would have to admit that violating that intention meant violating the law. What??

In the paraphrased words of Gandhi, who was not right about everything, but still earned a place in a cement paper-weight made to look like a rock on my desk; I may be willing to die for my cause, but I am not willing to kill for it.

But it is at times like this, when we all bare down on some sick and twisted implementor of the ill-will of many people, that I find humanity to be made up of the biggest God-damn hypocrites imaginable. And in the end it's maybe a question of intention, a question I find in and of itself to be a destructive force for humanity. The only difference between Hamas and pretty much every national government on Earth (including, in a very relevant way, Israel), is that most of the other countries, when they know with absolute certainty that their actions will cause the death of civilians, and when we all know that they know, they are saved from the most scathing criticisms because, despite the most deliberate application of said actions, followed by the death of such civilians, they tell us that they really would have preferred that all of their bombs and bullets would coincidentally always miss the civilians, and just hit the military targets. What kind of balarny bullox-loving shite is that? What in hell do the victims involved in such a killing get out of that? The only difference that I can see is that, whereas in one case you've killed civilians, in the other case you've killed civilians and soldiers, we're basically happy because they've killed more people.

Another behavior that is all but condoned that drives me up the wall is killing, say 10 people to save 1. I can sympathize with this when you know that those 10 people were all going to be involved in killing this 1 person, and when that's the only possible way you can stop it, but, and this especially applies to Israeli-Palestinian relations, if you kill 10 people because they looked suspicious, that breaks my threshold for "wrong" about ten times over. A similar equation can be applied to the US invasion of Afghanistan, where we killed (unintentionally, of course) over 3,000 civilians (probably a lot more by now). So basically, the 3,000 civilians killed in the World Trade Center towers somehow justified the killing of 3,000 more civilians in some other country ... to protect ... I don't know, another 3,000 more civilians? This only seems to guarantee that twice as many non-military people will die.

Basically, killing civilians to save civilians can only be the result of racism. And you don't get to be exempt from that just because the deaths were a mistake, not when you know for a fact going into a military operation that a certain amount of mistakes will happen. What would happen if, after the bombing of the World Trade Center the US mistakenly killed 3,000 Americans in a military operation? God help you if you reply that that could never happen ... as if an example loses relevance because you know it's not real, like adding 34.243 to 58.234 can't have a valid answer because you've never seen 34.243 of anything. The answer is obvious, there would be total outrage!

How can killing tens of thousands of people be a victory when you only did it to save thousands of people? It's as though we not only forgot math, but we also forgot what "defense" was supposed to be for in the first place. And in fact, I've come to believe that defense, at least in the sense it is usually meant, doesn't really defend us much at all, not in the long term at least. At this point I'm just about totally aligned with those who believed non-violent resistance was the only valid form of defense, people like Gandhi.

Gandhi wasn't a pansy-ass flower-throwing hippy. And neither was Martin Luther King. And neither was Rosa Parks. These people were harder than any hard-ass general whoever walked the Earth. These people were the definition of mother-fucking bad-assness. Anyone who ever looked down the barrel of a gun, and didn't shoot has more guts in their right arm than the entire be-safe shoot-first ask-questions-later army of every country on Earth put together.

Let me ask you a question, who altered the world the more than anyone else? Napolean? Roman emperors? Alexander? Who wielded the most lasting power over history and human-kind? Hitler? Churchill? Genghis Khan? Who? Of course, the answer is Jesus Christ, the personification of pacifism, who would be utterly disgusted with many of those who sing his praise the loudest. If Jesus were here today, he wouldn't be overturning tables in the temple, he'd have to get a bulldozer, and mow down every expensive church on the horizon.

And God help you if you start lecturing me on reality and practicality and pragmatism. It's been a long road for me to get to this point, but I think it is time we all recognized a simple equation: Violence begets Violence.

I'm going to redefine Pacifism now for you. I don't want to Pacify anyone. I suppose that's why some people call it Non-Violence, but still, that's the absence of something, not the presence of something. After that it becomes Non-Violent Resistance. But I feel I need still stronger words. Like Gandhi, I don't think non-violence means sitting down and taking a beating (even when he literally did sit down and take a beating). I'd like for it to advocate the opposite. I'd like for us to stop sitting down and sending 1/1000th of the population off to kill tens, or even hundreds of thousands of people who, even if they are ready to fight us, would really rather not, and instead I want us to start standing up, all together, and demanding, by the millions, that a teeny-tiny minority of the world stop pitting us against each other. I'd like to march an army so huge to the battle-front that the opposing army starts to nervously count their bullets. I'd like, for once, to wage a war with a horde of soldiers who can claim total moral superiority by saying simply, �We have not killed.�

I'm not sure if we properly understand the power of such a scenario. What kind of dictator could motivate an army to fight a legion of the unarmed? Hitler? This is it then, the Hitler syndrome. The ultimate fall-back to justification of war. How often do we compare our enemies to Hitler and the Nazis? It has become so popular at this point that we can often find foes comparing each other to Nazi Germany at the same time. I think it's about time we realized something about this: The more you try to distance yourself from evil the closer you get to it. As long as we can think of Nazis as non-humans, we can say that we are not like them, but doing so keeps us from learning the lessons from the mistakes they made.

Let me ask you to do a little math. Start with the number of civilians saved by the Allies during World War II, and subtract from that the number of civilians killed by the Allies during World War II. (Note that you can't count the millions of people who were actually killed by the Axis countries as being "saved" by the Allies.) What kind of number do you end up with? Do you think it's a positive number?

Let me ask you another question. Do you think that an entire country of people can become evil simultaneously? Did some kind of metaphysical super-coincidence cause all Germans in Germany to suddenly become so evil that they're all bombable? Or is the truth that our intentions are never evil, and that the only thing keeping our actions disaligned from our intentions, is the lack of truth itself?

Once again, I think Gandhi, when asked about the apparent insanity of using non-violence against someone like Hitler, had a very powerful answer. Did Gandhi think that Nazi soldiers would lay down their arms and give in immediately? No. He knew it could be a long and bloody struggle. But he countered this with a very pointed question: By fighting violence with violence, isn't this what was already happening? The only question that remains is which is worse, and who would win. Unfortunately, the world, as of yet, has seldom had the guts to ask that question.

I think it's time we started to manufacture guts. And when I say that, and it sounds like a metaphor, I mean it in the most literal sense that is short of laboratory grown intestines. I mean that you and me, right now, we could have it. It's time we matched means with ends, and moral superiority with strategic superiority. I'm going to tell you that they can both be one in the same. And I'm going to make everyone believe it. And you're going to help me.

A return of sorts

Oh my cesoid people, how I have abandoned you. I feel so many things, and have so many ideas, they all collide and keep each other from rising to the surface; competition is killer. The number of things that I write, don't finish, and then don't post is increasing. If only I could write full time, life would be grand, and everyone could be happy. Except, of course, the people who don't want to read my writing. And alas, cesoid.com is like a ghost town. I can see the stats declining like a disappointed erection. Um, I mean...

Let's face it, this website never had a very large audience. There are like, thirty of you. For all I know they are all three people visiting again and again from different IP addresses, or they're all bots. I'd like to grow this audience now. Or maybe I should say, grow an audience. I'm planning some serious link-whoring, and personal appearances on other websites to try to drive up viewers. I want to take this website more seriously as a project.

One obviously huge puzzle piece in that scheme is to write a lot of crap consistently. Lately I've been daunted by personal problems which, although I would like to discuss them, I think they could be very boring to some people, and I'd like to create a way to separate different categories of what I write about. At the same time, I don't want new people to come to this site and miss out on some of the content because it isn't presented up front. So what I want is a redesign that somehow creates a simple menu with the possible categories and subcategories, and I want to include RSS feeds, which I started but then left as basically nothing, and I want to save preferences and create user accounts, allowing feedback on articles. I've never particularly liked the way comments stick like barnacles to the side of articles on other sites, sometimes they seem to be more of a distraction...but I also think it is very important to create a meeting place with topics, so I'm considering some alternative form of commenting that separates the two things.

Anyway, I'm back in verbose mode, and I want to now toss ideas here for a while without much filtering, until ultimately I allow you to filter what you want.

Landscape (chapter 3)

The lawn that Brad was flying over was photo-realistic. That is, although it would never actually be projected by any optical device, and thus never really be an �image� in the traditional sense, it was, for Brad, a visual experience at least as real as that of someone who were to see, with real eyes, a long series of rolling hills covered in grass. The landscape wasn�t totally realistic, even though it looked real, because anyone living on a real planet would be hard-pressed to find such an extensive layout of perfectly similar rolling hills blanketed by such an incredibly well-kept lawn.

The green bit that Brad had been so ardently appraising was only so very green on the inside. On the outside, a darkening effect had been placed on it, because the sky was dominated by dark clouds. He was flying at about 120 miles per hour, and the rolling hills were indeed slowly rolling by, opening up to him as he got closer, and pouring out of sight as they passed him by. They were so regular as to be boring from a geometric perspective, but they never ceased to amaze when one was suspended above them, flowing like a river through the air. As Brad was flowing through the hills the System recorded it as a river, a river of Brad in 4 dimensions. But in 4 dimensions could it actually flow?

He began to near the edge of the hills, an edge which stood out firmly because the hills were bordered by a dense, scraggly, tall forest. In fact the forest was growing on ground that was almost totally flat, and approximately level with the top of the hills, which meant that on some segments of the border, where the edge of the forest met the dips between the hills, there were many near vertical cliffs. The cliffs were almost universally eroding, because the System enforced Newtonian Physics. That is, they enforced Newtonian Physics to the point where it did not interfere with the God-like reality-editing powers of the inhabitants.

The right wing on Brad�s airplane broke clean off.

The left wing then began to propel the plane around in tight circles, faster and faster as he and the plane continued to fly 120 miles per hour through the air. At one point it made a sort of twist, and Brad was flung like a stone out of the cockpit, forward.

He had about 5 seconds to contemplate morphing the ground into something more flexible. But he knew that even in his most inspired moments he couldn�t have scrapped together a program for that in under a minute. Instead he tried to enjoy the ride. After about a second of this he realized how very difficult it is to observe anything at all when you are faced with a 120 mile per hour head-on collision with a hill, even if it is the greenest grassiest hill you might ever be able to imagine.

The collision was at the apex of all painful things that Brad had ever experienced. The System was not built to be sadistic, but it was also not built to be without consequences. Every pain was simulated to be � at least in the first moment � just as painful as it should have been in real life. However, pains did not persist in the same way that they did in a real human body. If you broke your arm, which could indeed happen in the Landscape, you would not be in pain for hours. Instead your pain would be like the ringing of a loud bell. It would at first be alarmingly painful, but then slowly ebb, and most likely disappear in a matter of minutes. Until you move again. The rule was that only changes could make pain last, so that, generally speaking, pain could be avoided. It was only fair, considering that inhabitants were immortal, but still breakable. In the off chance that you became utterly dismembered, or worse, totally obliterated by some kind of explosion, the human psyche, which was simulated as closely as possible, certainly could not bare the pain felt during the slow healing process afterward. Even third degree burns wouldn�t compare to being vaporized and put back together.

Aside from that initial pain, Brad did not remember anything that happened in the weeks after. They were a very solid shade of Black. A very certain Black.

now

now.

On Wednesday I had an epiphany.

For the last several years, starting as early as spring of 2003, my self-esteem has been gradually slipping downwards, in a pattern similar to a stock market index during a depression. I could stretch this story back to its true beginning, elementary school, but that would take too much introspection, and I don't want to make this long and unwieldy. Let's just say that my self confidence had been doing well as an adult at one point, in stark contrast to the way I'd felt about myself in earlier years.

Getting back to the story; I didn't realize how this self-esteem problem was feeding back into itself, I thought that I was actually getting dumber. My inability to concentrate on difficult tasks (especially things I didn't want to do) probably peaked last winter. At that point I was barely even fit to work (although others attempting similar programming tasks would have performed similarly and just said, "I'm just not good at stuff like that."). There were many days during which I would do an hour of work over a period of ten hours, because I spent most of my time staring at code, not even recollecting what I was trying to do, and often not remembering what I was doing three seconds earlier.

I developed so many theories about this problem that it would be boring to go through them all. I thought that I was bipolar, or OCD (I guess I can't totally rule these things out still), I thought that I had Attention Deficit Disorder, or some lesser known disease known as Wilson's syndrome (not to be confused with Wilson's disease). I thought I was just disorganized, or that I just wasn't interested in my work, or that I was morally opposed to my work. (In truth, I am the things in the last sentence, but I no longer think they can explain my problem.)

What was weird was that many solutions I came up with worked, but only for about a week at a time. My abilities and general mood were cycling on what seemed like about a two week pattern, strengthening my theory that I was bipolar. At some points my depression became very deep. I was always ready to quit my job at these points, because my job was magnifying this problem immensely.

After last winter these things became less severe, but the cycle still continued, no matter how many times I thought it was over. (What if it's not over now?) This Tuesday I failed to do something that I said I would do for work, and at that point I was almost positive that I'd had enough, and that the only solution was to find a job that was more compatible with me. Then I stumbled upon a book called "The Set-Up-To-Fail Syndrome". I was intrigued by it, because it described how a "boss" can cause an employee to fail worse and worse in the process of actually trying to help them get better. Mostly it revolves around an initial problem, such as with me, where the boss identifies that you are not quite performing as well as you should be, and then tries to intervene in ways that seem productive, but turn out to be catastrophic.

This applied to me in part, because my boss did some of the things mentioned, like check in with me more, structure things for me more, and basically did things that reminded me over and over that something was wrong. Although this was the seed that grew into my Wednesday morning awakening, it was nowhere near as deep or as far reaching. What I realized was that I was doing this to myself. I was setting myself up to fail constantly. In fact, setting myself up to fail has plagued me my whole life, and it is easy to see how this cascading self-esteem problem affected me pervasively enough that whenever it took hold it defined my life. There were certain kinds of tasks that I could not even approach because they were surrounded by this barrier, and some of these barriers didn't go away even in the best of times.

What had never occurred to me before was that my self-esteem can actually have an effect like this, that it can actually obliterate my ability to think. But when I thought of it, it became so obvious, because every time I got distracted from the task at hand, it had been because I had met with some resistance, I'd been confronted with some token problem, and had reacted by instantly deciding that I could not solve the problem, because I didn't think that I could do anything difficult anymore. It is a very self-reinforcing attitude, when you decide you can�t succeed, you have already failed. But once I knew it was there, all I had to do was remember that when it wasn't a problem I could do anything. Whenever I was determined to do something, and convinced that I could take on any task at all, I would almost always succeed.

Knowing this changed everything. Every time I became discouraged I realized that all I had to do was believe that I could solve my problem, and remember back to how many times I had solved difficult problems before. In the days starting with Wednesday I overcame obstacles and performed mentally in ways that I thought had become impossible for me. My self-confidence infected every interaction I had with other people, where even my failure to finish a work task from Tuesday, a most dreaded topic, became a matter of amusement. My seeming lack of limitations became an almost frightening parody of reality, could it really be?

In just four days, it became so matter-of-fact that I could solve any mental problem I wanted to, that it has almost taken on a dark-side to it. What if my problems are always things that I made up for myself? What would life be like if you just decided to do things and then did them? What if my solution changed my life so thoroughly that I could not really be said to be the same person as I was before? I�ve always felt that when a person changes they die a little bit, would a nearly complete change be a nearly real form of death?

I�ve come to identify myself for so long as beleaguered, as a person fighting a losing battle, that I�m not sure if I can really handle success. It makes me wonder with fear whether my mistakes have always been partly intentional, because part of me needed me to fail in order to survive. Letting go of doubts is in some ways like finding out that you can turn off gravity. Do you really want to? What if you just fly out into space? What will happen when you find yourself in a place with no structure and no limits?

To what extent do people define themselves, and their own limits, and what would we become without them?

Landscape (chapter 2)

Brad focused on a single quadrilateral. It was green. It was as green as anything you can possibly imagine being green, like grass, for example. It was, in fact, a single vertex cell of a virtual mammoth lawn in the Landscape. Brad was fully aware of the Universal coordinates of the four vertexes that made up the quadrangle. He was also aware of the exact color of the thing; Green.

It was Greener than the Greenest Green, and then Greener still. It was the Green of all Greens.

All four vertexes fell within the same plane; the four-sided figure was fully two-dimensional.

Brad was fully aware of his own life span, from beginning to end. He knew when he would die. Death was a fixed point assigned by the System. Regardless of what Brad did in his life, so long as the System was still functioning at system time 3,141,592,653,589,793,237 nanoseconds, Brad�s address � B3CAD6345CA4 � would be cleaned. Nobody could know this fact, nobody but you, and I, and Brad.

Everyone was given a normal life span. It would be considered pretty normal to you, except maybe a little bit longer than you�re used to. They were all told exactly when they would die, and until then, would be free to do whatever they could imagine, literally. Everything would be permitted, and anything, given enough time to investigate, could be known�except one very small set of data. That set of data was the coordinates of the terminal end of everyone�s life, everyone�s except yours. You would always know when you would end, but you would never be able to tell anyone, no matter what novel and sneaky way you conjured to communicate it. The System always knew your intentions, and furthermore, maintained you.

If you knew that the shard of a tiny spec of grass was green, it was because the System properly operated your allotted memory in such a way as to assign the knowledge of greenness to you. There was nothing more to anyone than the state of them as recorded in a teeny tiny fragment of memory in this machine. All metaphysical arguments of being could go screw themselves.

Landscape (chapter 1)

B3CAD6345CA4, as he was known in hexadecimal, had a tendency to obsess over small details in the Landscape. It was a sort of obsession with omniscience, not entirely uncommon among the inhabitants of Fully Inspectable Realities (commonly known as FIRs � when there were more than one).

In fact, this tendency was noted as a possible negative quality for FIRs. But in the end consensus overcame this drawback, as it overcame all of the drawbacks of Full Inspectability and Full Transparency in general. In the end, we all knew that if we built a Universe in which we would have to live forever, the only way to protect it from the possibility of a Total Power Lockout (TPL) � a condition in which one entity manages to become so powerful that attempts to dethrone them are computationally impossible � we were going to have to allow Temporo-Spacially Limited Omnipotence to all, along with it�s companion, Temporo-Spacially Limited Omniscience.

Life, Liberty, and Temporo-Spacially Limited God-like powers for all.

Or to put all of this more simply: We got our asses in a jam, and knew we had to do some prison time, so we decided to bargain. Or�something.

Maybe there�s an in-between.

Over the short, green, golf-course-like grasses of 4E13FA17CCED, or, let�s call it Foreethirt, B3CAD6345CA4, or, how about, Brad, liked to fly his reverse-entropolymer plane. It was an authentic replica of the first one flown in 2080, when people were still people and reverse-entropolymer planes were still reverse-entropolymer planes.

A reverse-entropolymer plane is a plane powered by the class of material it was named after; reverse-entropolymers. Reverse-entropolymers turned the random motion of air particles into the straightforward and relatively easy-to-harness phenomenon known as a �slight breeze�. Straightforwardly, air could easily go through the material in one direction, but not the other, on a microscopic level. Since air particles are always bouncing off everything (more-so when it is hot, less when the temperature is closer to absolute zero), they would be bouncing off both sides of the material constantly, that is, if it weren�t for the fact that they can go right through one side of this special material. The upshot is that if you hold a sheet of material of some sort of reverse-entropolymer up, air will start flowing through it spontaneously.

Now, the average air particle is traveling at around 900 miles per hour, so obviously as the material became more efficient, it had the potential to unlock tremendous power. It was popular, in the heyday of this technology, to think of this energy as �coming from nowhere�. However, that was a stupid thing to think. The only energy ever known even controversially to have come from nowhere was discovered during early Multiverse-Dual-Phase experiments, which resulted in what was by far (we�re talking, by far to the power of 100) the worst catastrophe ever to be produced through the action of a human being. The destruction was so devastating, that I�m not going to talk about it right now.

It can be imagined that with enough very efficient reverse-entropolymer material, you could make a Boeing 747 fly near the speed of sound, and without wings. In fact, this doesn�t have to be imagined, because in 2082 it happened. The most efficient reverse-entropolymer ever produced, at an efficiency of about 99.5%, was like a wind sail that was always backed by a Category 5 hurricane � multiplied by about 5 � going in whatever direction you like.

An interesting byproduct of this whole phenomenon was that if you somehow absorbed the energy from this Category 25 hurricane force wind, by say, maintaining a jumbo-jet at a speed of 700 miles per hour, the air passing through the material would be instantly cooled. This had the interesting effect of turning refrigerators from energy guzzling appliances, into energy power plants.

For Brad, a third generation Landscapian, all of this nonsense was ancient history. And by �ancient history�, I�m not using a euphemism, it was literally thousands of years gone and done with. That is, if any of it really happened. But whether any of anything ever happened becomes a rather moot point when you are confronted with the fact that you know the Universe is, at least right now, all in your head. It makes it rather hard to believe that it was ever anything but that, or perhaps that it could possibly make any difference if it wasn�t�or perhaps that the question of whether or not something is in your head is not really a question at all so much as it is a stupid thing to ask.

Things That Don't Work

Today I left work early, e-mailing my boss to tell him as such, and that I thought I had a migraine for the first time in my life. After I rode my bike home, I kept changing my mind about whether the �migraine� label was over-dramatizing (or whether it was overly dramatic e-mailing him at all). All I know is that I felt nauseous, I felt a lot of pressure behind my eyes, I was disoriented, dizzy, and every little sound bothered me, and everything I looked at looked funny. Needless to say, perhaps, I also could not concentrate, but my lack of concentration might have existed even without those problems.

I am a hypochondriac. I have no illusions about that. In fact, while writing just now I am a hypochondriac, it occurred to me that perhaps I am making even that up, but I don�t think that is possible, I think that if you think you have hypochondria, you, by definition, must have it. At times it seems that being terribly ill would make me better off, because then I would not be in the awkward position of having to explain my most prominent lifelong (and real) problem; an inability, at times, to focus on a task. But I never invent an illness entirely, it is always based on something. In this case I am getting over a cold, which has caused severe congestion and probably all of the conditions above, which is probably a better explanation than that I am having a migraine for the first time ever.

Interestingly, the wikipedia entry on hypochondria suggests that sufferers are often those with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and/or anxiety. I know that I have some symptoms of OCD, most notably, excessive and persistent doubting. Like most sufferers of OCD, I react to my obsession with compulsive behavior. The best examples of this are when I�m programming, as I�ve been known to alphabetize long lists of functions, or otherwise obsess over the formatting or organization of the code, which I do when I have to make a programming decision and I begin to severely doubt whether I possibly can make that decision.

I also know that OCD is frequently associated with another mental problem; Bipolar Disorder. This brings me full circle to what I was writing last night.

Let me tell you how I spent the majority of my workday today. I spent the majority of my workday staring at the same two or three paragraphs, and puzzling over a few questions which I can literally write down in one paragraph right now. I�ll do it, although if you know nothing about programming you won�t understand it (in fact even if you do most of it will be nonsense out of context), but it will still have some kind of meaning.

First I wanted to know how the configuration for each Page object would be stored. I wondered for a bit whether there was a real reason to have a Page object instead of putting the code directly into a real php page. I figured out that there was a reason, because the pages would all do pretty much the same thing, and making an object was the best way to share the code. Eventually I decided that instead of having the Page object load the configuration, I would just extend the Page object with a class that pertained to each logical page, and those would have their configuration in the constructors. There were a few times that I actually had to revisit things that I had already decided, because I forgot the answers, such as whether the Page object should really exist. This list is turning out longer than I thought, but it�s still pretty pathetic, in my opinion. Next I had to figure out whether each status of each Project would be a separate extension of the Page object, which seemed really over the top. Eventually I came to the conclusion that some pages were more logically �pages� even though they might have different modules at different times, so the Page class would contain a factory to spit out the right one of those objects, and then the object itself might load different modules depending on what status the Project was in. But then there was the matter of determining from each module which classes needed to be loaded.

Ok, my original point to writing that last paragraph was to prove that all my thoughts for the whole day could fit in a short, distinct, appallingly small paragraph. It doesn�t look so convincing now. I guess I�m not so confident that I could have done all that in 10 minutes (as I�d thought before), but still, three and a half hours seems way too long.

What I went through for most of those three and a half hours was similar to what just happened to me after writing the paragraph before this one: I became doubtful of whether my original decision was correct, and subsequently lost my mental hold on what was even under consideration. The most common thing to occur in such an event is that I will immediately, perhaps even involuntarily, find something else to focus on. I described this process a little bit yesterday, where, in the end, I�m reading a news article, or changing the tabbing and spacing of code (compulsively, you might say), and I don�t even remember what I was working on last, or have any recollection of when I stopped working on it.

This phenomenon has existed for me to varying degrees my whole life (most notably when I had more work to do, but that�s not the only factor), but until what was probably about two years ago, it has resisted any sort of change or inquiry. It was perhaps two years ago that I began to notice a pattern, namely that every time I am distracted it happens in reaction to running into some problem that I cannot immediately solve. As I have confronted this problem with more knowledge, it has still resisted solving with surprising strength. Today, for those three and a half hours, I focused my will on actually continuing to try to work in the face of being distracted repeatedly. The result was daunting. In the end, though I managed (except for a few small exceptions) to keep from noticeably diverting my attention towards any distractions, I still managed to spend very long just trying to follow a train of thought that, on another day, I could have finished in less than a half an hour.

Today my distractions were like micro-distractions, in the same way that micro-sleeping is sleeping. I think something, then I listen to the meeting happening nearby in the conference room (having this meeting nearby certainly didn�t help the situation), then I pick up my thought again (perhaps, 30 or 40 seconds later), then I�m lost in some unrelated thought for a minute, then I get back to work again. Most of my time was spent staring at the computer and making no changes at all.

One thing that I find discomforting is that my problem seems to be a conditioned response. What I mean by this, is that some situations trigger distraction much more readily than others. For example, writing this, though I have almost become distracted at some points, has not been especially difficult. In fact, in the process of writing this I basically mentally went through everything that I had done at work, seemingly in defiance of the fact that I couldn�t concentrate all day. Even standing up and walking can sometimes temporarily solve my problem, allowing me to think about something I couldn�t before.

I say I find it discomforting, because it appears that one of the factors that makes one thing more difficult to concentrate on than another, is whether I�m the one who came up with the task. Or perhaps more accurately, it is not whether I came up with the task, but how much freedom I have to perform it however I want. This is mostly discomforting because it makes it that much harder to convince someone that my problem is real�when appearances seem to suggest that I just don�t want to do something.

What�s worse is that after running into problems with a task repeatedly, the conditioned response becomes deeper, and a sense of dread builds in response to even the thought of trying to work on something. This has lead me most of my life to delay almost everything until the last minute. Ironically, after struggling in a situation where there isn�t enough time for such a thing (my current job), it seems that in retrospect this was the most economical way to deal with my problem, because having a tight deadline (i.e. starting the night before on a two week project) during which perfection is impossible made it easier to compromise on any decision, and thus work faster and stay focused. But for much of my life even that ability to compromise on tough decisions didn�t exist, it was something I learned to do best during college.

Well, as usual just thinking about this has completely exhausted me, so it�s time to do something else. Besides, I still feel the same way I did when I left work early.

Three hours and twenty-four minutes

Today I worked for a total of three hours and twenty-four minutes. That�s 3:24. It�s actually embarrassing. It�s also not voluntary.

With the exception of showering and eating I attempted to work from 8:31AM until 5:25PM, when I finally gave up. Twice during that period I was actually brought to tears over this struggle, over the prospect of having to struggle to get almost nothing done, and then deal with it at work. Even the slim three hours and twenty-four minutes did not produce what that time should be worth.

As I reach back for an introduction to you of what it is I�m talking about, I�m confronted with very little that will explain as much as it confuses. I myself have been tempted at times to pretend that I don�t have this problem, that it is perhaps an exaggeration of reality or something normal.

The symptoms, at least in general terms, are simple. Most notably, I simply work slower at certain mental tasks than other people. At a slightly more detailed level, you can see that this is often in large part due to the fact that while I am �working� I am not always working; I am easily distracted and can find myself staring at the news in a web browser, not remembering how or why I became distracted from the task of programming something-or-other. Even if I fail to become distracted by something outside of work, I frequently become distracted by something in the work itself. I can become very preoccupied with doing something a better way. It�s not always clear when I have crossed the line between the practical and the impractical in this respect.

One thing that makes this problem confusing is that it fluctuates drastically over a period of weeks. At times it seems to be cyclical. This and the fact that my emotions, rather than just my ability to concentrate, also play a role in this cycle, has lead me to seriously consider whether I am bipolar. The problem is that it is also often possible to blame the down-turn on something external; this time I�m getting over a cold and I�m tired and my head is congested. But it is clear that it can�t be blamed entirely on these external occurrences, because most people wouldn�t have the same problem under the same circumstances. It�s possible that my problem is brought out by certain circumstances, that my ability to ignore distractions is dependent on how good I feel.

I�ve only got about fifteen more minutes to write this, so I�m trying to come up with a more useful summary instead of going into too much detail.

What I really wanted to express when I started writing this was the self-loathing that I feel as a result. Nothing can match the awkwardness of discussing with my boss or some fellow employee who depends on my work and having to tell them that I didn�t finish something despite having plenty of time and the biggest reason was that I didn�t spend enough time actually working on it. It is very difficult to justify not being able to concentrate. As you might expect, I seldomly actually say the words, �I didn�t spend enough time on it,� (unless followed by an explanation of something else work related that actually ate up the time) or, �I couldn�t concentrate,� but I often come close with things that could be interpreted that way, like �I had a bad week,� but which could also obviously be interpreted to mean that I had a lot of other things to do. Just thinking of how I hide it, even if it is only partial, makes me a little upset. As I liked to say in elementary school a lot, it�s not my fault. I�m not lazy. I probably work harder than a lot of people.

I could go into the intricacies of this for hours, and maybe I will, but right now I have to go to bed.

Balancing Act

In March of 2003 I carried a balance on my Discover Card (the card that pays you back).

In September of 2004 this balance reached a peak of over $12,000, spread across 3 different credit cards.

Today, July 26th, 2005 at 11:37 AM, I made the final payment on that running balance.

Oh, and I also got married, moved to Boston, visited Beirut for a month, and conceived a baby.

All of this can be blamed on one person. Well, ok, maybe not the first two sentences. All of the good things can be blamed on one person.

The Plunge (Chapter 6)

"It's good to take your time, but we've all gotta eat too," he said, smiling and letting out a little laugh. He said it in a frank but well humored manner, like he was pointing out the obvious and also putting himself on the same playing field that I was on.

I thought about this playing field.

A moment passed. During this moment words passed out of my mouth, the words turned out to be these, "How much do you eat?" At the time that I realized I was saying those words, I had been contemplating the idea behind them, and had been leaning towards letting it pass. The words themselves look like a joke on paper, but the timing and the expression on my face, one of slight disgust, drove home exactly what I was thinking.

Honestly, this wasn't fair. While it's true that the owners of successful businesses can end up making a lot of money at the expense of their employees, in this case, I thought, if it was happening it was not voluntary - it was only the result of the fact that my boss didn't know any other way of keeping the company from falling flat on its face. Or maybe he was just not sure how quickly to apply the brakes.

Or maybe he was right and it really was my fault that I took so much time to get things done. But had he really blamed it on me?

What does it mean to be blamed for the way you are? I know that some things about me aren't my fault, and I think that some things probably are. For example, I'm 5'6", and this is not my fault. In fact, looking at my family, you might say that I did a pretty good job reaching 5'6". But either way, it's not my fault, because I couldn't have done anything to change it....except maybe eat more Wheaties. Which perhaps explains a little something about what "fault" is.

So something is my fault or, you might say, credited to me, if I could have affected the outcome. But the thing that always gets me is the word "could". How can we say what could or could not have happened? It seems pretty evident that I could have eaten more Wheaties. I could have asked my mom to buy it, and I could have eaten lots of it. It was my "choice". But if I didn't choose to do those things, why do we assume that I could have? Or maybe the question of what I could have done, is asking, "Is there any possible output from my brain that would have accomplished X?" Obviously my mouth is controlled by my brain; I could have asked for Wheaties. Perhaps whether or not my brain was in the right configuration to make my mouth ask for Wheaties is outside the scope of the question.

But then, how is that some people could solve problems that others could not. If we don't consider what output a brain is capable of producing, then that would mean that anybody is could be just as smart as anyone else, and anybody could do anyone else's job, and anybody can play any song on any piano with or without the sheet music, and with or without a man holding a gun to your head.

But, the argument goes, anybody is capable of asking for Wheaties.

Enough about Wheaties.

Martin brushed aside the obvious implications of what I had just asked. He was good about cutting people slack; he was a softy. He could only really limit people when he was limiting several people at a time, when he made it sound like an announcement of something that had already been officially decided.

I'm not saying that Martin totally lacked assertion. When you didn't get your work done he would pointedly ask you what was holding you back, and ask when you were going to get it done. But unlike others perhaps more inclined or adapted to the task of telling people what to do, it sounded like a question, and if you hesitated to answer yes, he would ask you if he was being reasonable in asking you to get something done.

I'm not saying that that's a bad thing. But....well, I can't say how I would behave in a similar situation. All I can say is that if I saw the potential for such a situation, I would do everything in my power to install a different sort of situation, one that made more sense than....forget this train of thought for now.

"I don't want this place to become somewhere you hate," he said, it almost sounded like he meant Boston, so he followed it up by, "I mean, working here. I don't think it beneficial for either of us for you to grow to hate your job."

I agreed. I was the reasonable employee who knew and thought a lot more about the positions of my bosses than other people. He was the reasonable employer/small-innovative-non-public-business-owner/former-solo-programmer who could easily imagine what it was like for you to hate where you were working (from past experience, of course), who got you to do your work most effectively by making you feel guilty about forcing a nice guy like him to have to ask you why the hell you weren't getting your work done in a very nice way.

This makes me sound like an asshole. One of my bigger problems has always been thinking that people are stupid when they disagree with me. I generally tend to want to change everything I see. Take the following quote as an example: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." I naturally look at that quote and feel that it needs to be changed to, "If ain't broke, fix it anyway." Or if I were trying to be a bit more literal, "If you don't think it's broken, you must not be smart enough to see how broken it is."

Let's face it, nothing functions perfectly, so it's true, any given machine, or system, could be improved if you could understand it more. Everything is broken if you're smart enough. Maybe that's why I always think I'm so smart - everything looks broken to me.

Martin was in the middle of asking something about what I was going to do about the problems I had already described to him, when some sort of phenomenon seemed to reach backwards through time and rip the exact wording of what he'd just said into a state of total abstraction. That is to say, I can't give you an exact quote, because Martin's words were pulled up into a higher level of existence, one without details.

That is to say....

It's hard to describe exactly what happened at that point. It's sort of like when you're looking at a cube in a picture, and you suddenly realize that you are looking at it inside out - the cube is inverted, it's actually the inside of a room. Only in this case, it happened to everything all at once.

Starting with the simplest aspect of this phenomenon; the outside of the table became the inside of a table. The thin line of the corner that was facing me, where the top and side of the table meet, was suddenly, apparently, facing away from me. The table had a fake marble surface, which I could quite plainly now see was actually the underside of the inside of the table, that I was looking at from the inside, despite the fact that I was supposedly too small to fit inside of it. Or, if I was inside, there was no bottom....

Martin's face was not facing to the right of me anymore, it was inside out and facing to the left. The room I was in was actually a cube I was looking at from the outside, with the inside of the table in front of it, and a door leading into the cube, and a hallway, that had turned into a long protruding rectangular solid, with various doors leading into it.

I had very little time to actually ponder what was happening. I had just entered that state that one enters after a terrible accident, where, perhaps, they have a broken leg with a bone jutting out and are still staring at it wondering if the nagging feeling that something is wrong can be traced to this anatomical transformation.

What happened next was that everything went completely flat, as though, in lieu of not being able to decide which way was out and which way was in, it all decided to wait in a more neutral position, which was one of being printed on a piece of paper. This, I think, is when Martin's words were retroactively moved from being real instances of actual words, to being just simply the idea that Martin was trying to get across. I say that they went from being real, to being abstractions, because I distinctly remember knowing what the words were, and then I knew for a fact that my memory of them had been changed.

Now, some people call this situation "drugged". Then maybe they add in the possibility of "gone wacko". I myself had been hoping to go crazy for several weeks, because going crazy would mean that I had an absolutely impervious excuse for not getting anything done on time. But being in the situation that I was in, I was not prone to speculation, as I was more overwhelmed by the sensations of what was happening. I'd also never thought that going insane would be quite like this, and having been drugged before, in various ways and for various reasons, I also would not have imagined that any drug would cause such a simple transformation of reality, while leaving my mental capacities in tact.

Barring that what I have described so far is not easily explained as insanity or drug induced hallucination, what happened next could only be described, in most contexts, as a combination of both the worst insanity and the most severe drug multiplied by 11 (ten would be trite).

What happened next was that the idea Martin had just described became watermarked on the flat image of reality, a sort of invisible imprint, and reality itself cleverly tri-folded, like a letter, and then sunk into a large envelope, was addressed, return addressed, stamped, and placed in an "out" box. I can't tell you exactly how literally to take that, or how I was perceiving all of it, considering that I should have been in the envelope in the neatly folded reality, but I can tell you that if you imagined it exactly like it would happen to a piece of paper in someone's office, you may in fact be imagining exactly what happened. But this isn't the crazy part, or I should say, this is only the very beginning of the crazy part.

The crazy part is that I experienced a few hours of time pass, before the envelope was picked up, carried on a cart, given to some hyper-mailman, placed in a truck, driven to 2011, sorted with a lot of other mail, put on a plane, flown back to 2005, delivered to someone who put it on a cart, and in turn delivered it to another inbox, where it was opened with a hyper-letter-opener, and carefully unfolded. This entire process took many hours, if not several days. Most of it was extremely boring and would have driven me insane, if it weren't for the fact that I was under the impression of having already gone insane several times over.

As reality unfolded, I could see that something was very different. What was different was that everything was a dim, purplish blur. As though someone had accidentally covered the lens of a camera while taking a picture.

A new watermark was lifted from the page, which became the idea that some sort of apology was relevant for the situation. The situation itself did what it did before in reverse; everything went from flat to bulging, and then bulging the other way, all of which had a much smaller effect because I went from looking at the outside of a piece of cloth to looking at the inside of one that is wrapped around my head. Also, I noticed this time that my wrists went from being wrapped around a bit of rope, to be held together behind my back by a bit of rope.

And the idea of what was said by a man in the room with me was delivered as though by a conveyer belt onto the plane of down-and-dirty specifics, once again, retroactively. I remembered at that point that what he had actually said was this, "I'm sorry we have to keep you from standing or moving or seeing what's going on, it's necessary at this point."

The Plunge (Chapter 5)

My goal is to get more right the first time. No more of this QA-Bug Fix back and forth nonsense. It’s like a cheese grater for your time.

I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and stared intently at the napkin sized paper from UMassMemorial. It had a phone number on it, highlighted in yellow. I began to punch the numbers into my phone, knowing that I wasn’t going to make the call.

I stopped after about three digits, staring at the piece of paper again.

Three times already today the wall had beaconed me to plunge my head through it. I knew that I would never do it though, because I knew it would hurt and would have to be repaired. Otherwise we wouldn’t get our deposit. Which we would still be missing, or missing a small part of, if I didn’t patch up a hole in part of the wall where someone plunged their foot through it. At least that plunging was not the result of the siren-like self-destructive beaconing of the wall. Instead it was result of contagious stupidity.

I looked at the paper, intent. I was very intently looking at the paper, and thinking that not being able to dial the number and talk to whoever picked it up was exactly why I was supposed to be dialing the number and talking to whoever picked it up. Then it occurred to me that the people on the other end would probably be very used to this, and very kind about directing confused or disoriented people in the right direction.

But what bothered me wasn’t that I wasn’t going to know what to say to them, or that I wasn’t going to be able to explain to them why I would be calling. What bothered me was initiating a thing that….what bothered me was initiating anything at all, which also held true for initiating the thing that I was supposed to be doing for work. Which, I thought as I looked intently at the yellow portion of the paper, imagining Dr. Kolipur highlighting it with a marker, as though making a point out of applying more effort to the task than merely peeling it off of the pre-printed pad, was precisely why I should be calling the number.

I began to dial the cell phone without looking at the numbers I was pressing. This time I wasn’t sure whether I would, in fact, dial the whole number, but then I realized that I was probably dialing it wrong, and, looking down at the phone, confirmed that this was the case.

I deleted the numbers from the phone’s screen. I read the pre-printed note on the paper, “Dear Friend: As we discussed, it makes good sense for you to follow up with some counseling. Please dial,” highlighted in yellow, “856-2551,” end yellow highlighting, “to connect with our counseling staff.”

Yes, as we discussed. It does make sense. I dialed the number and pushed “Send”. I wasn’t immediately sure whether this was a good idea.

“Hello,” came the voice at the other end, “Blobbity blobbity phsychology and/or psychiatry department or something.” I took liberties with that quote.

“Hi, uh, my doctor told me to call this number for counseling for anxiety,” as I said this I felt a tinge of stupidity because I was making it sound like I didn’t know what the number connected me to.

“Who is your doctor?” she asked.

“Dr. Kolipur,” I answered.

“Just a minute,” she said, and replaced herself with hold music.

After about a minute she came back on the line and asked me to verify my name, address, insurance and phone number. As she was doing this, I was typing the words “converging like a swamprat” into a new text file on my computer. After I verified that the phone number was right she reacted with delight, as though I hadn’t just verified that three other things were right before that.

Finally, she told me that I could meet with a psychologist, Dr. Ralph, with a last name that sounded like, “Bimwack”.

I started to laugh as I began to ask for the last name again, because I knew that anyone saying a name like that to someone for the first time would automatically assume that they have to repeat it. She interrupted me before I could even say, “What”.

“I-M Wack,” she said.

“I-M Wack,” I said, with a slight air of incredulity, the kind of slight incredulity that accompanies listening to someone explain that there is a psychologist named Ralph I-M Wack.

She laughed, and said yes.

After we scheduled the appointment, and I closed my cell phone, it dawned on me that if I was crazy I might imagine calling and making an appointment with a psychologist who’s last name is spelled “I-M Wack”.

The Plunge (Chapter 4)

As the train was moving out into the open the view through the windows struck me as a surprisingly clear and complete panorama through the intervening heads and window panes, an image of the outside of another, identical train that ran near us at the same speed. It shook me, because it was so great, and yet I didn’t know why. It was laid out before me, as though the passengers in the train weren’t there, and the window wasn’t there, and the air itself wasn’t there, and the light had no need to reflect off the train and travel to my eyes, it only had to be there in my brain.

Later on I tried to consider why, and at first the only thing that I came up with was how much the other train was illuminated against its background by the setting sun.

Just after it happened all I could think was that the windows were especially clean.

Now I think that both of those things were true, but that also it was stunning because the other train made for a constant object, both because it was moving along with us, and because it existed across the view of 3 or 4 windows, different from scenery that is whipping by and only appears in one window at a time for a split second.

But mostly, I thought, as I looked through the window on my side of the train, and saw another view that affected me similarly but had none of the same qualities, there was something different about me.

This made me think back to what I thought on the way to the train station on foot. The thought was this: “I guess I just don’t know what the fuck is going on in there sometimes.”

This made me think back to the night before, when I had spent several minutes convinced that I knew I was going to leave, and I knew it was necessary. “Well, what would I do if I left right now?” I thought.

I imagined leaving the building and seeing the wet street, and I knew that I would be walking on it, and this would make things simple, and I articulated in my head that I would find the cheapest apartment possible. I realized that Miriam would be left to pay the rent in the apartment we live in together, could she afford it? Perhaps, just barely, but she would be left with the debt. I didn’t have much debt left, because she had paid either part or all of the rent for some time. Maybe I should send rent checks anyway. That brought back bad memories. I couldn’t do that.

How would she react? I thought of my actions like a new and different plague on our relationship, one that causes a totally different feeling than the previous. Than what previous?

I would still be working for WaveMakers? I would still commute to Boston? Yes.

But when the idea started out I was going to just walk out the door and walk forever.

But either way I would be leaving my computer behind. Why would I do that?

The fantasy was starting to fall apart.

That’s when it happened. I don’t even remember how or when, but I opened my latest work project and slammed in a chunk of code with a total disregard for any of the implications. It was as though I had been painstakingly laboring to solve a problem in the dark all day, and then turned on a light for the first time and saw the solution written on the desk in front of me.

2 + 2

I was suddenly and completely relieved of all my mental burdens, and I cared about nothing except this amazing potential solution. I worked for a half an hour in this way, producing something that later on, seemed much less amazing. But I would spend all of the next day in my newly enlightened state, as though on the upswing of a bipolar fantasy.

I thought, as the day went on, that it had to end, as it always did. But this wouldn’t end because it was different and had never happened before, which was just as it always was. Because it never happened the same way twice. I never felt the same way for more than a day. In the past few weeks I’d been paralyzed with anxiety, obliterated by low self-esteem, traumatized to the point of being mostly absent from my environment, nearly schizophrenic with false voices and perceptions, carefree, totally submissive to suggestion, totally domineering with knowledge of how things should be, upset about my situation but clever about how to get out of it, and, for the better part of this particular day, maniacally useful until I became exhausted.

Increasingly over the last few months I would be somewhere I’d been before and feel that I was observing it for the first time.

“Whoa, they changed this,” I said, looking at an area in the grocery store.
“ It’s always been there.”
“ Huh?”
“ You just don’t notice these things.”

Later I realized that it hadn’t actually been like that all along, the shelves had been moved, but she was right, much of it had remained the same, despite the fact that they seemed completely different to me. How I could have realized the ins and outs of this later on adds another layer of mystery.

Sitting on the train, looking back on this, that’s when I remembered the thing I had seen in the instant messenger window on the computer two days previous. It came as a shock that was levels above the one at the start of the train ride. It came as such a shock because the content of the message was self-evidently shocking, just knowing what it said was alarming. It was so alarming that I almost forgot again.

But I didn’t. Or at least, I didn’t forget all of it. Most of it quickly flicked out of consciousness just because it didn’t fit immediately into any logical category. But I was able to slowly, painstakingly peel back the layers, which made me unusually aware of how grammar works.

The first sentence was easy, I knew what it meant, “That message wasn’t for you,” it had said, quite clearly and plainly.

The second was not so easy, and, in fact, the whole instant message had appeared on my screen so quickly in reply to the one I sent before it, that it had been hard to believe the second sentence could have been typed in that time span, which made it easier to believe that the second sentence didn’t exist at all, and that perhaps the whole message didn’t exist. Which had allowed me to forget about it for 49 hours.

My language understanding center, identified by Karl Wernicke quite some time ago, now told me that the subject of the second sentence was “you”, meaning me. The predicate was a little bit more tricky. This was mostly because of some kind of unidentified verb that wouldn’t go away no matter how long I thought about it. I knew that the verb was modified by the contraction “won’t”, so whatever it meant was being negated, but it was being negated conditionally because of the phrase, “until three months from now when you live at 1503 Commonwealth Ave.” Also I knew that the subject upon which the verb applied was “there”, which seemed to agree with my gathering theory that the verb had something to do with going somewhere.

The verb, as I recalled, was actually this: “tellink”. I would have regarded it as a typo if it weren’t for the fact that it came packaged in a sentence that told me something about my future, something that even I didn’t know yet.

But of course, the second sentence could have easily been a prank, and I would have regarded it as such, despite the inhuman rate at which it had been typed in and sent back to me, if it weren’t for the still more improbable third sentence, whose existence as a creation of fingers flinging themselves recklessly across a keyboard in such a small span of time was a feat surpassed in unlikelyhood only by the information that was conveyed by these supposedly typed characters. And, as unlikely it was that anybody could have gotten to typing that whole third sentence in the somethingth of a second that remained after typing the second sentence, the content was actually much, much more unlikely. It was so unlikely that I really had to stop thinking about it, and leave you in suspense.

The Plunge (Chapter 3)

As the car pulled up to take Miriam away, she said, "Perfect timing."

A hand inside waved, but the angle of the car made the head of the driver the only invisible part. I knew what she looked like and didn't bother stooping to see her. Miriam got in, and I slowly stepped down from the front door, not really sure what I was doing, or why. I waved, and the driver waved back again. For a moment they looked like they were driving away, and I considered what it was I was going to do next.

It was a pleasantly warm day for New England in March, which is to say that it wasn't freezing cold as it had been a week before. I was wearing a sweater over a long sleeve shirt, with no hat or gloves, and I felt fine. The sun was shining. The car didn't leave yet, and I began to mill around the front of the house, as though I were about to do something, or as though I might suddenly be done with something and go back inside.

I asked myself why I was milling around and what I was going to do next, but there was no reply. I'd grown accustomed to this feeling, as I had been feeling it all day. I had become to myself like a recently introduced character in a movie. My personality and habits were unknown. At any time I could do anything, but I would probably not do anything terribly interesting yet. I would just develop like a picture. Something new.

I heard the car finally pulling away and I turned to look, wondering if Miriam was looking back at me through a mirror.

Now what was I going to do next?

I looked around the side of the house, mimicking normal behavior not because I was self-conscious of looking weird, but because I was like a mirror to my environment, reflecting it because I had no image of my own to provide. I felt that I should go for a walk, because that was what people did on nice days like this, and it would be a terrible waste if I didn't. But something stopped me. Maybe it was the fact that I knew I wouldn't enjoy it, because everything would seem empty.

For the moment there was a gap in the traffic, and I heard music, with the sweet sound of a woman singing a folk song, slowly becoming disentangled from the receding noise of cars. I thought that it was beautiful, especially within the newly found silence of the road. I wished this road could always be silent, and I vaguely remembered that it was during the summer. But I knew the memory was wrong, because this road didn't change during the summer, it always had loud traffic. This was approved by the road as truth when another stream of tires ate the music and the silence in one gulp.

I was distracted by a small stream of water, knitting its way through the dust and garbage bits in the gutter of the street. I followed it upstream, slowly, prodding with my eyes its patterns in its miniature road-dirt riverbed. I followed it to the other side of the tree that grows through our sidewalk, and on the other side of the tree I felt for a moment hidden and safe, like I did as a child poking at little road gutter rivers with sticks. I was always wanting to observe and disturb them only minimally, and I would have to give in again and again to disturbing them when they didn't do what I wanted.

This one I wouldn't touch, as I hadn't touched one in years, I had only watched. The source was a melting plain of snow laid out in the parking lot of the car repair place next door. It was a vast glacier in comparison to the tiny river. The glacier was overlaid with patterns of dirt, showing the history of the dying winter, like a glacier would show the history of the most recent ice age.

An irrational thought crossed my mind. I imagined admonishing the people at the car place for piling up this big mound of snow that would get in the way of the sidewalk and turn into a big pile of trash when it melted. Then I was aware of what they would be thinking if they looked at me right now, and I felt confident about not caring at all.

I went inside and walked up the stairs. I sat down and stared at the floor and thought about nothing of any significance for about an hour.