I went to the Museum of Fine Arts downtown, mostly to just sort of wander through the pieces and breathe in the musty smell of old things and check out the new things, including the enormous new wing they just added on. Some old guy paid for the naming rights to the new section as a present for his wife, so she retaliated by buying him an Extruded Video Engine by Peter Sarkisian.
The Engine basically consists of a hollow molded-plastic shell that has all sorts of round bits and flat bits and other interesting protrusions, and it's nailed to the wall with a video projector behind it, which projects a video of basically a bunch of random little moving gadgets and coils and cylinders and tickers through the plastic. The effect is super realistic and utterly fucking hypnotic; you can't believe that there are no moving parts involved, because the damn thing is clanking and clicking and spinning away, interspersed with winding strings of tickertape text.
It's strangely, technologically beautiful, and I can understand why it has such an unwieldy name; it looks as though a bright blue, very weird machine is being extruded through the wall like whirring Play-Doh. It's in a little black alcove, and I spent a good half-hour just staring at the thing and seeing how it all came together. It really makes you think a lot about how so much of our technology is made to seem magical by eliminating all the moving parts, ensuring that they're whisper-quiet, and spending years of man-hours on sheer utility. This piece is therefore really quite enjoyably subversive; it has all the qualities essential to wizardry but uses them to achieve the opposite effect.
The artist's website (and some of #2's cousins) can be found here. Bear in mind that all the little parts that you see on these things don't actually exist; they're all animated projections on a thin shell of plastic.
When I got home, I felt the need to blog about it, and decided to hit up the local paper's website for more information about the museum to be included here.
Until...well. I don't actually want to go into detail here. Suffice it to say that an article about my employer caught my attention immediately, and now, a few hours later, I feel like I smoked a lot of pot without any of the fun of, well, actual pot. In other words, tired, blah, and vaguely depressed. It didn't help that I made my first student-loan payment this afternoon--the fall of 2006 is now paid for--which only reminded me of my precarious financial situation.
I actually spent a good while yelling at my mirror, sitting on my couch staring vacantly into space, imagining novel-sized rants against the disparity between the rich and poor and how the gap is increasing quite literally by the day. Especially the CEO. Vague, smug, totally indifferent. Or Brad and Angelina, living in a $70-million French estate with 35 bedrooms, 20 fountains, and a private forest. Or even my dad's friends.
That's another funny thing. I was feeling pretty good this morning. I'm set to go to at least two major-league games this summer for free, and both times will be in private suites. Free food, free booze, free ball. Baseball, I mean, not testi-ball. One of those times is courtesy of my dad, and I was feeling pretty appreciative, but now I feel like e-mailing him and asking him why exactly it is that none of his friends will even consider at least paying off my student loans, because it's not fair that I get ground into dogshit, possibly laid off, likely evicted, and forced back in with my parents with all my shit in a storage locker because they've finally moved on from having a kid in the house with them, all because I have to devote all my money to a degree that's turning out to be pretty goddamn useless while a bunch of self-important assholes with stupid-ass MBAs laugh and rub elbows in party suites because they're untouchable.
Okay. It's unfair to talk about them like that; they worked extremely hard for their money, and I've known most of them pretty much my entire life. Some of them actually knew my dad before I was born, when he was a hospital cook. They helped push him into getting a degree and encouraged him to claw his way up as high as he could go and then gave him the venture capital he needed to go even further. A lot of what makes my parents' life so comfortable can be attributed to their influence. To say nothing of the (supposed) uselessness of my degree; I only just got it three weeks ago, and it already netted me a job. It'll serve me well in the years to come, come what may.
Still. In times of stress, I shift into selfish mode, wondering why exactly the entire world doesn't strive to make me more comfortable. It's childish and petulant. Also melodramatic and ever so slightly overboard. So I won't get a raise this year. I may not even get that terribly laid-off. The problem is my lack of seniority; I'm the second-most-recent hire. I would certainly hope that if the ax falls on my department, the first to go will be the high earners, who are mostly incompetents who lucked into 20-year careers. And mostly, I'm just angry that I'm so wedded to the idea of the absolute necessity of financial security to a fulfilling life. Especially after I spent a good portion of the day at an art museum!
In the end, it all leaves me with a terrible, terrible taste in my mouth. The only way I can forget about it is to think about the lifestyle of the hyper-rich. Have you noticed that very few of them tend to get involved with average wage slaves? So little contact occurs between the classes that I wouldn't be surprised if they wound up evolving into separate species. It actually makes perfect sense; the wealthy have the supreme health-care plan (read: so much money it makes doctors blind and their palms hairy) and breed only among themselves. As such, they're always in perfect health, have the means to ensure generational genetic fidelity, and will, over the years, concentrate desirable characteristics as they become ever more rarefied. The gene pool will get refreshed on a regular basis by the Horatio Algers of the future, but even that will dwindle as all the intellectual property and means of innovation in the world gradually trickle into the hands of the wealthy.
I'm starting to think H.G. Wells was a mistaken genius. Those people seem to be forerunners of the Eloi, these lovely, sweet creatures who spend their days flitting from continent to continent, enjoying the rarest delights. They never have to put up with a single day of rain, an overdue rent check, or a blown carburetor (yes, I know those things are obsolete, but I drove a truck with one for a year...all I have to say is thank God for fuel injection and shady mechanics). The worst that can happen to them is heartbreak or a bad review.
After all this stress and anger and fear, I find that I have to just throw up my hands in surrender to the inevitable and trust that regardless of what happens, I'll always at least have my feet under me, the sun on my face, a book in my hands, and some time to think. That, at the end of all things, is an ample sufficiency.
I advocate the use of the word gizmo when referring to technological devices in general. Its opponent, in the absolutist section of my mind, is gadget. It appears the gadgets are winning: a Google search for the word "gadgets" yields 134,000,000 results, while "gizmos" brings up only 8,250,000. Then there's Wikipedia, which offers only a disambiguation page for "gizmo" but has a dedicated page for "gadget." Although I will admit that after reading the gadget page my lexical outrage has been somewhat mollified, I'm still a fan of "gizmo." Maybe it's because I liked Gizmoduck in Duck Tales better than Gadget in Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers as a kid. Gadget was hot, but all she did was fiddle with stuff, while Gizmoduck had all this cool shit. Kind of like Iron Man but unicyclical.
I've been feeling a little scattered so far today. Well, for the past few years, really. Okay, maybe--just maybe--pretty much my entire life. I have a problem with coherency--a tendency towards erraticism. Or at least I did.
Prepare for self-absorption.
The older I get (and spare me thy groans, ye dowagers, for age is relative, and I've been permanently stuck at both eighty-three and twelve for quite some time), the more I look back and realize how my mindset's been shaped by my choice of reading material.
A large amount of what I read consists of epic science fiction, like Asimov's Foundation series and Butler's Patternmaster books. They chiefly involve visionaries, people who guide or remake the future according what they believe is the best outcome for humanity. Generally, those visionaries seem to have some kind of foreknowledge of the future--or, at the very least, a preternatural ability to read the writing on the wall--an intensive understanding of how to manipulate the outcome of events seemingly out of their control, the will to do so, the ability to write unnecessarily complex sentences ("Ridiculous," you shriek. Ever read Mein Kampf? Now that's a rambler; even this single sentence, which includes no less than three other sentences, sixteen clauses, fourteen commas, two em dashes, one list, a line of dialogue encased within a parenthetical aside, numerous errors, and a semicolon (for a grand total of twenty-eight punctuation marks and yet another parenthetical aside within the parenthetical aside mentioned above) doesn't hold a candle to that monster) and the means to accomplish all of the above.
When I was younger, I always figured that if you were just smarter and faster than everyone else, or at least just genuinely tried to be, some kind of magical insight would come to you. The graffiti, as it were, would come into focus. It turns out the exercise of potential is much harder than the admiration thereof; the greatest pressure produces the strongest material. I, however, spent most of my life in the upper middle class. Not much more needs to be said. My only chance at immortality is through the second, equally well-traveled road to genius: madness. True lunch-box-hood, however, requires time to cultivate; Phase One will therefore be the accomplishment of full incontinence by the age of thirty.
Preparing for the future--and perhaps even laying claim to it--now strikes me as endless labor in the dark to power a light that may never shine. Science fiction is nice, but it's all made up. The course of human history likely won't follow any of those paths; it'll follow its own. In the end, all you're really doing is spending a great deal of time and energy on the off chance that you're right.
This is, believe it or not, a huge load off my mind.
So I gashed myself pretty good on a cleaver while washing the dishes a few minutes ago.
While I wait for the wound to coagulate sufficiently to allow me to return to a life of domestication, I thought I'd set down some thoughts here (stone, alas, is expensive) on the whole idea of telekinesis.
I should probably clarify right here, right now, that what I mean is more or less the popular concept of telekinesis, in which one moves stuff around by means of hoodoo. I choose to ignore the broader definition of psychokinesis, mostly because it ruins the punchline (to be explained in the near future).
Now: The popular concept. This is embodied in characters like Jean Grey of X-Men, Carrie of the eponymous film, pretty much all of Anne McCaffrey's body of work, and Uri Geller of utensil-ruining fame. It mostly involves someone squinting at an object of some kind, which then miraculously moves, seemingly by the power of thought. In other words, the ability to manipulate an object's location in space.
Ass. Ass ass ass ass ass.
Pardon the outburst. This represents, as some of you may well know, the abandonment of one of my most cherished dreams of childhood. Mm. The power...
Anyway, let's talk a little bit about the limits of such an ability, particularly in the context of a potentially fatal situation. Say someone tries to shoot you, and you can stop the bullet in midair. A piano breaks free of its moorings and sails to the ground, hardly taking notice of the single obstacle on the way--and suddenly, against all reason, totally fails to hit anything.
Neato, right? Invincibility by means of mental mastery of matter is pretty tough to beat. Two big problems are visible from the outset:
You need to see it coming. Telekinesis is neat--but virtually useless if someone sneaks up behind you and pulls the trigger. There are two solutions to this: a particularly alert friend, and/or telepathy of sufficient power and finesse to keep an eye on the heads of everyone around you. Since telepathy can only be found in individuals with telekinetic ability (this is going to be explained in a later post when I feel like it), such sustained focus will kill either you or everyone else around you--or both.
You need to know what you're doing. For example, let's take the piano. How do you stop it?
Does your defense consist of just pushing the thing away from you, either upward or outward? If so, be prepared to pay for a very expensive piano--a half-ton object plummeting downwards at a speed roughly its own mass multiplied by 9.8 meters per second squared doesn't react well to being stopped suddenly and abruptly. You will therefore have the ancillary problem of a very large and dangerous cloud of splinters heading for the local populace. If you don't stop it, get ready for a lot of lawsuits for medical expenses and wrongful death.
On the other hand, you might decide to encase the entire piano in an envelope of telekinetic energy so that its every exterior surface is supported. This leads us to the very large problem of physics: Sure, the piano's stopped on the outside. What happens to all the shit on the inside? Same thing that happens to people who get in car accidents: the shell stops; the contents don't. They just keep going. The damn thing's going to look like it was pureed on the inside. Still, it's slightly better than scenario 2-1 above.
Even better is this: instead of just supporting the piano externally, one could simply support every single component of the piano, simultaneously and with an equal degree of force. This entails knowing--in astounding detail--each and every part of each and every piano (hey, just be prepared and all), how much mass each individual part contains, and what materials those parts are made of. Say you manage to accomplish this amazing feat of memorization, and sure enough, one day, Judge Doom and his graveling buddies get a little peppy. What happens? You've got a piano hanging over your head, intact! Except, of course, for the little problem of the law of conservation of energy, which basically means that the instant you let go, poof--sawdust.
So no matter what happens, you owe someone a piano. Hopefully your cohort of superheroes has an awesome insurance policy.
In case you missed it, scenario 2-3 contained the crux of my argument: the conservation of energy. Energy can't be negated; it can only be converted into a different form. When it comes to telekinesis, the type of energy being dealt here with is mentioned right there in the root word. Kinetic energy!
It's the extra energy that gets picked up by a moving object as it accelerates. It's pretty much one of the major underpinnings of modern physics, if not the most major one thereof. It's also what more or less killed the popular idea of telekinesis for me. It's physically impossible (at least thus far) to endow an object--whether stationary or in motion--with energy it didn't have before without an outside force acting on it. You can't stop a bullet in midair; where would all that energy go? Would it be liberated into the cosmos at large? It'd shred everything in the bullet's immediate vicinity (which would be a rather large area, given how much kinetic energy is invested in an object moving at (typically) slightly more than the speed of sound), including you.
So much for that. The answer, of course, to this painful acknowledgment of the limitations of my dreams, is psychokinesis. It's all about the manipulation of energy rather than matter (although they can be interchangeable), which could be extraordinarily useful.
Say, for example, you have a boulder that weighs about 2,000 kg. Assuming 2,000 kg is the boulder's rest mass, we can use Einstein's classic equation to determine that the boulder contains something like 180 exajoules of energy. If all of this energy were to be expended in a single second, it'd be about 180 billion megawatts. For some perspective, consider that the most high-capacity American nuclear plant in the height of summer puts out about 1800 MW.
That's only potential power, though. Nobody's damn fool enough to try to liberate all that shit. That'd only be six orders of magnitude less energy output than the Sun. Frying-pan city.
To say nothing of how mind-numbing the job would be, staring at a rock all day long, unbinding one atom at a time. It'd be almost as bad as an episode of Gossip Girl.
Jeez. I ventured off the well-trodden path there. Anyway, the popular conception of telekinesis is illogical in and of itself. What kind of ability enables you to move objects, but not the object's individual components? Why in the name of God would you be able to move that vase just a foot to the left, but also be incapable of shuffling a few atoms around to make its contours more aesthetically pleasing? That doesn't even touch upon the total inattention to the movement of matter on a large scale, like the weather or the motion of the planets.
The plausibility factor here is found in Anne McCaffrey: her Rowan series touches upon the idea that the exercise of telekinetic ability on the path of large objects doesn't just conjure energy up out of nothingness; it consumes calories. In other words, the energy driving telekinesis comes, obviously, from the body of the telekinetic in question. Brilliant! Unfortunately, the topic of conversion isn't even broached; how many pounds of fat is equal to how many Newtons of work?
In the end, one feels as though one is biting one's own tail. The stuff just doesn't actually, like, work. It makes me feel like a red-faced child, sitting on the floor, wondering why the hell the damn Lego won't fit with the TinkerToy even if I yell at it really hard.
I now own both film versions of Hairspray. I am very possibly the gayest heterosexual on this planet.
In my defense, I've thought John Waters was freakin' brilliant since I was 12 and saw Cry-Baby for the first time. Now that, of course, I've seen Hairspray multiple times (the original version at least), I recognize that Cry-Baby is, in fact, the lesser work. The fact that that has not diminished its relative brilliance in any way speaks somewhat to my enjoyment of this man's oeuvre.
Of course, it should be noted that as far as I'm concerned, the "oeuvre" to which I refer consists entirely of those two movies. This is mostly because they are actually his only good ones.
The original version's merits, however, remain unshared by its descendant. That's okay, because the more recent version has its own redeeming qualities. Mostly it's just cinematic Prozac, an hour and a half of bubbly emptyheadedness, but there are also very salient merits, such as the reinterpretation of the Corny Collins character (I like the James Marsden one much better--his support for integration is much more overt without crossing into obnoxiousness) or the Turnblad parents' marriage storyline. Overall, it sticks quite well to the original message about transcending race.
For the most part, I just like Waters's films because of how their messages come across in these weirdly twisted, ugly-people-infested visions of proletarian America, a gutter-reeking sewer that shows the viewers how race and economic class hardly matter whether one is stuck at the bottom of the collective toilet or sitting atop it.
At least the remake of Hairspray provides opportunities for endless analysis. What does it say that the version made nearly 20 years after the original is almost completely sanitized of sublimity? That it consists chiefly of knowing winks, strained exuberance, and a glossy sheen? It strikes me as being the product of an America striving to convince the world of its post-racial identity by reappropriating the voice of a previous generation. If I were Ozymandias in The Watchmen, I'd suspect society as a whole of having anticipated the present national struggle.
Make no mistake: this election represents a conflict between two opposing forces. One is the old way born of decades of ever-growing might; one is the new way born of shifting polarities in the world at large. It's hard to explain how deeply I feel about this election and everything it means to me. Over the past few years, I've been feeling as though we're still going through the hangover left behind by the Cold War, where it was the United States or nothing. I'd rather be dead than Red, right?
Now the world's getting all wonky on us. Suddenly, other countries are starting to matter a lot more than we're used to. They're starting to get better than us in some ways. A lot of us don't like it. I'm not sure how easy I feel about it myself. But in the end, I'd rather have a president like Barack Obama than John McCain. I want a realist, not an ideologue. An intellectual, not a cowboy or "maverick" or whatever other insipid handles they've managed to cook up for him. A reader, not a shouter.
Most of all, I want a president who inadvertently gets spotted reading this.
I got a little perspective yesterday. Not quite sure where it came from or why, but there it was.
Before I tread that particular path, thoughts on Aliens: Also impressively good, very thought provoking. Didn't like the android Bishop, thought he was a bit of a sacrificial lamb. Liked Newt, the terraformer child, if only because she isn't treated the way most children are in movies like this.
Okay, yes, she's used as a reason to prolong the plot and increase the tension, but in the end that's why most characters exist anyway. Newt's character, though, is depicted intelligently--she's in the way all the time because she genuinely wants to be in on all the plans. Her odds of survival are better that way, y'see.
I enjoyed how Ripley taped together a shitload of guns to make one big old master weapon that throws flames, ejects bullets--both regular and exploding--and tosses grenades.
I also dug the terraforming apparatus and the way the colonists' success was depicted in the general weather of LV-426--constantly cloudy, always windy, ubiquitously damp. That's what a world being adapted for Earth-life looks like, particularly if the atmosphere is originally an unbreathable gas (as evidenced by the first encounter with this moon in Alien; all the characters wore suits and the atmosphere was revealed to be mostly nitrogen and methane) and if the moon in question has polar ice. The first step in such a situation would be to melt the ice and get a rudimentary hydrologic cycle going, liberating plenty of oxygen and hydrogen to allow other processes to take place, converting most of the atmospheric methane into something useful (LNG, probably, to meet the energy needs that the processor can't until the atmosphere clears enough to make solar feasible or until enough radioactive deposits are found to make large-scale fission possible). Very smart. The atmospheric processor in particular made terrific sense, although it did seem to be a bit industrial-looking for my 21st-century tastes.
Okay. Now back to our regularly scheduled program.
So all that stuff about Singularitarianism. In a sense, I guess you could say I got swept up in it (for all of a week or two). I thought there were genuinely groups of people, conclaves of scientists actively bringing an end to the need to advance technologically.
In the end though, I have to cop to a sense that it's mostly a bunch of science-fiction geeks (like me) acting out some serious wish-fulfillment. One of them, for example, is exactly my age and is involved with the "Immortality Institute," which is basically a group of people over the Internet who dig, of course, immortality. They also show an unfortunate tendency to bitch about how people seem to misunderstand the term "Singularity," if only because it seems to apply to so many different things.
It could be the moment people start to live forever. It could be the emergence of the first computer to think. It could be the uploading of human consciousness into an inorganic matrix (pune intended). It could be the emergence of nanotech powerful enough to create anything and smart enough to attain sentience. In fact, it could be the moment we invent a machine that's smarter than people...or it could just be the moment we invent a machine that's as smart as a person.
Frankly, the whole argument kind of strikes me as a group of geeks bickering over the relative hotness of Deanna Troi versus Beverly Crusher and the quantitative effects of empathic powers or an M.D. on beauty. Kind of like Christians schisming six different ways based on whether they believe in Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, all four, or none of the above.
For my part, the more I think about it, the more I feel the "Singularity" escapes such narrow definition--mostly because I think the actual event will be the moment at which many, many different technologies will finally mature and converge. Given that we're at the infancy of true high technology, that kind of super-science will take a long time and a lot of work. Think of it as a unified field theory for technological gizmos; unless, that is, you're the sort who believe that the development of a unified field theory for science is the true Singularity.
To say nothing about the whole "OMG LETS CONQUER DETH TODAY" attitude. Immortality is a poor aspiration to begin with, but here it is adulterated with the attitude that such a thing will propel the human race into...well, who knows? Death is the engine of evolution. Wiping it out virtually guarantees stagnation. There will be a point--will be--where people stop reproducing because there's less of a driving desire to ensure the propagation of one's genetic material. Then the suicide rate will take off as people just get bored. It may take a thousand years, ten thousand, a million, but eventually those who are left will have drifted so far apart that the human species--or what's left of it--won't exist anymore. When two people do happen to bump into one another a million light-years away, they won't be able to relate to one another anymore because they're so different.
In the end, mortality is necessary. There simply isn't any way around it if we want to preserve the vibrancy of our species in perpetuity.
A new peeve's emerged recently, and I'm sure you'll groan, given the thread I've been on lately. The peeve is this: the abuse suffered by the word "technocrat" in recent political discourse. For some reason it's getting associated with policy wonkishness, a state of mind that has also, for some inexplicable reason, developed negative associations.
What's wrong with technocracy? Apparently, it's being dismissed as the dream government of elitists; meritocracies are not attractive solutions for people of little merit. Still, it's silly to use "technocrat" in a pejorative manner; it sounds like hiring a qualified individual to do a highly specialized job is a naughty thing to do.
It's even occurring elsewhere--an article I found that argued about Ghana and the world food crisis with this one columnist in Accra called the columnist a typical "statist, central-plan loving technocrat" for suggesting an aggressive, hundred-year strategic plan for ensuring that Africa--or at least Ghana, I'm being optimistic here--can feed itself.
The author's argument against the hundred year plan? Technological change and socio-economic transformation. Both of which would be valid in Africa but for the numerous other examples of countries throughout history that established plans for development over long periods of time and stuck to it in spite of uncertainty in the world at large; the United States' interstate highway system strikes me as being a good example.
Fuck, man. Are we seriously starting to experience a backlash against the 20th century? How weird?
I'm a full-blown Google Reader addict. It's always sitting in a tab, ready to be clicked on whenever a parenthesized number appears, regardless of whatever else I happen to be doing at the time. This isn't really that special or new; I'm still in the bubbly honeymoon stage.
Anyway, ever since Reader's advent into my life, I've found myself wishing for a button that would let me star or share pretty much anything I read--both on the general Web and out here in real life (I've even caught myself daydreaming about poking imaginary stars next to phrases I like in various books)--if only to stick it someplace where I could always come back to it later for closer scrutiny.
One of those starred articles from way back when concerned the search process for closed-captioned films in Google Video, so out of sheer curiosity--and this illustrates part of why I love Reader--I gave it a shot. I have to admit that I've never, ever seen an online video service offer closed-captioning as an option rather than a consequence of how the bootleg was made outside of my alma mater. Granted, it's limited to a relatively small body of videos, but oh what a body.
The first film that came up was virtually guaranteed to pique my interest: Human Computation. About 25 minutes in, I thought to myself, "I wish there was some way I could stuff this somewhere, maybe show it off a little in the bargain." So I noticed the "Share" button.
Long story short, I had what could basically be described as a religious experience, and have just understood the cult of personality that surrounds entities like Apple, Google, and Barack Obama.
In fact, I can't remember the last time I visited a website that wasn't popped from Google--whether GMail, Reader, Blogger, or otherwise--for more than one or two clicks. It's like the damn thing's swallowing my relationship with the Internet. Sort of like how Obama's site is the MySpace of political fundraising with a million small things that members can do that will somehow end up furthering the greater glory of Barack Obama. I like the guy and think we could do much worse than voting for him (like not voting for him), but good God, the near-religious stuff about him I've read over the last couple of days had me...well, not disturbed or frightened, but...taken aback.
That lasted about until my epiphany above. Google has turned into this miraculous, sprawling, chimeric thing. It's tentaculastic. It houses everything I consider important--my e-mail, my news, my schedule, shit to read, shit to watch, shit I write, and now my memory. It's like a really big house that always seems empty because there's always more room than stuff to fill it.
Interestingly enough, Human Computation has now, of course, in hindsight made me reconsider my relationship with Google. The same entity governs something like 90% of all my Internet activity. What if that's the scam Google's running these days? Instead of the ESP game, it's an insane number of services with crazy capabilities that allow people to label and classify virtually everything that's consumed through the Google portal. Advertising might be the main source of Google's revenue, but the actual driving force would seem to be to get a handle on the Internet and the amount of information it contains.
At least that's what it would be for me. For Google, of course, the classification of the Internet is merely the means to the ultimate end of getting you to buy their clients' shit. That's okay with me in the end, anyway--I'm wise to their shtick and am only too happy to take advantage of their services in the meantime. Even if that means getting addicted to my biggest productivity-killer since Big Tobacco.
Considering all the recent budget cuts in conjunction with multiple refusals to cut salaries for high-level employees, I wonder what happens when a government ceases to invest in its own citizenry. Add in the fact that the top 1% of earners paid over 20% of all tax revenues last year, and one wonders exactly how much stake the middle and lower classes actually have in the government, and if maybe that could possibly explain why the Bush Administration seems to have fallen precipitously in its sense of accountability to the body politic after the first and second elections.
Anyway. While I certainly will say that I'm a regular Reader (you see what I did there? Of course you did) of Michael Anissimov's blog, Accelerating Future, I have to admit to being more than a little vexed with the concluding line of one of his recent blog posts about Einstein's religious beliefs (or lack thereof):
“Despite his categorical rejection of conventional religion, Brooke said that Einstein became angry when his views were appropriated by evangelists for atheism.”
Too bad. You are angry when people take what you say seriously?
Now, now. Anissimov is confusing the issue here: Einstein's anger wasn't with the fact that his disbelief was being taken "seriously," mostly because it wasn't; instead, he was angry that religious fundamentalists were conflating his beliefs with those of the scientific community at large. He might have been one of the most significant individuals of the past century, but he was by no means representative of every physicist's views on the matter. His opinion of the importance of both faith and knowledge together have been known for decades; one wonders why this issue even came to light at all.
Perhaps the creationists are girding for another attack.
It's a silly old world we live in. Typhoons, earthquakes, wildfires, plagues, droughts, Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt...I don't blame the faithful for being so full of it. By "it," of course, I mean "faith." Naturally.
In any case, my sister recently helped me find the long road back to sanity: a very valid question about Stephenie Meyer. I am clearly not the only person who finds themselves dumbfounded by this woman and where she claims to be from, much less this fictional assertion of best-sellerhood.
A word on the Alien issue: In order, I have seen the following: AvP, Alien, AvP:R, AvP. Warnings about the vP series are fruitless, and anyway I rather like the backstory they provide. It prepares me a little better, I hope, for what I'll see tonight: Aliens. The folks at Blockbuster have, I think, grown accustomed to my tastes (from Wong Foo to The Last Crusade to Wristcutters to Smiley Face, only the dumbest stoner movie ever), but one of them said the other day that I seem to be trending darker in my choices. I shrugged and chalked it up to alternate-oeuvre exploration, and not much more was said on the topic.
In any case, I'm quite pleased to observe the rise of the makers. I certainly hope this becomes a permanent feature of our civilization for the duration. One can't really blame people for getting tired of the inexorable trend towards apparent wizardry. It's hard to feel a visceral connection to a magical plastic block o'knowledge. Steampunk in particular seems to be gaining...well, steam, which is also nice. It strikes me as the coalescence of a fictional prophecy, the neo-Victorian phyle of The Diamond Age. Personally, I'd rather be a Singularitarian monk--working toward the development of machine intelligence and its integration with organic creatures to the exclusion of all other purposes sounds really pretty fun.
Actually, what I'd love to see is a roaming city. It'd basically be Manhattan with cilia. A living, autonomous organism in a symbiotic relationship with its residents and with a habit of adjusting local ecologies to optimal measures using biological material gathered during its travels. You'd see the world from your apartment! The individual buildings could actually interpenetrate existing static cities in vacant lots, underused streets and alleys, and the roofs of the fixed buildings. It'd be big enough to create its own weather system from its exhaust and manipulate the local climate by controlling the amount of heat and moisture released into the atmosphere.
Considering how much garbage my city has in its local landfill, available as raw material for most nanoassembly processes, I'm confident that such a thing would be a very practical possibility (and a very interesting experiment) at some point before I die. Hey, we don't even need to do AI research--just upload a human brain and let him or her take care of it.
That is, of course, if we don't expire in a mushroom cloud of radiation and/or Puritanical disapproval of alternate forms of life.
I just watched a movie of surprisingly cerebral sensitivity. It may have actually been one of the most stimulating movies I've ever seen. I'm not sure when the last time was that I've encountered a piece of cinema that was so well-done.
I'm talking, of course, about Alien.
I had never seen it before tonight. The film's touched my life in many ways without needing to be watched. Ripley herself had my curiosity piqued. There's the popular impression that she's tough, yet easy on the eyes. Certainly true, but the main trigger was Stephen King's Dreamcatcher, in which a particularly aggressive alien infection is called "Ripley," for both its extraterrestrial origin and its difficulty with being eradicated. Then there was an article I came across in Reader about the 5 best science fiction movies in terms of their accuracy, and Alien had a place of honor on it.
Of course, I had to see it. I wasn't disappointed. There were moments that affected me quite deeply, like the shot of the first facehugger's tail tightening around Kane's throat after Ash tried to cut it off. There was something almost cozy about it. This was followed up by the reference made a few moments later after the dinner-table episode: "Kane's son." Deep. Or the android Ash--that was a tremendously interesting story there, along with the ship's "Mother" computer. Two very advanced AIs--one that could--and did--pass for a human being, and one that could handle a city-sized ship autonomously for years on end--suggests a post-Singularity civilization, although of course this movie was produced a few years before the advent of Singularitarianism.
On the other hand, since Ash was a product of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, he might have been proprietary; in other words, just a very, very good simulacrum. Then again, Ash would then bring up the question: where is the dividing line between simulation and truth? After all, if the simulation's good enough...
Either way, I loved the exterior shots of the ship. It's genuinely enormous and the uber-industrial design did a lot for me. Gorgeous. I was very sad when it self-destructed, but pleased by the manner in which it passed: a lovely large long explosion.
And I love the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. It fits the evil-megacorp trope perfectly. Even weirder is how I've seen the logo many times before on quite a few different things, but thought it was a real company.
Every once in a while, I find myself mired in a state of numb submission to the human capacity for self-examination.
It started with Singularitarianism*. I've been an unwitting proponent for at least three years; I certainly hadn't known that it was a movement, associated with transhumanism, futurism, and posthumanism. Still, Singularitarianism strikes me as having a moral dimension and this, I think, takes it a bit beyond the secular. That and the importance of belief.
Well, that led me to, of course, the whole topic of belief. After I spent a few minutes dwelling on the fact that most significant figure in the study of belief is still Plato after over two thousand years, I spent another little while thinking about what such an intensive field of study based on such an abstract and subjective thing said about human nature in general. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it's done us in by the millions. I find it interesting how much knowledge there is out in the world, codified and set down to be absorbed by anyone who makes the effort to learn it.
Singularitarianism is, I think, a big thing mostly among geeks who believe that the machines will inherit the earth. Well, it's an unfair characterization--most of the die-hards I've known have only been willing to go as far as the development of strong AI, although some have confessed to more than a little interest in the transhumanist oeuvre. The moral dimension comes from, I think, the belief of Singularitarians that the event is desirable and should be guided and even accelerated if possible. Whether or not this lacks any regard of the possible ultimate outcome--the extinction of humanity--is questionable in some ways.
The Singularity, though, is an interesting notion in general, notwithstanding anyone's personal beliefs as to the nature or outcome of this particular event. I'm still working on figuring out exactly why some think that the Singularity is anywhere in our near future. I think such a thing is certainly possible, yes, but only if the odds are favorable. I'm thinking it's about even with an extinction event. Not mass-extinction--that's already underway and has been gathering speed for the past two centuries.
I'd go into more detail, but I'm too busy experiencing geek outrage. The Simpsons rerun that just played--Homer's revenge story against that old cowboy--ended with a brief tribute to all those who perished in the Star Wars films. This included Darths Vader and Maul, as well as Uncle Owen and Stormtrooper #22. However, no Bothans were to be seen.
Many of them died to obtain the original Death Star plans, but is that recognized? Alas, it was utterly ignored. I was ready to attribute it to speciesism until Jabba the Hutt showed up.
Anyway, yeah. I find the whole situation to be mind-boggling and weird. That there's even a school of thought with established literature and distinguished icons (Ray Kurzweil, c'mon) based around the notion that humanity will develop a machine consciousness is sort of characteristic of people in general and explains a lot about what I think the real nature of any developed AI will be, and that's why I have several feeds in Reader relating to the subject, not least of which is Dresden Codak, one of the best futurist webcomics around today. It's also why I'm a Singularitarian. I would love to meet a machine that thinks, feels, and prays. **
* The use of this term should warn you that there's geekiness ahead. ** All Kurzweil's fault. I read too much of his stuff.
Can I just express how fucking sick I am of the word "elite" and its derivatives? "Elitist" has now replaced "Stephenie Meyer" as my Preoccupation Number One.
I am really, really, really tempted to blame the entire sick mess on the presidential campaign and that skag in men's clothing who has suddenly declared her radically left-wing inclination and upper-class upbringing totally verboten from commonsensical consideration of her political message. Every time I see that peroxide coif, I want to regurgitate anything and everything, including how to conduct a proper oil change. It was bad enough before when she was just a snake.
Now she's got people urgently disavowing any and all upper-middle-class aspirations. I just went through the pure torture of people stridently insisting that they weren't trying to be "elitist" just because they didn't like chain restaurants. One of them got accused of being meta-elitist, for Christ's sake--looking down on the elitist for being elitist.
I do, in fact, have some friends and immediate family members who could be characterized as pretentious (a word that, it seems, has gone out of vogue and been supplanted by "elitist"). They live in major cities and frequent bars that have character and are involved in community organizations and gush over neoclassical architecture and simply won't touch a brand-name beer or well-known wine. They luxuriate in the obscure, swan-dive through the rarefied. They frequently seem to think, "Well, since almost nobody I know knows about this thing, it must therefore be vastly better than anything they do currently know and therefore I must be the only consumer of said thing in their social circle!" Even my father goes through his snotty phases--his current love is Chimay Trappist ale.
Even I'm guilty of it. I live in a decent city which, although it's not as large or heterogeneous as some, offers plenty of opportunity for enjoyment, even if it's overseen by that hideously modernistic inverted pyramid out in the bay, overrun by the homeless, and infested with serious crime. I live in a gorgeous neighborhood in a lovely apartment with the basic gizmos (smartphone, wi-fi, laptop, flat-panel TV, etc.), enjoy unusual wines and microbrews, have various multicultural totems, and an extensive personal library which, though consisting mainly of science fiction, includes many literary classics and which sees near-constant use. I also have a graduate degree and work in the white-collar service sector in a building that abuts one of the poorest districts in the state.
Fuck, am I elitist.
I think that bandying such a term about completely ignores the real nature of the term. Elitism doesn't involve disliking many mainstream products, using fifty-dollar words, or even living on the coast. God forbid someone doesn't like Applebee's--he's a stuck-up twat who wouldn't know a callus if it formed on the tip of his nose!
Elitism involves a coddled upper-middle-class girl who went to an exclusive private college and used the time she saved by not having to struggle for anything to discover the joys of socialism. She got a law degree and worked in one of the most well-known firms in the country, earning a six-figure paycheck for writing legal briefs, before taking some time off to marry a politician and have precisely one--count 'em, one--child and move into a governor's mansion for more than a decade. After that, though, the family really struggled for a while, until her husband found a new job as the President of the United States. Since then, of course, they've been kinda scrapin' on by, earning only a few hundred million for talking to people about stuff.
This is, of course, opposed to a young boy who was the product of an interracial relationship in a very dangerous time for such liaisons, was raised in the dirt in one of the poorest countries in the world, and only managed to find entry into the lower layers of the upper crust by way of a scholarship.
The application of "elitist" in this campaign by that woman was appallingly disingenuous to begin with (and smacks one of the term "uppity Negro," given the context), but now the cultural devastation that is beginning to take shape is near-criminal. I can only hope that this is just a typical meme that will metamorphose into ironic commentary before the week's out and from thence into passé territory before the end of the month. The further entrenchment of anti-intellectualism and white-collar evil as a cultural institution is just too terrible to contemplate.
It's almost as bad as the brouhaha over GM foods and cell-phone radiation. O Pallas, touch us in our brains and show us the error of our dumbfuckery!
Well. I still shudder at any mention of Stephenie Meyer. I passed the Barnes & Noble that serves as the local university branch's bookstore yesterday, and saw The Name in the window on a very large poster or today at work in the kids' page. It's like my world develops a new, ostensibly colorful and artsy camera angle that serves only to disorient and irritate the viewer.
I hate to keep poundin' on the dead horse here, but I feel like I'm in one of those TV episodes where something changes the universe and everyone in it--almost. One person has been left behind through an unexplainable hole in the reconfiguration. That person stumbles about frantically, trying to understand why the world has changed without them, how this was accomplished, and how it can be changed back. Sort of It's a Wonderful Life or Buffy's "The Wish" episode.
But let's leave behind all mention of the witch. I don't have the moola for a pyre at the moment, so it's an exercise in futility just now.
While going through the journals I bothered to bring back home with me from my parents', I stumbled upon the one I kept during my time in Germany. I was 15. It shows. Especially my fascination with how a seven-story department store had an entire floor devoted to leather products. Don't ask.
But reading through it really brings those days back. It's total sense memory. I remember the quality of the light, the differences in the soil and building materials, the smell in the air, the tint to the sky. I'm looking at these entries and wondering how I survived in those moments when I was on my own, my sister three villages away, my interpreter four, my parents an ocean. I even went to a German school for the deaf where I knew no one and didn't speak or sign a word of the language.
It makes me wonder why I'm so loath to step out of my comfort zone these days. Then, of course, I realize that my comfort zone vanished permanently the day Stephenie Meyer came into my life.
I don't suppose anyone knows a good lumber wholesaler who'll cut a guy a deal or three...
Allow me to start this off with a link to this amazingly serendipitous essay by David Sedaris: Letting Go
From the notes: Modern-day Faustian bargain? Possibility-pulling suspected; must investigate. Cryptic, but it's not hard for me to figure out what my notes are talking about.
Stephenie Meyer.
The full-lipped, lustrous-haired, creamy-skinned former middle-class housewife who has, improbably, written best-selling young adult novels for two years that have provoked frighteningly-costumed obsession and gobs of money in her bank account without reaching my notice. At all.
This is not possible. I am one of the few twentysomething American males who are both A) aware of the brilliance of some of the more recent young-adult offerings (and not-so-recent--I remain a rabid fan of Diana Wynne Jones and have just completed her newest Chrestomanci doubleheader, which is as good as the last two volumes) and B) unapologetic about appearing pedophiliac for lurking in a bookstore aisle too young for me.
In the final analysis, I have become convinced that something is just not right here. Why has this woman been so famous for so long, managed to utterly escape my attention, and then suddenly intrude on my world in a furious spate of name-dropping from all directions?
Faustina, la! A contract signed in blood and he wisps away in a cloud of cinders as she falls asleep and dreams of her gleaming bloodsucker. Or maybe the world did what Stephenie Meyer (or someone acting on her behalf) told it to do, like a shepherd chastising his wayward flock. The world might have ended recently, and Meyer's success can be attributable to someone's attempt to repair the universe, like a splice that doesn't quite line up precisely.
Or I haven't been paying as much attention as I ought to of. I get this Twilight Zone feeling every time I see something related to the, well, Twilight series. Especially since it appears to be primarily about frustrated abstinence and there aren't even any pillars of particulate matter involved. Just sparkliness.
What has happened to the world? The Twilight drones insist that it's one of those things you need to read to understand. God. If I must, I must.
