Timeless Stories for the 21st Century

The final entry

2010-10-17T11:05:00.000+13:00

''The failure of man to not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach." Aldous Huxley

BLOG'S END

2010-07-16T14:42:00.000+12:00

Just a quickie note to those interested.

I haven't blogged for a while now and probably won't do any more anytime soon either, unless there's some news—like if I suddenly sold the entire Tethys series for five figures or something along those lines.

Reasons for silence are manifold, but the main one is a lack of time. I am working full-time again and have so much on my plate that I am very precious about the little spare time I have. And what I do have to say I can actually put into my fiction, which is a much more productive way of promoting it.

Another reason is what amounts to a lack of interest on behalf of the public. To put it succinctly: I'm sick and tired of writing to tiny audiences. Way I see it, if people who are interested in my doings really want to know what's going on in my life, they can write to me and ask. If they're just browsing my blog because they just might be interested when they have nothing better to do on a rainy day or because they's web-surfing...well, sorry, but it's not enough reason for me to waste time doing this. The promotional reasons are nonexistent, and it's time to wind up this blog. I'll start another when it suits me.

In about a month or so I will rename this blog, wipe out entries that I don't want in there anymore, and basically go off-cyberspace; and once I am re-motivated to start another blog for book promotion, I will do so—or maybe not. Whatever.

Anybody interested in anything I might have to say, can regale themselves to back-issues of this blog, which might actually elicit surprise at the strange subjects I've touched on over the years I've written it. There's also a blog preceding this one, nuncupatories.blogspot.com, which ran for years before that and has stuff in it that, in retrospect, even I find amusing.

Ciao, All.

Fast Sword Draw: actually trying it out for myself

2010-05-16T16:37:00.000+12:00

Well, I thought it was about time I did this myself. So I went outside onto our back paddock, aimed a video camera at myself and did some draws on thrown bamboo sticks. This short video contains three draws, in ascending order of complicatedness, if you will. Unsurprisingly, the first is the fastest.

Drawing times are calculated from the number of frames. In the first draw the time is taken between the beginning of movement of the hand and the contact with the target. In the last two draws, timing starts when the stick is released.

Stupidity, Our Evolutionary Burden

2010-05-11T12:40:00.013+12:00

I guess it's a common enough experience: stupid people and stupid behavior seem to be everywhere—including, humiliatingly, some contributions of one's own. Still, one tends to be much more forgiving toward oneself and find 'reasons' for doing things that, from any other point of view must surely be considered inflicted with a measure of stupidity.

But when one is bombarded by evidence at all levels that Frank Zappa was right ("Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe."), it can be hard to find a reason to excuse the continued existence of a species inflicted with such overwhelming numbers of truly, ineffably, usually incorrectably stupid individuals, all of whom seem to get even more stupid when placed into groups, which apparently acts as stupidity amplifiers. And this discourages even an optimist like myself; which is saying a lot. But the evidence for those who claim that we are actually getting smarter—through, for example, the influence of 'education', which is, of course, delivered at all levels by those who blessed with copious amounts of stupidity; definitely no less than the 'average' population—is...well...zero, basically. And not just 'basically'. It's zero no matter how you try to spin it.

Lest anyone thinks that I'm being judgmental, let me correct that impression. I know that 'stupid' tends to be used as invective, but I'm not doing that. I only lapse into 'judgment' mode if faced with situations like the other day, when my car was at the front of a four-car pileup, caused by someone ramming into the third car behind me with sufficient force to crash the two cars in front of him, both stationary and with their brakes on into my tail end. I was able to drive away with minor damage from the crash, unlike the other participants, because of the dampening effect of the intervening vehicles; but that didn't stop me from, very judgmentally, thinking of the driver who caused the accident as a 'stupid idiot'. Similarly emotional subtext also adheres all my assessments of politicians, who actually are stupid idiots, without any exception I am aware of—and all-too-often they are also criminal ones, who should be jailed for life, or worse. This includes individuals in the current Australian federal and certain Australian State governments, who should be held fully, directly and, I believe, criminally responsible, for the actual deaths of people who should never have died. I will name no names, but just mention two instances: 'Federal Home Insulation Scheme' and 'Queensland Health System'. And that's not even remotely close to being the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Far from it.

You think that war is bad? The carnage in society caused by the stupidity of people in governments at all levels, far outdoes anything happening currently in current war zones in terms of, in this instance, Australian soldier casualties. Add to that deaths or serious injuries, of the physical and mental kind, done to individuals as a result of the stupidity of non-politicians, which means everybody from stupid drivers to stupid corporate executives, scientists, doctors, engineers, and so on.

Stupidity is why the human species might not actually survive after all. The kind that, no doubt was on the minds of the following writers (quoted from Wikipedia):

The first book in English on stupidity was A Short Introduction to the History of Stupidity by Walter B. Pitkin (1932):

“

Stupidity can easily be proved the supreme Social Evil. Three factors combine to establish it as such. First and foremost, the number of stupid people is legion. Secondly, most of the power in business, finance, diplomacy and politics is in the hands of more or less stupid individuals. Finally, high abilities are often linked with serious stupidity.

”

According to In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters, (2003) by Merrill R. Chapman:

“

The claim that high-tech companies are constantly running into 'new' and 'unique' situations that they cannot possibly be expected to anticipate and intelligently resolve is demonstrably false....The truth is that technology companies are constantly repeating the same mistakes with wearying consistency...and many of the stupid things these companies do are completely avoidable.

Enough already, yes? It's just too damn depressing, is it not?

Still, let us inject some 'perspective' into this. For the definitions of 'stupidity' leave something to be desired, in that they do not actually define what it actually is, except in a circular kind of way. I'd like to propose an approach that may be more fruitful:

'Stupid' is an attribute attached to a behavior that happens as a result of the one(s) acting 'stupidly' failing to apply the maximal capacity of their intellects to resolving a problem, or dealing with a situation, they are faced with.

The causes of this failure can be wide-ranging: from simple mental dullness, to intent and/or emotion over-ruling better judgment, to situational over-complexity overwhelming the individuals mental capacities.

Stupidity is usually detected by others—correctly or incorrectly, because said 'others' might actually be the 'stupid' ones!—because their p.o.v. differs, and they 'see' things the person acting stupidly doesn't. 'Stupidity' is often used by stupid people as a epithet, to denigrate, possibly very un-stupid, actions by the ones assessed so unfavorably.

Yet stupidity is nothing but the result of the basic flaws inherent in the evolutionary process. After all, 'intelligence' is a property, if you will, of the human brain/mind that served only one purpose, namely survival. The intelligent animals survived to breed in greater numbers than the dumb ones. But intelligence is actually very specific and tends to be trained for in particular contexts: those a creature can identify, implicitly or explicitly, as requiring some sort of survival response. Being adapted to survive in one context, however, does not imply that this does get carried over into other, apparently unrelated, ones. The brain, despite its vast capabilities, is still a limited system that can only deal with so many things at once and pay attention to a limited range of attention-attracting items, all of which are competing with each other for...well, attention.

All of this, together with a sub-awareness instinct system, contribute to creating what we commonly know as 'stupidity'. It's as simple as that. Blame it on evolution, because evolution didn't have the time—and by now has been bypassed through science and medicine, which basically nuke the classic evolutionary procedures—to adapt us to a world in which our survival, as individuals, societies and the species, has become contingent on factors unknown to the creatures from whom we derive.

None of this, of course, helps to abate the flashes—and occasionally more than just 'flashes'—or irritation one might feel when faced with an avalanche of evidence for the pervasiveness of stupidity just about everywhere; from the casual to the persistent, from the petty to the grandiose, from the trivial to the significant. But when one finds it in oneself—as I did the other day when I wasn't paying attention and told myself "ahh, that's OK, I don't need to wear protective gloves" and promptly cut my hand in a place that's going to take some time to heal, and where I should count myself lucky that things hadn't turned out much more serious—it's probably a good time to reflect on it with what you might call 'perspective'.

The Nonlinearity of Life and Social Homogenization

2010-05-05T10:05:00.007+12:00

Someone I know well—and this is where credit must go in this case—used the adjective ('non-linear') as applied to people's lives the other day, and as I thought about it, it did indeed make sense. As a former part-time 'mathematician'—not the careful phrasing—I was used to applying 'non-linearity' in the context of mathematics, but I hadn't thought about applying it to life, even though it's a prime example of the phenomenon, if that's what you want to call it.

Actually, life should probably be described as predominantly non-linear with a few minor discontinuities thrown in for good measure. Of course, the ultimate 'discontinuity' is death, but let's ignore that unpleasant final certainty. Still, with all the yak-speak extant these days in health bureaucracy—'negative treatment outcomes' and gems like that—I fancy we might feel inclined to rename 'death' to 'final life discontinuity', or something along those lines.

But I digress—e.g. I was being non-linear, which requires a discontinuity to get back on track.

'Linear' lives are predictable lives. There's a plan, and the execution of said plan—subject to there being no falling pianos or contingencies like that—proceeds more or less along the planned track. Things may not be entirely 'y=a+bx' straight, but the deviations aren't of too high and order. Maybe a small quadratic factor, and, if it really gets outrageously curvy, an even smaller cubic one.

Example:

Boy meets girl. Girl and boy like each other. Boy and girl fall in love. Girl and boy have sex; repeatedly. (The latter two may be exchanged.) Boy and girl move in together. Girl and boy get engaged. Boy and girl get married. (Somewhere in here, one or both have to get jobs, I suppose.) Girl and boy have kids. Boy and Girl buy a house with a whooping mortgage. Girl and Boy bring up kids. Kids leave home. Boy and girl divorce, because they really don't know what the hell to do with each other now. (Alternative: Girl and boy 'retire' and die; boy first.)

Quite linear, and, with some variations but clearly recognizable, the course charted by many, if not most—and stuck so, as if their lives depended on it; which they do, up to a point. People who adopt this course, usually because they don't know that there's any other way to live their once-off never-to-have-a-second-chance lives, are often happy enough; on average possibly more so than those whose lives don;t follow such predictable courses. For much of the time anyway. But their 'medium' lives—that's like 'medium done'—seldom interrupted by flashes of extremes of joy or sadness, can occasionally bring about surprises. Everything settles down into routines, from marriages to jobs, even those who might initially have appeared to be anything but routine. Like who would think that being, say, a successful author could be anything but not-routine. But there are those whose life stories, on a non-author level, are as tepid as stale dishwater.

Linear lives can, and often will, be disrupted, possibly forever by various types of internally-generated 'crises'. I've seen a number of linear lives serious derailed by accumulations of personal dissatisfaction that eventually become too powerful to fight. In many cases you wouldn't have seen it coming—except in hindsight when rationalization often provides "I saw the signs" epiphanies and retrospective narratives—while in others it's actually pretty clear fairly far ahead of any visible cracks.

And there are externally-imposed crises galore, of course. Catastrophes abound, their scope small to huge. Any of these has the potential for completely destroying linear lives, though not necessarily those who lead them.

What to make of linear lives, in any cultural context? I've come to the unsurprising conclusion that they are necessary—in the sense that people who lead them form the infrastructures of all societies, and especially those in the modern world, where linearity is actively encouraged by those who would try to determine the shape of societies. Linearity of life and social homogenization—not just of the gender kind—are essential to enable societies to exist, independent of their size and structure. You can't have a 'society' of people who act non-linearly, or who arrange their lives along non-predictable, non-conformist precepts. Because 'conformity' is the direct behavior-counterpart of life-linearity.

The other conclusion I've come to, equally unsurprisingly, is that those whose lives and actions do not follow the predictive schemes of the 'linears'—that's another word, closely associated with 'homogenis'—do so, and are still able to live in a social environment that will, to an extent anyway, tolerate and occasionally support their lives' non-linearities, only because of the infrastructure of linears surrounding them.

It's a humbling thought, and maybe it should give pause to those who look down their noses at what they might consider the dull lives of the rest of the ruck. Not that it should entice them to join the masses, but it's always good to keep things in perspective, lest one gets carried away by one's own tunnel-vision and one's overinflated sense of personal grandiosity.

The Nicholl Screenwriting Competition

2010-05-02T10:07:00.009+12:00

Haven't entered a screenplay into the Nicholl Screenwriting Competition for a few years now, though back in the days, like 2001 and 2004, I did get into the quarterfinals of that contest with a historical romance/adventure called The Weaponsmaster, the synopsis on my website reads as follows:

A small kingdom in medieval France:

Fifteen years after his parents were murdered, Antione returns for a reckoning. But the murderer is now a general. Antoine manages to inveigle himself at court in the role of the king's new weaponsmaster. The role includes the tuition of the unruly crown princess Darcie, who is the focus of intrigues and assassination plots. Soon, Antoine's desire for revenge comes into conflict with his professional and personal interest in her.

It's unusual for a fun-piece like that to get this far in the competition, but it did. I guess I must have done something right. Still, quarterfinals is quarterfinals; and it ain't semifinals, finals or winning.

In years after that I have submitted other screenplays, one of the same genre, which did well (top 10%) but no better than that, and another, which was contemporary, but that didn't even get a mention. I guess I suck at contemporary, non-fantasy fiction. Oh, yes, and I think I also submitted a version of Dating Blind, the movie I eventually shot myself, but that was a no-go as well.

With that kind of record, some people—those who think of fame, glory and instant wealth— might feel encouraged to continue submitting year after year, working away like beavers on their submissions during the preceding year. You're allowed three simultaneous submissions, so there's a year's work in it, if one is thus disposed.

Me, I'm more jaundiced about things. One does get cynical after sufficient rejections, and I have other things to do with my life; and with writing, too. Like I have two novels that need serious attention. So, when earlier this year I thought about the Nicholl, I said to myself something like "yeah, maybe, but only if...". And the year passed. April came. The May 1 deadline approached—actually 'sneaked up on me' is more like it—and still no screenplay. I had thought about something that I really wanted to write about, and I even had a basic starting point...but a lot of people have that. It's a long way from there to a 'story'.

Besides, there's working for a living—currently that goes in stops and starts, but when a 'start' period is on, then it's like 50 hours+ per week—and that doesn't really leave much space and time for polished screenplay writing, or any damn screenplay for that matter, and especially to deadlines.

So, April was heading toward the end. Last Sunday, a week before the deadline, I told myself that I might as well try, even though I still only had something like 1/5 of the story worked out, and all of that was at the beginning an the end. The middle, however, is the hard part. The dreaded ACT 2. The thing that gets the story from the beginning to the end. Actually, it was worse. I just had a less-than-concrete notion of the end, though I knew what it was going to be like. That's hard to explain; it means that I knew the feeling of it, the closure and all that, but just how...well, no damn idea.

None of which bodes well for a week's part-time screenplay writing. Minimum of 90 pages, that working out to the same number of minutes, give or take. I ended up with 100 pages. Don't ask me how, because I don't know. I mean, I do know, technically speaking: 100 pages filled with words, dialogue and action. But that's not what fills pages. The words got to come from somewhere, and it better not be some Godot-esque void.

So, where did they come from? I learned—re-learned, had confirmed and re-verified—that indeed it's all about trusting the process and the power of a narrative with interesting characters that one cares about and a situation that really stretches their ability to cope. Well, at least I cared about them, and that's important, because if the story-teller doesn't really care, then the audience can't be asked to be any more engaged.

There is a MacGuffin, of course, but I've always tried to make my MacGuffins so integral to the story and so important to its characters that they never suffer the fate of so many others, which are just window-dressing and may eventually even be forgotten about. In this instance, the MacGuffin isn't only the 'mystery'-genre element—though this script isn't a 'mystery'—but had a direct bearing on the resolution of an apparently irresolvable dilemma for the characters.

I should mention that when I started writing I had no idea that this was the way it would come out. But it did, and in the end it made sense—to me at least. I'm kinda hoping that it'll make sense to the script readers as well. But the MacGuffin is still just a MacGuffin. Ultimately it all hangs on whether the readers connect enough with characters whose actions, in some sense, may well evoke initial instinctive rejection, or, alternatively, an interest for all the wrong reasons. I want the readers to fall in love with the characters and eventually to want them to succeed and come out on top. And I want them to have that terrible sinking feeling when things go wrong.

In some ways, another intention of this script—whose name I withhold for reasons having to do with it's being sub-judice—is also meant to be subversive, in a very benevolent kind of sense. I've done 'subversive' before, in my books mainly, but this here is probably my most open and most contemporary attempt. And, yes, this submission is, again, a 'contemporary' piece, without violence even, except of the non-physical kind, with a bit of retrospective domestic violence thrown in.

As I said though, I seem to suck at 'contemporary'. Still, it was what came up at this particular point. And, yes, it got submitted, before the deadline. A first draft submission, written inside less than a week, part-time. It'll be interesting to see if it gets anywhere at all. Watch this space—later in the year. Or not, because if there's nothing then I'm not going to write about it.

But right now I'm patting myself on the back. And, also, it's the kind of script that so potentially low-budget that I might well film it myself one day when I have the time. Like Dating Blind.

Life Lesson

2010-04-29T17:31:00.002+12:00

Surely, there one in this:

[sorry lost the hotlink... oops]

Timeout

2010-04-28T22:03:00.001+12:00

No blogs until Sunday. I'm trying to get a spontaneous last-minute submission for the Nicholl Screenwriting Competition written from scratch in less than a week.

The things we do...

Fast Sword Draw vs. Fast Gun Draw

2010-04-25T09:56:00.010+12:00

I know this is an obscure title, but there's a point to it. What follows is a follow up to this blog, because, as I was battering small bamboo sticks into submission this morning, I was thinking about this and so here it is.

Talking about battering bamboo sticks around. This is a part of my sword practice, as discussed here. It has the advantage of being both, good sword practice, and good exercise. And, since it has been shown that exercise is far more beneficial to your brain—and your body as a whole, of course— than any dumb-ass computerized brain training, it seems like a healthy practice to follow.

Anyway, about drawing swords and guns.

Let's start with guns. What we're talking about is the gunslinger stuff, newly popularized in that notable neo-Western TV series, Justified. The basic thing here is that having to get your gun out of a holster and aiming it is not a good thing, practically speaking. There's a lot that can go wrong along the way—snags and misses, etc—and you've also got to get the gun into line with the target, preferably aim right as well and shoot. That's a tall order, and it requires, I daresay, a lot of practice. People who do this kind of thing for show purposes usually have themselves trained in particular moves and setups, such as to avoid the snags and misses. Special holsters, affixed to the body in ergonomic ways, positioned just-so, and so on. Special guns, too, I suppose,; and if not that, then probably a limited number of different weapons, because handguns come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and they all behave differently and require different ways of gripping, drawing, cocking (or not, e.g. with Glocks) and aiming them. Some are OK for single-handed shooting, but the larger calibers become problematic in an unsupported hand. And so on.

But there is something about approaching things the Raylan Givens way; named after the hero of Justified, who never waves his gun around in anybody's face, but keeps it in the holster until he chooses to use it to kill someone. That 'something' is the non-threatening nature of this approach. For when you point a gun at someone, that's an aggressive act, a threat. Doesn't matter if it's meant as a signal to some attacker, indicating that maybe he'd better think twice before proceeding. It 'ups' the conflict level in a situation and puts you on the spot. Are you going to use it or not? Pointing a gun at anyone and not being prepared to use it is a fool's bluff. Chances are much better than 'even' that the bad guy facing you senses that you will chicken out. In that case, you may end up getting shot with your own weapon.

On the other end of that spectrum, you may be so worked up that you end up shooting the guy even though raising the threat-level actually 'worked' in a given case, but the attacker made some stupid move that you, in your hyped-up adrenaline-pickled state, misinterpreted. Plus, of course, having a loaded, ready-to-fire weapon in your hand means that any number of other things can go wrong. So, basically, it's not really such a good idea—apart from the aspect of raising aggression levels, quite possibly unnecessarily.

On the other hand...and, yes, there is a third...there is, however, also an argument that, in a self-defense situation, and in order to ensure that, when they judge you afterwards, you can claim that the aggressor was aware of your lethal capabilities and the risks he faced, you need to actually make him aware of said risks—which might well include presenting the gun, thus making clear your capabilities for defense; despite the fact that this only includes the physical capabilities and not the 'mental ones, if you will.

And there's another hand...four-armed is forearmed...which says that it's actually better, in the situation itself, not to advertise one's capabilities too clearly. It's usually beneficial to have an enemy underestimate one's capabilities. This isn't always the case—think of MAD, the Mutually Assured Destruction ideology of the Cold War—but in your average self-defense situation, your two most important weapons are probably your capability to use your feet to run away, and if that is not an option, then to have your adversary underestimate what you can do.

Still, bottom-line, having a holstered gun will slow things down.

The sword... Well, thing is, it's bigger than a handgun, and it isn't really in use these days. You can't conceal it, so a lot of the considerations above don't apply. If you have a wakisashi, the situation is a tad different, though it's still kind of hard to hide, except if you're wearing a suitable kind of coat maybe.

Anyway, this isn't what this blog is all about. We're not talking 'reality today', but maybe a kind of pretend-reality in some fictional universe where people use swords as weapons, rather than guns. So, in this pretend world, let's look at how the sword, drawn from the scabbard and into an immediate cut—the equivalent to draw-and-shoot—differs from that scenario.

Several issues are pretty much the same. There's snagging and missing, and a sword is quite long—though, again, a wakisashi is easier to manipulate; both, because it's shorter and lighter as well. But there's another important difference, because a sword doesn't just work for you by pulling a trigger, but it needs some physical force behind it; a swing. A drawn sword, held in a chudan position—the typical kind one might find in a defensive situation, where you're wanting to tell some aggressor to stay away by pointing the very sharp tip of a sword at him—is not very effective when it comes to actually using it. You can stab with it, of course, but that's about the only motion that doesn't require a time-wasting and dangerous movement to get the sword to pick up some momentum. And, yes, you could use other positions, which are much more effective that way, but these are inherently aggressive, and basically equivalent to pointing a loaded gun straight at someone's face. Not nice at all, and potentially inflicted with the same psychological pitfalls I talked about before.

This is where drawing comes in very handy, because it combines the comparative inoffensiveness of a sheathed sword—"I am armed, but not aggressive."—with an ability to actually get the required swing out of the act of drawing itself; mainly because of the position the sword is in. If you think about it, there's a strange beauty in the functionality implicit in this.

I just thought I'd mention this, because to some people anyway, the whole iaijutsu thing, cutting from a quick draw, seems to have an artificial air about it, that only serves to make life difficult. Well, this isn't actually the case. A skilled fast draw-and-cut is just as fast, and in some cases faster, than cuts from positions where a sword is already drawn.

The key attribute here is 'skill', no doubt about it. And that does take time.

Sex and Telepathy: In Your Pants and in Your Mind

2010-04-22T21:52:00.010+12:00

I can't remember since when I've been interested more than tangentially in the problems associated with human communications and how they'd 'work' if, say, two people were able to share each others' thoughts and feelings without the medium of language, body-language, and so on. I suppose the first time I began to tackle it was in Keaen. But this was embryonic at best. After all, the two people involved, Caitlan ♂ and Ailin ♀, weren't always in telepathic contact, but only sporadically so. The things came to a head several books later, in Tethys, very near the end—a wide arc spanning the five novels. In between that, there was another novel, Seladiënna, in which the theme was pursued further and to greater length—again, between the male and female protagonists. You can see a preoccupation developing, yes?

Why am I so interested in this? Well, initially I guess it just 'happened', as these things often do. Idle speculations, possibly occasioned by the plot of a novel. Also, there was dissatisfaction with the inadequate way in which the issue has almost always been treated by other writers. There seems to be a failure of imagination at work. The way this is usually dealt with is that either telepathy is sporadic, or it's pervasive and ubiquitous. In the former case it's used for occasional communications over long distances, mind-control, spying, and so on; while in the latter it's usually placed in a world which is very different to ours, where everybody and sundry shares some weirdo cosmic consciousness or some crap like that, or else people just aren't 'people' anymore. These are the extremes. And please, anybody feel free to point me at some book where the theme hasn't been dealt with basically in one of those two ways. I'd be happy to amend my judgment.

Back to my own preoccupations. There are two things about the notion of what you might call 'persistent' and 'pervasive' telepathic contact, which I find especially interesting. The first is the inability to lie, conceal, obfuscate and so on. The second is the fact that this kind of telepathy, maybe coupled with strong empathy for the other person, has got to feel pretty much like being possessed—a theme I've dealt with in recent blog.

So, there are some truly fascinating issues here, especially if you construct a scenario where the people involved are real human beings, and not transhuman freaks; and if you suppose that the contact is persistent, continuous and basically unfiltered. That the people aren't 'transhuman' is important, by the way, and particularly for a storyteller. That's because, let's face it, everybody reading the story, plus the storyteller him or herself, is not transhuman; and humans have no idea, except for data-less unfounded speculation about what it might be like, of what being 'transhuman' might actually entail—with the exception of being emortal maybe, but even that, in the long term, will probably lead to changes that are quite unfathomable.

So, for The Storyteller, I decided to pursue the theme further, this time without fear or holding bacj, and basically just running with it. What happens when two people, who also happen to be sexually very attracted to each other—and partially this is a means to establish the connection, of you will—find that they make, with frightening speed, a mental connection that is of the kind of quality, where you could say that each of them is basically 'possessed' by the other, but with them still being two distinct individuals with different histories. Also, it isn't obvious, by any means, what this communication is actually like. Words? Images? Notions? Emotions? How does one 'know' what another person thinks or feels? How do they remain human in the face of such changes? Or is this actually an issue?

'Feeling' is probably the easiest to deal with, because that needs no words, just empathy. If you want to be clinical about it, think of it as mirror-neurons in action. But propositional thought—which I consider to be just a different way of looking at mental narrative, the chassis of the human mind...remember?—is a different thing altogether.

And then there's the thing about identity. For if two people are in each others' minds, then each doesn't just perceive what they perceive, but also what the other perceives. Which means that both partners in a sexual act become each other...in a manner of speaking. Feeling what the other feels, seeing what the other sees, partaking in the act as oneself and the other at the same time.

Fascinating, as you will admit. And there is another thing, which is that, because of the inability to lie, there can't be any of the sexual mind games that people often play. And I'm not just talking about the sexual act itself, but also about what you might call 'everyday sexual politics' between individuals. The stupid and, to my mind utterly dumb-witted, power games between the sexes. And yes, I know they have evolutionary roots, but screw evolution!

What will such honesty do to people, and how will it change them? Can they live with it? How can they survive—and pretend not to be what they are—in a world that once was theirs, but which is now, from the point of view of human relationships, a universe distant from where they are? How do they communicate? What if verbal communication is actually better at some things than the mental stuff? What if they combined both? (And how, as a writer, should I represent that on a page, and still make it readable and have 'flow'?)

I'm still struggling with all of that, as my protagonists work their way through their discovery of what they share.

And this, if I may just come back to that, is another reason why writing sex and romance is such fun; because it keeps one grounded in Ur-issues, rather than making the whole thing into some intellectual what-if game. And it also helps me as a writer, because caring about those people makes it easier for me to deal with the complexities that emerge from such a premise.

Why Sex, Violence and Romance Work Better Than Philosophical Mumbo-Jumbo

2010-04-19T06:00:00.012+12:00

"The verb is the chassis of the sentence. It's the framework to which the other parts are bolted."
Steven Pinker

I'm going to advance the following proposition, which parallels Pinker's assertion:

'Story' is the chassis of the human mind.

I've been searching for a short way to express this idea for some time, and this here works for me. I'll leave you to think about it for a while.

Meanwhile though...

It's often been asked, and in some circles bemoaned, why stories have to be full of sex Imagined or actual) and violence (mental or physical) in order to attract large audiences. Either that or some serious romance—possibly with an element of tragedy, as long as it isn't just depressing; thus Shadowlands, for example, is OK, because while very sad it's not depressing.

Note that I was talking about 'large audiences', ignoring the arty-farty literati and cinemati. There's been plenty of literary and cinematographic fiction without either sex or violence—at least none I can necessarily see. But, let's face it, it's actually boring. Boring, boring, boring. It's the stuff you read for the 'language' or see for the sake of the 'performances' or the 'brilliant script/direction/cinematography', blah blah blah. When people come out of movies of that ilk, they end up talking about these things, and very rarely about 'story'.

That's because—and defying my statement above—there was no story to speak of, and because of that the other stuff, what made it worthwhile spending money and time on, seemed brilliant by comparison. I would claim that, contrary to what academic wisdom asserts—that no literary work would ever make it to literary stardom without there being a good story in it—this is indeed possible. That because people—like they did with 'Chance, The Gardener' in Being There—project their own stories upon this dismal void of blah; and since people usually think their own story is important and significant and so on, they tend to look kindly upon the almost-blank canvas that has just enough of a hint of something on it, so that they aren't scared of the complete blankness; a common enough fear, as almost every painter knows, and authors, too, I guess. I haven't got it and never had, mind you; so I 'm conjecturing, based on anecdotal evidence from real people, as well as those I've only read about.

But any story that has Sex, Violence and/or Romance, and preferably all three, in it, starts from a solid foundation of what you might call psychological predisposition in the audience members. Doesn't mean the writer/director can't screw it up and make it shit, but that's not the point. Basic Ur-needs, experiences and inclinations of our psyche, fashioned from SVR provides an instantly recognizable and relatable-to framework. Male chases female. Female selects male for breeding. Security is threatened—in reality or imagination: doesn't matter—and actions need to be taken, 'defensive' or 'offensive', to neutralize the threat. You can't get it more 'Ur' than that. Everything else is a MacGuffin, background, plot-driver, life-complicator, obstacle to fulfillment and so on.

Of course, when I say 'framework', we're not talking about something static. Rather it's about a framework of driving forces, which serve both, as causal and teleological, direction-givers. Put in restraints and constraints, and you have the story. Push the button and off it goes, with a gentle push from the author here and there to make sure the story goes this way but not that.

And, to speak from an author's point of view—mine anyway—writing about SVR is much more fun that penning, say, something along the lines of Waiting For Godot, which, I'm utterly certain, was anything but fun. And an author is allowed his fun, damnit. We're just people, you know!

More on this in the next blog. Maybe.

Civilization: Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust (Return of the Blimp?)

2010-04-18T09:41:00.007+12:00

I've read more science fiction and fantasy in my life than most people have read, anything at all. I've also written a fair amount, and I tend to take anything that happens on a global scale and extrapolate it with your classic storyteller's habit of "let's just image what would happen if this...?"

In this instance I'm asking a single short question: How many simultaneous volcano eruptions would it take to bring all world air travel to a grinding halt?

I mean, we have plenty of these suckers all over the place; and enough of them would be able to spew enough crap into the atmosphere at the right levels, so that the plumes, driven by the air currents, drift across sufficient strategic areas to stop all travel by just about all aircraft—just just jets, but even those flying close to the ground. No more rescue helicopters; no more emergency help to anything that isn't reachable by road or ship. And even road travel could be an issue, because this volcanic ash doesn't just clog up jet engines. Oh, yes, and it kills people, too. Iceland will have so many people dying as a result of this, that it may amount to a virtual Icelandic genocide. Not in the immediate term, but this stuff is lethal. Might as well inhale some Cobalt 60 from some terrorist lunatic's dirty bomb.

Air travel relies on comparatively clean air. The occasional bird strike is bad enough, but it seems that it's so common, that engines have been built to cope with a lot of it. Shredded crispy meat, bones and feathers don't do engine blades any good either, but they're survivable. Fine volcanic ash, on the other hand, means you can probably kiss your jet engine goodbye. Meaning that the airlines are going to wait a long time before they fly in European airspace again, because if they're not, the cost to replace hardware, including such sundry items as windshields and paintwork, will be higher than that of lost revenue. Not taking into account that the abrasion on the leading surfaces of wings could result in major re-work there as well. It won't take a lot of dust to do damage here, and there are few indications, at the time of writing this, that what dust there is, will continue to spread and do its dirty work even further afield. And, of course, eventually it'll need to settle somewhere. Meaning someone's going to breathe it in. I guess the argument is that if the quantity is sufficiently small, we'll be all right. True enough, but the larger the quantity, the larger the area over which it needs to settle to be 'thin' enough. Rain would help, of course, but as you know, it never rains when you need it.

In Australia we also have volcanoes on our doorstep, in Vanuatu, some of which are just waiting to blow their heads off. We're more concerned here—those not in denial, that is; the rest doesn't even know that these things are there—about tidal waves, which could be huge from those particular volcanoes, and which would reach the Eastern shores of Australia within 2-3 hours; hardly enough time to even sound an evacuation alarm. Another excellent reason not to live on the coast; not in low-lying areas anyway. We're not quite so worried about ash fallout, since the air currents tend to be on our side and will blow the stuff away from, rather than toward us.

So, back to the question I started with. How many volcanoes would it take? And what would be the effect on...well, on just about everything. And are we going to learn anything at all from this? Or are we going to wing back into the air as if nothing had happened? Heads firmly in the sand? Are we going to ignore the potential for global logistic, economic disaster—not to speak of the unhealthy addition of this factor into the Global Warming equation—that this presents?

I think so. I think we're going to proceed as Obama did, when he presented his recent PR campaign speech to NASA in which he promised we'd go to Mars in 25 years—but which totally neglected the real reason why we need to be in space and be there ready and waiting—not for tiny particles, but for the real big ones. People will waste their time and endless resources on Global Warming issues, rather than, say, investigating methods of air transportation that are comparatively immune to such issues as volcanic eruptions.

The science fiction writer in me is already penning a story—don't have the time, but maybe someone will take this and run with it—where indeed a lot of volcanoes have blown their tops, but slowly enough, so that the aircraft industry has actually had time to rediscover the blimp—a.k.a. 'Zeppelin' or 'Airship'—as a viable alternative to the currently-in-vogue jet. In doing this they also found that blimps actually emit far less greenhouse gases, and so are beneficial in more ways than just one. They just don't fly at high speeds, so your average executive-in-a-hurry would just have to learn patience. Too bad, eh?

Would it be too much to ask for aircraft designers to spend just a few more extra thoughts on the subject?

The Delusion of Wisdom

2010-04-15T08:03:00.005+12:00

James Surowiecki, in his book Wisdom of Crowds, argues that 'under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.'

As usual, the devil's in the details, or, if you will, in the proviso 'under the right circumstances', because they include that the crowds exhibit the following attributes:

There is diversity of opinion.
Independence of crowd members from each other.
Decentralized management structures.
Existence of effective methods for aggregation of member's opinions.

This probably be explains not only why modern democracies are prime counterexamples of the book's thesis, but also why, as appears to be happening all over the place, these conditions are being progressively dismantled—to the extent of being systematically destroyed—by the governments the dimwits in these democracies elect to rule them.

Any applicability of the thesis is nuked anyway by one of its premises that turns out to be almost universally false: #2. In any society, the members are not independent from each other; neither economically nor in terms of opinion. Everybody influences everybody else, and the vast majority of people are gathered together in opinion-blocks, where the contents of the group-connecting opinions are homogenized—with a few insignificant and uninfluential quirks, to be sure—to be as lowest-common-denominator as possible.

This is a fertile soil for those who want to make crowds as stupid as possible to plant their intellectual weeds.

Australia is a case in point, a sad example of the disease. Let's look at the other pre-conditions and their grim fate in this country.

Diversity of opinion: Like with biodiversity, I am wondering where it's gone or going to. The essence of democracy seems to be to get as many people as possible to support an idea, plan of action; or, what it all boils down to, political party. In order to support any of these idiots, opportunists, bureaucrats and demagogues, it is necessary to suppress diversity of opinion, not only in the populace as a whole, but also on an individual level, in one's own head. One forgets just what a bunch of clueless morons Party A consists of, but one is certainly not going to support Party B, whom one hates. Therefore one defends, usually to the point of believing one's own bullshit, Party A's agenda, and wisdom pretty much goes out the window. For true wisdom would dictate that the members of both Party A and Party B should be sent to hard-labor camps to work at paying off the damage they have caused during their tenure, and that they would be replaced with a random sample of members from no political party at all. That would make the members of parliament 'diverse', instead of them being party-animals; and thereby, or so one would think, the whole parliament much more inclined toward being a 'wise crowd'.

Decentralization...well, it ain't happening, folks. If anything, both in Australia and the US, the opposite is true. In both countries the push to centralize the health systems has acquired frenetic proportions. And the health systems, despite their apparent basic socially benevolent intentions, tend to be at the heart of centralized control of people in general. It's a classic wolf in sheep's clothing, and this one's running rampant. All in the name of 'better care' and 'better efficiency', of course, but anybody with more than two interacting cerebral neurons should be able to figure out that it's not about 'care' but about 'control'.

The same applies to educational systems, which in Australia are about as centralized as you can get in a federal framework. Almost German. 'National curriculum', 'national testing standards' and so on. Centrally-dictated brainwashing. Home-schooling will become so subject to rules that it'll become impossible to implement in practice, and will therefore come as close to being illegal as it can without being actually outlawed. It's collectivism in drag.

And, last but not least, to item #4. The only effective methods of collecting and collating information about people's 'opinions' relate to what the plebs want to hear and/or can be made to believe in order to vote for this party or that. Nobody in government does give a sparrow's fart about what opinions are actually valuable, but only which ones will guarantee survival of a regime in government—or get another one into place, if you look at it from the Opposition's point of view. Any 'opinion aggregation' methods therefore only serve those who have an active interest in minimizing diversity and opinion independence, and who love 'control structures', preferably centralized ones, be it at state or federal level.

All of this relates to so-called 'democracies', but, let's face it, it is not confined to these. The difference is that democracies have this deluded self-image that they are somehow specially suited to, and have a monopoly on, all this good stuff, like freedom and diversity of opinion, freedom of choice and action, and so on. Which is all smoke-and-mirrors, of course. Which makes people who believe they have all these freedoms so terribly pathetic and sad.

2010 is a year of an Australian federal election. It should be a year of choice and...

Never mind.

Morons and Masters of the Sword: From WTF to the Sublime

2010-04-14T17:52:00.009+12:00

Here are a few YouTube videos that show up some of the extremes of the spectrum of those active in 'sword fighting'. Some of it is awe-inspiring; some of it is so damn ludicrous that it isn't actually 'funny'.

Let starts with the demented first. Right up there at the top in the line of WTF-is-the-matter-with-evolution. Why did it desert us? And WTF is the matter with the parents of these...Ahh, never mind.

From the absurd to the merely pathetic. Reminds me uncomfortably of those exercises we used to do at our dojo. You never know how silly they look until someone else does them, I guess...

And now for something more positive:

Not 'fast-draw', but never mind that. I'm still working on getting my sword to move this fast in four consecutive cuts—even without actually cutting anything. But it's something to aim for. That, plus doing it from a lightning-fast draw.

And you gotta see this one! I was stunned...with the banana cutting anyway. The kata were somewhat less impressive and lacked 'spirit'. Too perfunctory. But the draw and cut...whoa!

And finally—and here, inwardly, I bow with the greatest respect—is a true Master of the Sword: Otake Risuke, of Tenshin Shoden Katori Shinto Ryu. Actually, this video is the best of him I've ever seen. Sufficiently good, well-lit and with a good angle; so that, when playing it at reduced speeds, say in VLC-player, I can actually work out his movements, despite the speed at which they're executed. I am in awe of this man, and always have been, ever since I first saw clips of him in a BBC documentary.

Draw to Kill—and Make Sure It's Justified

2010-04-13T09:48:00.007+12:00

One of the essential elements of iaijutsu, the one that makes it different from iaido, for example, is that drawing the sword isn't an art in itself. The art is drawing with the purpose of killing and accomplishing the kill.

I was reminded of that when I saw the first episode of a cool new TV series, Justified. The star of of show is Timothy Oliphant, of Deadwood, Die Hard 4 and Assassin fame, a guy who has more character that almost every other currently-in-vogue male film actor. He's a presence that fits equally well onto the small and the big screen, which is a rarity. If you close your eyes, he also sounds almost like a young Clint Eastwood; and I don't think there's anybody who could portray U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens—a man described by his ex-wife as "the angriest man I've ever known"—in quite the same way; especially since the anger isn't visible...and yet it is.

Justified is what some have called a 'neo-Western'. The term is appropriate. Raylan Givens is your classical on-the-edge 'Marshall' type, who, while on the side of the law, might as well have gone over to the other side. Not quite a Wyatt Earp, but getting close. He's also lighting fast with a gun—in his case a modern semi-automatic. The series starts with a shootout, where—as he later assures a former buddy turned bad, who's apparently wanting to kill him, too—the gun was definitely 'holstered'.

Givens doesn't draw unless he intends to kill. Way he sees it, a gun is a killing instrument and why should you draw it unless you plan to put it to its intended use? The way he explains it to a board of enquiry: "He drew first. I killed him."

This is much in the spirit if of iaijustu.

We used to play games at my former dojo in Dunedin, where he walked around with swords (wooden ones) drawn, facing a bunch of other dojo members, and doing pretend fighting against multiple opponents in slow motion. We also played these games one-on-one. All very unrealistic, though instructional, I suppose. Still, I think there was something out of tune there, and it was probably the fact that it lacked the 'kill' spirit. You can't get into that it you're doing slo-mo. At least with drawing practice you can pretend and practice draw-to-kill, even though you never really do or even want to. But it's a 'spirit' thing.

For those trying to figure out what I mean, here are two videos from YouTube. One is of a more decorum-version of iaijutsu, the other is considerably more 'raw'. Maybe the contrast will show some of what I found difficult to explain.

Schizophrenia (Dissociative-Identity/Multiple-Personality Disorder) and Possession

2010-04-11T06:00:00.006+12:00

In connection with my current work on my novel, The Storyteller, I have again been forced to confront an important question I've been asking for many years off and on. It is so important because the answer, or complex of answers that one gives, or could give, is like a touchstone of where one stands in a wide field of investigations of the human psyche, from hard cognitive science to outright 'occult' spiritualism.

The question is this:

What is the true nature or cause of, or the mechanism involved with, the phenomenon nowadays technically called 'Dissociative Identity Disorder' (DID)?

The question can be paraphrased in more practical terms, if you will:

Is/are there any experiment(s), and if there is what is/are the experiment(s) that can clearly differentiate between the DID being caused by:

Only physiological and biochemical factors in the brain; caused by any number of innate and external influenced and factors?
'Occult' influences, such as possessing 'spirits', or other, possibly 'incarnate' human beings or creatures from Earth or somewhere else, including 'other universes'?
A mixture of both; meaning that physiological and biochemical factors in the brain and associated 'mental' states, may provide occasional conditions for (2) to occur?

Regardless of what our answers to these questions say about ourselves and our philosophical position, if you will, it is clear that the correct answers are of profound importance to our understanding of not just ourselves, but also the nature of the cosmos at large. Indeed, I'd say that their import is so fundamental and influential of everything we know, think we know and what we can know, that it's almost scary.

One could argue, of course, that there are other issues that might similarly influence our view of the universe and our place in it. I mean issues that are mostly considered to be of little interest to science, excepting in terms of abnormal psychology. Things like UFOs, ghosts and the like for example. Survival after death. Near-death experiences (which some now try to explain by the presence of excess C02; but is correlation causation?). You get the gist, I'm sure. And it is true that they are touchstone-issues, whose resolution, one way or the other—conventional or paranormal science, or a mix of both—would have a profound influence on our self-understanding.

Of course, some would claim that the issues have been resolved in favor of the 'scientific' explanation. Others believe with equal fervor that the 'occult' answers are more accurate. Me, I think, the jury is very much out, and may remain so for a long time.

But studying UFOs and ghosts is hard, if for no other reason but that they are rare. They have also exhibited tendencies to behave in ways that make them appear 'unscientific' phenomena. That's why the world of science likes to jump on them; because it's so easy to tear the observations and the observers to shreds. Also, there are, not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of frauds and hucksters in the business. (And, yes, there are those also in, for example, politics; but that's different...sort of.)

The situation is different with people exhibiting symptoms of, or are diagnosed with 'clinical', DID. They're all over the place, so to speak. They live amongst those who appear not to have such symptoms—though I'm not so sure that absence of symptoms in most people is necessarily evidence for the absence of something qualifying as DID, albeit in form below the threshold of detection. It's not like there's 'flaps' of DID, like there are 'flaps' of UFOs. And there are no mysterious psycho-physical phenomena that might be caused by fraud. All we have is a person that seems, at one time or another, to exhibit characteristics that aren't typical of the person he or she was when not that other person or persons. In some fascinating cases we have instances of Foreign Accent Syndrome, which psychologists have trouble explaining. Or maybe they have an angle on FAS, because much of that could be explained by simple changes in vocalization and speech timing. But it gets interesting when people start talking in other languages than their own; languages of which they have either no or scant knowledge. The interesting thing about this is that these events are usually associated with brain trauma, and they often go away as the injury is thought to heal. That last snippet is particularly interesting.

As you may notice, if you click here, I am kind-of on the 'possession' side—and in some ways this post repeats stuff I've said before—but I'm open to coherent 'conventional' explanations, should anybody come up with them. I haven't come across any as of today.

Still, my main point here is that we have literally millions of people in this world who live with DID. Millions, who, if properly—and compassionately—studied with openness and diligence, might actually help to tell us all who we really are.

Instead, what do we do? We declare them to be 'abnormal' and try to suppress the phenomenon with drugs. That makes perfect sense in many cases, because the 'other' personalities and their interference in the 'normal' person's—understood to be the original, if you will—life can be destructive. But what about those cases that aren't like that? What about trying to teach and help those people to manage their 'disorder', come to terms with it, and thereby learning to control it—rather than drugging something that might actually be valuable out of existence?

Of course, one may also wonder just how many people do have non-clinical versions of the same 'disorder'. And how many of them know it and deliberately make sure that nobody notices, because they are afraid, rightly so methinks, of what's likely to happen if someone does. The very least is that they'll be stigmatized—maybe in a benevolent and possibly benign kind of way, but it doesn't change the fact that they'll suddenly be viewed as other than 'normal'; attracting attention and even consideration, again possibly well-meaning, from others; attention they really don't want.

Maybe some of them actually like their alternates and coexist with them in a productive kind of way, benefiting from their presence. It would be fascinating to know, would it not? I mean, who knows where mere imagination ends and reality begins?

† Here's a recent report on another possible instance of foreign-language syndrome. (Added 14 April 10)

The Importance of Forgetting

2010-04-11T06:00:00.005+12:00

Susan Greenfield is a lady to whose opinions I'm inclined to pay attention. In a recent ABC Talking Heads interview with Peter Thompson, she came out with a question that laid bare the entire problem with a lot of the transhumanist philosophy.

From the transcript:

PETER THOMPSON: This is the perfect forum to kick around big ideas in science and philosophy - like ethics.

BARONESS SUSAN GREENFIELD: Indeed.

PETER THOMPSON: Given the amazing advances of science and the mind-

BARONESS SUSAN GREENFIELD: Well, there's several- let's restrict that question to the brain sciences, because there are many, but these are the ones that concern me. One would be so-called transhumanism, which someone has described as the world's most dangerous idea. Transhumanism is the notion that you can enhance your physical and mental powers beyond the norm. So you could take, let's say, a cognitive enhancer, a pill that allegedly - although I'm very sceptical about this - gave you a better memory.

PETER THOMPSON: What's wrong with that?

BARONESS SUSAN GREENFIELD: Why would you want to do that?

PETER THOMPSON: Well, I can think of good ideas why I'd like to enhance my memory - cos I'd remember more!

BARONESS SUSAN GREENFIELD: OK, well, why do you want to remember more?

PETER THOMPSON: Because I forget.

BARONESS SUSAN GREENFIELD: Might not forgetting be an important thing, in that you can remember the things that are important to you?

PETER THOMPSON: But I forget things that are important to me.

BARONESS SUSAN GREENFIELD: Usually, things that are important have more connections, and therefore they're more robust. But, for example, if you take Einstein and Beethoven and Shakespeare, let's say. All of them had fantastic brains - agree?

PETER THOMPSON: Mm-hm.

BARONESS SUSAN GREENFIELD: And what did they have in common? Was it a good memory? No. Surely the best brain of all is your brain, your diverse, individual brain...

Since I am, because of my emortalist predilections, with at least a toe in the transhumanist camp—though I refuse to put even one whole foot into it, because there's too many dodgy characters in there—I realized again that the right questions, not answers, are what counts. And this led to other thoughts; and, besides, I've been thinking along similar lines for quite some time now. There's also the eponymous character from The Storyteller, of course, who is over 800 years old; and what about his memory? It's an issue Heinlein at least touched on in his immortalist opus, Time Enough For Love, but not in depth.

Greenfield though, with her question to Peter Thomspon, triggered the obvious next step in the chain of reasoning, and it is this: the deficiency of our memory may be the factor that determines how we judge the importance of things.

Said deficiency is, of course, a direct result of brain structure. Even in a perfectly healthy brain, not subject to the ravages of aging/disease, there will be memory loss. Though some may appear to exhibit amazing recall compared to the average, it's still true that they, too, forget things. They're just different things.

Furthermore, consider this. Everything our mind does—assuming that the 'brain' is all there is to the 'mind'; a moot point, as I'll be the first to admit—basically happens because of the same physiological mechanisms. So, whatever drives 'memory'—and I don't even want to get into what memory actually 'is', but in this discussion it doesn't matter—is also the same thing that drives, say, decision-making.

Decision-making is critically dependent on a graded system of priorities. Decisions are driven by what, in any given context or instant, is the thing, or the complex of things, considered to be of the highest priority. In physiological terms, the processes are almost indistinguishable. If they don't happen in different areas of the brain, we could not tell apart whether at any given moment someone makes a decision or recalls the set of memories that are most important in making it.

Think of it this way, and without reference to neurology or scientific jargon. Something I see almost everyday is people overtaking others along the highway, often with more than just 'reckless' disregard to the possible consequences. I've seen things driving to and from home that would make your hair stand on end. Now, in order to make a decision to overtake someone under given traffic conditions, one has to make an, implicit or explicit, assessment of a whole hierarchy of priorities, which will combine into and eventual 'go' or 'no go'. In the case of a situation that's potentially lethal for the driver and the car's occupants, not to speak of other road users, we can think of this as:

Either, the driver considering that his main goals are being a macho or femo-macho asshole, showing off, getting there faster, etc.
Or, the driver considering the potentially lethal aspect of the situation being too great, decides not overtake after all.

One can also rephrase this as saying that either the driver forgets that his or her survival is actually more important than being an showing off; or that they remember that survival is actually the most important thing of all.

Of course, the decisions are more complex than that, but these are sketches of significant elements. There's no doubt that if you remember that survival is the prerequisite for anything else that'll ever happen to you—the bad and the good—then you are unlikely to do anything that will jeopardize it. I know this to be true, because that's how I make my overtaking decisions. Meaning that the memory of the need to survive is equivalent to deciding the hierarchy of priorities involved in my decision making process.

The decay of unimportant memories, whatever 'unimportant' means, in a normal human brain is not only 'natural' but essential. An emortal, like the eponymous Storyteller, who doesn't forget almost everything but the most important in his past life, would effectively be unable to function. There are people who are made utterly unable to function because they are unable to create hierarchies of priorities of importance. I forgot what the disorder is called, but surely it must be one of the most crippling imaginable. To remember everything equally clearly. To be able to see the full range of possible choices of decision-making. And yet, not to be able to use this to actually decide or choose. How horrific would that be?

If you think further on this you'll also realize that ultimately the same process is involved in learning, because learning isn't just acquisition of data about facts and procedures, but it's also about, and possibly mostly so, the use of these data. And it is involved in what you might call 'personal change', which wouldn't be possible without our apparently deficient memory.

Those who cannot forget, or tone down the importance in their lives of their memories, will remain the same. They will also become progressively more unable to look forward to the future.

I remain fascinated by Greenberg's statement: ...Einstein and Beethoven and Shakespeare... All of them had fantastic brains... And what did they have in common? Was it a good memory? No.

I'm wondering, maybe...is there possibly some kind of inverse correlation between creativity and the quality of memory?

Maybe someone could do some research into that.

Love And Hate, So Close Together

2010-04-10T07:00:00.000+12:00

Here's a cool game, in which mean and women participate—and that in a country where you'd kind of expect some traditional gender inequality—and it seems like it's one where the girls can actually win. It's called Kyz Kuu ('Girl Chasing'), and they play it in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, two former Soviet Republics. Kyrgyzstan is in the news right now, because there's some serious social and political upheavals going on.

Saving time by quoting Wikipedia:

A game is usually conducted as follows. A young man on horseback waits at a given place (the starting line). A young woman, also mounted, starts her horse galloping from a given distance behind the young man.

When the young woman passes the young man, he may start his horse galloping. The two race towards a finish line some distance ahead. If the young man is able to catch up to the young woman before they reach the finish line, he may reach out to her and steal a kiss, which constitutes his victory.

However, if the young man has not caught up to the young woman by the time they reach the finish line, the young woman turns around and chases the young man back to the finish line. If she is in range of the young man, she may use her whip to beat him, which signifies a victory for her.

Since I love riding horses, though I haven't had much of a chance to do that for many years now, I think this may be one of the most 'fun' games between men and women I can think of. It's also called the 'Kissing Game', for obvious reasons. And, yes, it's not entirely gender-symmetric, but then again, in societies like the Kyrgyz, you wouldn't expect too much gender homogenization—though this game is obviously, from a 'skill' point of view, quite gender balanced.

Neither would one expect from any place subject to the rule of Islam—well, not of Christianity either, but the advent of science kind-of screwed things up for Christian church domination—but it seems to me like the Kyrgyz people have a reasonably sensible view of their religion. A far cry from images you expect to see coming out of Afghanistan, for example. I just hope that the country isn't going swept up into the morass of religioid darkness that seems to be the fate of many Islamic dominated nations. But, as you know, hope is often futile and can be perilously close to despair once it is dashed.

Which bring me to love and hate. Yeah, what a leap!

Pondering the Girl Chasing Game wasn't really what prompted the love-and-hate topic. That was just something I came across, and I thought it was cool. It's certainly appears far more congenial and just 'fun' than a almost all of the 'sports' practiced in the 'Western' world. That's something to think about, I guess.

Regarding love and hate...

The other day, during a discussion on various issues, someone said—as people are inclined to say, and as is conventional and even academic wisdom—that "love and hate are just so close together". And I started wondering, "are they really?"

It's useful and instructive to look at popular, including academic, wisdom—which is often just uncritical and regularly-parroted platitude—and wonder about that kind of thing. What does it actually mean: "Love and hate are close together"? What kind of 'love' are we talking about and what kind of 'hate'? And what does it mean anyway, that they are "close together"? Close where? How? In what way? Or are we just saying that love can easily turn into hate? Really? What kind of love is it that readily turns into hate?

I hadn't intended to answer these question—just in case you were wondering. That's because I've yet to sort some of this out, and it'll probably be in the context of a novel or screenplay. But I thought it's worthwhile at least questioning this tidbit of pop-psychology. And I'm seriously beginning to wonder if it's not a classic case of someone taking one rather small subset of a very complex emotion, or set of emotions, called 'love', realizing that its frustration can easily cause it to flip over into another complex of emotions, called 'hate'; and then make it into a general rule. And then everybody—uncritically, as people tend to do when they come across what sounds like some profound and plausible statement about the human psyche—suddenly, "yeah, of course".

Or is it just that what may be simple emotional confusion in some people's heads, or maybe contextual necessity, causes them to mistake one strong emotion—strong affection/attraction for/to another person, toward whom, for any number of reasons they should not feel that way—for the exact opposite. But that says nothing about the proximity of the two emotions—only about the fact that people can be confused; which is hardly big news.

Anyway, worth having a serious think about. For me anyway. Being a storyteller, one needs to consider such matters at length. After all, stories are about people and their relationships. Just like Kyz Kuu.

Gender Roles: Why Do Men and Women Do What They Do?

2010-04-09T06:00:00.002+12:00

Ben Bova, in Voyager's II, said it quite explicitly, thereby expressing something that is probably considered quite un-PC nowadays.

In abbreviated paraphrase: Men do what they do because they want to attract women and have sex with them. Women do what they do, because they want to find mates that will make genetically and socially good fathers for their offspring.

This, of course, does not apply to the homosexually-inclined, where the rules are a rather muddled up; predictably so. But otherwise it seems pretty straightforward. Maybe the veneer of 'civilization' overlaid on this has wrought some changes, but ultimately these are skin-deep. Scratch and scape away the veneer, and you'll find that the straight metrosexual still thinks he's a caveman, even if he'd never admit it. Just like every poodle thinks he's a wolf. And inside your average 'liberated' 'career woman' lurks a mother-animal, who isn't all that sure that the price she's paying is worth the prize she's going to get one day, or has already won.

The homogeni (for a definition, see here) of the world will probably treat such statements with disdain and, in extreme cases, anger. I can hear invectives like 'redneck' or even 'caveman' hurled at me. But the truth is what it is. And the evidence for it is not just biological—said evidence being sufficiently incontrovertible to make the case all by itself!—but there is a cultural component as well. You just have to look at the stories told, most of which, when you strip away the MacGuffins, end up as variations on the 'looking for the girl' and 'looking for a potential father for my children' tales—and if that's not the main theme, it usually lurks there somewhere. There are variants, of course. The most obvious ones are 'failing to find or get the girl' or 'failing to find the potential or actual father for my children', which often metamorphose into the more general 'being a failure'.

And, yes, I know there are stories that don't follow that pattern, but they're in a definite minority and often they are often agenda-driven of blatantly polemic, of just self-indulgent. They're also usually far less as popular; and popularity is, after all, the only serious measure of a story's 'success'. By which standard Avatar ends up being the most popular 'film' story of all time.

Since its collective story and the stories is believes in and those it treasures, are what defines a culture, this pretty much says it all.

But what does all that mean? Well, depends on the context. If you're talking about evolution—well, we've dealt with that in a previous blog. If you're talking about 'civilization', it's clear that it's pretty much smoke and mirrors, and self-deception and hypocrisy. If we're just interested in human psychology and how to lead happy lives...

Well, we need to allow the cave people to exist inside us. It's like the 'dark side'. Suppressing it is counterproductive and in many cases destructive, not just at an individual level. Allowing it to take over one's psyche is also undesirable. Like always, it's a matter of treading a careful middle path, walking along what's a kind of psychological knife edge. Easy to fall off from and land irreversibly on either side, thereby effectively losing the game and the plot. Very easy. Which is why most people prefer not to walk it, and to pretend that what they're living is the 'right' life. If they think about it at all.

The Three Amigos

2010-04-09T06:00:00.001+12:00

The Dangerous Doodler and Playmobil Killers

2010-04-08T06:00:00.001+12:00

I blame Deepak Chopra for the news item below. Surely, this is a side-effect of some other meditation he did. Maybe it was something about really, really stupid 'education authorities'.

Girl Arrested for Doodling

(April 3) -- When 12-year-old Alexa Gonzalez was caught doodling on her desk at Junior High School 190 in Queens, New York, she expected detention and an afternoon on desk-cleaning duty. Instead, she was arrested, led out of her school in handcuffs and detained at a local police precinct for hours, she said. ... Gonzalez describes the ordeal as traumatizing and excessive, saying that after her Spanish teacher caught her doodling on her desk with erasable green marker, she was "physically dragged by a teacher and an assistant principal" to the dean's office, where school safety officials searched her by placing "their hands inside the rear and front pockets of her jeans." Police were then summoned to arrest her. Gonzalez told the Daily News she broke down as she was led out of her school in handcuffs. "I started crying, like, a lot," said said. "I made two little doodles. ... It could be easily erased. To put handcuffs on me is unnecessary." ...Comacho [the mother] was not permitted to accompany her daughter to the precinct and was instead told to go home and wait for a call. ... Gonzalez was detained in "an enclosed room" at the precinct and handcuffed to a pole for more than two hours. ... What were the doodled words that led to her arrest? "I love my friends Abby and Faith," Gonzalez said she wrote, adding "Lex was here. 2/1/10" and a smiley face.

The mother is suing the school and the municipality, of course. Damn right! These kinds of things seem to happen more and more; and not just in the US. Australia and New Zealand are right on track to follow them into this kind of insanity. Remember the no-hugging thing! And I kind-of wonder what would have happened if either of my daughters—now, and for quite some time, safely beyond schooling age, both of them; and what a relief that is!—would have brought weapons-wielding Playmobil figurines into the school.

I'm thinking 'psychiatrist'; though s/he'll probably be sanitized to 'counsellor' or 'violence management specialist'; or, to santitize the word 'violence' out of the last phrase: 'pediatric adverse behavior pattern management consultant'.

Really, what's happening in today's schools and the 'educational system' is going beyond the mere 'occasionally bizarre' and is rapidly turning into the 'fairly common outright ugly' or just plain 'sick in the head'. With a huge amount of hypocrisy being added to the mix, mainly in the area of schoolyard bullying, plus the pervasive 'make them into good citizens' brainwashing that's more than 50% of today's so-called 'curriculum', I don't think that I'd feel comfortable at all sending kids to school nowadays.

Still, compared with civil-liberty-disaster countries like Germany—where it is actually illegal to home-school your child; punishable, potentially at least, by jail and the state taking away custody of the child from the parents concerned—I suppose we should consider ourselves fortunate indeed.

The Guru Delusion

2010-04-07T10:14:00.006+12:00

There was at time, wa-a-a-a-y back, when I actually read a couple of books by Deepak Chopra. Nowadays, I'm almost embarrassed to admit it—skip the 'almost': I am embarrassed and confess to it publicly here and now—and I'm slightly red in the face right now. But everybody's allowed a few mistakes, OK? So gimme a break for a less-wary version of me having delved into some rather dodgy materials. Believe you me, there are more serious face-reddenders among the things I wish I didn't remember having done.

Anyway, here's DEEPAK!

Chopra Blames Own Meditation for Baja Quake

The U.S. Geological Survey is blaming day-to-day seismological changes for Sunday's 7.2 earthquake along the U.S.-Mexico border. But Deepak Chopra, the famed alternative-medicine practitioner and transcendental meditation guru, is pretty sure he knows what really happened.

"Had a powerful meditation just now -- caused an earthquake in Southern California," Chopra wrote to his nearly 179,000 Twitter followers shortly after the quake.

And then, to clarify: "Was meditating on Shiva mantra & earth began to shake," he tweeted. "Sorry about that." ...

And so on.

After I stopped laughing...

[sorry, still chuckling...]

Anyway...

...after I stopped laughing, I started to wonder what prompted that tweet. Does the guy actually believe this crap himself? If so, he is a moron—assuming that comes as news, and maybe even assuming that there was a time when he wasn't.

If he's no a moron, does he really have sufficient contempt for those who 'follow' him to pen this. Does he truly consider them sufficiently stupid to believe it? And are his followers actually dumb enough to believe him? What, in other words, does it say about both, the man and his followers?

The only possible reaction by any moderately rational human being, no matter how much they think he is wise and knowing and that the sun shines out of his butt—just as if he were a 'Bright'; what delicious irony!—no matter how much they have followed him and read his books, every single damn one of them, and/or forked out ludicrous amounts of cash to attend some retreat or workshop, or...ahh, never mind; you know what I mean...the only reaction by a human being capable of reason and a sense of proportion must surely be to trash the books, forget about the whole Deepak bullshit, and maybe start a new chapter of using the brain for critical thought.

On the other hand, that just might not work anymore. I wonder if someone could do some research into this. You know, like they did with marihuana, where it turns out, from long-term and large-scale epidemiological studies, that it actually does damage the brain beyond repair. Maybe, if one did some serious cognitive studies, they would find that brains failing to engage in critical thinking for long periods of time also suffer physiological damage.† Meaning that there would actually be a biological explanation for why people actually aren't going to walk out on this wally by the hundreds of thousands.

If stupid thinking really were to induce physiological damage, we would, of course, have cause to declare the likes of Deepak—and Oprah as well, to name just one other member of that loony bin—as being on the level of illegal drugs. It's a thought. It won't happen, but one can always dream.

Oh, yes, and to wit...

An hour after Chopra's Twitter confession, he vowed to one Twitter user, @WhiteMoon7, "Won't do it again -- promise."

[Sorry. Unable to write. Finger refuses to follow coordinated signals because of continued laughter.]

† I'm not even to begin to discuss the full ramifications of this turning out to be true.

A new story: The Storyteller

2010-04-04T23:16:00.005+12:00

I used to work with a guy, who called himself a 'mathematician', though he was really just a programmer, and not a particularly good one at that. Another called himself a 'physicist', but hadn't done any serious physics for years. Richard Dawkins calls himself a 'scientist', but he's no more one than I am, and if anything less so. There are a gazillion people who call themselves 'writers', but they don't write anything much, except for...ahh, yes, blogs. And there are whose who like to think of themselves as 'storytellers', but their stories, though technically 'stories' all right, are an insult to the profession to which these people claim to belong.

I call myself a storyteller whose medium is mostly the written word. That means some will think of me as trying to be a 'writer'. I say 'trying to', because a lot believe that in order to merit the appellation 'writer' you need to be a published writer, preferably of the traditional type of published variety. Well, they may say what they want to say, but I do tell stories and I do write—more than just blogs or letters or opinion pieces.

I'll admit that Aslam, the next in the Tethys series, is somewhat behind in schedule, waiting at 27k words for me to make up my mind, just exactly what is going to happen at this point. I know where it's going, but some people made some decisions, or are about to make some decisions, which I considered to lead to a fairly linear progression of events to the next point. But then I realized, again, that linearity is indeed a) boring and b) not like life at all. So, there's now a twist, which will have predictable, tragic, consequences that I've yet to fully think through; plus the unintended ones that I'm going to think about only later, because that's the way I operate. And so Aslam waits until I figured some of that out.

Still, a writer writes. As a light diversion I wrote an uncomplicated short (65k) suspense romance, called Third Chances, which is always fun and good writing practice, because it exercises dialog and human relationship descriptions, which are actually very difficult, and a lot of writers suck at them, even though these writers are published. This still needs copyediting, which is always a PITA, and so it's not priority one material right now.

As of writing this blog, I'm also about 40k words into my long-intended novel about a story teller, called tentatively The Storyteller—though I have a notion that the final title will be different. The intent of the book is, of course, primarily to provide a good, fun yarn. There's sex and violence and all the other good stuff. There's plots and sinister intrigues, and wheels within wheels and twists and turns galore. Just when you thought it'll go this way, it makes a sharp turn and goes that way instead. Sometimes I do this because of a whim and because I might think that things are becoming too predictable. Got to keep your audience on their toes.

The Storyteller is about the eponymous character, a guy who right now calls himself 'Arthur Smith', but is so old—like eight centuries—that he has difficulty recalling what his birth name was. Apart from being apparently immortal, he also has a gift: when he tells someone a story, they absolutely believe it; and will continue to believe it, even in the face of any evidence to the contrary. The wet-dream of every demagogue that ever drew breath. But for Arthur there is a catch: he actually has to be face-to-face with those whom he tells his stories. He can't just, say, record them by writing them down or videoing them.

Ever since Heinlein's Time Enough For Love—and also because I happen to be an Emortalist, of course—I've been fascinated with the problems associated with longevity, and what happens in a person's mind as he or she has to adapt to the historical changes around him. And not just that. A person changes through life, though it is, I guess, debatable how much real 'change' actually takes place. But what are they going to go through when it's not just a single human life, of three-score years and ten.

I'm also fascinated by—a subject Heinlein avoided because he write future-fiction, and Lazarus Long never had to live through what we consider 'real human history'—what a man might have gone through who was born sometime in the 13th century and ended up in today's world. What would he know? How would he cope?

The whole notion of an immortal in the storyteller role has a dual function. First of all it serves me to make it an ode of sorts to the tradition of storytelling, which, as I've said before, is probably as old, and maybe more important than, as those of solidering and prostitution. Secondly it emphasizes the loneliness of the storyteller, because it creates an implicit distance between him and everybody else. I also gave him the power of persuasion because that's what stories do, especially the good ones.

Apart from all that, I also want to 'explore', as they say, some ideas I have connected to the issues associated with telepathy; the thing known as 'possession'; and also 'reincarnation' and what that might be all about and how it might be related to possession. Not that I subscribe to any of these notions, but they deserve fictional exploration, and maybe something a bit more interesting than some of other works dealing with the subject, most of which are not much more than fictionalized proselytizing. I don't want to do that.

The Storyteller is one of the reasons why my blogs have been sporadic, though there's been a recent spate of them; which appears to have—for reasons entirely unknown to me—occasioned a sudden surge in readership. This will, no doubt, decay again to it usual levels once my blogging frequency decreases again, and/or when the topics change back to something that doesn't elicit quite as much interest, presumably caused by people goolging keywords and ending up on my blog. I wish I knew what those keywords were. Was it about the gender homogenization thing? I doubt it. But if not, then what?

Whatever... I'm back to my telling a story, because that's what storytellers do.

Gender Homogenization Part 2

2010-04-03T13:05:00.003+13:00

More on the theme of my previous blog. It is, after all, very complex and contentious, what with everybody and sundry having their agendas when it comes to discussing it. I take that back: few actually 'discuss' it. They either talk about it, which is what people do who basically agree about their positions. Else they argue, because it's just one of those subjects about which people who disagree will end up arguing. And, yes, I'm generalizing, but it's true anyway.

I should say a bit more about what I mean about those two potentially inflammatory terms, 'feminization' and 'masculinization'. If you'd feel better about it, look at them in terms of parameters in a description of human attributes. Their value, say, always lies in the open interval (0,1). So, and I'm being deliberately 'mathematical' about it, let's suppose we have an attribute 'T', which describes some trait that's considered male, because it's present more in the male of the population.
Consider the capability to perform spatial position mapping and movement tracking.

What's that mean? Here's an example.

Most mornings, I go out and do some sword practice, as I have mentioned in a previous blog. Some of this involves throwing short bamboo sticks into the air and trying to hit them on the way down, preferably as late as possible before they hot the ground. The reason for that is simple. They move faster the further they drop—at different rates, depending on their shape and size, whether they're spinning or not or what angle they fall at, whether they're already partially shredded from previous hits, and so on. And they accelerate—again, at different rates, depending on shape, spin, etc.

Acceleration makes things hard, because when we track moving targets we judge subsequent positions by making assumptions of constant speed. We work best when an object moves at constant velocity, and preferably it should also move at an approximate tangent to an imaginary circle with us at the center when we're trying to hit it. Things become harder when the object's trajectory is not straight, the angle to us is oblique at the time of us trying to hit it, and when there's acceleration—even if it's constant. If we're trying to hit the object with another object, which in turn is going to move along a trajectory that's possibly even more complex and whose trajectory we have to control with amazingly precise muscle coordination...well, you see where I'm going with this.

That we can do it at all is downright amazing. And you can see why it's useful and even essential—and I mean 'is', even though its obvious survival value may be more obvious in the context of hunters, who had to bring down game with projectile weapons, from rocks to spears to arrows. If they didn't, they died. So, the ones who were good at it tended to survive, and the attribute promoted itself in the gene pool.

It's also obvious that said attribute is 'male'. Women, with rare exceptions, didn't go out hunting. Hence the attribute 'T'—tracking and targeting ability— tends to be much higher in even today's males than in females. And it'll stay that way, because there's no evolutionary selection process that will change it. I think. Maybe.

Yes, there are, of course women who happen to have a high 'T' index. But that just means that, like everywhere else in biology, the distribution curve across a population of the value of this particular attribute has a long tail. But a long tail doesn't imply that the tail ends, as it were, represent more than a very few individuals. Most of the individuals with a high 'T' value will be male, and the higher the 'T', the more they will also possess other 'male' attributes. That's the way things are. At the moment.

Gender-homogenization changes those gender-indices in individuals, as well as their distribution across populations. This is not a good or a bad thing. It's just something that's happened as a result of role adjustments in human groups throughout evolutionary periods and in different contexts. In Western societies in particular, the movements from hunter/warrior societies to settled farmers and eventual urbanites, made possible by to the extent to which we see it today by the industrial revolution and what's sometimes called 'post industrial' periods, has wrought changes that, on further reflection, may indeed have evolutionary consequences.

I don't mean silly ones, like atrophied limbs because we're driving cars. But consider this: In modern industrialized societies, certain parts of the population will consist of more gender-homogenized members and couples. They will breed, probably at a fairly low rate because of the woman's tendency not to want to be just a 'baby machine', and propagate the genes that have disposed their parents toward those roles. This part of the population is likely to be come very distinct and inbred, because the gender-homogenized and unhomogenized don't mix well; at a personal as well as a cultural level. The other parts of society, those with lesser degrees of homogenization, will continue to breed like bunny rabbits, because they follow older, if you will, evolutionary imperatives. As a result, they will outbreed the homogenized members within just a few generations—which will, first of all, have the simple result that the gender-homogenized sections will simply disappear in due course. Either that or there will be some very nasty conflict between the two sections. As a secondary consequence of outbreeding the 'homogenies'†, society on the whole will in turn assume a very different profile, the consequences of which are quite unpredictable.

Don't think it won't happen. We already have an example of this kind of effect in action. It's been called the Roe Effect, and if you look at the US today, you'll see it in action with a vengeance. The whole Obama-thing and the apparently 'progressive' nature of whatever happened in the US that got him elected, that's just a blip in the overall trend toward increasing conservatism and religiod-dominated politics and social life.

The Roe effect—not a 'hypothesis', but methinks demonstrated fact, even after just one generation—is, of course, the kind of thing I was alluding to when talking about the nonsense that is the 'Singularity'. Gender-homogenization is, like everything else in human social life, a process that's subject to regulation by other competing processes; some of which, ironically, were set into motion by the process itself. And in the end the breeders have the upper hand. I know this from personal experience, because despite the massacre I performed on the Cane Toad-lets, as of recent, with all the rain, there's been an explosion of the blighters around here. For a couple of weeks you couldn't can't walk across any stretch of lawn or paddock without thousands of them leaping out of your way. Most were still tiny, thumbnail size. But others were definitely getting bigger. And every female ends up capable of laying up to 30,000 eggs every year.

How can one beat this? How can one stem such a tide?

Well, here's another bit of math. Assume you kill 10 of these things. Assume their gender distribution is 50/50. Assume that maybe 1/5 actually survives to breeding age. That means that, statistically speaking, if you kill 10, you have an excellent change of preventing 30,000 coming into being—every year, which over a canetoad's lifetime (at least 5 and up to 15 years) may average to half a million toad-lets. Not a bad return for a ten-kill. And it gets better the bigger the toads are that you kill, because it increases the probability that they're those that survive to breed.

But the math is still grim, because, let's face it, those kill-numbers are utterly insignificant compared to those that survive. But it kind of makes me feel useful when battering another one of them into oblivion.

Anyway, evolution is a tough cookie, and despite modern healthcare, there are other aspects to it—not just 'survival of the fittest'—that make it tick. All it takes is for individuals survive for long enough to reproduce, preferably several times over. Those who reproduce more will win in the end. Whatever 'winning' means.

† Homogeni: Someone having a significant set of those gender attributes traditionally associated with their physical sex, decreased; and attributes of the opposite sex increased. The term doesn't exist yet, but maybe it should. Better and more descriptive, I think, than 'metrosexual'. See also 'Homogeni Coefficient.'

Gender Homogenization

2010-03-31T22:37:00.005+13:00

I guess this blog fits in thematically with some recent blogs (1 2 3). Funny how themes tend to develop and thread themselves through what otherwise might just be random musings...

I found this article in the WSJ:

Why Women Don't Want Macho Men

New research suggests that women from
countries with healthier populations prefer more feminine-looking men...
...
how masculine a woman likes her men based on her nation's World Health Organization statistics for mortality rates, life expectancy and the impact of communicable disease. In countries where poor health is particularly a threat to survival, women leaned toward "manlier" men. That is, they preferred their males to have shorter, broader faces and stronger eyebrows, cheekbones and jaw lines.
The answer begins with the theory of sexual selection. It goes that women are the choosier sex because they take on most of the risk and burden of reproduction and child rearing. While a man can sleep around with 100 women in a year's time and have 100 kids, a woman who sleeps with 100 men in a year will only have one baby (barring multiples). She has more at stake in each pregnancy. Therefore, it is in her best interest to at least choose a high-quality mate. And one of the hallmarks of a quality male is good health.
But what does health have to do with masculinity? The link is testosterone, the hormone behind manly muscles,
strong jaws, prominent eyebrow ridges, facial hair and deep voices. Testosterone is immunosuppressive. This means a man must be healthy and in good condition to withstand its effects on his development. Testosterone is also linked to other traits related to strength: fitness, fertility and dominance. From an evolutionary perspective, masculinity is basically man's way of advertising good genes, dominance and likelihood to father healthier kids. When disease is a real threat, as it had been—and arguably still is—heritable health is invaluable.
Masculinity, however, can come at a high price. Women often think of high-testosterone types as uncooperative, unsympathetic, philandering, aggressive and disinterested in parenting. In fact, there is evidence that they really do have more relationship problems than other men.

...
...if you're a woman living in a country with a decent health-care system and few harmful pathogens [...] while a masculine father's "good genes" may confer health advantages to children, so do good medical attention and aclean environment. [...] women with the weakest masculinity preferences tended to live in some of the healthiest countries: Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Austria. Other countries in the study with low masculinity preferences are Romania, Greece and New Zealand. Women with the weakest masculinity preferences of all lived in Belgium, a country considered to have one of the best publicly funded health-care systems in Europe (alongside Denmark and the Netherlands in the health-care index).

And so on. Read the article if you're interested

First of all, there's nothing new about this, though it points to a problem compounding, possibly to a point where it'll be hard to imagine how it could be fixed.

Why isn't it new? Well, it's just another variant on what happens when hunter-gatherer, nomadic, or warrior-like societies become agricultural. The adaptation required from a farmer-type is quite different to those on a hunter or warrior. Also, farming societies tend to be more gender-homogenized than the hunter/warrior ones; a feature that, with the wisdom of hindsight, should have alerted aspiring futurologists to what would happen when urbanization overtook ruralization as a major social development. Actually, it really just needed a bit of study of history and the 'great' civilizations that have come and gone. Rocket science it is not.

'Gender-homogenization' is a kind of measure of how much men and women share activities, roles and, above all, personal goals, in a given group or society. It has nothing to with equality or the lack thereof, equal opportunity or not, equal pay, dominance by one sex over the other, and so on. A society can be quite highly gender-homogenized and still have gender inequalities. In the case of farming societies, past and present, it's indeed quite obvious that men and women were and are unequal in many ways; but they still will share a lot of activities associated with the farm, and they will probably differ much less in their life goals—make the farm work, bring up the family, and so on—than, say, men and women in hunter or warrior societies. The reasons for this are simple: the less people have to rely on gender-specific attributes and requirements to perform their social roles, the more both genders will occupy those roles to which this applies. This may not happen immediately, but it will happen, as evidenced by history again and again. In a society whose role-requirements and made progressively more gender-neutral, this will obviously lead to exactly what we are seeing.

By the way, I'm not passing positive or negative judgment on this—just presenting the facts.

Gender-homogenization results in the feminization of men and the masculinization of women. Those terms aren't meant to be emotionally loaded either. It just means that the difference between 'traditional' gender roles becomes progressively more blurred. And—and here I'm going to be so un-PC that it'll probably raise quite a few hackles—it means that the 'masculine' male and the 'feminine' female, of what you might call the 'traditional' kind, will become progressively restricted to those social groups who have have a tendency to reproduce with the greatest efficiency. And these aren't exactly the people whom I consider to be prime examples of the positive aspects of evolution.

Is all of this a problem for us? Isn't the world becoming a better place with all that? After all, the less 'difference' the less cause for fighting. Or so you would think. Just like at one time, as the song went, let's all work to produce "coffee-colored people", to get rid of the 'race' thing. That way it'll be all make-love-not-war and so on.

What it amounts to is a reduction in diversity, of course—which is something that, in the context of biology, is generally considered to be a bad thing. In fact, I can't think of any instance where a decrease in the level of diversity, despite occasionally lowering conflict levels, has, in the long term, shown to have had beneficial effects. The experience in ecology is that decreasing diversity also decreases the robustness of ecosystems and lowers the survival probability of the system itself, as well as the species living in it. Given that we are now living in a world that is far from stable and may indeed be soon confronted with high levels of threats to planetary and human survival, it may not be such a good idea to sit back and congratulate ourselves on all our social achievements, such as there are, and to think that our haphazardly out-together societies and their infrastructures are really going to ensure that he conditions that make, inter alia, women in certain societies choose progressively more non-male males, are going to remain in force.

In the West we are, by and large, so far removed from an understanding that we, as a species, are actually still in a battle for our very survival—maybe more so than ever—that such thoughts will at best cause a few raised eyebrows, followed by a dismissal of the issue.

Still, the truth is stark and clear: The price we pay for being able to survive as a species is the existence of conflict, which is a direct consequence of diversity. And while it is true that we are woefully unprepared by evolution for the demands placed on us today that will enable us to survive as a species, it is also true that, as usual, we are over-correcting and missing the target again. It remains to be seen whether the 'new' ways—which, by the way, are just a paper-thin veneer—are going to work better than the old ones. I certainly hope so.

Still, what I said many blogs ago, does it really have to mean that we have to extinguish the fire? For fire destroys, this is true. But it also warms and energizes, and in its destruction of certain things lies the source of creation for others.

The price we have to pay. The choices we have to make.

Why the SIngularity is Probably Nonsense

2010-03-29T10:58:00.006+13:00

I've been catching up on my futurist web-reading as of recent, just to keep me in the loop. Prolongevists, transhumanists, Singularity adherents, doomsday sayers, Earth savers, and so on.

Don't know what prompted it; I guess it must have been the unread list-emails relating to such subjects, and especially to the issue of human longevity, that have been accumulating unread in my various dedicated mailboxes.

Anyway, I came across the whole 'Singularity' thing again. I don't know if you're familiar with the subject, but it boils down to this (taken from here, to save me typing):

"Imagine a curve that represents the technological progress of human beings throughout history. Most people would agree that we have come a long way in only a century; we've invented new technology, learned new things and developed as a race. Thus the curve slopes upward. We can examine this curve and extrapolate to create a function that describes the level of progress for any given point in time.

Many have done this, including Ray Kurzweil, the renowned inventor of synthesisers and text-to-speech machines and also author of The Age of Intelligent Machines, a book that won the Association of American Publishers' Award for the Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990. Kurzweil has shown that the doubling period of the speed of computers is diminishing, i.e. it used to take us three years to double the speed and memory capacity of computers in the beginning of the 20th Century, and now the same kind of progress is achieved in only one year. He claims that these trends will continue, and that computers will be able to emulate human brains in the year 2020.

When and if computers become intelligent, computers themselves could construct new computers, causing a massive acceleration in technological progress. One way to visualise this acceleration is to consider the following rather trivial function.

f(t) = -1 / t

Readers with working knowledge of mathematics can see that this function gives us very large values for very small negative values of t. As t approaches zero (from the negative side), the value of the function approaches infinity. This is called hyperbolic growth. A hyperbolic function grows much faster than an exponential function, as the reader can easily see in the following table. Note that t takes on negative values; think of it as a countdown to the Singularity."

Yeah, very mathematical and scary for some—but what it boils down to is that we're going to have some point in history, probably soon-ish, where technological progress will run away from us and either completely annihilate us or else solve all our problems. It's represented by the function labeled 'hyperbolic' on this picture:

Those promoting the concept of a Singularity tend to get very enthusiastic about it, as fervents do—and especially about topics they know nothing about, which is anything related to what the future will bring. And, being woolly thinkers, they tend to forget one of the most fundamental lessons from physics: there's always friction.

That's like one of the most fundamental laws of the universe. That, and Newton's 2nd and 3rd Laws, of course, are what's putting the kibosh on the whole Singularity nonsense. The thing is, you might notice, that in the initial parts of the three curves in the picture above, they are hard to tell apart—and just how far that 'initial part' goes is a question of the exact equations governing the processes described. Right now there's nothing to suggest right now that we're talking about a hyperbola, instead of an exponential and maybe even a sigmoid function. Nothing, that is, except people's overheated imaginations.

Indeed, it seems to me that what you might call 'progress friction'—which expresses itself in all sorts of ways, from the purely physical to the conceptually achievable—is already showing its effects, and will do so increasingly as we continue moving along the curve.

And, yes, I may be wrong about that, and the Singularity Believers may be right. But at least I remember the importance of friction; one of the first and most important topics even in the most elementary of physics classes. For friction is the nemesis of singularities.

Those Who Might Have Been But Never Were

2010-03-25T12:11:00.005+13:00

Every now and then I 'click through' to one of those links on a web page and end up in some never-never-land of weird-dom. In this instance it was on the Radioman's Kansas City website, which, judging by its contents, is basically politically 'left', as you can probably notice from the sample screen content on your right. (Yeah, pun intended.)

Well, actually, I know it doesn't look 'left', does it; what with having an anti-abortion T-shirt displayed there, draped over the shapely bosom of an attractive young woman—who is either a model or a Christian or both. Certainly, she ain't no Obama fan; I can tell you that for nothing.

I was confused, too. I mean, what was an ad like that doing on a left-wing and implicitly pro-abortionist website? Until I read the parenthetical caption underneath, which fit in perfectly with the basic crudity and tastelessness that characterizes not only the layout of this website—designer's worst nightmare!—but much of its content as well. Loudmouthed juvies; probably all male.

Anyway, the sheer contrast piqued me, and I clicked the picture link and, after some more clicking—because not even the links were quite right, and why should they be?—I ended up on a site that does T-shirts with a gazillion of imprints, among which there are many variants on the "I survived Roe vs Wade" theme, e.g....

...and so on. There are T-shirts on men/boys as well, but I chose females. So sue me. Anyway, it looks like a thriving industry.

I'd like to ask dear readers to pause at this point, take a deep breath and get over their knee-jerk reaction to the whole issue tackled here. Said reactions may be personal, political, philosophical or religious. I don't really care one whit. Just get over them and try to do some thinking instead.

First of all, there's an interesting statistic here. It may or may not be exact—in any case it'll be 90- million-and-counting—, but the order of magnitude is probably correct. So, in a parallel universe, where RvW had come out the opposite way, there would have been an extra 90 million—probably unwanted, unloved, economically challenged, insufficiently schooled, [insert other undesirable attributes here]—people in the world that aren't in ours. That's a good thing, right? 90 million—that like three times the current population of Australia!—that aren't clogging up our economic and social security systems, adding to crime and drug use and all that stuff. They really wouldn't have liked to have been alive anyway, because of the low quality-of-life they would have ended up having. Many would probably have died young. Maybe there were even a lot of potential terrorists in there, because we all know that terrorists are bred by economic disadvantage. Intelligent people don't get involved in terrorism. Right?

Also, just to put those anti-abortionist religioids right, let's remember that, since we're talking parallel universes here, there are many many more people that aren't around because of contraceptive measures taken at the time people got together to have some serious fun. As Roger Zelazny once put it in one of his novels (I paraphrase slightly): Ready, willing and able to help propagate the species, but not right now.

So, looking at our and that parallel universe in question—or a multitude of them—we can see that sure we're better off in the one where a bunch of Christians, Rightwingers, Anti-intellectuals and Rednecks wear I survived Roe vs Wade T-shirts.

It's a pity though that we can't—just for curiosity's sake—have a peek into those alternate universes to see what they look like. Because, of course, while there might have been terrorists in the 90+ million, there also could have been the odd genius who rose above his or her miserable fate of being born and ended up making the world a truly better place. But again, that goes for the alternate universes unrealized because of contraception as well. It's just as things are. We make choices and thereby limit the universe we live in to...well, the universe we live in.

Having, at least I hope so, represented the pro-abortionist viewpoint up to now, I would now like to switch sides. This is because I happen to be very ambivalent about the issue. My reason tells me that one side makes sense. My heart tells me something else.

Let's consider why someone—usually someone young—might choose to wear such a T-shirt. I can think of three main reasons:

Brainwashing.
Religion.
Conviction motivated by other promptings.

I know, I know! What's the difference between being brainwashed and being religious? Well, a great deal actually, because the two are not necessarily related. You can be brainwashed into believing anything at all! Religion has no special place here. Like you could be brainwashed, as many people are these days, into believing in what the Brights try to make you believe. Q.E.D.

It occurs to me though that, despite the potential 'brainwashing' aspects of the first two of the threesome of reason-types above, that actually need not negate the general point I'd like to make about what might be going on in the mind of someone who actually wears such a declarative T-shirt. Like what is such a wearer actually likely to 'understand' about their own understanding and grasp of what these five words mean?

Well, what does it mean? Expanding the pithy five words we end up with a declaration that, in essence—and stripping out the religious, philosophical or political—says something like:

My mother could have legally aborted me.
She chose not to.
Therefore I am alive today.
(Subtext: And I'm glad I am.)

This in a non-judgmental way of expanding this, and when you see it like that, doesn't it sound just a tad different to the way it sounded to you it when your knees were jerking and twitching?

Cold Fusion and Biology

2010-03-24T07:00:00.000+13:00

In a comment to a recent blog of mine, a friend from New Zealand pointed me at some interesting observations. One of them was a URL to an article on a recent conference on 'cold fusion', a field of science that has long suffered from being seriously maligned by those in scientific power and their supporters. And no wonder: how dare chemistry invade the domain of physics and tell them what's what, right? How dare these upstarts, who work in labs with test tubes and comparatively small-scale electronics compete for truth with those who waste untold gigawatts in the LHC—which probably won't give them the answers they so eagerly seek, but may also endanger the very future of our planet.†

One of the fascinating snippets in the article was a throwaway clause in a sentence which read like this:

The presentations [at the conference] describe invention of an inexpensive new measuring device that could enable more labs to begin cold fusion research; indications that cold fusion may occur naturally in certain bacteria; progress toward a battery based on cold fusion; and a range of other topics.

That reminded me of the French scientist, Louis Kervran, who many years ago wrote a book called Biological Transmutation, of which I have had a copy for many years and which is now available, minus the figures, on the internet. In it, he reported on his experiments, painstakingly performed with the passion of a true experimental scientist, which appear to demonstrate that not only 'cold fusion' may occur in living systems, but a lot of other elemental changes. Since these are obviously performed at energies far too low to be compatible with the models of physics, which require energies far in excess of what biochemical systems can muster, these results have been mocked at length. Kervran was thus relegated to the scientific fringe, and nowadays is hailed mostly by alternative-medicine advocates, new agers and the like.

I'm wondering if maybe one day soon, he may end up having the last laugh—and, despite my physics training I'll definitely laugh with him. The metaphor that leaps to mind is that of opening a door. You can smash it in or you can use a key. And just because it seem like nature by and large tends to open subatomic doors by smashing, that doesn't mean that they don't have locks that can be picked with the appropriate keys.

And here's a little snippet that might be of interest: the US Navy is actually taking these things seriously enough to fund cold fusion studies.

† Yes, I am definitely in the 'alarmist' anti-LHC camp. The idea that the thing's running right now at full blast gives me occasional nightmares and causes acute attacks of anxiety and nausea. And they spent 9 billion dollars on this monstrosity...

Ex-parrots

2010-03-23T10:02:00.006+13:00

I'm sure you've seen this Monty Python classic, yes?

Well, how's this for an encore?

Woman spends £50,000 on sick parrot which finally loses fight for life

Anne Lowery spent the money on chemotherapy for her 42 year-old pet Areba after the bird was diagnosed with cancer.

However, the Wagler's Conure parakeet died after 13 months of treatment.

Ms Lowery, a tax expert from Florida who has 11 other parrots, said she was glad for the extra months with Areba who she had raised for 30 years.

She said: "When they said she had cancer, they gave her two months to live. It seemed such an aggressive time frame, so I thought nothing of putting her into the vets' care."

The parrot passed away on Wednesday.

Dr Teresa Lightfoot, the vet who cared for Areba, said: "It was tough for Areba. But we improved her quality of life and gave her and her mom more time together."

This actually isn't funny at all. The same money would probably have been able, to think of just one possibility, to get some child a badly-needed life-saving operation. Not that either Ms. Lowery or her vet cared a damn. And why should they, right? It's Ms. Lowery's money after all. And if she considers her pets' welfare to be more important than that of some human being she doesn't even know and basically doesn't give a shit about, that's her business, is it not?

Further to the last blog...

2010-03-22T16:01:00.011+13:00

Relating to my comments from the last blog, here's an article in the Guardian (from 2009). For a change, it's one that makes sense.

It's also depressing, and appropriately so:

...The universe is still waiting. There has been no great leap. Indeed, the United States, which next month celebrates Apollo 11's 40th anniversary, will soon have no way of putting men and women into space at all....

....The moon landings marked not the beginning, but the end, of our space dreams...

The point I was trying to make, about the loss of spirit, comes through with some fascinating observations:

"A great many Americans suffered premature heart attacks and strokes from their efforts in making the Apollo project succeed. More than 400,000 workers were employed by private contractors to build capsules, rocket engines, space suits, and computers for Apollo and the vast majority worked flat out, over weekends and holidays, much of the time for free, for several years to make sure the programme succeeded."

For example, at the Grumman factory in New Jersey, where the lunar module was built, staff would clock off at 5pm, leave by the front door, walk round to the back and work for free until midnight. Similarly, employees at the International Latex Corporation - which made the suits worn by the Apollo astronauts - worked with equally obsessive intensity. In a recent documentary, the company's senior seamstress, Eleanor Foraker, recalled working 80-hour weeks without days off or holidays for three continuous years, suffering two nervous breakdowns in the process. "I would leave the plant at five o'clock in the morning and be back by seven. But it was worth it, it really was."

Imagine anything like that happening today. In your dreams!

I know, it sounds terrible, all those heart attacks and stressed-out people. But see what they accomplished, with a technology that by today's standards is less than pitiful:

Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins - who would pilot Apollo 11's command module while his two crewmates descended to the lunar surface - guided their craft using sextants, slide-rules and a computer that had less power than a modern mobile phone.

The things we can do, if only we have the spirit to—as individuals and together. But who still has that spirit? It's been leached out of us by a combination of factors, too numerous—and contentious, controversial and probably offensive to the ears of most—for me to actually spell out. The only remnant of such a spirit nowadays resides in religious movements that aim to conquer the world with their insanities.

We have fallen a long way. We've turned mottled green instead of a clear-sky blue. Our fears and insecurities are blotting out whatever pathetic remnants of courage we appear to have left. And if we survive, it will be because of sheer dumb, and utterly undeserved, luck.

Meanwhile R.I.U.P. space programme.

Losing Heart. Losing the Future of the Species.

2010-03-18T11:53:00.028+13:00

I'm just finished re-reading, after something like 10 years, Voyagers, a 'hard SF' novel by Ben Bova. Right now I'm into Voyagers II: The Alien Within, also after a similarly long time, and that will be follows sometime soon, when it's back in print, Voyagers III, which I've never read. I think I might pass up Voyagers IV, which Bova has recently written, and which, I suspect, will depress me too much—partially because from the synopses I've read it pretty much parallels, emerging from of the the Greats of science fiction, the malaise I'm about to discuss.

In Voyagers, I found the following quote from one of the greatest pioneers of rocket science:

The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

Yes, there was a time when the world was on the brink of nuclear annihilation—half an hour of big bangs and we're all goners...that kind of thing—but at the same time there was something worthy of being called a 'space programme'; instead of the abortion of one that we have right now, where we just put more and more of what eventually end up as 'space junk' into orbit, making the near-Earth 'space' a very dangerous place indeed.

A far cry from today, where missions, and especially manned ones, that go beyond the orbit of the next piece of orbiting space-junk are dead in the water—and they may indeed be dead forever, because something's gone out of us; and by the time it might come back, which may be when humanity's survival situation becomes terminal, it'll be too late to do anything about it. Ship's sailed for good. Forever. Certainly for this phase of what we think of as 'civilization'.

There is a segment of the populace that will actively cheer this trend. There were many, even in the heady pre-Moonlanding days, who were vociferously decrying the whole space-effort as a colossal and irresponsible waste of money. Better to feed the hungry, build hospitals, improve living conditions, etc. All noble goals, without a doubt. For a while the US and Soviet governments were able to forge ahead with their programmes despite this, mainly because it served to further 'national pride'. That was the bottom line—who has the biggest dick and the best technology—and all the 'science' stuff was just rationalization. And when the US landed men on the moon, the nation was ecstatic. Hell, the world was.

Motives have changed. The International Space Station was not built for reasons of national prestige, but because of the desire to create a concrete example of 'international cooperation in space', which presumably helps to further that greatest goal of them all: WORLD PEACE. That's like the desirable counterpart to the undesirable major issue: GLOBAL WARMING.

Again, nobody in their right mind would deny that it would be desirable if we all lived in peace with each other—or would it? Actually, the issue is by no means clear, and there are very cogent reasons to be acutely afraid of a situation of universal peace; mainly because the preconditions for such a state would seem to imply that we have to surrender so much of our 'humanity' that we would effectively cease to be human. We might also lose our desire to survive, as so grimly suggested in the movie Serenity. Some people would possibly welcome such a state of affairs, where nature can revert to its raw state; which, if I recall rightly, is just about as brutal and bloody as it gets. Nice job!

What's happened between the 60s and now, and why? It's complicated, of course. But the trend, at least in Western societies, was and is to tone down their national pride much more than was common, and so the motivation to spend on big-ticket items to glorify one's nation has decreased to the point where even, or maybe especially, the US, simply hasn't got the will anymore to spend significant amounts on 'space travel' efforts. Any party advocating it, any presidential candidate, would be finished the moment the suggestion was broached. It's all about 'the eehhcaunomy' and problems on the ground. And every dollar that's expended in 'space' needs to have a ground-based justification, be it military, communications related or having to do with monitoring weather, 'security' (meaning spying on people), and whatever pathetic remnants of 'scientific' reasons remain.

We've turned our faces away from the stars and toward the ground. We can't see the stars anymore—neither in our imaginations, nor in reality, in the light pollution of our cities. And, one could argue, why should it be different? Our problems are down here. If we want to survive, we need to clean up our environment and solve population and social problems, stop wars, feed the hungry, help those in need, make the world a better place—whatever 'better' happens to mean, depending on the current social paradigms. This is so reasonable that only lunatics would argue otherwise.

There is, of course, one excellent reason for looking up, and looking up in fear and with a sense of foreboding, and that's the possibility that some nasty big object will come along and wipe us out. Detecting something like that coming at you is just a prerequisite for even starting any action. And that's all we're doing today. But real 'action', a response to a threat that's considerably more unforgiving than creeping Global Warming, would require technological capability and hundreds of billions of dollars spent on something that's entirely a 'maybe'.

Does anybody really talk or think about this? Apart from a couple of movies, Deep Impact and Armageddon, nobody has recently really said much about it—and neither of the movies was considered anything more than entertainment. Well...they weren't. They weren't even 'great' movies, though I enjoyed both. But both at least tackled the notion that we might damn well do something about being annihilated; not just curl up into fetal ball and wait to be wiped out.

But in reality that's basically what we'll doing. That's all we can do, because we've got nothing to offer in terms of a defense. We don't because we're not willing to consider the significance of the 'maybe', which is not really a 'what if' kind of 'maybe' but 'what when'. We should be very, very afraid of this. Much more than we should ever be afraid of Global Warming. In fact, what the world has been unwilling to accept is that it's just as frightening as living under the shadow of likely nuclear annihilation. Just because it comes from space—and that means 'deep space'—doesn't mean it's not going to terminate our species and just about every other within less time that it would have taken to make us extinct in a world-wide nuclear war.

Thing is, if we're not going to look up in fear, as humans did once upon a time, what's the likelihood that we'll look up in hope and yearning? What's the chance that, though our cradle is being systematically destroyed by the infants inside it, we will take heed of Tsiolkovky's dictum, quoted near the beginning of this blog? If we exclude a tiny minority, one without any political or social clout, we're talking about a big fat ZERO. Null. Nada. Nix. Nothing.

Besides, how is one going to get billions of people enthusiastic about spending billions of dollars on a project that will not benefit them personally in any way, and never mind 'spin-offs'. Nobody really gets great motivation out of the prospect of those. But sending even a few thousands of astronauts, explorers, scientists or colonists into space—if we ever get to those kinds of numbers!—still means that only one in a million will ever leave the planet, while the rest are stuck here to choke in the species' cradle's progressively degrading environment. Why should anybody care? To preserve the species? Who gives a shit about the species if one's family can't be preserved? Seriously, would you?

But he have to go, with or, as it likely, without 'popular' support. And there's only one solution to this problem: make the enterprise independent of governments and taxpayers. Meaning find a reason to make space exploration attractive to private enterprise; and that means a reason must be found to make it profitable, despite the likely investment of billions and billions of dollars in R&D. Because R&D it will need, to develop, above all, suitable energy sources, propulsion and effective radiation protection measures. These three are the Achilles Heels of the whole enterprise. Solve them and you can build huge spaceships that will carry large numbers of the willing into 'deep' space, to the planets of our Solar System and beyond.

Motivating corporations or 'private' individuals—those who have obscene amounts of resources—into sinking the money into the enterprise would be difficult, of course. As far as private individuals are concerned, they're mostly trying to find a way into heaven after spending most of their lives accumulating wealth, usually to the detriment of others, and have found their social conscience, or at least try to convince the themselves, the world and their God that they have.

I think that good old greed is probably still the best motivator. That and power. Power derived from wealth and economic influence. The 'Vanguard' corporation in Bova's Voyager series is a good example: richer than many nations, even those in the 'developed' world, profiting immensely from 'alien' technology they managed to acquire from the visitor from far away, who happened to pass through our solar system. Snagging that alien vessel and its mummified occupant was an excellent motivation to launch a serious space-enterprise. Seems to me like we need something like that.

Either that or, of course, technology that makes it 'easy' to go up there and explore. Because right now the ratio of return over investment is so much smaller than unity that nobody'll want to look at it seriously. Meaning we'd have to rely on wealthy idealists. Not a reliable base on which to build one's hopes for the preservation of the species.

Avatar, Iraq and the Demise of the Value of Imagination

2010-03-16T10:28:00.014+13:00

I'm sure there are many reasons why Avatar didn't win best film at the Oscars, being beaten by The Hurt Locker. Many of them have nothing to do with the value of the film(s) involved; and anyway, 'value' is pretty much in the eye of the valuer. And, yes, it is quite possible that in many ways it is a better and more worthy film than Avatar. I don't know; I haven't see it yet, and so I'm not judging it. But I'm not actually interested in the films' relative merits, but more in some other reasons, some of which have nothing to do with 'merit', that will also have been in play—and one in particular.

Some of the reasons were no doubt political and had to do with the current fashion in popular issues. Right now, politics and political ideology definitely trumps currently-less-sexy issues like the rights of indigenous peoples. Fashions come and fashions go, and right now 'international law' is a much more powerful buzzphrase than, say, 'right to a way of life'. And Iraq, where The Hurt Locker story is located, is prime territory for political jacking-off. The irony, by the way, is that, as I predict with some confidence, in the future, when historians look back at this period in time—if there is still a human civilization with historians who know about this period—they will probably note that, in terms of its effect on human history, the war in Iraq was far more important for the continuance of civilization than that in Afghanistan.

Other reasons for Avatar being given a less-than-flattering treatment by 'The Academy'—which, by the way, is a handy way for the members of said 'Academy' to absolve themselves from personal responsibility for their choices—include the fact that it was been the highest-grossing movie in cinema history. That alone disqualifies it from consideration. What the masses flock to in such droves surely must be inferior; this has always been the reasoning of the arty elite. The story surely has to be simplistic, so they actually 'get' it, because the masses have no taste and can't handle profound or deep stories.

Well, as I may have mentioned, I'm inclined to agree with the dim assessment of the capabilities of the vast body of humanity. But I disagree with the notion that 'profundity' is found where the intellectualigentsia thinks it's found. They think it's in the mind, when in truth it's in the heart. And, yes, I know, that view isn't exactly fashionable. Which brings me to the next, 'other' and main reason why Avatar didn't win the Oscar for best picture: it was sci-fi/fantasy.

To the best of my knowledge, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King was the only movie in those genres that ever won an Oscar for best picture. And I'm certain—other universe, I know—that, if the trilogy hadn't been based on what's considered, rightly or not, one of the great works of literature, nothing Peter Jackson could have done would have gotten that Oscar.

Which brings me to the main topic of this blog. Sorry for the long intro.

Science fiction and fantasy are, of course, nothing but the most obvious of modern day incarnations of fairy tales. These in turn—while having certain social, political, satirical, cautionary, educational and demagogical components—are, by and large, stories of the imagination. They were the stories told to what might well be called 'simple' people—and children, of course. Which probably means that the likes of me, who love fairy tales are simple and childish. Well, so be it.

Many people—actually 'most', or so one would have thought until Avatar—just can't relate to sci-fi/fantasy/fairy-tales simply because, as they will tell you in various direct and oblique ways, "they can't really happen". Now, I don't know if you noticed, but young children, until they're brainwashed by well-meaning adults or life in general to think otherwise, don't actually care about that. But it appears that adults do—or at least the adults littering the societies of the West today.

Or is this true? Well, actually it isn't. Most people believe that religious texts, which are almost all patently fairy-tale, allegory and myth, are 'true'. But it appears that these kinds of tales have some special status, which they do because people believe in God and gods and all sorts of things that surely are, at best, highly speculative.

So what have we got here: People who will, usually dull-wittedly, accept religious fantasy—or the equally fantastic cosmology and metaphysics of the Brights for that matter!—but at the same time dismiss 'fantasy' stories that don't lay any claim to being real as somehow inferior and less relevant to life, or whatever they want them to be relevant to, than stories with content that "could actually happen". Am I really a member of a truly tiny minority who think that this is quite bizarre? ('Truly tiny', because I don't hear/read many others—well, none actually that I can recall offhand—talking/writing about it.)

Children do not look at things that way. I know this, because I have been a child and remember at least that much of it—possibly because there's such a lot of it left, too—and because I have children, and I have watched them closely for that aspect of their mental development. I have come to the conclusion that—unless there's a clear pathology of some sort, but it has to be serious and disabling—one of the worst crimes a parent can commit is to interfere in a child's relationship with the stories they are exposed to. Or, for that matter, to allow others to do so in your stead; which means of course, that one ends up battling our brain-washing educational systems, an army of basically arrogant bureaucrats and apparently well-intentioned teachers, and the damage they wreak on children's mental development; a process that nowadays extends, in places like Australia, from before the age of 5 to about 18!

Children should be allowed to figure out 'stuff' on their own. Teaching children 'critical thinking' should not consist of telling them what they should think critically about and how, but merely that they should use their intelligence, powers of observation, deduction, analysis, intuition—about themselves, the world and especially what people tell them!—to build up an image of the world that enables them to survive in it and to lead lives which they may actually find to have meaning, purpose and that kind of thing. Because, believe it or not, but all those things ( intelligence, powers of observation, deduction, analysis, intuition, etc) are actually intrinsic and require no 'educational' input. Education can provide tools, because the raw faculties need to be trained and provided with a framework of knowledge to make them work more effectively. But that knowledge itself must be allowed to be subject to critical inspection itself. That is the essence of what a proper education should be like.

Parental duty consists of educating by example and making available the facilities that will help children to develop their faculties. The education system, on the other hand, should be a mere servant in 'facility provision'. But that's in an ideal world, and it isn't ever going to become real, is it?

I've digressed, but that's nothing unusual. What I really wanted to point out is that we are living in a world where adults become progressively more conditioned not to relate to stories in the same way as they might have been able to as children. I don't know if it's overstating the case, but it seem sfairly obvious to me that stories about "things that could happen" are inherently less imaginative and less imagination-stimulating than stories about things that can't. And I, for one, think that adults whose imaginative capabilities are so stunted that they've come to that point should be considered...well, 'impoverished'. They don't know it, of course, and they never will.

Maybe all this amounts to a 'progressive' development, and certainly Richard Dawkins, in his Andrew Denton interview took such a position, and appeared to support progressive removal of all fairy-tale like stories from our cultures, because he considered them to be "lies" (sic). Needless to say, I find the fact that anybody, even a Bright like Dawkins, should entertain such thoughts, nauseating, abhorrent and quite frightening.

Faith is the Opposite of Evidence

2010-03-10T23:11:00.006+13:00

Seriously, would you trust someone who uttered these words with anything else he might be saying about life, the universe and everything? Especially if you knew that he isn't just some unknown challenged-'thinker', but someone who has had extensive experience—and, dare I say this, earned a lot of money from it—of convincing people in talks, symposiums, interviews and books, that 1+1=3.

Before you say "Huh? WTF?", here's what's wrong with that statement: it's a classic example of someone committing what's known as a 'category mistake'. That's because 'faith' is a property, or manner of operation, of the human mind; while 'evidence' describes a wide range of processes or objects that are used by the human mind, but not of the psyche itself, to establish the truth or falsehood of some proposition or set of propositions about...well, whatever.

Category mistakes are common and usually forgiveable. But a statement like the one in the title of this blog, by someone like this guy... Well, just let me say that I would have been terminally embarrassed if someone had caught me out with a doozie like that. Statements preceding the one above included the assertion that (I paraphrase, but accurately) "knowledge cannot be gained through faith but only through evidence". There's so much wrong with that statement alone that it would warrant a 1000+ word rebuttal. Suffice to say here that a) the speaker obviously has no concept of what, if anything, is 'knowledge'; b) is even less aware that it is not evidence but our faith in our interpretation of the significance of said evidence and the validity of the paradigms we're using to perform the interpretation that leads to anything that might qualify as 'knowledge'; and c) utterly fails to comprehend the scope of the 'knowledge' he's talking about.

Such philosophical naïveté is forgiveable and indeed to be expected in John Doe, but not in one of the paragons of todays thinker-dom and one whom the ABC currently—in a tediously recurring sound-bite replay of a well-known interviewer's introduction—touts as "...the world's best-known natural scientist."

And, yes, we are of course talking about that founding member of the Brights Movement, paladin of atheism and reason—yeah, whatever—Richard Dawkins.

BTW, the Brights Movement's goals are the following:

Promote public understanding and acknowledgment of the naturalistic worldview, which is free of supernatural and mystical elements.
Gain public recognition that persons who hold such a worldview can bring principled actions to bear on matters of civic importance.
Educate society toward accepting the full and equitable civic participation of all such people.

In other words—once you read between the cautious phrasing of their goals, which sound like something the Church of Scientology could have come up with in their public statements about their purpose and goals—it consists of a bunch of intellectual elitists, who think they know everything, but are dumb enough not to realize that they are just another religion, with all the humbug paraphernalia that go with it. Trying to educate the stupid religious masses into understanding that they are right—without a clue as to what they think they're 'right' about—and know better than the stupid plebs. Well, I am the first to admit that I agree the plebs is indeed not very bright—and I'm being polite—but at least they, by and large, dont' live under the delusion that they are. At least the plebs go in for religion en masse and they know and admit it. The Dims—my cheap shot at a pun on the Brights—don't even know that they're pretty dim, despite all their cleverness.

And if you have any doubt about their religious inclinations, just consider their faith's logo:

They should have been more careful choosing their designer, because that looks for all the world like a variation on the theme of "The sun shines out of my ass."

In another BTW—and just to preempt any plaints or accusations that I, too, have no notion of what that thing we term 'knowledge' can actually be said to 'be'—here's my two cents.

I view science much the same way as I do religion, and everything else we can say to 'think' or 'know', which is as a collection of narratives; in the case of science about the 'natural world'. Part of that narrative is that there's nothing but the 'natural' world covered by scientific narrative. Note how that sounds almost biblical. "You shall have no other God besides me", and all that kind of stuff. The narrative's validity is supported only be the faith of those who subscribe to it, as well as what's often called a 'body of knowledge', which is just a phrase to describe the collection of 'evidence' available to support the predictive capability of the scientific narrative. Saying that we 'know' means that we can use the logic of the scientific narrative and its language to make accurate predictions about what's going to happen in the natural world. This body of knowledge or evidence becomes a part of the narrative itself, and its continued descriptive and predictive success is what we call 'proof'. It's not actually anything 'real', of course, and it has no existence in itself, but is just a collection of narrative snippets.

But just what exactly is covered by 'natural world' is another component of the scientific narrative, as well as most others concerned with answering existential questions. Those who subscribe to it have confined themselves to addressing certain phenomena, which are declared to be 'real, and everything else therefore cannot be real, according to the narrative. If there is any 'evidence' that cannot be successfully incorporated into the narrative, it will be converted into evidence for something that can. This is accomplished through yet other narratives, which qualify as 'explanations' and sometimes 'debunking'.

I, too, subscribe to a significant portion of the scientific narrative, but I also know its limitations. That may be because I tell stories...consciously so; while the overwhelming majority of people, who also tell stories all the time because that's the essence of 'thought', have no idea that that's what they are doing. It's a somewhat odd kind of existence when you look at the world that way, because you start seeing all these interwoven narratives of all the people around you, close or distant; and it's like looking at this swirl of loops of energy in endless motion—and they all have in common that neither is completely 'right', not even in their most basic and primitive assumptions about their lives, their selves and the other selves they share the world with. And the 'science' narrative, by virtue of its self-imposed limitations—which, by the way, are also a part of its strength and a major reason for its success—has excluded much that is essential to what you might call a 'complete' understanding of what 'is'. Personally, I think that it would actually gain strength if it only extended itself far enough to allow itself to admit that this is so.

Not that I'm holding my breath. Indeed, it may not be possible to extend the narrative much beyond its current limits, while at the same time retaining its predictive potency. And so, the Richard Dawkinses of the world will continue to befuddle one subest of the plebs, while the rest muddles along in another version of religiosity.

Get Real. Be Rational.

2010-03-03T13:45:00.001+13:00

I like it!

Disarming Australians

2010-02-26T12:05:00.009+13:00

Yesterday, Anna Bligh(t), the Queensland Premier, compared her determination to go through with her government's highly unpopular plans to privatize many state assets to the 'fortitude' displayed by the former Australian PM, John Howard, who, in response to the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, introduced new legislation that placed Australia's gun laws among the most draconian in the western world. In the wake of this, the states quickly followed suit with their own legislation, which further served to 'control' gun ownership. Not that there had been much to control; after all, the possession of 'concealable' guns had been strictly controlled and confined to 'authorities' for as long as I can remember, which is back to the early 1970s.

The merits of Bligh(t)'s claim may be under dispute—she is a person that evidences few personal qualities, but then again, neither did John Howard—but let's suppose that her claim has merit. It is true that resistance from all sides to Howard's gun-control response to the massacre was significant. It is also true that he saw it through nonetheless.

That could be construed as an act of political courage, and maybe it had some aspects of it. But, being suspicious of anything 'beneficial' rolled out by politicians, it occurred to me that his real motive was much more self-serving—and 'state'-serving—than the naive observer tends to perceive. And, of course, in the wake of this, and with suitable irony, Bligh(t)'s comparison suddenly, quite without her intending it, assumes completely new significance. Not a matter of fortitude, but of some twisted selfish motive that still has to become evident. As it will, in due course, but by then it'll be too late; and yet more of Australia will have been sold to foreign interests, who give even less of a damn about 'ordinary people' than do the home-grown large corporations.

To understand what Howard was doing—well, basically he was fulfilling your average politician's wet-dream—we need to go to the US, where currently there's a frenzy of states loosening gun legislation, in anticipation of what the avowedly anti-gun federal administration might do to curb gun possession.

Now, I need to emphasize that I do not support free-for-all gun ownership as it exists in many US states, and I certainly have big issues with the uncontrolled possession of machine guns, serious assault rifles, and the like. But I do believe that 'self defense' is a valid reason for someone to apply for a firearms license, and that it is also a valid reason for buying a gun, and that includes 'concealable' handguns.

Right now, that particular right has been taken away from all Australians. This means—and it does mean it, and this is not some gun-nut's ranting—that anybody disposed toward invading someone else's home uninvited and for the purpose of doing the occupants direct harm, can do so without needing to fear that said occupants can defend themselves in any significant way. He might be wrong in assuming this, of course: if someone came into our place I'd club him with a bokken at the very least; and a bokken, together with the requisite skills on the part of its wielder, is a fearsome weapon that is quite a match for a handgun or shotgun.

But people by and large do not possess these skills, and therefore my argument stands. Most families, small or large, are utterly helpless when it comes to the growing army of home invaders, which is my general term for anything ranging from burglars to sickos, who abduct girls from their bedrooms and leave their corpses in municipal stormwater drains. Bundaberg, Queensland, last week.

In the case I'm referring to, the capability of the home owners to defend themselves wouldn't have made a difference, because they didn't even know it had happened. Or maybe it would have? Would the 19-year old perp have reconsidered his decision if he had been aware that the parents could have caught him and, instead of chasing him away, might have shot him in the ass? Or, to look at it another way, would a family in whose house there is a loaded gun, not be much more aware of the issues involved in securing a home? Because why else would anyone buy a gun, unless they had some awareness that there are secutity issues? It may be a stretch to say that Howard's decisions had led to this girl's death, but it's possible. It surely wasn't an intended consequence, but in the vast scheme of unintended consequences, this may well have been one of them.

The debate about what are legitimate reasons to own a gun is nowhere more vociferous and out in the open than in the US. One of the issues the debate focuses on is whether an individual ought to have the right to do whatever is reasonably required to ensure that said individual and those who are in his or her care can protect themselves against assaults on their welfare. In the US, based on an old tradition reaching back to the days of the nations foundation, the agencies who might commit such assaults need not be other individuals or in general 'criminals', but may include 'authorities'.

And here lies the crux of the issue—and, I suspect—the true motivation of John Howard, as a agent of the 'state'; next to his wanting to look like he was a man of principle, rather than just another opportunist and power-seeker.† For even those opposed to gun ownership—in general or inparticular for the 'self-defense' reason, which would instantly result in an increase in the distribution of guns—must admit that a 'state', no matter whether it is openly totalitarian or nanny-totalitarian and 'democratic', and especially as it begins to make ever greather inroads into people's lives, really doesn't like the idea that it has to deal with an armed populace.

All the reasons why this is so boil down to the state's desire to control the plebs—said 'plebs' being anybody not 'in authority' or 'authorized'. Any 'defense' is to be handled by the police, and never mind if they come too late to help anybody, which is invariably the case when it actually matters. And of course, there's the possibility of some nuts—US examples abound—thinking seriously about using their weapons to practice anti-state activities, which nowadays is lumped under 'terrorism' and we all know there's a 'war on terror' going on. All the excuses the state needs to increase surveillance and control of the population's behavior, and most definitely to even clamp down further on what pathetic remains there are of 'legitimate' gun owners.

My own view is that properly licensed and properly trained people—that would mean a compulsory training course, with exams at the end and a certain minimum of rounds fired at a certified training range, so they end up being better shots than your dangerously under-trained police officer—with no criminal background and subject to a few other criteria, should be perfectly entitled to own guns, concealable or not. In fact, inside a house handguns are far more practical than anything larger and far less dangerous to boot, especially when used wimpy ammo, which has less recoil and penetration power.

I can see that succeeding. NOT! Just think of crack-shot civilians, in contrast to couldn't-hit-a-barn cops. Yeah, like that's ever going to happen.

Instead, anybody owning an illegal gun and being caught using it—even it it's to defend the lives of their family—will be slammed with a compulsory jail sentence and a criminal record.

Makes no sense? It does to someone!

† It needs to be noted that Howard's position had great popular support. He was therefore being very politically savvy. And the public got exactly what it deserves: armed criminals and unarmed citizens.

R.I.P. Honor, Truthfulness, Courage, Valor.

2010-02-25T11:33:00.011+13:00

Last weekend, we conducted an impromptu marathon of Peter Jackson's trilogy The Lord of the Rings (1 2 3)—the extended DVD version—just because we could, I guess. I suspect that this viewing was partially responsible for bringing to the fore my pissed-off-ness at the state of things in the society around me.

Yes, I know—and I have said so on many occasions to those idiots who think they can 'perfect' humanity—societies, all of them, are inherently imperfect, seriously flawed; and most have aspects to them that are outright disgusting. That's par for the course. Even the 'great civilizations' of history—and the present, insofar as there is anything qualifying for that appellation extant right now—exhibit(ed) dark nooks and crannies. Very dark ones. Nasty, mean, disgusting stuff that people do and which the society as a whole tolerates, for whatever reason.

In many ways, the situation and characters depicted in LoTR—the movie, if not so much the much-less-interesting novels—seem to map pretty much onto the world of the living.

Most people, I've come to conclude are like Hobbits, only that nowadays it's becoming socially respectable, and even I think expected, to have a far lesser proportion of individuals who rise above the level of those who exhibit the Hobbits' 'lesser' qualities. Frodos are probably impossible to find, and the likes of Pippin and Merry are being bred and educated out of existence slowly but inexorably.

Politicians—our lowest life-forms, who are rapidly establishing new standards of intellectual, ethical and moral devolution into decrapitude—come either in the Hobbit-variety, or in something slightly different that approximates less-powerful versions of Saruman. Every single one of them, without exceptions, would take the Ring, do their worst with it and have their dislikeable aspects magnified to Gollumesque proportions.

Imagine a whole horde of Gollums crawling over the buildings of the parliaments of the Western Democracies! Well, actually, I'm not sure that, apart from appearances, they're not already there...most of them. Our current crop here in Australia, at state and federal level, are a pretty horrific and pathetic sight to behold.

Our heroes a questionable lot. Not per se and as individuals, because at so many levels those—well, some of them—that are being elevated to 'hero'-status, like sports people, do actually achieve something of note. In personal terms, for them, it may even be something that they can rightly be proud of. And then, since they, in international contests, represent the nation of their origin, they'll make said nation proud by proxy.

But that's hardly 'heroic', is it? It's a personal or tribal validation exercise, but hardly anything more.

Other types of—far less adulated—heroes, like scientists, also hardly qualify as such. They may be people of achievement; but 'heroism' surely has to be more than a label for 'achievement', if the term has to have any significance that hasn't been reduced to the level of currently fashionable blandness.

Other terms whose very use tends to make a lot of people either cringe with embarrassment of just having someone say it, or whose utterance will invoke the indifference of those whose life-fire has been dimmed to a terminal and soon-to-be extinguished glimmer, include those listed in the title of this blog. The consequences of trying to follow them are, after all, likely to bring those attempting to do so into situations sufficiently complicated, confrontational or even dangerous, that surely the legislature would be instantly prompted to consider measures to outlaw them. That's because honor will always be challenged by, and be constantly confronted with, the dishonorable; truthfulness will offend the self-serving liars who have slithered into positions of power and influence; courage will only be tested under fire; and valor will usually result in social castigation, because society as a whole runs on non-valor, which is its lowest common denominator.

LotR is, of course, a tale of heroes. Meaning that there are also those by comparison with whom the heroes are accentuated. But heroes are at the focus. Frodo and his buddies; Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli; plus those with lesser impact on the tale, but who exhibit the qualities outlined above, like Boromir and Faramir, who, though flawed and initially misguided, do come through and grow to be heroes.

They all have in common a quality that's missing from so many of the heroes of other movies. I'm not quite sure what that quality is, but it's of the kind that you know when it's there. The kind of quality one would wish—futilely, to be sure—that people would know how to detect when it stares them in the face. That way they might have something worthwhile to work toward.

But people are, by and large, like Hobbits. Mostly, they don't even see the real heroes. And, though occasionally, usually briefly, adulated, those real heroes soon fade from the radar or interest of the dull populace; to be replaced by the common, base and vapid.

Was it always this way? Maybe. Quite possibly so. But the sad thing is that it hasn't changed; that we haven't become any better at seeing it. Which tells us a lot about the evolution of our societies, which measured on any scale, is probably indistinguishable close to zero—and which might, is some ways, be a negative quantity.

Petty bureaucrats with nothing to do

2010-02-24T11:42:00.001+13:00

Haven't blogged for a while. Paralyzed by too much to talk about. Currently I feel like I'm surrounded by morons, of the 'state' kind, be it Queensland or Federal Australian—and with a few choice bits and pieces thrown it from overseas, and it's "OMYFG, WTF is going on?"

There ought to be Darwin Awards for retarded public servants and/or politicians who would be outwitted by your average 3-inch roach—of which there are aplenty in Qld. You know the saying "Give a man a hammer and every problem gets to look like a nail"? Well, I think for public servants or politicians it's "Give a moron legislative capability and he'll start making rules to handle every problem".

I want to rant and rave about so many things that currently 'irk' me that I continue being paralyzed from too much choice. My response to this is to basically ignore these things. I might go back to the halcyon days where I was 'news free' for almost two years. I seem to recall that I seldom felt better. That would mean turning off every news bulletin, never listen to radio talk shows—even if they are on the non-commercial ABC, where the listeners and hosts often appear only marginally more intelligent than those on the commercial stations, and refuse to talk politics to anybody. That may be the most difficult thing, because it creeps into virtually every conversation you have with people.

A A A R G H H H !

Only in New Zealand. Maybe...

2010-02-13T11:20:00.003+13:00

From the Sydney Morning Herald...

Foul-mouthed surgeon blasts fat patient

February 11, 2010

A foul-mouthed New Zealand surgeon has been reprimanded after swearing at a severely obese patient.

A 44-year-old mother filed a complaint about the doctor after a tense consultation with him last year, The New Zealand Herald reports.

The doctor said f--- at least three times to the Maori woman after she told him she didn't like the word "diet" and preferred the term "lifestyle".

He told her she was, "going on a f---ing diet".

In the letter of complaint, the woman wrote: "[The doctor] said if I couldn't handle the word diet then he challenged my motivation and stated that I would never survive surgery because I was still bullshitting myself and therefore my thinking was still f---ed".

In response to the woman's concerns, the doctor said they no longer had a "therapeutic relationship" and scratched her from the gastric bypass waiting list.

New Zealand's Health and Disability Commissioner, Ron Paterson, said the doctor, who admitted using bad language, had been unprofessional and insulting.

Whatever the doctor may have thought when he uttered the 'f---'s—or he may just have had a real shitty day—this kind of approach is at the very least unprofessional.

What the article doesn't say is that, as was reported on TV, the doctor was told to attend 'sensitivity' classes as a result of this. Whatever the merits of the case, does that not have echoes of A Clockwork Orange? Seems to me like having to attend such classes could constitute disproportionate punishment.

Oh, and by the way and for those who haven't spotted it, you can't "go on a lifestyle". You may change a lifestyle; just like you can change a diet, of course. But a lifestyle is much more than a diet, which may be a part of a lifestyle. So, apart from the invectives and the, potentially damaging, act of scratching her from his gastric bypass list, the doctor may not be that much of a total pillock. It could also be argued that maybe scratching someone, whom he considered to be a lost cause, made space for others more likely to show positive results from the procedure. The issue is fraught with a number of very big ethical pitfalls. The same goes for such issues as how to assess whether to give liver transplants to alcoholics that show no sign of changing their ways.

What a Rush! Best Birthday Present Ever.

2010-02-12T23:33:00.002+13:00

As I mentioned last October, my three ladies—spouse and two daughters—got together for my last borthday and got me a TIF, a Trial Introductory Flight in a helicopter.

Well, I finally took advantage of it today, and WHAT A RUSH!

Problem: Now I finally have not just looked at blood but tasted it.

So, I ask myself. WTF do I do now??

Northern Territory Bashing: Favorite Pastime of Australian Urbanites

2010-02-11T23:28:00.000+13:00

This morning, like almost all mornings, I got another earful of that rather pathetic urbania past-time of running down the people of the Northern Territory. It usually happens in context with something that appeared, usually on the front page, of the Northern Territory News, which admittedly a 'rag'. But then again, so are 90% of all 'newspapers'; so what else is new?

Comments on the NT, or 'Territory'—on radio, TV or in the context of just people talking to each other—are almost always laced with mockery and contempt, most of it undisguised. Pretty much the same thing one hears in urbania about 'rednecks' in general, only this time it's amplified, because there's this notion that not only and the Territorians rednecks, but that the place is also a gathering place from dumbwit rejects and losers from all over the country. 'Race relations' are often dragged in to illustrate the Territorians' cultural, ethical, moral, racial etc degeneracy. After all, one just has to look at the pathetic state of aboriginal life in the NT, and that just about tells the story, right? Right?

I hear this crap mostly from the Queensland point of view, and especially the 'Brisbane' angle. Brisbane is, of course, pretty much of a hicktown itself, despite its size, which has by now swelled to over 2 million people. Meaning that Brisbane has a vested interest in depicting itself as superior to the remainder of 'regional' Queensland, and even more so the great Australian bashing-child, the NT—often by the mean-spirited expedient of running down other places, which by implication appears to elevate it.

But things aren't confined to Brisbane, though their acrid mockery of Territorians surely ranks among the worst Australian urbania has to offer. The ABC as well as the commercial stations, when reviewing the day's 'papers, invariably have something caustic to say about the NTN—which the paper deserves—with, equally invariably, something snide following that implicates the people living there.

By way of disclosure, I need to admit that I love the NT, and that the people there don't seem to me to be any different to the people anywhere else; though, of course, there are less intellectuals and metrosexuals about than in urbania. Darwin, where would-be-urbanites are working hard, pathetically and futilely so, to make it into a form of urbania, may have a somewhat greater proportion of typical urbanites, but overall, of the less than 250,000 people in this vast land, there are hardly any. Which to me makes it a very attractive place indeed.

I mean, my wife and I live in Queensland, and we managed to get a place that's as far out of urbania as is practical, given that I have to work for a living and that my usual occupation requires a certain proximity to 'city'. But the vast spaces of the NT and its people hold a strange attraction for me.

Admittedly, in most places the likelihood of intellectual or highly 'stimulating' conversation is very small—but then again, I have noticed that it's no different in most places; especially since I find discussions of politics anything but stimulating, and that seems to be pretty much all the 'intellectual' stuff urbanites seem to be able to come up with. So, the most stimulating conversations I have are with members of my immediate family, friends on the other sides of Skype connections; and an old friend, who, like me, has 'ruralized' himself and lives not too far away from us.

Then there's the lack of general 'culture', as some would point out. The NT isn't exactly riddled with great art galleries and theaters, or with cinema multiplexes that show the latest flicks as they come out. And, yes, I would have missed seeing Avatar in 3D, which would have been a pity. But I'd see them eventually, and most flicks present very well on a nice big LCD TV, especially now that we have BluRay.

What else have we really got in urbania that's so attractive? Shopping malls? Not exactly my natural habitat. Coffee shops? Well, there are some really good ones in Darwin and Alice Springs, and I think in Katherine, too. And I remember a really good one out in the bush on the road to King's Canyon. (Not that I drink coffee, but I appreciate a good hot chocolate.) Better hospitals? Not any better than those in Darwin, Alice Springs and even Tennant Creek. Traffic jams? Yes. Lower grocery prices? Yes, true. Better 'racial relations'? Yeah, right; mainly because there are hardly any indigenous Australians in sight around here. And I can assure you, from my days as a cabbie in Brisbane, that those who do live here are no better off than many in 'regional' Qld or the NT.

What the NT does have, is something that needs to be experienced to be understood. And it isn't just the wide open spaces and the low population density. That's a part of it, but there's more to it. As far as the favorite NT-bashin item is concerned, race relations, the Territory does have serious problems, but they are no worse than they are anywhere indigenous Australians are found. It's just that in the NT there are comparatively many, and that the problems involved with helping them are too great and the whole thing's just too 'hard' for the self-serving politicians in Canberra; who'd rather go and 'help' the 'poor' and 'disadvantaged' overseas than attend to their own citizens. But the NT itself has some admirable initiatives going that might provide a real hope for the future. And this is not something found anywhere else. So stop knocking the NT!

But such considerations aren't going to trouble the dull-witted mockers from urbania.

Surprise, surprise.

Adaptation is not Evolution

2010-02-10T11:19:00.004+13:00

I had a discussion the other day with friends. During the course of it, the whole issue of the influence of computers on our society and future etc came up. Being who I am, I pointed out that computer-human interaction is fundamentally unsuitable for the brain, which simply isn't designed to handle this kind of interaction. The increasing ubiquity of the interaction though, as well as the long-term exposure of especially developing human beings to computers, and even more so, of the internet, will have consequences that are mostly unforeseeable, though modern science is well on the way to at least trace some of its neurological and psychological effects. None of these are pretty, and most are very damn scary.

One of my friends pointed out that we'd 'evolve' to have all this work out. Give it a few generations, or maybe more than a few, and it'll all work out. It's the kind of conjecture you might have heard in a different form once upon a time when applied to the human-car interaction, which was supposed to eventually presumably produce humans optimally designed to operate cars, with those body parts not required for car operation degenerating over the course of time.

Thing is, it just doesn't work that way. Evolution is a process that works through death, and through killing of certain members of a population before they can reproduce; while others go on reproducing happily along and eventually outbreeding those who are, in that context, less 'fit'.

Without death there is no evolution. Without preventing people with certain characteristics from reproducing, their characteristics cannot be eliminated from the gene pool. Not yet anyway. We may, of course, in due course be able to modify genes in other ways, and even change those that will end up in the offsprings' gene pool. But that's a different story. It not 'evolution'. It's something completely new, for which there is, as yet, no definite term.

Evolution is pretty much dead, given the current level of technology and health-care available in many places. Of course, should we suddenly take ourselves back to some pre-technological time, that would be different, but we're assuming that our health-maintenance capabilities are, if anything, only going to increase. Since evolution, under those circumstances anyway, is dead, so is the argument made by those who oppose extended human longevity (>200 years, say), at least as far as the "Oh, but you'll stop evolution!" nonsense is concerned. It's already stopped, folks!

What my friend was talking about when he said that we'd 'evolve' to be better adapted to a world with ubiquitous computers and the internet and maybe even more influential and cognition-impacting cyber-things, was really just 'adaptation', which is a completely different animal.

Adaptation is an adjustment of an organism's behavior, physiology or anatomy in response to encountering a particular set of environmental circumstances that require such adaptation, in order for the organism in question to function optimally. But while the ability to adapt may be bestowed on the organism through an evolutionary process, that doesn't mean that the adaptation itself will be transmitted to offspring. Only the ability to adapt will—this is the best one can hope for.

This means that, with evolution being out of the picture, that the next generation will be no better adapted, at birth, to, say, being exposed extensively to computers and the internet, than the current one. And if—as is highly probable given the evidence—our brains really are not really suited to extensive human-computer interaction of the 'intensive' kind, then that means that the next generation's brains also aren't adapted 'naturally' to it either. Meaning that what can be shown to damage the brains of this generation (whatever 'this' generations happens to be), will also damage the brains of any generation following.

I'd go further than just confining the applicability of my jaundiced view to individuals and the way computers completely screw up their cognitive systems. I think that our societies are at a stage which actually constitutes a form of reversion to a more primitive state. The thought and emotion control being imposed on people through computer-enhanced state/government/media/education systems are taking us back to pre-intellectual days, into the dark ages of humankind, when the notion of individual liberty, choice and 'free thought' was, if it existed at all, confined to very few.

The grim irony is that we actually think we're 'progressing', when in truth we are falling back into mindless, uncritical conformity. And, yes, I know, many will argue that this is patently wrong, because isn't there so much more critical discussion now than ever before?

Well, no. There isn't. I admit that the world of human thought is divided into a number of camps—and there really aren't all that many, though each have factions of sorts—this I admit. Some think this and other think that. But are they 'critical'? Hardly. The only 'criticism' you get is that of those from one camp criticizing those from other camps. In other words, virtually all so-called 'criticism' is camp-oriented. And that, in my book, isn't criticism, but pretty much the same as a bunch of Christians berating a bunch of Muslims. Republicans bitching about Democrats. Liberals berating Conservatives. Religionists slamming Atheists. Objectivists deriding Collectivists. You get the idea, yes?

It's all pretty stupid and silly. Intellect doesn't come into this, except as the slave of already-existing convictions. And while reason tends to be a tool, as it should be, for dealing with the world, our cowardice in applying it to uncover things that may be uncomfortable to us or endanger our world-view is truly pathetic. The computerization of our societies and the use of information technology to exert social and mind control is going to hasten our decline into more of the same of this.

It need not be that way, of course. But, like always, what can be used for great good invariably can also be used for a similarly great evil. IT is one of those things. It has allowed us to discover things that previously were hidden; solved problems and created machines that perform feats once only dreamed of by SF writers. It has been used to save millions of lives. In the final analysis, it will result in a decrease of environmental damage, even though its development caused and is causing quite a lot. It has brought us breathtaking, revealing images of the universe. I could go on and on about the benefits of computer technology—and about its evils, which people, in their apparently infinite stupidity and venality, insist on bringing into the world.

None of this will help, of course. Like the dumbwits we are, we may muddle through by sheer good luck. Maybe enough of us will get through this without being integrated into the mindless hordes of opinion camps littering the world today. Maybe some of us, and maybe some of our children also, will continue to be able to think for our- and themselves; as individuals, and not as parts of group-thinks.

Maybe a few piggies will continue to be able to fly.

True Blood. Vampires, Werewolves, Telepaths, Shapechangers...and what else?

2010-02-04T11:20:00.008+13:00

We're just working ourselves through the first two seasons of the HBO series True Blood, which is basically about an near-future world, where vampires are able to come out of the coffin, as it were; said event made possible through the invention of a blood substitute, 'True Blood', that basically obviates the need for them to feed on humans. The series is another instance of the current coming-back-in-vogue of the whole 'vampire' thing.

There's a lot of sex and violence, with occasionally graphic depictions of gore and body parts flying here and there. Where there are vampires, werewolves aren't far off. There are also people with unexpected talents here, such as telepaths and shapechangers, plus a host of half-people-half-creature things, like a sorceress who is a cross between the Odyssey's 'Circe'...

...and some bad-ass were-monster, which likes to rip people's hearts out.

True Blood is good, unclean fun, if you like that kind of thing. It's set in a fictional small town in Louisiana and makes excellent use of the ambience of that region. The characters are sharply drawn, and in particular Anna Paquin, not hyperventilating anymore like she did when she got an Oscar for her role in The Piano. Her affair with the vampire Bill Compton, whose manners, way of thinking and social etiquette date back to over a century back, is the pivot around which much of the story and its other characters revolve. Definitely worth seeing, though I understand why this really wouldn't be everybody's cup of tea.

One thing that occurred to me—and it's something the series, with its many 'talented' humans popping up all over the place—is that it kind of clarifies why those denying the existence of anything that isn't 'scientifically provable', though few actually have a decent notion of what that actually means, are so rabid and...well, 'fanatical'...about their assertions.

It is this: if only one, just one—and it could just be a tiny 'one'—of those things beyond the reach of the scientifically-accepted fabric of reality were actually shown to exist, that would open the floodgates for just about everything else as well. If vampires, those 'undead' creatures who can walk and talk and suck the blood out of unwary humans, exist, then werewolves probably do, too. If just one shard, one fragment, can be found, made of a material unknown to our technology and demonstrably from some kind of 'craft' or machine, then the whole UFO thing follows immediately behind. Find a single telepath who can communicate across vast distances—say, from Australia to the UK—at will and with precision, and you'll open the doors for telekinesis, clairvoyance and even talking to the dead; which would, of course, overturn the current paradigms of the likes of Richard Dawkins for good and forever. If just one object or person suddenly disappears in mid air, and it can be demonstrated that this wasn't a hoax, we've got the whole 'other universes' thing staring us in the face and waving hello. We find a single person of reasonably youthful appearance and in good health who can demonstrate that s/he is, say 400 years old, and that's the end of the you've-got-to-get-old-and-die paradigm, which holds us all in thrall. And so on.

This is the problem with, and the promise of, such matters entering our lives beyond the point of reasonable doubt. It is a problem for those who don't want it to happen. It is a promise for those who believe, or at least strongly suspect, that things aren't what they appear, no matter how comforting the status quo is to those believing fervently in the method and body-of-knowledge of science.

While some will, no doubt, be certain that the current body of science will continue to reign supreme, I am watching this space with interest—mainly because... well, just because... and also because it would be be good, though possibly also scary, fun if there was more to 'reality' than we give credit for.

Mastering the Sword

2010-01-29T09:46:00.009+13:00

One of the profound differences of opinion dividing me and many 'sword' martial artists is their attitude toward the whole relationship between the sword and the one wielding it. This, difference, oddly enough—or maybe not so 'oddly', because there's some fundamental life-philosophy involved—also applies with many of my fellow 'writer' and 'film-maker' buddies—though 'buddies' is a definite misnomer here.

With regards to the sword it is the notion of 'mastery' of the weapon as a major goal of whatever discipline is being practiced. In some schools, like MJER, this translates into the use of swords—and also a focus on other weapons, like the Naginata—that are too large for the practitioner ever to establish a relationship with the weapon that makes it into an integral part of the practitioner's body.

I've seen this trend close-up, and I've seen what it does to the mindset of the practitioners subscribing to it. Once you know what you're looking for, once you've asked the right question, the signs are everywhere, and they're not even subtle. Maybe one should also add that it's difficult to say which one is the chicken and which one the egg: the mindset; or the choice of sword and what to do with it.

Like the Needledick that I noted a few blogs back, the obsession with trying to 'master' ever larger swords has a definite phallic element about it. And mastery of ever-larger objects as an indication or proof of one's prowess with regards to whatever, results in diminishing the person doing it. Reminds me, in a way, of many Australian drivers' obsession with cars with noisy exhausts, that signal anything from "here I come" to "look at what a powerful engine I've got".

Of course, I do appreciate the desire, especially with many koryu schools, to preserve traditions, and these may include the use of large weapons, like Naginata or Bo (6-foot-long staff). But that's something completely different, for many of these weapons had a definite fighting tradition. As did long swords, of course, but these had very specific fighting purposes; which applies to the European versions as well. And in the truly 'martial' context, it wasn't ever about 'mastering' a weapon, but about learning how to use it well enough to competently dispatch enemies.

This is not the case today, where koryu teaching isn't done for real-life fighting, but, in countries like Japan, for mostly 'cultural' reasons. In other words, it's play-fighting at best; mixed in usually with, especially in the West, 'self-development' stuff and some semi-serious self-defense 'application'. And because it isn't really everyday-life 'practical' or necessary—because true 'warriors' are few and far between in the urbanias of today all over the world—the pshycological elements of 'sword mastery' are far more important than the practical ones.

Indeed, big swords are highly impractical. As Otake Risuke, of TSKSR, points out, it's about speed. Watching Otake Risuke do the TSKSR kata, one cannot be helped but be dazzled by the lightning-fast and deadly-precision execution.† He never gives the impression that he has 'mastered' the sword, or that he has a mindset that includes the notion of 'mastery'. Instead, his sword—a short and manageable one!—appears integral to his body, requiring no thought about how to use it. This is, no doubt, also a result of many years of daily and intense practice. But I have also seen other 'masters' from other koryu do demos, and it just looks different. I find it hard to put a fingfer on it, but maybe it's about the separation of sword and body being just so much more in evidence. There's 'mastery' there, but there is no integration.

I'm all on the side of 'integration'; of Sword and Mind as One. It's not about 'mastery', but about one-ness. Familiarity, to the point where the sword feels like a part of you, no matter where it happens to be: in the scabbard lodged in your belt; in the draw itself; in the cut, its hasuji and trajectory; the flow of its movement from one cut to another; its feel and balance as it is being held while at rest. Even if it's standing in a corner or resting on a stand, the look of it should have that 'familiarity' element, as if it weren't distant at all, but right there, in one's hand. A totally trusted friend—if anthromorphic terms are required—but not a servant or slave. An inanimate object with a close connection to one's own mind.

It doesn't have to be a particular sword, though that is, of course, an extra element of the intergation thing. As long as another weapons bears sufficient similarity in terms of size and handling, the feeling is there. It is, in other words, an intimate connection between a person and a whole class of objects, not just a particular instance of that class.

I doubt that all that many sword practitioners have thought about their relationship—physical, mental, emotional, philosophical—with the sword to the degree required to aid with integration. Not in today's world anyway (with there probably being a lesser degree of such reflection in the dojos of the West; but that may be an overly hasty generalization); not with todays weapons-of-choice; not with today's attitudes toward the martial arts as what in effect is a mix between 'sport' and 'combat' training. Either that, or it's about infatuation with some other culture and its 'traditional' ways; which is all wrong as well and doesn't do anybody any good.

It's a pity that this is so. Still, it is unsurprising, I guess.

† Actually, I noticed that even TSKSR seems not to practice this philosophy throughout the organization. On a demonstration DVD issued by the school, very little of Otake Risuke's explosive technique remains. It's all become rather flattened and ritualistic; which might well have been intentional because of the desire to demonstrate the kata in a decorous, rather than Otake Risuke's highly charged, manner.

Martial Arts Teachers

2010-01-16T17:48:00.014+13:00

One of the issues raised in John Donohue's novels is that of the relationship between a martial arts teacher and his—usually 'his'—student(s). Donohue obviously has been through some soul-searching in the regard, just like his main character, Connor Burke. The relationship is ambivalent, though probably more so now, and more problematic, too; especially in what they call 'this day and age', where so many things are in flux.

The most interesting and potentially controversial relationship is, of course, that between a student who has been with a teacher for some significant time; and where both, teacher and student, are what you might call 'strong personalities', with the student not some fawning, adoring co-dependent, but a definite person of his own, whose attitude toward the teacher alternates, sometimes with a high flipping-frequency that makes it look like both states actually existed simultaneously, between admiration/respect and suspicion/dislike.

There's also the issue of how 'close' students come to their teachers, or teachers to their students. What to teachers expect of their students, and what do students want out of their teachers? What are their separate and/or common agendas for this relationship?†

In the martial arts, maybe more so than anywhere else, teachers are likely to demand a great deal of blanket obedience, at least on the dojo floor. The more serious this gets, and the more the teacher sees himself (herself) as a 'sensei' in the true sense, the more profound and far-reaching the 'obedience' factor is likely to become. There is, in other words, a definite attempt at control of the life of another person, who in turn must agree to be controlled in such a way, even if s/he doesn't really like some of it. But there must be a degree of trust that overcomes the student's reluctance to subject herself to the teacher's whims; and 'whims' is the right word.

A lot of teachers in this area also subscribe to a doctrine, which is also found at military schools and modern-day acting schools. In these systems the theory is that in order to train the student, one must first take him or her apart—psychologically speaking—and then putting them back together again. This is a form of narrative-altering, also known as brain-washing, which I find profoundly objectionable. It offends my sense of the dignity of a person. Only someone who wants to be altered and who chooses to undergo such a shredding-followed-by-reconfiguration—for whatever reasons that are his or her own alone—should be subjected to such treatment.

I'm much more of a mind to build on whatever is already there—even if it appears 'bad'—and to use this to make the student, and allow the student to make him or herself, into a more whole person, with part of their strength of character derived, and taking its energy from, their 'dark side'. Of course, the prerequisite for this to work must be a student who has a desire to 'change' from whatever they happen to see themselves as being at the time. Which also means, at least in my book, that, just as an example, accepting someone into a dojo, who basically just wants to learn how to beat the crap out of people and become a latter-day variation on the Musashi theme (wandering self-important, though very skilled, thug, looking for fights), and who doesn't have that desire to be other than he is...that's actually not a good thing. I would probably find it difficult to justify it that a student of mine, trained by me to indeed beat the crap out of people, actually ends up doing so without a reason that I could justify myself as having and being abkle to accept.

Which makes the idea of opening a dojo very problematic indeed, especially in this culture and the urban environment we're living in. I don't know how I could do it without really constantly watching and controlling what to teach to whom and when; plus reserving myself the right to say to someone "Sorry, but what you seek, you won't find here." Which has its own issues, because how can you tell for whom there's real hope and for whom there isn't, and you'd better send him off to the nearby Ninja joint? Haven't you assumed a responsibility by taking the student on to begin with that bars you from acting in such a way? And what right do you have anyway, to judge a person as being basically one who should not be taught such things—or, conversely, those who are OK to be taught? Isn't sending them off to some kick-the-crap school not possibly more irresponsible than trying to nurture them to more complete human beings?

I've had such thoughts many times, and maybe I'm overthinking things. Or maybe I'm not. But I think the business of equipping people with the ability to seriously maim others, or worse, shouldn't be a 'business'; not the usual kind anyway. By selling this product—this skill, if you will—one automatically assumes a kind of responsibility of how it is used. Of course, you can't 'control' it, because everybody is their own person, and ultimately you shouldn't be held responsible for what your students choose to do with what they've learned from their teacher—though society may end up doing just that! Everything has consequences, most of them unpredictable, and many of them not even thought of.

It's easy to be a student in a martial arts school. I know it doesn't seem that way to most students. Teachers appear to have all the fun. They can boss students around; be a whimsical as they please under the mantle of apparently flimsy excuses like 'keep-you-on-your-toes inscrutability'; stand there and do nothing but look and direct while the rest of the class sweats and strains and hurts; set tests that appear totally unrealistic; and so on. And that is, in some—maybe many, but in any case 'too many'—instances, very probably exactly as it appears. Teachers, especially of the martial arts variety, usually got to where they are by having significant egos and high opinions of themselves; though how these arose are different questions altogether. They may overtly, and possibly even internally, pay humility-homage to masters yet higher up the food-chain than themselves, but they're pretty damn sure, by the time they open a dojo and start signing their name with the prefix 'sensei', that in their nick of the woods, pond or backyard, they're pretty hot shit. Those who work within a framework of an organization, be it a ryu like MJER or TSKSR or some martial arts organization of a much more secular, political and practical streak—and, yes, the boundaries are usually very blurred!—have a further issue with their position within hierarchies. All of this makes for serious distractions from the real job of martial arts practice and teaching; plus everything that should go with it.

In a country like Australia, representative of current Western society and its trends, paradigms, politics and socially-expecteds-and-acceptables, the teacher-student relationship largely defined by the business-end of things—the students purchase a product and the teachers deliver it, or not—as well as the simple fact that, excluding co-dependency relationships and their relatives, the personal engagement between teachers and students has a certain degree of professional uncommittedness. Teachers, by and large, are like...well, preachers maybe. Professional manipulators of the social structure of a flock, as well as, in this instance, the job of teaching them certain skills and, say in the instance of someone like a Head-Master or high-ranking sensei, coming for a teaching visit or a seminar/workshop, ensuring that either the style or whatever the sensei considers he should transmit gets taught as it should.

But it's still basically like the pastor during and after Sunday Mass. I've looked carefully, during the visits of Style Masters or high-ranking sensei—all unquestionably superbly skilled and intelligent; and invariably alpha-male—for more than just the pastor and skill-teacher. Every now and then I saw flashes of it, and I've even seen instances where a Style Master exhibited a sense of 'care' for something else than his style—but it was only 'flashes'. The visitors usually strive to deliver the goods as they understand their 'goods' and how they should and need to be delivered, but it still always had an air of essentially detached professionalism.

This makes sense, of course, and how could it be different? It's the result of an excessively large Student/Teacher ratio and nothing can be done about it. And if you want to run a dojo around here, or just about anywhere, you'll soon find yourself aiming for the highest possible S/T ratio, because that's how you pay the bills, even if you're non-profit. It's like a sports club, but what's OK for a sports club simply isn't for a dojo. That's what I think anyway. And I may be wrong. It's been known to happen. But anything above, say, S/T=5, give or take two, and you're forced to turn on 'pastor' mode more than is good for you. And the more levels there are in the student body, the more difficult it gets. I know there are are crowd management techniques and delegation of teaching to lower grades, but it changes the whole dynamic; and though it's accepted practice and there are apparently cogent reasons for delegating in such a context, I have a gut sense that something's not right about all this.

Gotta think about this more. Much more.

† BTW, having said all that, there are relationships here that contain little of the kind of emotional input I hinted at above. In some instances it's really just about one person teaching another some skills that the teacher simply knows better. There may be a bit of ritualistic behavior involved—especially if the training context is somewhat formal in terms of etiquette, as tends to be the case in a lot of dojos of Japanese derivation, and also from other Asian contexts—but this isn't the level of teacher-student involvement I'm talking about here.

Solitary Sword Sessions (Iaito and Bokken)

2010-01-13T12:52:00.013+13:00

Yeah, alliteration. Couldn't resist.

So, following on from the previous blog, here are some more details on what I ended up as a general scheme for sword sessions, done entirely by myself. This system developed over several weeks of trying this and that, and wanting to get a handle on things again. On a purely practical level and ignoring philosophy and such like, the aim of the practice is to make Sword and Mind As One. Ken Shin Ichi Nyo.

'Sword' means both, shinken and bokken, real and wooden sword. This guiding phrase would be the name of any dojo I'd establish, if ever. I may expand on rationale behind this at some stage, but for now it'll have to do. Let's take it as a given for now. The purpose of sword training therefore would be to become so familiar with it and its use and handling and just its presence, that it would indeed not only become an extension of one's body but also one's mind—all of which has a number of biomechanical and psychological ramifications. More on that later, too.

So, with this in mind, here's what I do. Note also that training takes place outside, usually in the early morning or at dusk, because of the temperatures. This may change in winter, when temperatures are lower, and it can get quite chilly in the morning. I have ample space to roam—we're talking 'acres'—all grass, some of it dense and some not so dense. I keep a suitably large area cropped short enough, so I don't have to concern myself about snakes, which like longer grass, especially in the summer, and also because that way I know where I'm stepping. The terrain is sloped to various degrees; never really flat, which makes for interesting practice. None of this nice polished dojo floor.

Basic training consists of four parts, which usually take between 45-60 minutes, depending on circumstances. The phases—except for the first one, which is the most predictable—may be of different lengths.

Phase 1: Suburi (cutting air).

Done with a iaito, and used as a warmup. Start slowly, 50-100 cuts per cut-type. Include the standard ones, but also add those usually neglected. Aim to get the iaito to make a sound cutting the cut every time, indicating a good hasuji. If it doesn't, repeat the cut, and only when it's done right, continue counting. Cuts speed up through the cycle of cuts, but only to the level where the quality of the cuts remains untarnished. I don't believe in people getting themselves sweaty with crappy cutting. It teaches the brain bad sword habits, which take too much work, and wasted time, to unlearn later. I've seen it happen time and time again.

Basic rule with iaito training: if the cut doesn't have a good continuous sound, evidencing a satisfactory hasuji, you haven't made it and need to repeat it until you get it right. No exceptions.

This is followed by a few rounds of happogiri, plus some ghost-tameshigiri. The latter is something I first introduced into my lessons while still in Dunedin. You pretend you have really a tall cutting target, taller than yourself, and that you have to cut it up into thin slices, according to these patterns, but with more cuts per pattern if this is suitable. The purpose of this exercise is to get the cut at every level to be accompanied by a satisfying sound from your iaito, indicating that your hasuji in correct for all cuts. As you move your arms up and down—and down and up, because the practice includes returning to the starting level—the biomechanical shifts mean that grip and cut that work at one level don't work at another.

Phase 2: Pretend-Fighting.

Using a bokken.

In one area of the ground are a number of holes, in concentric circles with varying radii. I punched these with some stakes. Into these go arrangements of varying numbers of thin bamboo sticks, about a man's height. Some still have thin branches, because it's wild bamboo we cut at a friend's place. The sticks are pretend-enemies and the branches can serve as pretend-arms if required.

Once the sticks are set up, there follows a series of what amount to scenario developments, of, if you will, fight narratives. You stand this way and that with relation to the sitcks and run through the narratives that suggest themselves, trying out as many as possible. This is a bit like what you do when you try to narrate the background to standard kata in the dojo; only this is much, much more complicated and demanding.

Basically this phase is all about fight tactics, practiced withput anybody present. The absence of people superficially might make this appear like it is pointless and artificial, but it isn't. On the contrary: it's a self-training exercise in a skill that's immensely important when you're faced with real unpleasant people, who want to beat the crap out of you. You learn here to create quick narratives that represent situation-assessments, and to grade them in order of probability, practicality, fatality and so on.

I usually develop these narratives by going through each that occurs to me slowly, with an almost Tai-Chi like speed. The ultimate aim is, of course, to then play the same thing faster and faster, until each adversary takes less than a second to process; optimizing your movements as you go on, adding close-contact elements into the mix, making your moves more efficient and learning not to develop tunnel-vision, and so on.

The bokken may be in a scabbard and have to be drawn, or it can just be in your hand. This is an exercise in planning for serious self-defense, at close quarters—even though using the bokken—and also at a distance, pretending that your opponents may have anything from no weapons at all, to knives, to sticks, to swords to handguns to shotguns. Endless possibilities, and each requiring different tactical considerations.

Phase 3: Throw-and-hit Practice.

Using a bokken for this, ususally in a scabbard, though sometimes just holding it in two hands, one hand on the grip and the about halfway down the 'blade'. If the bokken is sheathed, this is a practice designed to take the mechanics of drawing the sword out of the equation and learning how to focus on hitting something with it. If it is not, it can be made into a different kind of timing exrcise of various levels of complexity.

The target are bamboo sticks, usually of the thinner variety—though the ticker ones also have a use, because they behave so differently—about a foot in length. They are thrown into the air in different ways—straight, spinning, higher, lower, closer, further away—and should be hit, preferably in the center, by the bokken as they come down. The starting aim is to hit them as late as possible and to do it in such a way that the bokken is drawn and the cut follows immediately. If you have too much time to set it all up, that defeats the purpose: you're supposed to learn how to draw lightning fast and at the same time have a clear notion of just how fast it is and how that relates to the target as it comes down and where it's going to be and what angle it's at and so on. I ensure that all kinds of cuts are used, single- and two-handed. The aim is also to have the grips on the bokken right and one's cuts precise and effective; that the sword comes out gracefully; that it comes as close to the ideal way of doing this as possible.

There's also the variation where the aim is to shred the bamboo in as few powerful and precisely-placed cuts as possible, again with the best possible technique. All of this is excellent practice at all levels, and variety is ensured. This is never boring and excellent cardio-workout besides.

Phase 4: Warm-down and Drawing Practice.

There are many ways of drawing the sword—and cutting from the draw—that aren't taught at the traditional schools. I always found that irksome, especially once you've advanced a bit in your practice. It's also counterproductive to limit oneself to the limited set taught and considered a part of this 'style' or that. Familiarity with the sword requires that it becomes an instrument used in all possible configurations, including those involving the draw, and associated with a whole plethora of possible body positions and movements.

And speed. Speed is essential, and I try to work myself up to go as fast as I can, without bad habits showing up, like not drawing the sword completely before cutting, which is usually accompanied by a little "snick" sound where there should be silence. Oh, yes, and drawing as quietly as possible overall. Another challenge added to the mix.

As a warm-down therefore I go through an increasing number of possible draws and variations on these themes. It requires inventiveness and focus, but isn't as athletic as Phase 3 tends to be, and so serves as a warm-down very well, without actually one losing focus. I hate wasting my precious training time doing things that appear to have no real use.

I also make sure that the many different ways of chiburi and noto are taken into account. Again, styles tend to focus on only one or two. I tend to string the TSKSR and the MJER chiburi together with MJER noto at the end; or sometimes use just the TSKSR style, followed by their style of noto.

END

That's basically it. No actual kata are involved, because I don't have the time, and I use this practice both, as a development of Ken Shin Ichi Nyo, as well as a work-out. For the moment it does fulfill its purpose, and it's fun besides.

Blog's long enough. More later. Maybe.

Martial Arts Matters

2010-01-12T21:48:00.004+13:00

Coincidence or plan? Blind chance or hidden variables? Or maybe there's some blind chance and some stuff driven by hidden variables; it's just that we cannot tell which is which? That seemed so obvious to me once the notion had implanted itself in my head, that I'm baffled at the complete absence of serious discussion of this possibility just about anywhere!

Do we just notice things that we are prone to noticing, usually because of their significance to us, or is there actually something to notice?

What about Tarot cards? The I Ching? Clairvoyance? Is it all suitably tweaked 'interpretation' and what amounts to utterly unscientific—meaning, for many people, 'not real' or 'dumb-ass superstitious'—waffle and/or psychobabble smoke and mirrors?

Where do you stand with regards to such matters? Or maybe just some of them, but not all...

What's it got to do with Martial Arts? Well, it's certainly got to do lots with martial arts and me.

It so happens that at the beginning of December '09 I finally started up sword-work again. Not in a dojo context, because I came to the realization, finally and for good, that there's no dojo in Brisbane that can teach me what I really want to know. Everybody has their schemes and agendas and, occasionally weirdo, philosophies; and there's the invariable 'Master' somewhere, who often also appears, not to put too fine a point on it, just plain cuckoo. Add to that a bunch of 'local' 'sensei'—mainly self-styled; the 'sensei' mainly in their own heads, and usually signing themselves as 'sensei' anywhere they get a chance to, which is always a bad sign—with vastly overinflated assessments of their own importance, and maybe you can see my problem.

So, I started the 'work' by myself, and more of that further below.

About the 'coincidence' issue though...

Couple of weeks ago, an old friend of mine, who is about my age, definitely isn't into martial arts—though he would benefit from it greatly, especially sword work—but who reads a lot, came across the works of one John Donohue. The latter, apart from being a 'martial artist' also writes novels. I'm just going through the three he's written, and will review them when I'm done.

Apart from being great thrillers, the books also contain a goodly portion of martial arts philosophy—not all of which I agree with, but which nonetheless make one think about things again, even if only in contrary response. But I can see where the guy's coming from; a different place than myself—more on that in another blog, too—but still not a bad place. Too testosterone-charged for my taste, but that's what happens in those kinds of disciplines. Not enough of the female element. You wouldn't believe, would you, that all males start off as females in the womb...

You may not think of this coincidence—me starting up sword practice again and my buddy reading and recommending those books to me—as particularly significant. But it was, because I keep on thinking about what shape and philosophical and practical form to give to any dojo that I might establish myself. These thoughts and reflections are with me a lot, but they were going nowhere fast and somewhere only slowly.

As usual, that was due to me asking the wrong questions. This, by the way, is the case with just about everything for everybody that tries to do something and seems to be getting nowhere; or who seems to be getting somewhere quite fast, but definitely onto the wrong path. But somehow, reading the first of Donohue's novels, Sensei, other questions emerged; and that set me onto a different track with regards dojo issues.

The first question coming to the fore was: What are you actually qualified—in a real sense—to teach?

By 'real sense' I mean what of 'substance', if you will, am I qualified to teach, and what does 'qualified' mean anyway? Just being a 2nd Dan in some, albeit venerable and centuries-old, martial arts tradition—in my case Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu—doesn't necessarily mean that I'm actually 'qualified' for any damn thing. Not in my book.

You may 'have qualifications' in this and that skill, and it may appear that you 'know' a shitload of stuff—but does that mean you're qualified to go and open a dojo and tell people, "come in and learn from me"? Not in my book.

You may have passed a number of exams in certain certificates that attest to your 'qualifications' in the teaching area; but does that make you a teacher? Not in my book.

A 'sensei', translating it literally, is someone who has been born before—before those he is a sensei to. 'Birth' in this instance usually implies some spiritual dimension, being 'born to something'; or a dimension of skill or practice; or, if you will, of what is sometimes known as 'walking the path'. In other words, he or she will have gone somewhere you haven't yet, and therefore may be able to show you the way. Of course, all of us walk different paths, but a lot of the lessons learned by one person apply to others. If the 'path' includes specific elements, such as 'martial arts' ones—even without going the whole hog and declaring martial arts to be something pompous like 'The Path' (of the warrior or whatever); which is something I consider seriously misguided and narrow—then a 'sensei' should definitely be able to guide you along certain sections of it; or not, if s/he thinks that maybe you need to really figure this or that out by yourself. 'Being born before' carries an implication of 'having gone along here before'. Anybody who wants to be a 'sensei' therefore, and anybody starting up a dojo by implication makes him- or herself into a 'sensei', better make sure that he has the qualities and qualifications required to be able to say, "Yes, I have been there before, and I can help people along their path(s)."

That's a tough one, and I'm not certain I can say that with sufficient confidence to go ahead and establish what you might call a 'meaningful dojo'—or even what that implies and what's needed for the existence of such a place. This isn't paralysis-by-indecision, but a matter of responsibility. It occurs to me that, in general, establishing a dojo of any kind, advertising its existence and trying to get as many people as possible to come and visit and train in it—train for what?—isn't quite as trivial a matter as a lot of people appear to see it as. I don't mean 'trivial' in terms of economics, or venue or insurance matters; but trivial in terms of...responsibility maybe. Advertising one's wares, of any ilk, always implies a promise of quality and relevance to those the advertising is directed at. You can't do that with martial arts training, except in terms of maybe self-defense skills or something along those lines.

But I'm not a self-defense guy in the sense that people would understand it. It's a significant part of any martial arts training, of course, but the mechanics are only a tiny fraction of it. But anybody coming to training advertised as containing 'self-defense' would expect training in those above all. There are a gazillion people out there, who are better 'qualified' than I am, who can beat the shits out of each other and any unwary and even a wary attacker, and who'll gladly train up people for that purpose. But my view of self-defense and the general social activity we call 'fighting' is that the most important skill is to know how not to fight to begin with, and that the most important body parts involved are your feet and legs, and next down the line your face and your tongue. Because you need to be able to run away if you can, and if not, being able to defuse a situation with suitable facial expressions and body language and the right words and so on. That's the first and most important thing you need to know. But if that doesn't work—and you really to do your best to make it work, because in the aftermath you'll be judged by your society on how much you genuinely tried!—then you need to turn on your Dr. Hyde nature, which has to lie there, dormant and waiting to be unleashed in case it's needed, and become the most fearsome and ferociously terrifying dude or dudette your opponents have ever faced; and finish them off without mercy or hesitation before they even know you started getting serious.

That, however, is not something you can teach people as readily as a nice jab to the throat or kick to the knee or crack with a bokken on something that'll inflict suitable pain and disability. And these days people want results, which martial arts, the real kind, will only provide with patience, persistence, insight, a desire to learn and understand, and practice and practice and practice.

I'm wondering if there's something inherently wrong with the whole notion of hawking martial arts like some 'product', competing for the disposable income of your potential clients.

"When the Student is ready, the Master will appear," goes the saying. But maybe it's also a case of "When the Master is ready, the student(s) will appear." Who knows?

Gotta think about that some more. Meanwhile, this blog is long enough, and I'll talk about solitary sword practice and how one can do this meaningfully in my next blog.

The World's Largest Needledick

2010-01-07T22:36:00.006+13:00

Seriously, I can't be the only one who immediately thinks 'phallus', right? A $20 billion one at that. The largest erection in the world. I wonder if it's representative—if not in size—of certain anatomical attributes of those ordering its construction.

Seeing AVATAR — * Major Spoilers! *

2010-01-01T13:24:00.021+13:00

This article is about AVATAR, the movie. Don't read on if you haven't seen it and are one of those people who really, really don't want to know anything about it before you do!

But if you're still with me...

Here's the plot summary copied from imdb.com:

When his brother is killed in battle, paraplegic Marine Jake Sully decides to take his place in a mission on the distant world of Pandora. There he learns of greedy corporate figurehead Parker Selfridge's intentions of driving off the native humanoid "Na'vi" in order to mine for the precious material scattered throughout their rich woodland. In exchange for the spinal surgery that will fix his legs, Jake gathers intel for the cooperating military unit spearheaded by gung-ho Colonel Quaritch, while simultaneously attempting to infiltrate the Na'vi people with the use of an "avatar" identity. While Jake begins to bond with the native tribe and quickly falls in love with the beautiful alien Neytiri, the restless Colonel moves forward with his ruthless extermination tactics, forcing the soldier to take a stand—and fight back in an epic battle for the fate of Pandora.

Avatar is the re-telling of familiar stories, such as might be found in e.g. Pocahontas (the 1995 Disney movie and its sequel) or Dances With Wolves. I also detected themes explored in Australia, none of which should come as a surprise.

Having said that, the movie is neither of those; though it demonstrated that certain story subjects are indeed 'timeless'. Add to the mix a goodly dose of Bush/Cheney bashing, some heart-felt Gaia-esque mysticism, and the whole thing becomes 'topical', though it has a time-transcended air about it.

The technology used to create the movie is mind-blowing. I imagine a major mainframe farm chewing up more power than a small city, churning away on the frame-by-frame rendering—double, because of the 3-d requirements—for weeks on end; contributing majorly to greenhouse gas creation. But who cares? The results are stunning, almost seamless; and that includes the 3-d, which, to the immense credit of the creators, becomes virtually invisible early in the story, with the latter absorbing almost all of your attention. Well, at least it did it for me, though I can imagine—actually I know this for sure, judging from the comments of some of the people with me—that a lot of folks, and not just geeks, will be distracted from the tale by the technology involved in presenting it.

"Best special effects ever," is a typical kind of comment—which, of course misses the mark. Nowadays it's getting to the stage where people expect ever-better verisimilitude in the special effects department. Avatar was right up there, setting a definite new standard that others will have to spend a lot of money on trying live up to it.

The movie had enough potential and 'message' material to satisfy just about everybody who wants to push a current politically correct agenda—and piss off those who aren't into 'green', or the apologists, no matter how slickly they put their case, for economics trumping the rights of people to their established of life. It's easy to see endless indictments of US military might, the military and soldiers in general, greed and multinational corporation driven exploitation with political support, and so on blahblahblah. I heard that kind of stuff from some of those I went to see it with. About par for the course and fatuous to boot.

Avatar stands out, however, by transcending the specifics of such current-issue politics-mongering. I'm not sure it was meant to proselytize, or not, or what the director's intentions might have been. I don't know if he was aware of the irony implied in the character of the indigenous people, who may have had a close connection to 'nature' and their planet—said planet being covered by what may well have been a true, sentient, organism, rather than the rather contrived 'Gaia' concept; more like Solaris—but who were no peaceniks themselves; like was the case with a lot of those colonialized, for reasons that ultimately boil down to 'profit', in Earth history—and not just, and this needs to be noted, by 'Western' powers.

'Being close to nature' or whatever need not imply peacefulness and never has—just like 'being civilized' or being possessed of a 'culture' does not have as a logical consequence that the society concerned and its members have reached some more evolved state on the scale of social evolution. Is Cameron aware of this, or was he pushing some hyperborean social message? Who knows, and in this instance who cares? The movie's genius lay in transcending the instances and making what lies behind them visible. Again, whether this was intentional, or fortuitous and due to the director's ability, is a matter of conjecture. People will argue for both sides of the case.

I don't subscribe to the 'Gaia' theory, though Earth's geological, atmospheric and biological systems do have some potent self-regulatory properties. These are, however, completely non-sentient—at least I haven't seen any evidence whatsoever for them being anything but 'phycial'. But I think that it is possible for worlds such as Avatar's 'Pandora' to exist somewhere in the universe. Planetary organisms, even entities such as planetary 'brains', possibly sentient ones, are not impossible by any means. As such I didn't consider Avatar pure fantasy. Indeed, Pandora reminded me a lot of the planet 'Cadwal', from the eponymous Jack Vance Trilogy (starting with Araminta Station), which was even more strongly and radically conservationist than Avatar.

The true 'fantasy' element of Avatar, if you will, lies in the fact that, in the end, the good guys win. Here Cameron's narrative, though otherwise close—including in the sounds and cadences of the natives' language—to a retelling of stories from European-Amerindian colonialist encounters, deviates drastically. The good guys can win. Greed can be defeated. People can succeed in having their way of life as they want it; and they can beat the crap out of technologically advanced invaders. It's what we all would like to be true, though on Earth and throughout human history it has invariably turned out to be false. The right of people to have a right to their home and way of life—something that, on a smaller scale, has been depicted in that classic piece of Australiana, The Castle—should be respected as much as possible. Not because it's in some absolute way 'right' that things should be so, but because in our gut all of us feel that this is the way things should be.

I say 'all', and maybe I'm being too inclusive. Maybe far too inclusive. Because when it comes to the crunch, people tend to be far less tolerant than one might expect if they really followed their gut feelings. Indeed, their sentiments in such cases tend to be oriented toward said freedom from interference applying to them, while 'others'...well, that's different, right? Like, don't we have a duty to liberate the oppressed and socially unenlightened barbarians of the world? Abolish the oppression of women in Afghanistan, and such like...

Yeah, easy this is not, and rife with hypocrisy it is as well.

Still, in Avatar, there is a victory for those fighting vastly superior technology, which is in the service of those ruled by naked greed. And we all (?) cheer and feel good about it, and leave the cinema uplifted, because this gives us hope. And the people go home to their lives, ruled by the ever-encroaching and tightening web of the nanny-state they live in. Don't they see the bitter irony? Don't they see that, were they to fight for their right to live their lives without the nauseating, suffocating interference of 'the State', they would be soundly slammed with the iron fists of the police states that have become the de-facto condition of even the so-called 'liberal' societies of the Western democracies?

I loved Avatar from what politically is best described as a 'Libertarian' point of view.

Libertarians are committed to the belief that individuals, and not states or groups of any other kind, are both ontologically and normatively primary; that individuals have rights against certain kinds of forcible interference on the part of others; that liberty, understood as non-interference, is the only thing that can be legitimately demanded of others as a matter of legal or political right; that robust property rights and the economic liberty that follows from their consistent recognition are of central importance in respecting individual liberty; that social order is not at odds with but develops out of individual liberty; that the only proper use of coercion is defensive or to rectify an error; that governments are bound by essentially the same moral principles as individuals; and that most existing and historical governments have acted improperly insofar as they have utilized coercion for plunder, aggression, redistribution, and other purposes beyond the protection of individual liberty. [link]

Though these principles are unrealizable in any 'real' society—for the same reasons that anything that demands universal consideration of the rights of others is unrealizable: human imperfection—they are worthwhile working towards in approximation. Avatar's world, despite it's imperfections, is oddly close to perfection despite of it—and maybe, paradoxically, because of it; because only in an imperfect world can the concept of 'justice' exist as a contrast to the 'injustice', social and contingent (e.g. good people die, while assholes are allowed to live on), that appears to be a ubiquitous feature of our experience.

Great flick with too many levels of possible meaning to fully encompass it. All of which is the hallmark of a damn good story.

Banned Literature

2009-12-29T19:09:00.003+13:00

Talking about controlling what people read. The wet dream of the likes of Mr. Dawkins. The perfect world created through careful control of what kinds of ideas people have access to.

Here's something you won't find in libraries anymore, not even in German ones; where I first read these, in translation, some years back. I say that, because I checked. This is forbidden literature; something belonging to another age and mindset; something we wouldn't want to allow to pollute the minds of anybody.

If you look at the covers, you'll see the mindset in action. Squeaky-clean, perfectly ironed white colonialist confronting tribesmen from the darkest Africa.

Never mind that the stories are among the most accomplished ever written, in terms of structure and style, as well as just story-telling. But we're not interested in that anymore today.

Mr Revise is alive and well in our libraries. And we have the gall to complain about the censorship in countries like China. It's mind-control, no matter how you package it. And mind-control is never, ever benign, no matter how benign it looks. It always amounts to oppression and a removal of choice from those being controlled.

Book Promotion Scams

2009-12-27T09:31:00.003+13:00

Seriously, would you even consider, for the slightest instant, using the services of someone offering to 'promote' your self-published book, if you got an email that contained, inter alias, the following phrase(s):

BOOKWHIRL.com is an online book marketing company, specializing in providing affordable, effective online book publicity marketing services for authors. To empower authors all around the world by offering highly-effective online book marketing services at easily affordable rates.

I do believe you are the author of the book entitled “Fontaine”. I came across your book and we are very much interested in helping you in promoting your book online and exposed it to vast number of audience wherein it could attract not just your potential book buyers, but as well as your general audience.

I shit you not! And then you can go to the web, where they advertise their services, and you get stylistic gems like:

Even if this is your first time self-publishing, there is no excuse for you to commit mistakes. Committing mistakes with your self-published book can project the perception that your work is made in an unprofessional way and this can significantly hinder your success.

I'm sorry, but who writes this crap? Did they commit the mistake of outsourcing their promotional copy to some non-native-English-speaking country? If so, it is definitely hindering their success. I'm thinking Nigeria...

Or maybe it won't make a damn bit of difference. The success of email scams suggests that there may be enough dimwits out there who will fork out the preposterous fees these people charge.

Yeah, that's got to be it...

Whenever we write, it is natural to miss a punctuation, or make a spelling and other typographical mistakes. But to allow these mistakes to appear on your book, will make your appear very unprofessional. Just imagine readers reading the blurb page and finding mistakes which could have been avoided if you only had somebody review it for you before printing and distribution.

Just imagine that...

Aside from marketing, some self-published authors also tend to make mistakes in distribution. Make sure that your target audience gets to have a chance to buy your book. Some authors overlook online distribution. There are cost-efficient online distribution channels where you can have your book made widely available to a targeted and hungry audience. the internet is becoming a convenient place for people to buy stuff that they want and need, so don’t overlook the online sales and distribution channel for your product.

Nigeria. Right?

And a very happy holiday to you all...

2009-12-26T10:02:00.005+13:00

Appreciate the time you have...if time you have. I know of at least two instances where people are dying or maybe already dead; said event representing for them the ultimate catastrophe, and for their relatives and friends grounds for sadness.

I won't even mention the millions without reasons for any holiday-cheer whatsoever—and while I'm not one to wallow in guilt at my good fortune and masochistic I-suffer-with-them paroxysms, it appears to me that anybody reading this blog is probably not a member of that group. And so I feel perfectly justified to suggest to them that, should they lose their sense of perspective or get drowned in trivia that aren't worth a second thought, or about matters that aren't going 'right' just-so, to get a damn life.

As I sometimes do, I responded to one of those I-don't-really-give-a-shit-but-I-am-obliged-to-ask queries by a shop checkout-op by saying: "Well, I do have a pulse." I got one of those looks of helplessness from the questioner—you know, like, "WTF do I say now?"—who then decided to comment, very cautiously, that this didn't sound very cheery, I pointed out that it is. It just depends on what you consider important—with a pulse being right up there with...well, right up there at the top. I suspect the next customer in line immediately reverted the bewildered op's thoughts back to matters more germane to the season; like the price of cherries at Christmas, or the rains, which are finally starting to set in; meaning our grass is going green and starting to grow like crazy.

As for me, I decided, and it was easy, that the fact that after three years we finally had a full nuclear-family complement present and accounted for at Christmas day, was what mattered. Presents under the tree these days leave me indifferent, except maybe for the fact that those who give them do actually feel pleasure at giving them, surprises or not. So, my own pleasure was indirect, but that's cool, too, I guess.

Let the likes of Richard Dawkins fester and rot at the notion that Christmas is, as he would have put it, 'a lie', and that the whole damn world seems to buy it. It's not a 'lie', but a narrative that people buy into. Fortunately for many, it's also a narrative they can use for profit, to fleece those who buy into it, but instead end up spending, spending, spending—all of which 'powers', as they say, the economy.

This is, of course true, and yet carries implications that aren't; because it implicitly assumes that economies need to be powered by 'consumerism' of the kind that even those currently not able to afford 'consumption' of fatutous and utterly useless goods would happily indulge in, if only they were given the chance. That, of course, simply isn't so (the necessity, that is); but it is the way things are, and that's that. Trivial consumerism, which gave us the social obscenities known as 'shopping malls', is a direct parallel to the kind of perspective loss I started with.

Of course, it's also possible that I'm just running along a course paralleling that of Richard Dawkins's narrow-gauge railway track. Because one person's 'consumerism' is another's pleasure and indulgence; and that, too, is a part of the great multifaceted canvas that is life and human society. Its consequences, on a personal as well as global level, may be potentially disastrous, but we'll just have ot do our best to muddle through. Neither of the non-existent guides offering themselves—fictitious deities and dumb-ass know-it-alls alike—are available for assistance.

Anyway, I'm certain that by now—with Christmas being over—some of you will recall occasions during the last few days where you wish you hadn't lost perspective over a really, truly, dumb-ass irrelevant issue or two—or three. Well, better luck next time, eh?

Accompanied by that cheery thought, have a happy 2010, and, paraphrasing Yoda: "Don't make New Year's resolutions. Just do better than you did this year."

But why wait until next year? Right now is good, too!

Richard Dawkins: Atheist Standard Bearer

2009-12-23T01:11:00.005+13:00

Last night on Australian ABC, Andrew Denton interviewed Richard Dawkins, a man who is as obsessed with the non-existence of God as your average religioid is with the existence of this phantasm.

I never thought much of Dawkins, whose writings, some of which I've wasted time on, strike me as infused with a fervor rivaling that of...ahh, never mind. After last night's interview the impression has been confirmed beyond a doubt. Denton managed to lay bare a deeply troubled man, who, but for a quirk of circumstance—whatever that was—could have been a fundamentalist preacher/demagogue. (Actually he is just that. He's just not, say, a Christian, Muslim or Communist.)

For a few moments, listening to some statements by Dawkins, I found myself nodding, because I heard things that I could not but agree with. The next instant though I realized just how deep the gulf is between the likes of Dawkins and the likes of me. And, as if it required confirmation, then came the killer, when Dawkins revealed himself as a zealot of the kind that thinks that there are 'right' and 'wrong' ways to think; and that indeed—and he said this very carefully, but the message was very clear indeed—certain kinds of stories should be eliminated from the treasury of our imaginations, and indeed that 'imagination' should be in some form directed toward particular content; which, so he clearly thought, would be more appropriate for the development of the human mind.

Though sounding like a man of truth, science, compassion and free-thinking, it occurred to me that, given the right stimuli, he would have been one of those secretly cheering the burning—or at least the discrete elimination from libraries and general distribution—of 'unsuitable' books, all in order to eliminate pernicious influences on the mental development of our young and maybe also the not-so-young. Surely, he's a major real-life instance of creatures like 'Mr. Revise' from Bill Willingham's Jack of Fables comics. (Though, as it turns out, Revise isn't the real evildoer! But that reference is only for readers of Fables. The rest of the world wouldn't even understand what I'm talking about; Mr. Dawkins least of all.)

It is ironic—though maybe not that at all, since this seems to be the way things tend to go in the 'extremism' business—that one of the major standard bearers of a movement that is ostensibly anti-religioid is a man of such conceptual narrowness, who is fawned upon and held up as someone who actually has to say something of significance. A man who conflates having emotions with spiritual depth and understanding. A man who actually is naïve enough to believe that anybody will ever be able to create a scientific theory that explains 'why' the universe is and why it is as it is and not different. (Talk about being a religioid in search of his God!) A man who will be hailed as a leading 'thinker' at atheist conferences, where, like all good religioids, they're really just having group-think orgies promoting dogma and their agenda—and damn whatever may be 'truth'.

Am I being harsh on the man and his faith alike? Maybe, but I make no apologies. The arrogance of extremist atheists like him is just too close to that of every extant monotheism. Still, unlike Dawkins and his ilk, I believe that we are free to choose what we believe. It may be hard to do so, and it probably is for a lot of people. But that's life. Nobody said it was going to be easy. Though Dawkins's books could all have been edited into a single volume, and not a very thick one, they do contribute to the richness of human thought; and though his narratives about 'reality' are deficient, simplistic and, at least in my view, wrong in so many ways—and right in some others; as we must not forget, because that's important, too!—they belong into that vast pool of 'diversity' that is the source of human spiritual evolution.

But there is a difference between 'Being an Atheist' and just not believing in God. The two may overlap in many ways, but at heart they are different. Atheists just need to believe. God-Free-Zone people, like good old Absurdist me, just refuse to 'believe' matters that we may not actually ever be able to know about—and want to figure out as much as they can, within the scope of their intrinsic limitations, about what is, if you will, 'really going on' with life and the universe and every-damn-thing.

And the answer is not going to be '42', because 42 isn't prime. That, at least, is my theory—which I offer to anybody for disproof.

Meaning, it's probably '43'. But that, too, is conjecture.

Facebook Obsession

2009-12-22T03:18:00.000+13:00

Since viewing this article required you to actually sign up for the NYT—something you might be reluctant to do—I quote it verbatim here. It's worth reading.

Facebook, while useful for 'networking' purposes and, say, finding people one may have lost contact with and so on, has a very dark side, which may turn out to be more costly than the benefits it purports to bring. A much simpler way, for example, of keeping up with people you know, and to communicate with them may be to have a shared blog or something along those lines. The technology infrastructure for that exists, and it's really easy to use. It also makes it easy to keep the social network to a sensible size, and to stop things like 'friend' requests that one would rather ignore, but for fear of offending feels one cannot.

Another way out is to use Facebook as an interface to find people you may have lost contact with, and then switch over your comms to another medium, like emails or blogs, with the latter probably being the nicer and more visual interface.

To Deal With Obsession, Some Defriend Facebook

By KATIE HAFNER

Published: December 20, 2009

Facebook, the popular networking site, has 350 million members worldwide who, collectively, spend 10 billion minutes there every day, checking in with friends, writing on people’s electronic walls, clicking through photos and generally keeping pace with the drift of their social world.

Make that 9.9 billion and change. Recently, Halley Lamberson, 17, and Monica Reed, 16, juniors at San Francisco University High School, made a pact to help each other resist the lure of the login. Their status might as well now read, “I can’t be bothered.”

“We decided we spent way too much time obsessing over Facebook and it would be better if we took a break from it,” Halley said.

By mutual agreement, the two friends now allow themselves to log on to Facebook on the first Saturday of every month — and only on that day.

The two are among the many teenagers, especially girls, who are recognizing the huge distraction Facebook presents — the hours it consumes every day, to say nothing of the toll it takes during finals and college applications, according to parents, teachers and the students themselves.

Some teenagers, like Monica and Halley, form a support group to enforce their Facebook hiatus. Others deactivate their accounts. Still others ask someone they trust to change their password and keep control of it until they feel ready to have it back.

Facebook will not reveal how many users have deactivated service, but Kimberly Young, a psychologist who is the director of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery in Bradford, Pa., said she had spoken with dozens of teenagers trying to break the Facebook habit.

“It’s like any other addiction,” Dr. Young said. “It’s hard to wean yourself.”

Dr. Young said she admired teenagers who came up with their own strategies for taking Facebook breaks in the absence of computer-addiction programs aimed at them.

“A lot of them are finding their own balance,” she said. “It’s like an eating disorder. You can’t eliminate food. You just have to make better choices about what you eat.” She added, “And what you do online.”

Michael Diamonti, head of school at San Francisco University High School, which Monica and Halley attend, said administrators were pondering what the school’s role should be, since students used Facebook mostly at home, although excessive use could affect their grades.

“It’s such uncharted territory,” Dr. Diamonti said. “I’m definitely in support of these kids recognizing that they need to exercise some control over their use of Facebook, that not only is it tremendously time consuming but perhaps not all that fulfilling.”

In October, Facebook reached 54.7 percent of people in the United States ages 12 to 17, up from 28.3 percent in October last year, according to the Nielsen Company, the market research firm.

Many high school seniors, now in the thick of the college application process, are acutely aware of those hours spent clicking one link after another on the site.

Gaby Lee, 17, a senior at Head-Royce School in Oakland, Calif., had two weeks to complete her early decision application to Pomona College. Desperate, she deactivated her Facebook account.

The account still existed, but it looked to others as if it did not.

“No one could go on and write on my wall or look at my profile,” she said.

The habit did not die easily. Gaby said she would sit down at the computer and find that “my fingers would automatically go to Facebook.”

In her coming book, “Alone Together” (Basic Books, 2010), Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discusses teenagers who take breaks from Facebook.

For one 18-year-old boy completing a college application, Professor Turkle said, “Facebook wasn’t merely a distraction, but it was really confusing him about who he was,” and he opted to spend his senior year off the service. He was burned out, she said, trying to live up to his own descriptions of himself.

But Facebook does not make it easy to leave for long. Deactivating an account requires checking off one of six reasons — “I spend too much time using Facebook,” is one. “This is temporary. I’ll be back,” is another. And it is easy to reactivate an account by entering the old login and password.

For Walter Mischel, a professor of psychology at Columbia University, who studies self-control and willpower, “what’s fascinating about this is that it involves spontaneous strategies of self-control, of trying to exert willpower after getting sucked into a huge temptation.”

Professor Mischel performed a now-famous set of experiments at Stanford University in the late 1960s in which he tested young children’s ability to delay gratification when presented with what he called “hot” temptations, like marshmallows.

Some managed to stop themselves; others could not.

“Facebook is the marshmallow for these teenagers,” Professor Mischel said.

Rachel Simmons, an educator and the author of “The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence” (Penguin Press, 2009), said Facebook’s new live feed format had made the site particularly difficult to tear oneself away from.

“You’re getting a feed of everything everyone is doing and saying,” Ms. Simmons said. “You’re literally watching the social landscape on the screen, and if you’re obsessed with your position in that landscape, it’s very hard to look away.”

It is that addictive quality that makes having a partner who knows you well especially helpful. Monica said that when she was recently in bed sick for several days, she broke down and went on Facebook. And, of course, she felt guilty.

“At first I lied,” Monica said. “But we’re such good friends she could read my facial expression, so I ’fessed up.”

As punishment, the one who breaks the pact has to write something embarrassing on a near-stranger’s Facebook wall.

After several failed efforts at self-regulation, Neeka Salmasi, 15, a sophomore at Greenhills School in Ann Arbor, Mich., finally asked her sister, Negin, 25, to change her Facebook password every Sunday night and give it back to her the following Friday night.

Neeka quickly saw an improvement in her grades.

Still better, she said, is that her mother no longer visits her room “every half an hour to see if I was on Facebook or doing homework.”

“It was really annoying,” she said.

...

In his follow-up work, Professor Mischel said he found that some of the children who delayed gratification with the marshmallows turned out to be higher achievers as adults.

Halley said she and Monica expect their hiatus to continue at least through the rest of the school year. She added that they were enjoying a social life lived largely offline.

“Actually, I don’t think either one of us wants it to end,” she said.

'Knowing'

2009-12-19T23:57:00.002+13:00

Sometimes I feel that I'm saying things here—into the void of cyberspace, and is it a case of "in cyberspace, no one can hear you scream" and/or "do you really make a cyberspace sound if nobody hears it?"—that are so dazzlingly obvious that they should require no elaboration. Yet I elaborate. Why is this so?

Here's a case in point.

Question: What does it mean to 'know somebody'?

Like when you say "I feel I know you!" or maybe "Sometimes I think I don't know you at all!"—whatever the case may be.

What say with this is effectively: "I know what's going on one your head." And even more importantly: "I know what you're going to do in a given situation."

If we're wanting something more profound, we may think of 'knowing' someone's 'soul', whatever that's supposed to be. But basically it boils down to something that's ultimately concerned with explanation and prediction.

Explanation of why some person acted in a particular way in a particular context.
Prediction of how some person is going to act in a particular context in the future.

That's really all there's to it. Our 'knowing' of another is confirmed either by the consistency of our post hoc explanations or the success of our predictions. It is called into question by the lack of said consistency or predictive success.

But is that really all there is to 'knowing'? And, even if it is, is there something 'behind' all this, that is the actual thing to be known? And what, if anything, is that 'thing'; that element of what there is to be 'known' about a person?

To any self-respecting Aburdist or non-religious Existentialist, 'the Soul' obviously won't cut it as a suitable answer. Besides, we then have to ask further: "What about the soul is it that we claim to 'know'?" It's likely way to respond to this or that situation? That's basically, as any half-decent philosopher should know, a naïve form of materialism, where the soul is some object of substance, no matter how esoteric, which takes the part of the body in defining the 'real you', or something along those lines.

A much more useful question to ask about 'knowing' is: "What characteristic of our beings, what property, events, cause-effect relationships, and so on, can actually be held to be broadly causative of our actions and therefore need to be properly understood, or their detailed nature or contents identified and characterized, in order to serve as suitable explanatory frameworks for explanation and prediction—and thus qualify as the things that we need to be able to claim to 'know' if we want to make any sensible statement about 'knowing' a human being?"

Yeah, that was a long and convoluted sentence—offending my own sense of 'Plain English, please!' So, I apologize, but I'm not going to rewrite it.

The answer—and you could have predicted it, coming from me—is, of course, that it's the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and the people around us and the world and the universe. Know the stories and know the person. It's a simple and complex as that.

What changes as we go through life—in some people more than in others, driven by their dispositions and life experiences—are our stories. And when someone says to someone else "I just don't know you anymore!" that's all they're saying: "Even if I once knew your stories, I know don't anymore; at least not the ones that matter to our relationship."

Think about that next time you look at another person. Think about what it means for your relationship, and for what you have to do—and the other person has to do—to make it better.

A quick note about fiction writers—whose business it is, of course, to tell stories that usually aren't true, except maybe in a metaphorical, symbolic or allegorical sense. Any fiction writer, however, will, by implication or intent, incorporate portions of the stories they are telling themselves about themselves and the world into their fiction. Even those who think they don't, do. They're just too naïve to realize it.

Because of this, if you have a good friend who is a writer of fiction, it will almost certainly help your 'knowing' of him or her, to read what they write. If you don't do this, then those who actually do read what they write, even though they may just be a part of the 'general reading public' may well know your friend better than you do. They may know more about his aspirations and dreams, about his views of life and the universe, about what matters and what doesn't.

It's possible, of course, that the kind of fiction your friend writes isn't your cup of tea. Like maybe, you're a detective fiction fan and your buddy writes sci-fi. Or maybe you like 'literary' fiction, but your friend writes what you consider trashy romances instead. Or invert those things, if you will.

Your friend not worth that much to you, that you'd step out of your "this-is-what-I-like" circle and into his to see what really going on in his or her head? Interesting. Why is it so? Is it because you actually don't really want to know about your friend, but would rather cling to the image you've built up over years, maybe decades, and it would be disturbing for you to have all that shattered by a dose of what's really going on in his head?

And take this one step further, because that's the next logical place to go. Because, say, your friend doesn't actually write fiction; but almost everybody reads it; or watches movies or TV series. I know, one will argue that of course the choice of reading and watching material consumed by a person in their 'option' time will leave clues as to what they think and like and are interested in and aspire to and dream about. But nothing, nothing at all, will reveal this as directly and pointedly as the fiction they consume 'for fun'. Meaning that which isn't work related or in any way obligatory. We're talking about the books they read themselves to sleep with, or inside of which they'll spend endless hours in preference to doing other things, some or all of which may appear like they must surely be hugely more important that reading this book or watching that movie—and possibly not just for the first time, but again and again and again.

The fiction consumed in people's 'optional' time will tell you just about anything worthwhile about a person; not only what they are like now, but about what made them into the people they are—because where they were at one time on the way to where they are now is just as important to understand someone as a current-state-of-affairs analysis. Every psychoanalyst will tell you that, but how many of them will actually try to find out what kind of fiction their patients/clients like, and liked, to consume? And it's all such a total giveaway!

So, if you want to 'know' your friend, your mate or whoever you choose to have a close relationship with, in this dullwitted urban 'civilized' world of ours, where true life-trials as character-revealers and 'I-know-you' testers are rare indeed, have a look at the fiction s/he consumes. And, of course, if s/he's a writer, or, more generally, a story-teller, look at the stroies s/he tells. If you don't do this, you may indeed not be in a position to 'know' your friend.

And, yes, this is personal. Very, very few of my oldest—sometime very 'old'—and closest friends, people I've known for decades, haven't read a single line of what I've written; and certainly not a single one of my novels. I do understand partially why this is so: because sci-fi—and especially the rattling-yarn, adventure, romance, sex and violence kind I tend to write—is basically below the level of what they consider 'literature'; and often is, indeed, unless it makes obvious pretenses to social or philosophical commentary, considered somehow irrelevant to their lives.

I have good reasons to 'know' them to this degree, because I know what they read, have read some of it; and I know the movies they watch, and those they watch again. I'm a 'library spy', and a bookshelf tells me more than you know; especially the fiction. So, yes, I can claim to know their stories to some significant degree. Yet it strikes me as somewhat ironic that they know far less of mine than any stranger who has actually bothered to, for example, read the entire Tethys series.

This is not something one holds 'against' one's friends, of course. Friendship, if the evidence is anything to go by, obviously can transcend such apparent trivia as 'knowing' one another. At least as far as certain individual-stories are concerned. There are more important things; other stories, sufficiently shared to create a social bond, which can be very strong.

So, no judgment is implied, and I want to make this clear. But there is irony nonetheless...

Remaining new Tethys series covers

2009-12-18T10:54:00.000+13:00

All the Tethys novels are now available with the new covers from lulu.com. Because of distribution logistics, this means that Finister and Tergan now exist as second editions, which are available in parallel with the original first editions.

The Terrible Asymmetry of Death

2009-12-14T11:27:00.002+13:00

There's a big farmer's market every Sunday in a town not too far away, starting at the ungodly hour of 5:30 a.m. or thereabouts, though in winter people tend to arrive later than that. But in summer at that time in Queensland it's bright daylight, and by 7 a.m. you can get seriously fired by the rising sun. One gets to know people at the market, some of them anyway. There are stalls you return to for your fruit, vegies and things you intend to plant in the garden, like herbs, flowers, trees, fruit-trees, aquatic growths like water lilys, and so on. If you're that way disposed, you talk to people at those stands, especially those who run these stands basically by themselves. And you get to know them, in a way, and as far as they're prepared to let you know of them; what with you being a stranger, someone who just drops by their stall a for a few minutes on an early Sunday morning.

There's a guy I buy lettuce from, plus occasionally, when he has them, free-range eggs. In his 60s somewhere, I'd say, judging from appearances—which can be deceptive, of course—and the fact that his oldest offspring is in his 30s. The guy reminds of your archetypal Santa Claus, and would fit into that role in a mall, with kiddies on his knee and "ho ho" and everything and sundry.

And then, yesterday he told me that he'd just had a car accident, the car was scrap, his lettuces are scrawny because of the heat and dry weather, he had more back problems than you could shake a stick at, with some of them dating back to his youth, and basically, as he told me, he would not be indisposed toward putting a gun to his head to end his dull, boring and basically pointless existence—if it weren't for the fact that he didn't want to inflict this on his wife and three children. Otherwise, what was the point of continuing this anyway? Nothing's there before you are born and nothing's there after you die. So what?

It's been a while since I heard the extinctionist† case put forward so pithily. And I actually believe that he meant it.

People die everyday: this is a fact. We're all going to die someday: this is another fact. Even if we manage to postpone that day for a long, long time—as some of us intend to!—it'll come. 'Living forever' merely means that today and every day after today isn't that day. Living forever therefore means living in eternal vigilance, such as there has never existed before, to make sure that this situation will prevail.

Of course the non-religiously-inclined ones might argue, as did my buddy at the market, that we should stop making such a big deal of death, since it's pretty much the same 'state', if you will, that someone found themselves in before they were conceived. A 'state' that isn't a 'state' at all, but the non-existence of any kind of 'state'. The religious folk will, of course, dispute this version, but that's unsurprising.

While I think the religiously-inclined are speaking from a point of view of very little evidence, so, of course, do the extinctionists, who are in a position not unlike that of those on either side of the current Global Warming debate; seeing and hearing only what they want or expect to see or hear.

Thing is, of course, that, even if one accepts extinctionism as one's basic death-paradigm, that it still means that the extinction at the end (death) is something completely different to the non-existence before the beginning (birth). This is so because of the asymmetry of time and its arrow. Before the birth—or conception, or somewhere in between; draw the line wherever it pleases you—of an individual there was no individual, and no universe that contained said individual. There were possible universes, each of them different from the other, but none of them existed as such.

After the point of 'birth', wherever it is placed, there definitely existed one universe, which by itself gave potential rise to a gazillion possible branches, in which the individual in question did exist. In that universe—whether there also can be said to have existed others is entirely a matter of speculation—said individual had the thoughts and feelings it had, and performed the actions it did, each time, by virtue of its existence; shaping the universe in some, albeit small way; thus determining, again even if only in a tiny way, which branch of the possible universal history was being taken. You should really treat yourself to Continuity Slip. Download is free—for the time being anyway.

By this simple existential expedient, post-death extinction is not the same as pre-birth nonexistence. It doesn't matter—again assuming that the extinctionist view is correct—that the individual, extinct as it is after death, will never 'know' that it is dead or what 'death' actually is 'like'. The question may indeed be in principio meaningless.

And there is another difference, a very important one. Because pre-death-extinction the individual is capable of thought and action, and of reflecting on, for example, the nature of post-death extinction. It was, however, never able to reflect on this, or life, before it was born. The individual may also, indeed it probably will, find that it does not want to be made extinct; and there will be a profound cognitive, judgmental and, insofar as these feelings are involved, emotional asymmetry in the individual's attitude toward its non-existence prior to birth and after death.

Therefore the atheist same-after-as-before argument is existentially null and void, in a very 'cosmic' way, if you will. And that, by the way, is also what makes contraception and killing two very different things, while abortion and killing are not; thus making a nonsense of the conflation of the two (contraception and abortion, that is). If I had a dollar for every time a conflation of un-conflatable concepts is performed in arguments about just about anything that qualifies as moderately important, I'd be rich. That and category mistakes, of course.

† This is not, just in case you feel inclined to 'google' or 'wikipedia' the term, the kind of extinctionism you might find in the venerable game of NetHack. Rather it refers to a philosophical position towards death, which states that with the cessation of neurological function everything having to do with awareness, cognition and 'mind' ceases to exist completely. There is nothing left. Not a trace. Might as well never have been born, as fas as the dead person is concerned. Actually, 'dead person' is an oxymoron. A person is only a 'person' when they're alive. When they are dead, there's just a corpse.

What Then Shall We Die For? The freedom of the seas.

2009-12-11T09:45:00.001+13:00

Pirates again! After a time...

The latest potential victim of Global Warming and the general psychological malaise afflicting the people of this planet apparently may be the freedom of the seas.

UN may curtail 400-year-old 'freedom of the seas'

Not that I much hankered for living a life on the oceans—though being on a ship does strange things to me and invokes odd yearnings—but having someone officially take it away, no matter how cogent the reasons (though when it comes to the UN, 'cogency' probably is an oxymoron when applied to anything they do), is a serious blow to a dream. All the more urgent that we work harder to find a way to sail the space-seas beyond our world. Mankind needs open frontiers, or it will destroy itself.

Creepy, creepy

2009-12-10T15:57:00.005+13:00

Things people do...

Way I see it, we should do all we can to put this whole damn industry and anything related it out of business. Is that really too much to ask? Just think of what all the money we waste on trivia and irrelevancies could do. We could even find a way to retrain the death-profiteers for something better and more productive maybe? Stranger things have happened.

Personal Urns

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Now we can create a custom urn in the image of your loved one or favorite celebrity or hero.

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They are built from just one or two photographs of the cherished persons face. This is the most heartwarming and special memorial product available anywhere - "A Personal Urn"

Available in Two Sizes

The Full sized Personal Urn will hold all of the ashes of an adult

Keepsake sized Personal Urn is about 1/4 of the full sized and will hold a portion of the cremation ashes.

Personal Urns are the latest in custom personalized cremation urns. They are created from one or two photographs with exceptional attention to detail. The advent of state-of-the-art 3D imaging means that these high-tech urns can be made to look like anyone.

Personal urns come with a bare scalp ready for a suitable wig, which we can provide. A plaque and nameplate are also available.

Personal Urns will provide a very realistic memorial for anyone. We simply request from you a good photograph of the front of the persons face. If you have one or two from the side, then all the better.

We will send you a proof of the Personal Urn for your comments and approval before we go ahead and manufacture. Custom made in the USA, within 2 weeks.

Well, at least they're made in the USA, not China. Though I wouldn't shout it from the rooftops if I were an American!

The Ahmadinejad comedy hour: and you thought OUR politicians were dimwits

2009-12-09T10:45:00.004+13:00

How's this for a change. I'm not sure what would be more unsettling: that this guy believes what he says, or that, much more likely, he believes that enough of people he rules over are sufficiently stupid to believe it...

Quoting from the article:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claims the United States is attempting to thwart the return of mankind's savior, according to reports from Al Arabiya, a television news station based in Dubai.

Ahmadinejad reportedly claims he has documented evidence that the U.S. is blocking the return of Mahdi, the Imam believed by Muslims to be the savior.

“We have documented proof that they believe that a descendant of the prophet of Islam will raise in these parts and he will dry the roots of all injustice in the world,” Ahmadinejad said during a speech on Monday, according to Al Arabiya.

"They have devised all these plans to prevent the coming of the Hidden Imam because they know that the Iranian nation is the one that will prepare the grounds for his coming and will be the supporters of his rule," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying.

This was brought to you by the Ahmadinejad comedy channel. But I think he may have maxed out with this. It really will be hard to beat.

FINISTER New Cover

2009-12-07T14:17:00.002+13:00

Next one coming along. Just as well I have the layered Photoshop original images. Makes it easier to use the bits and pieces that are required for this format.

Cover Designs...again!

2009-12-03T14:42:00.006+13:00

Still tweaking these. Still not happy with them.

Here's the latest for KEAEN: whole wrap cover and what is the effective front page. The wraparound theme, which you can also see on the owlglass.com home page, is an update on what was there before. I think I prefer wraparound. It means, of course, that the front-cover images have to be re-thought, and this is how I have re-thought them.

Below is the version of Keaen appearing soon on lulu. A new interior, somewhat tweaked, has also been uploaded, since the printed versions with the old headers can have problems, due mainly due to the quality of the POD printers, with whose services and quality I continue to be unimpressed. I had expected better from Australia.

Teen Angst

2009-11-29T16:39:00.008+13:00

'Teen Angst' (or 'Teenage Angst') is a term-couplet bandied about by many people from all walks of life, from the obviously naive to those who think they aren't. It's also very poorly understood and used too-often in a condescending manner; usually by those not 'teens' anymore.

So, basically, teenagers don't really 'get' it because they're living through it; and non-teenagers don't get it because they're not teenagers any more. Psychologists don't get it, because they're asking the wrong questions, and philosophers don't care, because they don't care about anything that smacks of being less than something 'mature'. Parents don't get it because parents, by and large, are hopeless at parenting, and especially those aspects that require putting themselves into their offspring's emotions. Media people don't get it, because they also don't really care about anything but the notions of dimwitted adults about what it's like to be a pre-adult. Educationalists don't get it, because they are obsessed either with controlling or 'managing' the phenomenon—it being very inconvenient to them, as might be expected.

And yet Teen Angst is not only essentially simple, but indeed an element of 'growing up' that the likes of me would consider essential for creating a rounded, aware and emotionally developed human being.

It is nothing but the juvy version of the same angst faced by every more 'mature' Absurdist or Existentialist—an angst that has its roots, as you may have guessed, in our awareness of our mortality, and which is especially pronounced in those who, for whatever reason, are unable to live in permanent denial-mode about the dreadfulness of our ultimate extinction. Teens—Young Adults!—usually do not yet have the sheer body of life and experience 'context' required to deal with it in the manner 'adults' would. And since they haven't learned yet to displace and prevaricate about it, it all comes out in those symptoms that we know so well, and some of which may be very dire indeed.

And, yes, it is as simple as that. Add to that a brain developing toward some form of neural maturity, plus a hormonal system in a state of acute turmoil, and...well, that's what you get. Nothing mysterious about it at all. And certainly nothing that requires the condescending, paternalistic attitude displayed toward it by adults; many of whom will deny their own former experience of the phenomenon, because they feel it's almost embarrassing that they were ever subjected to such silly emotional upheavals. And it also is nothing to fear by those undergoing it, and I wish the apparatchiks running our educational systems realized that the best way to deal with it is not to deny or try to 'manage' it, but to help those in their care to welcome it with open arms and accept the dread it brings to their lives.

It is through facing dread that we grow. Pretending it doesn't exist isn't only cowardly, but, above all, simply stupid.

Global Warming and Scientific Corruption

2009-11-27T08:27:00.006+13:00

I would hope that by now even the most withdrawn from reality will have heard of an instance (or instances, or a culture of) of what can only be called 'corruption' at the highest levels of the GLOBAL WARMING debate.

I really don't give a sparrow's flatulent greenhouse emissions about the reasons for such deliberate dishonesty. Said reasons may range from genuine Save-The-Planet zealotry to genuine self-serving research-fund grabbing. It is possible that those who would withhold scientific information supporting the 'warming doubter' position—or who would at least cast into doubt the influence of the human element, such as those expressed by David Bellamy—do so in a spirit that, in their own minds at least, makes them into great human beings, who are in some way actively saving the world. Like haven't we heard that before...

The point is that it still amounts to corruption. And every instance of such a thing, no matter how justified, will serve to enhance the credibility of other attempts to withhold data, falsify them or simply make them up. All it will require are reasons qualifying as 'beneficent'.

Of course, someone can challenge my argument by, for example, suggesting scenarios where the corruption becomes so grey-in-grey that one gets stuck in an argumentative mire. Like, how should one view this scenario, which may be more familiar to readers of sci-fi:

There's this scientist—or person with a scientific background, though he may or may not be employed as a 'scientist' per se—who discovers or invents something that might change the world. Some of my favorites are:

A way to generate unlimited electrical energy (even if it doesn't involve potentially world-destroying sources, such as balack holes etc).
A method to take mankind to the stars at minimal effort and cost (my favorite here is the 'phase ship' approach explored by Gordon R Dickson in Mission to Universe, because that's got such obvious flip-side implications).
A way to create something like real 'force fields' that can act as physical protection.
'Real' honest-to-goodness 'teleportation' (see Stephen Gould's Jumper).

You get the idea, I'm sure. All of these things have potentially huge benefits and also serious word-destruction potential. So, what is the ethical situation here if someone, for example, finds a way to create unlimited electrical energy without pollution, but he or she also realizes that it doesn't take a lot to use the same technology to create weapons that are seriously world-destroying? Or, maybe even if there aren't dangerous consequences to the world, revealing such a discovery could definitely pose serious threats to the welfare of the person involved, or his family or friends. Yoy can surely work that one out, too.

So, what does he do? Conceal it and let the world continue to pollute itself? Reveal it and try to do it in such a way as to retain some control? Just publish it on the internet and let the world run with it?

Remember the law of unintended consequences: there are always many more of those than intended ones and most of them fall in to the Rumsfeld category of "things we don't know we don't know".

Should he choose to conceal his discovery/invention, would that make him 'scientifially corrupt'?

Well, no. It would make him corrupt if he published information in a scientific context—peer-reviewed journals, for example—in which he deliberately falsified or withheld information relating directly to his discovery/invention, thus leading to a conclusion by the 'scientific community' that whatever he discovered/invented could not be discovered/invented. By such communication of misleading information—even if it is in the way of withholding it; i.e. lying by omission—he could commit an act of scientific corruption, because 'corruption' is a social concept, whereby someone agrees to abide by certain social standards, but in truth acts contrary to them, for whatever reasons. One who has not made such an agreement, either explicitly or implicitly, cannot acts corruptly, because the term just doesn't apply. If Joe Blogg, in his workshop, invents a machine that can provide the world with unlimited power, but chooses to conceal it, because he judges the unintended consequences to be so dire that they outweigh any potential benefits, then Joe Blogg makes a personal decision—but it isn't one to which one can apply a standard that one pin the label 'corruption' on.

But scientists living and working within the framework of 'the scientific community' deliberately withholding information about something that may influence the lives of billions...that's something else completely. It is akin to the citizen of a country placing his religion above the social contract he was with his fellow citizen. It's the real reason why a soldier went out on an army base in Texas, shouted "God is Great" and killed people who implicitly trusted him not to do such a thing. He is the ethical equivalent of these scientists; as they are of him.

The damage these morons inflicted on the case for GLOBAL WARMING—and continue to do, because some are are actually defending their perfidy!—is incalculable. This is quite independent of whatever the merits of that case happens to be, which isn't something I'm discussing here. In other words, they, too, have just become the victims of the Law of Unintended Consequences of their own stupidity and zealotry. Whatever that means for the planet and the issues under dispute remains to be seen.

Massacre at Mary Smokes Creek — Carl Hiaasen, we love you!

2009-11-22T22:45:00.025+13:00

I've previously commented on the ugly, poisonous brutes called 'Cane Toads'. If you haven't read the blog, it would be a good idea to do so, because sometimes life does play rather off-color jokes. You can take the following as a metaphor for a lot of things, but I'll leave it up to you. No particular meanings are implied. But you might be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

I have developed the most humane killing method I can think of, which transports the creatures from the land of the living to that of the dead with alacrity. I must confess that the idea was brought to me by that famous fairy tale The Frog Prince, wherein the spoilt princess tries to dispose of the pesky frog by throwing it against a wall—not by kissing it, as the sanitized versions would have it!

Well, I am no princess, and I don't throw the beasties against walls, but usually, with significant force, on hard ground or against a concrete water tank. They have yet to turn into anything but splayed out toad-Jesuses, with limbs spread out from the final neural shock of the fatal impact—and maybe the similarity with the crucified one lacks in conviction because the rear legs are spread out just as much as the front ones. You gotta do it hard though, because these blighters are tough. A princess, especially a spoilt one, would probably not even make a dent.

Anyway, so I thought I had my relationship with Cane Toads all worked out (I see 'em; I kill 'em)—until today, when I walked down to our 'dam'—which is what they call the water-collection ponds that dot the countryside around here. Ours is more than 150 sqm, and I was going down there to plant some Irises. The level of the water, after months of very little rain is rather low, with the vegetation verge well away from the water's edge.

What I found at the pond induced a moment of what was almost panic.

This is a tiny section of the pond's rim, and the objects you see are thumbnail-size Cane Toadlets. I estimated there to be something like 2000, give or take 1000. They saw me come and leapt into the water in a tiny-toad kind of Mexican Wave, swam out for maybe 0.5 metres, then returned to the shore. Our newly-introduced Water Lilys were covered with them, to the extent that the leaves were submerged like overloaded refugee boats.

I looked at this and my brain had something like a metaphor-explosion going on inside it.

W—T—F ???

I tried to calm down and work out how to deal with this. Scenarios ranged from beating the shits out of them with a spade (yeah, like that would make a dent!) to pouring petrol over them (too expensive and poisonous) and finally, as my wife suggested, scooping them up with a fishnet or something (very difficult, since the things were mostly on land).

More metaphor moments. Was there really a deeper message in this for me? For all of us? Were these tiny f---ers a sign from a morbid deity of some sort? How can you kill a few thousand of these things and not pollute the pond; or spend the rest of your days chasing them down?

Victory by numbers. Victory by exhaustion. The devils! The devils!

We are so screwed!

Salvation did come though, because I knew there had to be a way. Damn it, I'm a human being and I have a brain larger than the mass of all these little f---ers put together! Am I going to be licked by a few thousand little toads?

Not me, chickadee. A solution came; one so ingenious, original and, let's face it, completely and utterly sick-in-the-head, that Carl Hiaasen would have been truly proud of me. (Hell, I am proud of me!) The key words here are 'Chemo' and 'weed-whacker'—the latter known in Australia as a 'whipper-snipper'.

Hiaasen fans will instantly make the connection, and they would have watched in awe as I, representing humankind, accomplished the impossible. My 2-stroke Ryobi weed-whacker was a dealer of death, such as Cane Toad-kind has never seen before. Within less than 15 minutes the phalanx of (living) tiny toads had been reduced to a few hundred max—and those will experience the wrath of the weed-whacker-wielding-human tomorrow morning. In the heat of the day (35+ºC) the whirling blades delivered judgment day.

I even caught, quite by accident, one of their progenitors, who leapt forth from a clump of grass and was caught in the whirling nylon-of-death, with limbs and bits and pieces flying here and there and everywhere, mingling with the corpses of its offspring, which were floating in the water—in the characteristic kind-of-toad-Jesus pose, of course.

A swimming insect—a larva of some kind, I guess—swam past and dragged one of the tiny corpses into the depths of the murky water. I guess somebody will be having a feast right now.

So, peoples, here's a great way to start solving the Cane Toad problem. About this time of year, everybody in the vicinity of a dam or pond take your 2-stroke weed-whacker and deliver some serious Armageddon to Cane Toad-dom. Within 15 minutes I removed about 2000 of them from circulation. Think of the potential here! It's so much easier to get them this way than having to do the spoilt-princess thing with them—which I'll be doing, I guess, on a regular basis for as long as I live around here.

The sale of 2-stroke—as opposed to electrical—weed-whackers should skyrocket, too. But that's just a fringe benefit.

On a cheerier note, here's a pic of one of our resident Green Treefrogs.

In the Moment, but nor for it. For the Future, but not in it.

2009-11-21T14:59:00.005+13:00

People seem to have issues with the 'living in the moment' thing. It appears that there's some mystery associated with the notion. I never could figure out why, but never had the words to explain it. Invariably, it ended up long-winded and convoluted, worthy of some academic philsopher's attempt to explain in plain English a simple concept that he doesn't actually understand himself, but has to pretend to understand. There, I got my dig at philosophers in yet again. Whoopee!

Anyway, one day, when I was struggling with significant problem—which usually mean that one's attention is focused on them and directed away from the moment, in terms of attention and appreciation alike—the simple solution almost fell into my lap. It did not require grand philosophy, but merely a few words; like a simple formula might provide an explication of what might initially have appeared a puzzling physical phenomenon.

The title of this blog is actually too long-winded It could be said even more pithily:

In the moment. For the future.

This is snappy enough to be remembered, even by the densest. I think.

Existentialism, Immortalism, Teen Angst and Twilight

2009-11-20T04:30:00.003+13:00

Two guys from Channel Nine's Today show, co-anchor and entertainment reporter, today admitted that they had read the Twilight-series books. The two women, co-anchor and newsreader, said they hadn't. Given the whole thing about these being teen-girl books and movies, makes you wonder, don't it?

And here's the ultimate irony, right at the end of Twilight, that flick based on a book written by a Mormon. Life and irony—what is it with those two anyway??

SPOILER WARNING. THIS IS DIALOGUE FROM THE END OF THE MOVIE.

Edward Cullen: Shall we?
Isabella Swan: You're serious?
Edward Cullen: Oh, why not?
Isabella Swan: [sighs] Hmm.
Edward Cullen: See? You're dancing.
Isabella Swan: [giggles] At prom. Edward why did you save me? You should've just let the venom spread. I could be like you by now.
Edward Cullen: You don't know what you're saying. You don't want this.
Isabella Swan: I want YOU. Always.
Edward Cullen: I'm not gonna end your life for you.
Isabella Swan: I'm dying already. Every second I get closer, older.
Edward Cullen: That's the way it's supposed to be.
Isabella Swan: Alice said she saw me like you. I heard her.
Edward Cullen: Her visions change.
Isabella Swan: Yeah, based on what people decide. I've decided.
Edward Cullen: So that's what you dream about, becoming a monster.
Isabella Swan: I dream about being with you, forever.
Edward Cullen: Forever?
[Bella nods]
Edward Cullen: And are you ready right now?
Isabella Swan: Yes.
Edward Cullen: Is it not enough, just to have a long and happy life with me?
Isabella Swan: [after a second of thought] Yeah. For now.

This is immortalist, existentialist and a dollop of 'feminist' thrown in for good measure—though I fancy Germaine Greer would have issues with that last label.

I also heard the entertainment reporter, in his comment, alluding to 'teen angst' in relation to the sequel. I've always considered that aspect of teen-hood probably its most productive. It's where you are still allowed, by society and your elders, to have a general unease about 'being' and its uncertainties. Where you can still, with license, truly worry about what and who you 'are', and whether life is about anything but your own angst-ridden self and its current preoccupations, like love affairs and the 'meaning' of it all, and shit like that.

As you get older and become an 'adult', entertaining the same kinds of thoughts and feelings becomes suspect to the rest of the world around you. You're supposed to be a 'grown-up' and all that. Grown-ups may have their difficulties in life, but they're not supposed to fret over them—not unless you have some license by virtue of being not-quite-normal, like artists of all types, for example. And if you're a woman, you definitely have more license to have your 'what is the meaning of my life?' days than your average guy, who is supposed to be pretty much immune to getting emotionally worked up over life-philosophy. Women who agonize over their lives are far less likely than men of being accused of things like 'irresponsibility' or being asked to 'get over it'.

Is this a good thing? Well, yes and no. It's good that one learns—some do anyway, though their proportion is invariably overestimated—to take responsibility and look at things through lenses of 'rationality' and the wisdom of years and 'experience'. But the price for that learning and for adopting the attitude that comes with it is very high indeed. In many ways something very precious—what we somewhat derogatorily label 'teen angst'— is being brow-beaten out of us.

But in truth, at least for some, it doesn't actually go away, but lurks there, not that far below the surface at all. And if you're an Existentialist/Absurdist (which few are) or an Immortalist—that's even fewer, because few want, or can bear, to live with the constant awareness of, as Isabella puts it: "I'm dying already. Every second I get closer, older."—then it's not just a matter of it 'lurking'.

Some while back I had a blog about the 'Fire Inside', with reference to a Bob Seger song. It's basically the same thing we're talking about. And in far too many, the fire is either quenched beyond the point of flaring up again; while in others it merely smoulders, with its smoke polluting the psyche to the point of poisoning it.

The Seven Dwarves and Snow White?

2009-11-19T07:00:00.002+13:00

Well, so I came across this version of the tale of the seven dwarves. Not quite as elaborate as the Disney version, and nowhere as nice. But I thought I'd share it anyway.

The Swiss Version:

Auf einer der Hochebenen zwischen Brugg und Waldshut am Schwarzwalde wohnten sieben Zwerge zusammen in einem kleinen Häuschen. Da kam einmal spät Abends ein junges nettes Bauernmädchen verirrt und hungrig des Weges und bat um ein Nachtlager. Die Zwerge hatten nur sieben Betten, dennoch stritten sie sich, denn jeder wollte dem Mädchen sein Bett abtreten; endlich nahm sie der Älteste von ihnen zu sich in seines, kaum aber ging's ans Einschlafen, so kam noch eine Bauernfrau vors Häuschen, klopfte und begehrte Einlass. Das Mädchen stand gleich auf und sagte ihr, wie die sieben Zwerge hier selber nur sieben Betten und sonst keine Platz mehr für jemand übrig hätten.

Darüber wurde die Frau sehr zornig und schalt in ihrem Argwohn das Mädchen, in welcher sie die Beihälterin von sieben Männern vermutete, ein Lumpenmaitschi. Unter Drohungen, dass man einer solchen Wirtschaft bald ein Ende gemacht haben werde, ging sie grimmig davon; noch in derselben Nacht aber erschien sie mit zwei Männern, die sie vom Rheinufer her geholt hatte, und diese brachen sogleich ins Haus ein, und erschlugen die Zwerge. Man verscharrte die Leichen draußen in dem Gärtchen und verbrannte das Haus. Das Mädchen war darüber den Leuten aus den Augen gekommen.

A translation: (I very slightly modified the one on the web page.)

On one of the high plains between Brugg and Waldshut, near the Black Forest, seven dwarfs lived together in a small house. Late one evening a nice young peasant girl, who was lost and hungry, approached them and requested shelter for the night. The dwarfs had only seven beds, and they fell to arguing with one another, for each one wanted to give up his bed for the girl. Finally the oldest one took the girl into his bed. Before they could fall asleep a peasant woman appeared before their house, knocked on the door, and asked to be let inside. The girl got up immediately and told the woman that the dwarfs had only seven beds, and that there was no room there for anyone else.

With this the woman became very angry and berated the girl, whom she suspected of being a slut, cohabiting with all seven men. Threatening to make a quick end to such business, she went away in a rage, and that same night she returned with two men, whom she had brought up from the bank of the Rhine. They immediately broke into the house and killed the seven dwarfs. They buried the corpses outside in the garden and burned the house. With all of that happening, the girl disappeared from sight.

Twilight: on the difference between beliefs and values

2009-11-18T10:06:00.010+13:00

I finally got around to watching the first flick in the Twilight series. Yeah, I know: I'm behind the times, what with the second one just out. But there's a time and a place and whatever. Last night was it, and that was that.

About the movie: it was very good. Teen flicks, more so than other movies, tend to be inflicted with endless strings of cringe-factor-TEN dialogue lines; the stuff written by people apparently incapable of crafting believable, yet original dialogue. This is one possible explanation. The other is that they think the vast majority of the teenagers watching these flicks are linguistically shallow, unlikely to respond to a anything but stereotyped prefab lines, and possibly also intellectually challenged, because it seems like they need everything explained at length and in platitudes. Neither is true, and the attitude smacks of self-serving contempt.

Twilight's dialogue didn't go that way, though it was definitely 'teen'. It also spanned very nicely the spectrum of teen vernacular: from the laconic/reluctant/surly, to the chatty and 'whatever' and 'so' and 'like'. The dialogue also didn't make it appear like every teen was somehow mentally deficient or incapable of having thoughts that were definitely adult. For those having read through recent blogs of mine, you can see how I found that refreshing.

So, yes, I liked Twilight. It took the vampire/un-dead mythos, soon to be added-to with some more werewolf elements, and put a 'Young Adult' 2009 spin on it. Very cool.

Now to beliefs and values. Twilight got me thinking about this, in a thinking-about-thinking kind of way. As I mentioned before, the author of the Twilight series is a Mormon; and when you come to think about it, the fact that so many Mormon value elements are incarnated in vampires, of all people—'people'?—is quite remarkable.

It certainly doesn't appear conform to what you might call 'Mormon Beliefs'. These are the kinds of things that people believe actually happened. Like the Angel Moroni (sic!) handing Joseph Smith some golden plates with the contents of the Book of Mormon. Or the veracity of the biblical stories woven, in particular, around the figure called 'Jesus'. The kinds of things, in other words, where people, when challenged, will sit back defiantly and say "That's what I believe!"

What Twilight does very deftly, is to separate mythos and 'belief' of that kind from the values associated with it. One very important element in Mormonism is the significance of the family.

Rosalie Hale: [after Edward asks her to put on Bella's coat to distract James] Why should I? What is she to me?
Dr. Carlisle Cullen: [Hands her the coat] Bella is with Edward. She's a part of this family, and we protect our family.

And, yes, there's the patriarch, too; which tends to turn a lot of people off, but let's face it, it could be a matriarch also—though maybe not in the context of Mormonism—with the basic element being that 'family' and a strong 'family head', who acts as a kind of family guide/preceptor/conscience, often, if not almost always, go hand-in-hand. This may be in the nature of human social organization. Most people need someone to turn to for reference. That's just the way things are.

But the quote from Twilight above isn't a statement about 'beliefs' but an assertion of life values, which may result from certain 'belief' elements in a given 'faith'. But they are not the same thing. Of course, one needs to 'believe', if you will, that certain values have 'value' and that therefore one should endeavor to live by them. But those are 'meta-beliefs'; that is, beliefs about beliefs and their consequences. This is where we run into terminology issues, as one often does when discussing philosophical concepts.

It is probably a very good idea to consider the difference between beliefs and belief-associated values; because in the course of this one might that:

Just because some 'belief' may be demonstrably 'wrong', that doesn't mean that the values associated with the belief are therefore also wrong by association.
One may indeed have the same values as people whose beliefs one does not share.

This shouldn't come as a surprise, of course, but unfortunately it does. The majority of people will conflate 'belief' and 'value', or draw a direct connection in order to judge the 'value' of 'values'. This is both, wrong and very, very destructive, to human understanding.

Toasty Today

2009-11-17T22:53:00.004+13:00

So, this is what it was like much of the day...

Right now, at 7 p.m. it's a mere 30º C, and it feels slightly cool-ish!

KEAEN 2nd Edition - DOWNLOAD FREE for a limited period only!

2009-11-17T06:00:00.004+13:00

Until the end of November you can now download a copy of the 2nd revised edition of Keaen for absolutely nothing. This copy can only be read on-screen. Printing and copying have been disabled.

The Second Edition has been revised majorly to:

Bring the narrative of the first book in the Tethys series into line with the sequels.
Get rid of some quaint-isms I'd rather not have in the book.
Remove some of the linguistic 'flattening' that happened as a result of the publishing process for the first edition.
Restore story elements that were removed in the process of preparing the book for the first edition.†

In return, I only ask for this: that you write and leave a review here.

This is, of course, a promotional exercise, intended to suck you into the story of Tethys and its people.

† Warning: Some of these elements involve the deliberate violation of deeply ingrained social taboos.

Peter & Max, Fables and Bill Willingham: Sheer Genius

2009-11-16T10:56:00.002+13:00

Peter & Max by Bill Willingham

It may require someone nursed on comparatively unexpurgated, original language, versions of Grimm's Fairy Tales, to fully appreciate the genius of Bill Willingham. Well, I was, and I do.

For those interested, here's a sympathetic review that I almost entirely agree with.

The whole Fables universe, including the satirical allegory that is the Jack series spin-off, represents not only a long-overdue resurrection of fairy tales, but also runs counter to the current trend to sanitize the tales until their are limp, pathetic ghosts of their former selves. I found out that apparently this trend wasn't just a recent thing, but dates back through the whole series of fairy-tale revisions. This is just one example. More can be found in the links on this site. For those interested in such matters—and especially the evisceration of the true meanings contained in the original fairy tales—it makes for grim reading.

The popularity of Fables does give me hope though, as it appears to demonstrate that, while the majority of our species— at least in the Western and Western-influenced world—is drowning in a cloying morass of conformity and fear of anything that may threaten our currently prevailing delusions about our human nature, there are quite a few who at least sense that this is not only wrong, but—as Willingham obviously believes and tries to put across, sometimes very overtly—indeed destructive of the human spirit.

People-People Time vs. People-Computer Time — The Rise and Imminent Demise of the Intelligent Peripheral

2009-11-10T16:54:00.007+13:00

"A laptop for every child!"

"We're going to refurbish 1000 classrooms, to bring the best modern technology has to offer to our children to become computer smart for the future." (Paraphrasing that strage creature, the current Queensland Premier, Anna Bligh; whose name should indeed sound familiar!)

This is the kind of verbiage coming form those who want to appear as if they cared about the education of our children. Because anybody who advocates or promotes the advancement of 'computer literacy' must care—about the future of the planet, our society, our children. And the Australian Prime Minister—and in this I find myself agreeing with someone I universally disagree with by default: Rupert Murdoch—is definitely obsessed with the future of the planet; to the point of OCD and with a grandiose naïveté that borders on, and maybe crosses over into the territory of, dangerousness. But he's not alone. Whenever anybody who's got anything to say about the subject, for reasons of self-advancement of self-opinionation, such catchphrases as "a laptop for every child" will be dragged out of the closet and intoned like the national anthem. And throw in "internet" and "research'" as well, because that makes it sound like it was really, really useful.

Trying to stop this hysterical mania is the social equivalent of trying to avert GLOBAL WARMING. And, like G... ahh, you know what... the best one can do is to try and learn to live with it, and salvage what can be salvaged—which in this case means as many children and Young Adults as possible.

For those who don't 'get' what I'm talking about, consider this.

To achieve 'computer literacy' for a person under the age of, say, 18—and especially given that said person is very likely to find a computer in their home environment as well!—takes almost no time at all. Making a big deal out of littering classrooms with computers and what's referred to as 'technology' is something that belongs into the last century, not today or tomorrow. It may make a difference in areas where children are unlikely to have access to computing equipment for socio-economic reasons; but that's about it. For the rest of the kids it may have use as a tool to "find information", as some people put it, but that, too, has a dark side. For, like just about anybody else using computers and the internet for extended periods on a daily basis, I find my research habits changing, to the point of being afraid that I may slip into a kind of ADD territory, though I am missing the hyperactivity component of the syndrome. And I'm a very disciplined internet user, who very rarely 'surfs', but almost always tries to find things using search engines, and then very occasionally follows links he may not have had on his radar. Those not exercising such restraint will almost invariably waste incredible amounts of time learning nothing at all—not in the long term anyway, because most of the things they find will go into short-term memory and disappear from there into neural never-never-land.

The consequences of the increasing ubiquity of computers at school as a major component of 'schooling' are grim. They relate closely to what I said in the previous blog. Human-human time gets muscled out by human-computer time, because, contrary to the promotional imagery, human-computer time is mostly one-on-one. It is not a social activity, except in the case of such things as tele-communications between, for example, groups of people separated by distance, but connected by some audio-visual link-up system. But that's not the way these things are used. Most of the time it's human peripherals staring at screens. And while at one time, these human peripherals merited the attribute 'intelligent', this may well be redefined once homo computerensis takes over the world.

For computers do not make children smart. They just change them and reconfigure their cognitive spaces. Whatever lies at the end of that, nobody knows. But I don't think it's good.