Today’s vid. A talker. I tried to do it WØRD style, but I think I prefer having the text appear on the whole screen. It has more visual impact and visual impact is the whole reason I put text on the screen in the first place.

This week we are doing the Top Ten Science Stories Of The Week! (there was just too much cool stuff to cut it down tot he usual 6 or 7!)

10. and 9. An extraterrestrial twofer??

Not one but two stories claiming, independently of one another, that extraterrestrial life has been discovered.

There is this one from a Professor Wainwright in the UK which claims that they found extraterrestrial life by harvesting particles from the very edge of space.

The claim is that these particles are definitely life forms but like absolutely no other life forms on Earth, suggesting they came from space.

If so, does that mean we are constantly bombarded with life? Panspermia indeed!

And then there’s this story, also from the UK, where a Chandra Wickramasinghe claims to have found extraterrestrial life inside a meteorite found in Sri Lanka.

It’s not quite a slam dunk, but it’s a good shot. They have confirmed the sample is definitely meteoric in origin and there appears to be an algae-like substance inside it, looking for all the world like it grew there.

Did we pass some invisible point of maturity and now suddenly the alien overlords are letting us know there really is life out there?

8. Viral Or Bacterial?

Is your illness viral or bacterial? It can make a big difference in course of treatment, and now there is a fast safe test to find out.

The test is based on certain genetic markers that are present in the body in response to specific infections (more epigenetics in action!), and can give a 90 percent accurate result within 12 hours.

This could have a whole host of benefits, but primarily, it is intended to cut down on the amount of antibiotics given to people who have viral infections, and hence slow the evolution of antibiotic-resistant strains.

And now… the Phantom Zone.

7. A New Geometry of Physics

Physicists have discovered a new geometry of particle physics that vastly simplifies the whole field and goes a long way towards finally tweaking quantum theory into something less downright messy.

It might even open the door for a way to finally integrate that fickle bitch-goddess gravity into quantum theory and integrate the world we see at the quantum level and macroscopic world we all live in and perceive.

I will just note in passing that I have been predicting that the whole bizarre quantum mess would some day be revealed to be far simpler and more sensible than we thought.

6. Did a hyper-huge black hole collapse create the universe?

Hell if I know.

But these folks seems to think so. This is one of those cases where I feel I don’t know enough about the subject to even have a layman’s opinion on it.

I confess, when things get to that scale, my mental pinball machine goes TILT.

But I like this quote :

“For all physicists know, dragons could have come flying out of the singularity,” says Niayesh Afshordi, an astrophysicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada.

Well, so much for the first half. You know what comes next, right?

Brain science, of course!

5. Brain science, of course!

In this case, small animal brain science.

A new study has shown that small animals process visual information far more rapidly than larger ones, and hence live in a slow-motion world compared to us big clumsy critters.

Anyone who has tried to catch a cat has at least suspected this.

I wonder if they compensated for the very different way human beings see int heir comparisons. We pre-process raw visual info more than any other animal species.

4. Can Animals Think?

That is the question that this Time magazine article asks.

Loaded question. Define “think”, please. Sorry, I am a philosopher first, scientist second, because you can’t get useful result from wrong thinking.

We will never know if they “really” think, just like we cannot definitely prove anyone else thinks but us. Direct observation is not possible. You can’t walk around in someone else’s skull.

And considering how we treat animals, there will always be a strong incentive for doubt.

But animals can care, worry, scheme, help, hinder, play politics, have favorites, make friends, solve problems, and even fall in love.

I would say we have as much evidence of their consciousness as we have of our own.

3. Creativity Is Messy

Studies are showing that there is a correlation between messiness and creativity.

Subjects asked to do a fake consumer survey in either a messy room or a neat one. The ones in the neat room tended to choose the “classic” choice, the others the “new” choice.

This fits neatly with my theories regarding the ordering mind versus the creative mind.

Plus, full disclosure, I am a highly creative person in a very messy room.

I might be biased.

2. Finding the Imagination

Scientists Dartmouth think they may have found out just where the imagination lies in the human brain.

However, their answer is that it is a “widespread neural network”, so big frigging deal.

That is seriously not much of an answer. They might as well have just pointed to someone’s head and said “It’s all over the place in there!”

The problem is that “imagination” is far too broad and ill-defined a term, and when you combine that with our need to be able to point at something and say “There it is!” leads to trouble.

Maybe it’s everywhere in the brain.

And finally, the Big Story….

1. Making a Memory

And this being the FSW, you just know those memories aren’t being created by Hallmark moments.

Scientists at the University of California at Irvine have successfully created a specific new memory in rats.

That’s right… they created a memory in the rats’ brains. You can see why this story won the “creepy science” race. Today it’s creating new memories in rats, tomorrow it’s Total Recall city.

Go to your local equivalent of Rekall, Inc, and get yourself memories of whatever you want.

Or, the government could simply give you new memories like you were Wolverine.

Seriously, if it wasn’t for his mutant healing factor, his brain would look like a bowl of soggy cauliflower that had been shot up with an Uzi by now.

See you next week, folks!

Wow, another week has barreled by like a frictionless train and we are back to share all kinds of wonders from the world of science with you, the fortunate few.

Tonight, we have lasers, solar death beams, mega-canyons, miracle cures, the coldest thing ever, the Big Bang, and panspermia.

So let’s get started!

Solar Death Beam

An odd shaped skyscraper in London is doing a lot more than just giving middle management somewhere to go that keeps them off the streets.

At certain times of the day, it is producing an intense beam of concentrated sunlight that raises the street temperature to 150 degrees Celcius where it strikes, and has been blamed for bleaching the paint on other buildings, setting people’s carpets on fire, and even melting the paint on one poor man’s car.

When I first heard about this story, I wondered how on Earth a building dubbed the “Walkie-Talkie Building” because of its smoothly bulbous shape could generate something like that.

But then I saw this picture and it all clicked into place.

Gee, what could it be.

The other pictures I had seen made it look like the building was convex on all sides. But that pic made it absurdly clear. The whole front of the building is a giant concave concentrating mirror, just like the one they made for the Solar Death Ray myth on Mythbusters!

People are building those on purpose these days trying to create efficient solar power. And these folks built one by accident.

I am sure architects and engineers will be chuckling over this one for years.

Crashing Down Syndrome

Scientists at Johns Hopkins have discovered a compound that completely reverses the effect of Down Syndrome in mice.

One injection at the right time in the mouse’s development caused the mice to develop perfectly normal cerebral capacity and hence normal learning and problem solving capacity as well.

That could mean that in the future, if a baby is born with Down Syndrome, they are just given a shot of this new compound and that is the end of it, forever.

Down Syndrome would become one of those birth defects that is totally treatable and that most people have never even heard of because taking care of it after birth is so routine.

Of course, there’s a small chance these mice will become hyper intelligent and TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD.

One artist’s concept of what that might look like.

Under The Ice

NASA data has recently revealed that their might be a huge mega-canyon longer than the Grand Canyon buried under the ice sheet in Greenland.

Here’s the scoop :

The canyon has the characteristics of a winding river channel and is at least 460 miles (750 kilometers) long, making it longer than the Grand Canyon. In some places, it is as deep as 2,600 feet (800 meters), on scale with segments of the Grand Canyon. This immense feature is thought to predate the ice sheet that has covered Greenland for the last few million years.

Now normally, this would be interesting, but not all that important. Who really cares about things buried so deep under the ice that we will never seen them?

But with global warming accelerating, what was previously inaccessible becomes entirely plausible, and for all we know, we all might be vacationing in the Great Canyon of Greenland some day.

Headline of the Week

Next we have a story that I instantly knew I was going to feature today based purely on the headline : Weather could be controlled with lasers.

LASER WEATHER CONTROL. Tell me that’s not fun to say!

I mean, how Bond villain is that? Wasn’t there a Bond flick where some insane Scotsman was trying to control the world via weather control?

Bet he used lasers, too.

This weather control speculation is based on a recent discovery that extremely short duration laser bursts can cause ice to form and water to condense inside clouds.

Thus, lasers could be used to make it rain or snow wherever we liked, as long as there were clouds for us to zap. And that’s just the most obvious use. I am sure meteorologists can came up with far more subtle ways to mess with Mother Nature.

Big Cold Bang

In an effort to understand just what happened during the Big Bang, scientists at the University of Chicago recently chilled some cesium atoms to within a billionth of a degree of absolute zero.

Obviously, when the Big Bang happened, it was mighty cold in… whatever it was the Big Bang exploded into. So this sort of experiment is necessary if we are to understand how everything got here.

That would be impressive just as a technical achievement. But it is result that matter, and they discovered that at such low temperatures, the cesium atoms behaved in a new and peculiar way, almost like sound waves traveling through the air.

Most importantly, the patterns created by these ultracold cesium atoms match the patterns found in the cosmic microwave background radiation, otherwise known as the echoes of the Big Bang.

That, scientifically speaking, is fucking awesome.

We are definitely on to something there.

Men From Mars

And finally, our Big Story for this week, more evidence for the idea that life on Earth originated on Mars, and that life may indeed be transplanetary.

Now to me, the evidence in question is pretty slim and has a lot of “if” and “then” type assumptions based around of all things, molybdenum.

It revolves around the idea that a) oxidized molybdenum is vital for the early stages of the creation of life on Earth and b) way back then, Earth had very little oxygen, but Mars had lots.

Pretty shaky stuff. But I am glad there are people pushing the panspermia idea because, while none of us can guess at how likely it is to be true, there is no logical reason why it cannot be true, and thus it is an idea worth theorizing about.

And hey, maybe we really are all Martians.

Wouldn’t that be neat?

Today’s video is about the diving line between faith and fanaticism. Here it is :

I seem to have discovered a rich vein of insight with this line of thinking, so I will continue to explore the topic in this blog entry.

Picking up where the video left off, what really has me fascinated right now is the notion that no matter how a particular subculture looks from the outside, as long as they do not break the law or otherwise step outside the bounds of normal pluralistic society, they are all more or less equal in society’s eyes.

I say “more or less” because obviously being a neo-Nazi is a lot more likely to get you off the guest list for fancy parties than being Presbyterian.

But in a live and let live society like our own, in the eyes of society, everybody who behaves themselves is equal. Whatever you and your friends do together on the weekend is fine, whether it’s a church picnic or a NAMBLA rally. As long as you are not breaking the law, do what you like.

And I find that fascinating because it runs completely counter to the way the average citizen actually thinks about society, and yet it is also undoubtedly true.

In a modern society, we are all about judging one another socially and deciding who are the good people and who are not. No matter your political stripe, it’s virtually guaranteed, indeed it’s almost logically inevitable, that you think people who think differently are wrong and possibly defective.

Same with people who don’t share your taste in music, or television, or fine dining. The modern society is highly pluralistic, so these little divisions are usually not taken very seriously and we all, to some extent, grasp that the Big Rule of society is “mind your own business and others won’t mind yours”, but because modern life is safe, stable, and secure, it furnishes our lower level needs quite reliably, causing the next level up, the social needs, to become our highest priority.

So we divide ourselves into all these overlapping groups, circles upon circles of association connected together in a n-space Venn Diagram that would drive even the most resourceful topologist insane.

And we behave as though these social (as opposed to legal) divisions are incredibly important and are, in fact, iron clad rules of the universe. And I don’t exclude myself from this by any means. Ask me what I think of the current crop of conservatives some time.

But when you really look at it, in society’s view, we are all the same. In society’s view, there are sane law abiding citizens, and that’s most of us, and there’s the crazy and/or criminal who need to be punished, and that is it.

Nobody actually gets bonus points from society itself for being a good person. That happens on a lower level, both due to the nature of human interaction (people like nice people) and the more subtle forms of social punishment that lack the brute force of law (like becoming a social pariah).

And this causes a certain amount of stress between the citizens and their societies sometimes. We all get the “live and let live” rule in the broad sense, but sometimes, when confronted with people who really make us angry or disgusted, we forget ourselves and demand the right to punish the members of a subculture for being so odious to us, the only truly good people of society.

The long arm of the law, on the other hand, has to take the position that all law-abiding citizens are equal or the law will become compromised, lose its impartiality, and cease to be a force to restrain the citizenry and maintain law and order.

It would instead simply be a socially condoned lynch mob, and that cannot last.

Luckily, we have progressed far enough in the world of the developed democracies of the world that this pressure from the citizens is largely muted. You still get law bent to punish socially odious people (like smokers, for example), and this is good because sometimes, not often but sometimes, this is actually needed in order for society to progress.

But when this does not happen, citizens become angry about the society that “does nothing” to punish these “bad people”, and tension builds. If it becomes strong enough, people will give up on society and decide to rectify the situation themselves via vigilante justice.

A modern society must always keep this in mind. From this point of view, vigilantism can be seen as a symptom of society’s failure to deal with a problem, real or imaginary, in a way that resolved the tension one way or another.

Luckily, vigilantism is a form of fanaticism, and requires stepping out of the role of “normal citizen” and doing things which are at the very least abnormal and quite possibly also illegal. So most people will never become vigilante (despite our love of them in fiction) because most people are not crazy.

It is when ordinary citizens become angry enough and/or feel threatened enough to take up arms in protest and step out of the ordinary lives that no longer make them feel safe that revolution becomes a real possibility. That is the true cause of real social instability, and a society has to suffer a very large degradation of the feeling of connection between the citizens and the government for this to happen.

People have to believe that there is some reasonable way for them to be safe. It has to be possible to be okay if you do all the things you are supposed to do.

When people begin to feel that there is no security no matter what you do, vigilantism turns into revolution and society itself is in peril.

Sane and smart societies do everything they can to make sure they never reach that point.

And those that don’t fall and get taken over by others.

I wonder what will happen to us?

This week, we start with a subject unhealthily close to my heart, obesity.

The Obesity Era

The article is loaded with fascinating news from the bleeding edge of obesity theory (a lot of things make you fat, not just low willpower), but the thing that blew my mind was this :

Consider, for example, this troublesome fact, reported in 2010 by the biostatistician David B Allison and his co-authors at the University of Alabama in Birmingham: over the past 20 years or more, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America’s marmosets. As were laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas.

The hell? Animals are getting fatter? Try to blame that one on McDonald’s, folks. There has to be some sort of environmental explanation. Nothing else would fit.

Are we making them fatter by osmosis?

Your Ancestors Didn’t Sleep Like You

They slept on the ceiling.

Seriously though, before the era of electric light, people slept in two distinct periods. They slept, then got up for two or three hours, then slept again.

Between the two sleeping periods, they would do whatever struck their fancy. They would read, pray, eat, make love, and so on. And this was so common that it was simply assumed. It’s how everybody did it. Even back to the days of Canterbury’s Tales, people spoke of “first sleep” and “second sleep” as though it was the most commonplace thing in the world, just like we would talk about breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

It can’t have been entirely the lack of light and the expense of candles. This whole process took twleve hours, and it’s a rare day indeed when there are 12 hours between sunset and sunrise.

When my sleep issues were worse, I slept like that all the time.

Maybe I was on to something.

And now for the Fun With Carbon section of tonight’s news, starting with every girl’s favorite form of carbon, diamonds.

Tiny Diamonds Levitated By Lasers

Yes, they have done it. They levitated something bigger than an atom. Sure, it’s a nano-scale diamond, and thus still quote microscopic, but this is still a major step.

Turns out that when you focus a laser down fine enough, it can exert a force on physical objects. And get this… despite what you would think, the force is actually a pull, not a push.

You know what that means, don’t you? TRACTOR BEAMS!

And super-science involving both diamonds and lasers? How James Bond can you get?

The world becomes more sci fi every day, and I am loving every minute of it.

Beam me up now, Scotty!

Super-capacitors Amp Up To Replace Batteries

Now I will admit right now, I don’t know the difference between a capacitor and a battery.

But the articles says that these super-capacitors charge up extremely fast, and they do not wear out as fast as traditional chemical batteries. Plus they are much better for the environment than a bunch if heavy metals soaking in acid lying around a garbage dump.

But they main strength is that they can deliver a lot of energy fast, which regular batteries cannot do. With chemical batteries, you get the same energy no matter what.

So right now, super-capacitors are being used for things like storing energy gleaned from regenerative braking, and storing energy generated by wind turbines.

Currently, however, they are much larger than chemical batteries and much more expensive. So they will nto replace you cell phone battery yet.

Proponents are optimistic about the future.

Welcome To Carbyne

It’s all theoretical so far, but scientists at Rice University have calculated that yet another way of sticking carbon together could result in a new substance called Carbyne that would be even stronger than diamond or graphene.

These names are getting increasingly silly sounding. The next nanocarbon miracle should be called Graphaloo or Carboinger.

Officially, carbyne is “…a chain of carbon atoms that are linked either by alternate triple and single bonds or by consecutive double bonds.” I recognize most of those words.

Anyhow, this new substance would be both stronger and stiffer than the competition. One small problem though… it’s probably not stable. In fact, for years it was thought that if two carbyne strands touched, they would explode. Yikes!

The Rice team says that is not true, that in fact, the stuff would likely last for days.

Hardly resolves the issue, but at it’s progress.

Alright, enough physics. You know what comes next. BRAIN SCIENCE!

We have two super creepy brain science stories tonight, and I am not sure which one is creepier, so I am just going to flip a coin.

Heads it’s lab grown brains, tails it’s mind control.

Tails! Mind control it is.

Controlling Someone Else’s Hand

For the first time ever, one researcher has been able to control the motions of another’s hand purely via the power of his mind, plus a nifty bit of technology of course.

These University of Washington scientists are touting this as the world’s first successful human brain to brain interface, and I am glad they used those exact words, because controlling someone else’s hand with your brain is definitely brain to brain, but not what you would call mind to mind.

Still, these people clearly think like I do :

“The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains,” Stocco said. “We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain.”

Like all modern brain science, this is both amazing and terrifying.

Imagine a future in which it is no longer true that we are always alone within our skulls…

And speaking of what’s inside our skulls…

Lab-grown brains are real

They are called “cerebral organoids” (that is totally ready to attack Doctor Who) and they are the size of peas, but they have the three dimensional structure of brains and are made of brain tissue, so I am calling them brains.

Just teeny tiny pea brains. Insert your own political joke here.

To keep the creepiness level down, the Austrian researchers who made these little brainules say they are only for use in learning more about how the brain works by giving us something to test on that was never a person or somebody’s pet.

But they also admit that the brains are about at the complexity level of a fetus at nine weeks of gestation, and that means that it is only a matter of time before they can grow full grown adult human brains and make them do their bidding!

Isn’t brain science fun?

Seeya next week, folks!

SCIENCE! Thousands of it. Let’s go, shall well?

Nicotine exposure in the womb leads to addiction susceptibility as an adult.

A recent study found that rats exposed to nicotine in the womb were far more likely to become adult rats who, when given the chance, over-indulged in nicotine, alcohol, and fatty foods.

The theory is that the nicotine causes the fetus to develop more of a kind of cell that makes neurochemicals that stimulate appetite, making said rats “hungrier” for all sorts of pleasure.

When I read this, a number of facts instantly correlated in my mind :

1. For most of my life, my mother chain-smoked more or less constantly.
2. In the seventies, when I was in vitro, people had no clue about smoking being bad when you were pregnant or breastfeeding
3. I weigh over 350 pounds.

Guess I should be glad I stayed away from the cigs and never got seriously into booze.

Could this eight year old be the key to immortality?

The girl in question, Gabby Williams, ages at an incredibly slow rate. It’s like the opposite of progeria. (Regeria?) Right now, it sucks to be her, because she is eight years old but has the body of an infant.

But by studying her, we might very well be able to find out her secret and invent an “off” switch for aging, rendering us effectively immortal.

Or at least extremely long lived.

The article leaves me with a lot of questions, though. Like, is Gabby mentally eight years old? One would think not, because she still has a baby’s cranium and hence no room for the all important brain expansion that occurs between birth and the age of five.

Still, if a human being matured normally until their physical peak then took the cure, that would not be am issue and we would just stay 25 forever.

A mixed blessing, that.

The Secret Of The Frozen Frogs

Some, but not all, wood frogs freeze absolutely solid ever winter and then thaw out in spring and hop away perfectly healthy. And scientists want to know why.

We have two-thirds of the puzzle. We know the tree frogs use three chemicals as protectants against the cellular damage that usually makes such a thing impossible.

One is a very common complex sugar, glucogen. They store this in their livers, which grow half again as big when winter is approaching.

Another is good old urea, AKA uric acid, AKA the acid in your pee.

But the third one is… unknown. And that is what has scientist’s interest peaked. They don’t know what it is or what exactly it does to help the process unfold.

I think you can imagine why they are keen to find out.

Cryogenics is not as dead as we thought! Perhaps it was merely frozen.

Ion thrusters. ION THRUSTERS. ION THRUSTERS!

Sorry about that, but I am a tad excited about this one. NASA has tested a viable, super efficient ion thruster and the age of the chemical rocket might just be over, thank goodness.

Instead of getting its thrust from a chemical reaction, an ion thruster gets its thrust from magnetically accelerated charged particles, or ions, of its fuel.

This makes it far more efficient than chemical rockets, able to get 10 to 12 more distance from a given amount of fuel. But there’s a cost.

The amount of thrust is tiny, so an ion based spacecraft accelerates extremely slowly. Slow as in, takes 10,000 hours, or around 417 days, to reach top speed.

So it is not so good for human space travel, but phenomenal for autonomous spacecraft, which could see so much more of the solar system on a single tank of gas.

You know what is coming next, kids. BRAIN SCIENCE!

Brain based labels are bunk.

Remember when people were abuzz with talk about whether someone was “left-brained” or “right-brained”? Don’t feel bad if you don’t. because it was ages ago now.

Well thanks to the miracle window into the brain that is fMRI, we now know that those ancient labels were full of crap. After we found out that certain brain functions happen in certain places, people leaped to the conclusion that the people who had “more” of those functions must have “more” on that side of the brain. Typical pop psychology.

Unsurprisingly, this turned out to be total bullshit. This does not surprise me.

What surprises me is that anyone still cared about some pop psych labels that I have not heard mention of for around thirty years.

Well, publish or perish.

Computer program knows what letter you are looking at.

Speaking of the marvels of the fMRI era, scientists have come up with a way for a computer program to interpret information from an active fMRI scan of a subject’s brain in such a way that the program knows what letter of the alphabet the subject is looking at.

Spookiness aside, this could be simply amazing for those poor souls who are so profoundly paralyzed that their eyes are all they can move.

They could finally be released from their locked-in condition by being able to use their eyes like a typewriter, rather like Stephen Hawking’s speech program. By looking at each letter in succession, they could spell out words, and finally be able to communicate with the world.

Further afield, it might just give you a way to type messages on your Google Glass device.

And finally, the Big Story of the week.

Predictors of suicidal behaviour found in blood.

This story is my big finale not because it is the most important or most amazing, but because it is the one that I found literally jawdropping.

When I saw the headline, my mouth gaped open and I said “WHAT???”

I had no idea we were this far into epigenetics yet. These scientists claim that they have found six blood markers than when taken together can predict when someone is a higher risk of suicide.

I find this hard to believe, but that might just be my brain nerd’s tendency to reflexively balk at any suggestion that a complex behaviour can be predicted by a simple test.

People have been trying to make that a reality for a century or more, and it has always turned out to be way more complicated than that.

But between epigenetics and fMRI, the rules are being rewritten at lightning speed. So there might just be something to this.

Having being suicidal myself, this story strikes home for me. I am not exactly sure what good a blood tesr would have done me, seeing as when I was severely depressed I rarely ever left my room, but I am sure it could be useful in an institutional setting.

One word of caution, though : suicidal people WANT to kill themselves, and if they think a blood test will deprive them of the ability to do so, they will resist said blood test very strongly.

That’s all the newts that’s fit to sprint for this week, folks!

See you next week for more SCIENCE!

Sometimes, days feels like other days. Today, despite being quite firmly a Tuesday, it feels like a Sunday to me. Not sure why, really.

It just feels Sunday-ish out, I suppose.

Mind you, the weather is fabulous. It’s a quiet sunny day that feels like it was made for kids to play and adults to swim and for everyone to have a lovely time.

It’s the sort of day that, when I was a kid, would have prompted a trip to the beach. Growing up as I did on an island which has more coastline than land, the beach is never far away, but our beach of choice, as it was for most of Summerside, was Linkletter Beach.

I know. Linkletter, right? Sounds like it should be found amongst the crosswords and sudokus in a pen and pencil puzzle book somewhere.

I have been thinking about those sun-drenched days at the beach from my childhood because those were days when I can say I was genuinely happy. There was a time when I was young when we were a more cohesive family unit who did things together now and then, and those were my Bradbury days.

I’m not sure what put an end to all that. I suppose as my father’s temper got worse and worse, we grew increasingly distant from him and without him to be the hub of a family activity (not to mention the only one of us who could drive… my mother never learned), the excursions had to stop.

But those little trips to the beach or to Rainbow Valley or to one of the national or provincial parks (which were also beaches…. like I said, more coastline than land), shine quite brightly in my memories, and that is a good thing.

It’s good because I feel like I am at the point in my recovery when I need to start remembering that my childhood was not all bad. There were some very happy times, especially during my preschool years, when I was an adorable redheaded kid with oodles of natural charm and an amazing brain behind the big smile and the little freckles.

School is where things went really bad.

But even then, there were happy times, despite my having to hide from the entire student body and being such a lonely, bored kid. There were times spent in the library, where I felt safe and happy because there was always an adult there (the librarian), so no bullies could get to me there, and from a very early age I have loved books, so the school library was the perfect haven for me.

Even today, in my fortieth year, I automatically feels more relaxed and comfortable and even happy when I am surrounded by books. I suppose those books were my world when I was in elementary school. They were both safe harbor and my only companions.

No wonder I grew up to be a writer. Of sorts. I am a creature of words.

Looking back, the librarian probably found me to be a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, I was her ideal kids, because I loved the library, I loved books, and I read voraciously.

But because I was so lonely, I tended to try to befriend whatever adults were around (always got on better with grownups anyhow) and so I did have a tendency to follow her around sometimes, or ask her questions I probably already knew the answers to, and generally be kind of a pest.

In a perfect, Judy Bloom world, the librarian would have befriended me back and we would have had a long friendship where both of us lived a little, learned a little, and grew as people.

But she was a very busy woman, librarian to a whole school full of people, not just me, and so I get the feeling that I got on her nerves quite a bit with my clingy, dependent behaviour.

That’s the think about having nobody in your life to look out for you. Kids have a strong instinct to seek protectors, and if they can’t find one, they will try to make someone be one for them.

Perhaps that is why the school administration’s apathetic disdain for my being bullied was such a huge betrayal and caused such enormous trauma to poor little me.

Grownups are supposed to protect little children, aren’t they?

But back to my happy times. My home life was not so bad, at least not compared to life outside the home. I was lonely there too because people tended to just forget about me and because it was nobody’s job to keep me company, nobody did.

Not that I was without problems. I was very hard to reach, and clumsy, and a tad high-strung at times. But what kid isn’t, really? Maybe I did too good a job of sounding like an adult, and it made people think that I didn’t have the same needs as any kid my age.

Or maybe people just got busy having lives and forgot about me.

But despite that, my home life was okay. Certainly it was not an abusive household, and all my material needs were well covered. And there was plenty of books to read, and televisions to watch, and eventually video games to play as well.

Those are no substitute for actual friendship, acceptance, and socialization, but they are what I knew.

Throw in the Internet, and not a heck of a lot has changed, really.

But I can’t say I was unhappy at home, my father’s tantrums aside. I was sad sometimes without understanding why, but I guess I learned to bury all my emotions under constant media consumption.

Just stay distracted and nothing can get to, right?

But the wounds remain even when the symptoms are ignored. Looking back, it amazes me how little of what was wrong with my life I could understand at the time.

But everything is normal to a kid. Or at least, everything is equally weird.

Everyone thinks their family is normal until they are teens and start truly comparing their family to the other families they know.

Then your family becomes the weirdest, wrongest family in the world.

If you are lucky, you eventually realize that all families are about as weird as yours.

It’s normalcy that is the myth.

Enough for now. Peace.

All my life, for as long as I can remember, I have had a burning desire to know the truth.

It is one of my deepest passions, and for most of that time, the dominant one as well. I felt as if, somehow, my job in the world was to pierce all the layers of confusion and illusion, find the real truth, and then tell people about it.

But the truth is not a gentle thing, and I think of myself as a gentle person. I have lived my life with the innate assumption that the truth is always the best thing in all occasions, that you are always better off hearing the truth rather than comforting lies.

And I still believe that. But I am beginning to see its limits.

Sure, for someone like me, who has been a fearless delver into the deepest, darkest, most disturbing layers of human reality in my never-ending and unquenchable thirst for the truth, there is very little that you can say to me which is true that I cannot accept.

My therapist is constantly amazed at how readily I accept the truth of painful revelations and how willing I am to deal with the harshest of truths in my quest to heal myself. But I am not the sort of person who can consciously deny the truth of something which rings true to me. And because I have this lifelong instinct to lunge for the truth the moment I see it, I sometimes leap vast crevices that lead deep into the wounded flesh of my broken spirit that others might have to labour through the hard way.

So I suppose therapy works a little faster for me because of this self-honesty. But I digress.

For a fearless philosopher like me, honesty is always the best policy. I am a very understanding person, so much so that people are often surprised by how readily and non-judgmentally I can accept, understand, and sympathize with their deepest, darkest secrets.

But other people have more elaborate psychological defenses than I, and do not live outside Plato’s Cave like I do, and so the truth, especially in the concentrated form I usually deliver it, can very well do them a lot more harm than good.

Sometimes, a lie is the moral thing to do. Like in movies, where a character is very definitely going to die or at least is very gravely injured, and people tell them “You will be fine. It’s not as bad as it seems. You just relax and we will have you up and out of here in no time. ”

This is quite clearly a lie, or at least, misleading. But I have no problem with that, because it is not like the truth will do this person any good anyhow, and the last thing they need is more fear, stress, and panic. The best medicine, in that case, is to lie.

And this principle applies to the rest of life as well. I have been a fool and a pig to imagine that my deeply oracular truths are diamonds beyond price that anyone should be happy to get. I have let the arrogance of the intellect spill into personal arrogance about what is good for others, which just happens to be what I feel like doing anyhow.

Always a red flag, that.

Now I am not claiming that I have been a brutally blunt bulldozer all my life. I have not. I am, largely, a fairly sensitive, sweet, compassionate fellow who puts a very high premium on the ability to navigate the waters of diplomacy and discourse without stepping on people’s toes.

The kind of connection you can make with others if you have the poise and skill to listen well and give people the kind of help they need is, to me, priceless beyond all measure. I often feel humbled and privileged that I could do that for someone, that they could let me in and I could do them good, even if it’s just by lending a sympathetic ear.

So I am no brute. But I still feel I have inadvertently hurt and/or alienated people all my life with my very sharp and piercing perceptions of the truth.

Whether or not I am “right” or not is unimportant. Everyone thinks they are right, myself included. The issue at hand is whether that truth at that moment was the morally right thing to say. And I think that, many times in my life, it has not been.

And I am someone who takes ethics and responsibility very, very seriously. Possibly to a fault.

So I have to ask myself : what is more important? Being absolutely and utterly honest and truthful, as if one is expecting to be rewarded for having the right answer?

Or being less than completely honest, maybe even slightly misrepresenting yourself, in order to get along with others and do the least harm in the world that you can?

This is not an easy issue with me. I have rather naively acted like my opinions are the same as anyone else’s, and so when I am asked about X, I give my honest opinion.

But they are not the same. My opinions stem from deep analysis and perceptions honed over decades. They are stark, strange, and terrible to behold for a lot of people. Often they will simply not understand because it is too far out of their experience and they lack even the start of how to get a grip on what I am saying to them.

But even if they do have an inkling, it is nothing like what they know, and they, rightly so from their point of view, view me as a strange and dangerous person best left alone.

Final result : I feel rejected and humiliated and alienated, and historically, I am left naively thinking “What did I do to deserve that? ”

Well now I know, and I can start on the journey towards correcting my excesses.

This will not be easy.

But it has to be done if I am to connect with others the way I wish to do.