First off, a TED talk :

Loved this one. Much genuine wisdom (backed up by hard science, even!), hilarious self-effacing humour, a charmingly candid speaker who looks a little like Caroline Rhea, and of course, much food for thought.

First off, I will get a few things off my mind about the talk itself, then I will go into my own line of thought springing from it.

And this one I have to get off my chest right away because it is burning a hole in my mind : “What cannot be measures does not exist”? What a massive load of crap! That just limits human knowledge to what we currently know how to measure. Radioactivity existed before the Geiger counter, heat existed before the thermometer, and there are things between Heaven and Earth that are beyond our philosophies. I find that kind of philosophical corner-cutting for people who cannot handle the qualitative and abstract to be completely intolerable. It is the worst kind of intellectual laziness and cowardice, because it pretends to be about being logical and sensible and scientific, but it is merely a product of small minds pretending big things will go away if they ignore them.

The other thing that struck me about her talk is when she speaks about how she set out to figure out these big and very important questions of psychology and philosophy with her “measuring stick”. Doing thousands of interviews, collating reams of data, trying to deduce a pattern from thousands of data points. All very proper and according to the rules.

Me, I just would have thought about it.

That is the difference between two very different mindsets, hers and mine. I greatly admires hers, and certainly cannot argue with the quality of her results. What is more, she can prove her results via rigorous science, whereas I, like Freud, have absolutely no data to back me up. I am a thinker, not a scholar. I expect people to examine my reasoning and decide for themselves if they think it rings true. Proof does not really enter into it.

The two mindsets are complementary if not forced into opposition by some myopic false binary. Some of us are thinkers and dreamers, and others are builders and makers. Some of us find truth by examining reality and drawing conclusions afterwards, and some of us think up ideas, test them for internal consistency, and only then compare them to the world.

You need both.

Nits picked, we are on to me thought about the actual substance of the talk. I loved it when she said that you cannot selectively suppress emotion. I have believed this for a long time, but it is also provable by modern brain science. There is no selective emotional filter circuit. You cannot let the good ones in and keep the bad ones out. You can only turn the volume down or up.

If if you, one some level, decide “I would rather feel nothing than feel this”, then do not be surprised if you find your life very depressing and grey and unrewarding.

Our ability to suppress our emotions is vitally necessary, of course, otherwise we would act on every single emotion without thinking and we would be less sentient than our pets. Even a dog can resist going for the steak on the table if he thinks he will get in trouble.

But like all things, emotional suppression has to be done in a balanced and reasonable way. Too much, and the vital balance of pain and reward is lost, and the person becomes depressed, perhaps clinically. The person comes to rely on the diminishing returns of a vicious emotional suppression cycle, where the suppression brings pain, which brings on further suppression to deal with the pain, which then leads to even more emotional starvation, and more pain, and so on and so forth.

Soon, the person has their emotional volume control down so low that they are barely making it through the day, and yet, the idea that it is the emotional suppression that is the problem is more than a little counterintuitive. After all, if you are depressed, it seems like it is emotions which are the problem, especially if you are prone to intellectualizing your emotions.

All this applies especially to dysthymic depression, the “hugging the baseline” depression. No big highs, no big lows, just a very constrained existence with very low functionality.

The other observation that she made, although sadly not till the very end of her talk, is the one about the difference between happy people and sad people is that people who were happy felt that they were “enough”. That they, in and of themselves, were sufficient.

This is an issue I have wrestled with myself. I have a great many gifts and talents, and yet I constantly feel as if I am “not enough”. That no matter what I can list in the “assets” column of my self worth spreadsheet, it somehow always come out to a big net loss in the end.

So where does this sense of insufficiency (or sufficiency) come from? And does self-worth stem from a self or worthiness, or vice versa?

To me, it is entirely possible that on some level, for a depressive like myself, the overwhelming feeling of unworthiness comes from the depression. The feeling that you are a “bag dog”, that if you feel this bad, it must be because you “did something wrong”, and hence deserve it.

It might be that, for whatever reason, no matter how hard a depressive strives to have a free and open mind, the depression have such a powerful distorting effect on the mind that it forces them to reach the same false conclusions as every other depressive.

We think we are figuring things out and basing our emotions on our conclusions, but in reality, we are just working backwards from the emotions and constructing elaborate systems of thought to justify them.

And with that happy thought, my comments conclude.

– Self worth = “enough”
– Strength in vulnerability = the way out is the way in
– Tear down The Wall

Did you know that the human race has no brain?

It’s true. Humanity has no brain whatsoever.

Human beings have brains. One per, in fact. But the species itself has no brain.

This might seem a trifle obvious, stated baldly like that. But you might be surprise how many deep and highly emotionally charged philosophical debates such a simple truism can solve, or at least, shed light upon in a useful way.

For example, take Global Climate Change, sometimes known as Global Warming, or as I prefer to call it, Killer Weather Syndrome.

It is widely scientifically accepted that human caused carbon emissions are changing the global climate, causing global temperatures to rise, trapping more solar energy in our weather cycle which leads to more extreme weather, and potentially doing a number on all this lovely high energy civilization we have all come to enjoy and use.

Like the Internet, for instance.

And in this debate, thoughtful and concerned thinkers often ask the question, “Is the human race so stupid that it cannot control itself enough to keep from fouling its own nest?”

Well, yes, it is exactly that stupid, because it has no brain. There is no central hub of control for the entire human race. A single human being has anticipate problems and moderate its behaviour in order to prevent undesired outcomes. A driver can slam on their brakes to avoid hitting the deer that just leapt onto the road. But what part, exactly, of the entire species makes those kind of decisions? Where is the brake pedal on the human race?

Via our institutions, especially democracy, we have slowly evolved the nation state, where large numbers of humans being can act as though said group had a brain, with individual citizens, with all their thoughts, ideas, opinions, and passions, acting as the individual neurons to the brain of the body public. But elections are only once in four years, and ask but a single question.

How smart do you think a person would be if they had to make all their decisions for an entire four years based on a single, often binary question? How good would they be at adapting their behaviour to a changing situation if it took four years for them to decide whether to stop for that deer?

And that is the best we have come up with. A clumsy, slow, primitive brain for our largest units of humanity, none of which control anything like a preponderance of humanity.

Fish brains are more intelligent.

As for the race itself, it is as primitive and mindless as any slime mold or fungus. It has no way to sense danger and avoid it. It has no consciousness, no ability to be aware of its actions, no ability, even, to form the sort of associations that let even stupid animals learn from their mistakes.

And yet, humanity is powerful. We are mindless yet mighty, perfectly capable of ruining this planet for ourselves as we lurch about like a mindless zombie. If we are to survive as a species, we are going to have to develop a brain for humanity, and do it before we do irreparable damage to ourselves.

Luckily, without intending it (because how can a brainless monster have intentions?), we are doing that very thing now. We are wiring up all those individual human neurons to one another, and lo and behold, something like the glimmering dawn of consciousness is on the horizon.

What is this initiative to give this bunch of naked beach monkeys a brain?

Well, you are looking at it. It is called the Internet, and it is busily building all those neural connections that will, some day, let a sleeping race wake up for the first time in history.

You can already see it beginning to happen. A disaster happens in Haiti, and within moments, the whole world knows, and within minutes, people are donating to charities to try to fix the problem, like a body responding to pain by sending a flood of white blood cells to the area.

Or millions of discontented Egyptians discovering, through the Internet, that they are not the only ones upset with the dictatorship ruling their country, and through this realization, having the dawning of consciousness necessary to become a movement.

A movement that toppled said dictator.

Now, this by no means that the human race has a brain now. That will come with time, but that time is not near. This is merely the earliest twinklings of awareness, which is not the same thing as sentience or even consciousness.

But as the connections between us grow, so does awareness. And modern information theory and artificial intelligence theory clearly states that if you get enough connections between enough processors, consciousness is bound to emerge.

And all with no need for a conquering army to force a unifying identity upon us. In fact, the whole progression into consciousness requires that we all keep acting as individual neurons, processing signals from the outside world as best as we can and adding our output to the synaptic choir that makes up this amazing new mind we are forming.

With every person who joins the Internet, even if all they do is share knitting patterns with their friends, the power of this newly formed mind grows. It becomes more alive, more aware, more awake.

And some time in the future, perhaps the entire human race will rise from its long slumber, awaken for the first time, and look upon itself, and know who it is and why it is here.

And all that went before this will simply fade away like a bad dream, swept clear by the dawning consciousness so that the brand new mind can face the future with clear eyes and a new vision for the future of this oh so human race.

I look forward to that day, even if I will not be alive when it happens.

Then the future will truly be in our own hands.

Finally, here we are with another edition of the Friday Science Thang. Ever had one of those days where you set out to do something, but other things keep popping up like random monster encounters in a cheap JRPG, and you’re all like “But the thing I want is right there, five steps away, and yet every step I take it’s another bunch of stupid monsters I have to fight before I can just get on and do the damn thing?”

Well that has been what it is like settling down to write today’s science goodness. But now I am here, and baby, it’s science time!

Potential Comeback for Hydrogen

You have not heard a lot about hydrogen as a fuel in a while, but that might be all about to change due to an amazing new nanoparticle that can electrolyze hydrogen from any water, no matter how dirty.

Previous electrolysis systems required the use of highly pure water, and clearly, adding the need to distill the water before even beginning is going to be a serious drain on the efficiency of a system which is already trying to compete with the ease of the fuel we find just lying around underground.

But with these nanoparticles from HyperSolar, all you would need is a plastic bag coated with said nanoparticles, any dirty ditch water you care to put in there, and sunlight, and you are making hydrogen.

Presumably, the future implied would take waste water from any source (yes, even that one… remember, electricity can’t be dirty) and produce hydrogen for fuel cells on a massive scale.

The Circle of Life

Speaking of potentially gross stories involving water, brace yourself for this one : the shower that saves water by recirculating it back to you while you shower.

Now if you are anything like me, your instant and quite severe reaction to the idea of a recirculating shower is ICK. I mean, the whole point of a shower is that it washes the bad stuff off of you, down the drain, and away from you forever. The last thing you want is that water comes right back at you! EWWWW!

But it is not as bad as it seems. Obviously any moron could design a system that just sprays your dirty water on you. But what this guy Peter Brewin has done is create a super efficient shower that uses a tiny powerful heater to boost the water up to Pasteurization temperature, plus a gravity funnel arrangement to get rid of all particulates, and the end result is something that, even counting the energy needed to run the heater, still uses far less energy than a regular shower because the system only needs to heat up a much smaller amount of water.

So you would be washing with water that is not just clean but Pasteurized, and saving on the power bills to boot. Still, they would have to work hard to overcome the ick factor.

I want the dirt to go away dammit.

The Reverse Microwave Lives?

Well, sort of. In effect, it does, although of course, it doesn’t use microwaves.

It’s called the Cooper Cooler, and it can take a room temperate can of beverage and make it icy cold in the space of a minute.

All you need is water, ice, and your beverage, and you can have an icy cold drink a minute later. That sounds like a decent minimum for a consumer level product : I doubt a consumer would be willing to wait much more than a minute for their beverage, ice-cold or no.

But I can imagine being willing to invest a modest amount in a device that would power chill a can for me. The one minute delay is only a big factor for your first brew. If you plan on having (or serving) more than one, you just chill the next one while the first is being enjoyed.

I could see something like that being beyond huge with the backyard barbeque and tailgate party set. And of course, frat parties. Imagine handing bro after bro a super cold brewsky or being able to have the coldest beers (and coolers, and drinks for the kiddies) on your block this summer.

That could be a major social coup, and that is exactly the sort of thing that sells millions.

The Secret Sex Lives Of Penguins

And finally… you know I usually save the best for last in this column, and that usually means one of two things : something really amazing, or something really bizarre.

Well folks… this is definitely the latter.

A secret document has recently come to light, one that was all but lost for decades due to the shocked prudery of its author, Antarctic explorer and scientist George Murray Levick, who was so overwhelmed by the deviant sexual practices of the Adélie penguin that he left them out of his final report, and he wrote those findings down in Greek, so that only learned men would be able to read them.

And just what did he observe? Masturbation, gay sex, chick molestation, rape, necrophilia, and even sex crazed murder, just to name a few.

You see, the Adélie penguin has only two weeks in which to get their freak on, and despite what some wildly unscientific moralists would have you believe about what is “natural” and “unnatural”, nature has no taboos and does not provide detailed instructions on how to mate.

All it provides is horniness. I think this song gets the point across. (NSFW!)

And all the bad behaviour that poor Levick observed was from males who had never had a mating season before, and had no idea what they were supposed to do with how they felt, and that leads to a lot of, well, experimentation. Eventually, they get things right, and most of them presumably lose all interest in the other variations immediately thereafter.

Luckily for science and posterity, a copy of the redacted portion of Levick’s report, which was circulated (only amongst a few other scientists who presumably could take it) under the name Sexual Habits of the Adélie Penguin, recently surfaced, and we all get to enjoy their lurid exploits.

It’s pretty strong stuff even for a rampant libertine like myself. If only there has been someone willing to warn us about all this penguin deviancy…

Oh my god, BILL THE CAT TRIED TO WARN US!

Seeya later, folks!

At the speed of life, we have once more returned to where we started on this merry merry-go-round of time we call the Friday Science Whatever. I have four hip hot stories to share with my science loving public today, and yes, there is a weird and wacky Japanese entry.

In fact, like last week, we will start with Japan and then move on to more serious science.

Eyes Bigger Than Your…

Once more, Japan leads the world in ridiculous attempts to solve problems with a vigorous but ill conceived application of technology.

In this case, the problem is dieting, and their solution is to invent augmented reality glasses that make your food look bigger so you will get full sooner and eat less.

The study showed that the control group ate 12 Oreo cookies in one sitting, whereas the group with the augmented reality glasses on ate only 11… a nearly ten percent reduction!

And to think, in order to create mind blowing, game changing results like that, all you had to do was wear heavy, clumsy augmented reality glasses with wires running in and out of them and eat your cookies with a bunch of scientists watching expectantly!

Talk about over-solving a problem. For the amount of trouble involved, I would want much more dramatic results than a lousy ten percent. I cannot imagine any way this could be practical, at least until we are all wearing augmented reality contact lenses 24/7 anyhow.

Oh, and speaking of which…

The View From Inside Your Computer

An entrepreneur named Randy Sprague has come up with the first steps towards that heady future.

He has invented an augmented reality system which combines a special pair of glasses with augmented reality contact lenses to give the user the complete augmented reality experience that, so far, is only the stuff of cutting edge speculative fiction.

In his system, which he calls iOptik (eye optic… get it?), the glasses contain two tiny projectors in the arms of the glasses, and the contact lenses act as both the projection screen and image filter.

What this gets you as a user is a view of reality with any sort of computer graphic projected over it. Want to know what other people who bought that brand of pineapple juice thought of it? Your augmented reality system could superimpose user ratings and a star rating over the product itself. Want to know the name and family details of the person you are talking to? Facial recognition software and some augmented reality graphics could show the info floating around the person’s head.

Now myself, I am not keen on this whole augmented reality business. I am pretty much only interested in it as a way to create extremely immersive video games and other entertainment experiences, and then you are not really talking augmented reality any more, just a different and more immersive display system.

As for practical life applications, I think the augmented reality advocates are missing out on a lot of little details, like the fact that being able to to something does not make it desirable. A world in which we are all half in the Cloud all the time sounds quite unpleasant to me. We already have a problem with people paying attention to their iPods rather than each other. Imagine how much worse it would be if the person could pretend to be paying attention to you, but is really playing Farmville on your forehead and writing snarky comments about what you are saying on Twitter.

I will not be signing up for it any time soon. I like being able to get away from technology.

Predicting Your Health Future

Speaking of technology intruding into our lives, University of Washington Assistant Professor Tyler McCormack has invented a new algorithm for predicting what problems patients will face in the future.

What makes his algorithm better than previous ones is that instead of simply applying statistical models directly to patients on an individual basis, it also uses the outcomes from other patients in similar situations to reinforce the conclusions, thus creating something similar to Amazon.com’s “Other people who ordered this book also ordered… ” crowd-sourcing data pool.

This leads to superior predictions, and creates a far more robust and deeply integrated prediction model than previous systems that did not draw in real world data to test the statistical model’s assumptions.

In theory, this could be a great help to physicians, who after all can only know so much about any given condition and certainly do not know about outcomes from patients other than their own, to work with the patient and see what problems might lie ahead of them, and work to head them off before they become serious enough to require the attention of a doctor.

That would be some top flight preventative medicine.

Radiation Burst From The Past

And now, as always saving the best for last, I present you with the mystery of the massive radiation burst from the past.

Recent evidence from tree ring studies have found that somewhere between 774 AD and 775 AD, the amount of carbon-14 in the Earth’s atmosphere jumped to twenty times the normal amount over the space of just under one year.

And the great part is, nobody knows why.

A lot of the obvious explanations have already been ruled out. Solar flares intense enough to do it would have had far more effects than a carbon-14 jump. It would have to have been far larger than the biggest solar flare ever recorded. There would have been massive auroras all over the world, and surely someone would have noticed and written that down.

As for a supernova, that would have created a “new star” in the sky even brighter than the ones observed in 1006 AD and 1053 AD, which were bright enough to be seen during the day. Again, surely someone would have noticed and jotted it down somewhere.

So we are not sure what the heck happened way back then to put so much carbon-14 into play. It makes for a highly stimulating mystery, and I love genuine scientific mysteries.

I cannot begin to offer any plausible theories. The science is far beyond me. The only theories I can come up with involve crashed alien spaceships or mysterious dark matter asteroids or the like, and those are entertaining, but hardly helpful.

Still, if there is one thing we science fiction writer types like, it is speculating, and I look forward to speculating on this one for a long time.

Seeya next weekm, Science Fans!

Once more, a TED talk has inspired me to write about it, and this particular one is a very excellent examination of a topic I find absolutely fascinating : how past a certain point, having more options makes people less happy, not more.

First off, let me get this said : I love this Barry Schwartz guy. He is likable, he is funny, he is obviously a good thinker, and he has a lot of interesting things to say on the subject.

Also, I have to give mad love to anyone who does such a good job of illustrating his points with cartoons from the New Yorker. That is intellectual brain candy for a fellow like me.

Now, on the substance of his talk : I have a deep personal interest in this Paradox of Choice of which he speaks. Being someone whose overabundance of creativity and/or lack of character often leaves him experiencing the very option paralysis of which Barry Schwartz speaks, I find comfort in the fact that it might be a product of more than my own neuroses. It might, in fact, be product of the current state of society, where we have removed all the old restrictions that used to confine people, but in the process, took away all the things people used to guide and define themselves.

I loved that cartoon with the two goldfish, the bigger one saying to the smaller “You can be anything you want to be!”. I have seen no better illustration of the problems created by the well-meant but ultimately destructive message of unlimited individual potential upon which I was raised. Myself, my generation, and every generation afterward, in fact, as far as I can tell.

But the nub of his talk was this fact that more choices make people less happy in our modern world. The more options you have, the less likely you are to be confident that you made the right choice. The more options you have, the higher your expectations are as to the quality of the result. The more options you have, the greater your fear of being judged for your choices.

That is a point I would like to emphasize, because Schwartz did not cover it. One of the most profound effects of a middle class consumer society is that, in a condition of enormous material plenty, and of communities of people who all have roughly the same income levels (compared to the difference between a lord and his serfs, for example), we compare and compete amongst our income peers almost exclusively on the basis of which products we buy. We judge and are judged by the quality of our choices. We endlessly compare ourselves to others and if they seem more affluent and successful, we ask ourselves “What do they know that I don’t know?”. We pore over magazines looking for that special info that will temporarily assuage our pervasive fears of “falling behind”. We dread like death the idea that we will be found guilty of the worst possible middle class consumer crime : “settling for less”.

That is, and always has been, what the whole “keeping up with the Joneses” thing is about. Odds are, the Joneses are no richer than you are. But if they seem richer and more successful, it would just about kill you, wouldn;t it? To think that people think those smug bastards are better off than you? That they might even think you made stupid consumer choices? That you settled for less?

I mean, what will the neighbors think?

And this modern era of on-demand manufacturing and brands trying to push the other brands off the shelves by offering more varieties of their product and the Internet making it possible to order from anywhere in the world and from a billion different possible suppliers, this option neurosis only gets worse. When you could have ordered any product in the world, what are the odds you will be sure you got the right one? And how high are your expectations for the final result?

I also want to cover that aspect a bit more. I think that not only does a large number of options make you more demanding of the result by the direct mechanism of comparison, but it also works via the deep logic of the labour theory of value. Having the sort through a massive list of options before being able to get what you want forces you to work hard to get the thing, and the harder you work for something, the greater the reward you expect from it.

And when we are talking about is something as mundane and everyday as a tube of toothpaste, the odds are heavily against it being rewarding enough to justify the extra effort.

Another choice that disappears in an option rich society, besides the obvious choice of having fewer choices, is that you lose the choice of not having an opinion on something. In fact, the greater the scope and variety of options, the greater the number of preferences you are now required to develop. You have no choice in the matter. You are going to have to figure out if tartar control is more important to you than tooth whitening. Even if deep down, you really do not give a crap.

One more thing to add before I move on to solutions : what truly complicated this whole issue is the recent science that objectively proves that people are actually extremely bad at predicted what will make them happy. Study after study has asked people to rate their current happiness, then predict which of a set of options will make them happier, then choose, then rate their happiness again.

And time and again, people given full choice of options nevertheless report that they got no happier, or even that they got worse.

People have wondered why. How is it that we are so bad at figuring out what will make us happy? I submit that the Paradox of Choice might provide an explanation. The people are so unsure of whether they made the right choice that it spoils their enjoyment of whatever choice they make. Result? No net gain.

Now on to solutions. At first glance, the problem of too many options seems unsolvable. We individualistic citizens of option rich consumer societies would certainly balk, and balk hard,
at the very notion of someone limited our options for us for our own good.

But I think there are possibilities. For one, from a private sector service point of view, a great advantage could be gained by making all your options optional. Offer people a standard package with only a mild suggestion that other options are available, then if the customer asks for something different, you can tell them “yes, we can do that.”. That way, the customer is not inundated with options and yet still has the freedom to customize their experience to their liking.

But from a broader point of view, the only solution I see is the rise of a group of consumer gurus who work with consumers one on one to help their make their choices. Call them shopping coaches, or happiness experts, or the like. People with the knowledge and expertise to help people voluntarily cut down their options and hone in on the choices and products that suit them best. I think a lot of people would be willing to pay someone to do this.

I can even picture the rise of a chain of supermarkets which, in a sense, specialize in a lack of choice. There would exactly one brand of everything, the store brand. The consumer would obviously have to trust that the store brand represented quality, but with the right kind of promotion, you could make it work. And imagine how much less retail space you would have to pay for if you did not have to stock so many brands of everything!

We can already see choice-limiting trends in the proliferating of consumer ratings on online shopping experiences. With online shopping, you cannot directly interact with the product, and this creates a very abstract and information poor consumer choice experience. But if you can get the aggregate opinion of all the other people who have bought the same sort of product from that retailer, you can then use that information to help make your choice.

Information is only an imperfect solution, however, because of course, inundating the customer with information is as bad or worse than inundating them with choice.

Regardless, I am fairly confident that the increasingly efficient mechanisms of the marketplace will develop solutions to the problems of excessive options in our lives, and in the future we will all be able to find the number of options with which we are comfortable.

After all, it is not as if we have a choice.

Oh wait, that should be bachelorettes AND prison. My bad.

There are two articesl hanging around my browser looking bored and wondering when I will get around to commenting on them, and today I decided to give in to the guilt and let them have their say.

The first one is another example of procrastination making me quite late for the party on an issue, but it is an opinion piece which concerns the recent hooha over a gay bar banning bachlorette parties.

First of all, before this broke, I had no idea that having your bachelorette party at a gay bar was even a thing. It would not have occurred to me that straight ladies would do this, although in retrospect, the logic of it is obvious. You can have your bachelorette party at a bar with a somewhat outrageous and sexually open atmosphere that is full of hot guys wearing next to nothing shaking their groove things, and yet feel perfectly safe because you are (somewhat naively) sure that none of these hot guys will be hitting on you or any of your future bridesmaids.

Now right of the bat, that sounds exploitative, does it not? The feelings of the gay men who frequent the club are not even a consideration. Maybe they do not like being treated like testosterone wallpaper, or worse, unpaid strippers, for the amusement of a bunch of loud, obnoxious, drunk women who will feel perfectly safe making crude, fumbling passes at them and their boyfriends and who treat the other paying patrons like they are all part of some exotic show.

And all while patting themselves on the back about how progressive they are for being “willing” to have such an important event at a bar for, you know, those people.

Want to be progressive? Have it at a lesbian bar.

That is not even counting the political issue about celebrating marriage in front of people who cannot get married to the person of their choice.

But still, it took me a while to sort out my feelings out about this issue, because like a lot of outsiders, I am inherently biased towards inclusiveness. I do not want to kick anyone out unless it becomes absolutely necessary due to their behaviour. I want everyone to be together and get along. The idea of refusing any defined group entry rankles me. And to do it for political reasons makes me feel ill in the pit of my stomach.

But I think I have to side with the ban on this issue. These bachelorette parties sound like they are highly disruptive to the kind of safe haven atmosphere that a gay bar has to generate in this cruel and unfeeling world. And the sad and undeniable fact is that sometimes, in order to create an atmosphere of inclusion for one group, another group has to be excluded.

Even typing those words makes me feel ill. But there are plenty of other places for ladies to have their stagette parties. Nobody is denying them that right.

They just have to do it somewhere else.

The other story I wanted to touch on is this story from Norway about the world’s nicest prison.

Briefly, the story is about Bastoy Prison, a prison located on a small Norwegian island that is run far more like a summer holiday camp than a prison.

There’s a beach where prisoners sunbathe in the summer, plenty of good fishing spots, a sauna and tennis courts. Horses roam gravel roads. Some of the 115 prisoners here — all men and serving time for murder, rape and trafficking heroin, among other crimes — stay in wooden cottages, painted cheery red. They come and go as they please. Others live in “The Big House,” a white mansion on a hill that, on the inside, looks like a college dorm. A chicken lives in the basement, a guard said, and provides eggs for the inmates.

And here is the kicker : they have a very low recidivism rate. Only 20 percent of inmates reoffend within two years of leaving Bastoy. And that is what we want, right?

I mean, we pay a lot of lip service to the idea that a “penitentiary” is someplace we send people to be “rehabilitated”, right? The idea is prevent crime in the future. We want to make good, normal, law-abiding citizens of these people. Right?

Or do we? I imagine a lot of people would howl with outrage at the idea of a prison that treats murderers and rapists so well. After all, these people have done horrible, horrible things and we need to punish them for it. That is what we want to do and that is what feels good, feels right, when people have made us angry. Lash out, make them suffer, call it justice, and then act surprised when treating people like animals in cages turns them into the very sort of anti-civilized monsters we do not want roaming the streets.

So what is more important, our safety or our urge to punish? The prevention of crime, or our bloodlust for vengeance? What would you say to the relatives of a person killed by someone fresh out of prison who had lived so long in that savage environment that they were barely even human any more?

Would you tell them it was worth it, because we made the criminal suffer? That we would gladly have more citizens suffer and die from the actions of dehumanized brutes rather than restrain our lust for revenge and our deep sick desire for a little piece of the suffering of a stranger?

I mean, we have to hurt and torture and dehumanize somebody, right? Someone has to fill in for all the people in our lives we wish we could punish but cannot or will not. And we have criminals in our power, helpless and vulnerable, perfect whipping boys for whatever is pissing us off.

So what if a few extra people die? Just more of an excuse to punish!

The party never ends!

Or maybe we could learn from Bastoy that what these people need is civilizing influences, not savagery.

Well here we are, the first day of June, the month of weddings and school year endings and the Summer Solstice, that longest day of the year when officially goes from Spring to Summer and all the little kiddies get out of school and begin the serious business of enjoying the hell out of not being in class, at least until they started to get bored.

When I was a little kid, I got bored of summer pretty quickly. But then with each successive summer, the time it took me to get bored grew longer and longer, till by high school, I was already at the point where I was thinking “School again already? Damn. ”

But enough personal remembrances. On with the science!

Dear God Japan

We will start off with the weird invention from Japan today, as it is not really all that weird and is barely disturbing at all, and is, in fact, kind of mysterious.

This time, the Japanese have come up with what they are calling a telepresence robot, a field of development they seem to be pursuing with a greater zeal and dedication than any other nation despite the complete and total mystery as to why anyone would want such a thing.

I mean, OK, check this thing out.

Seriously now. What is the frigging point? Why would anyone want a tiny robot on their shoulder that crudely mimics what some remote person is doing? How could that be anything else but incredibly creepy?

And yet, the Japanese seem to be hot after this kind of technology. Just another impenetrable mystery of the mysterious East, I suppose. My theory is that it has something to do with all those soft and hard H anime movies where the shy and hapless male protagonist ends up with a tiny magical chick as a roommate, sex slave, or something along those lines, and I Dream Of Jeannie wackiness ensues.

And did you see that picture of the intended end product? The dude with the hologram on his shoulder? Yeah, that is absolutely nothing like what you have shown us, folks. And even if you could do that, it would still be pretty useless and creepy as hell to boot.

Imagine seeing someone walking down the street talking to a hologram of some geisha on their shoulder. Once you convinced yourself that you had not suddenly been granted the unwelcome ability to see other people’s hallucinations, you would think that person should just talk to their friend on their cell phone like a normal human, wouldn’t you?

Once more, the Japanese have disturbed me with their apparently need to create non-people people.

The Serpents Of Medicine

And I am not talking about the two on the caduceus either.

So, not these guys. Look, they're kissing!

No, what I am talking about is snake type robots that would be let loose in your body to fix it up.

Let us just pause for a moment to let the icy cold squirmy heebie jeebies we all get at the thought of anything like a snake slithering around inside us subside. Feel free to talk a walk or get a hot drink. I will be here when you get back.

Squickiness aside, the technology is intriguing. With a properly defined “mission”, it would be safe to let an autonomous robot loose in the human body to say, clear arterial blockages, destroy bad cholesterol, patch up faults in the nervous system, and who knows what else.

It would be done under a doctor’s supervision, of course, and would raise the bar for how rigorously something was tested before being used on live human beings (I imagine cadaver testing would be first), but still, it could be a viable tech.

Of course, nanotechnology might beat them to the punch and make medical repair robots the size of virii instead, which you have to admit would be a lot less intrusive.

And a lot less creepy.

I mean, what if you could feel them moving inside you?

The End Of Allergies

And now for the Big Medical News of the Week : some scientists from the University of East Finland think they may be on the trail of a vaccine to end allergies.

And not just one allergy, or specific allergies. All of them. Every single allergy in the world would be cured with a single vaccine.

Boom. Gone forever.

It is an awesome and thrilling thought. Imagine all the serious life-threatening allergies in the world
wiped out like polio. It would be amazing if they could just sure that horrible peanut allergy that has cropped up in the last 20 years or so. Nobody should have to live in fear of peanut butter breath. That is just too much for anyone to have to bear.

But no, they are talking about all allergies. From the big to the small, from deadly auto-histamine disorders (like some forms of arthritis!) to the common sniffles many of us get every spring, gone with a shot.

The vaccine would basically alter the allergens so that they would not trigger a histamine release, and without those pesky histamines, there are no allergic responses.

Now, this begs the question why we have histamines in the first place. What is the point of these responses? I cannot, for the life of me, see the evolutionary advantage of being allergic to something. It is not like a runny nose and watery eyes help you to pass on your genes. If anything, they make you a lot less to do so, as nobody is going to want to make babies with the sneezing guy who is about to be eaten by a sabre toothed tiger.

So I have been pondering the question of what would happen if a person simply had no histamine whatsoever for a while now. I am not so arrogant as to assume if I do not know what it does, it must do nothing and we could get rid of it.

But seriously, Darwin. Allergies. WTF?

I just finished watching this TED Talk via Netflix, and it filled me with such marvelous wonder and inspiration that I just had to write about it.

(Look, Ma, I am following an inspiration all the way into action!)

The talk is by noted historian David Christian and it is about Big History.

Now when he says “Big History”, he means, as big as it gets. From the moment of the Big Bang to the very second in which you are reading the word at the end of this sentence. And what is unique and to me extremely satisfying about Christian’s account of all the history there is, period, is that by framing it as the history of increasing complexity, he provides something absolutely vital and unique : a single meaningful context for the totality of the history of the universe.

From nothingness to singularity to Big Bang to super-hot undifferentiated energy to slightly differentiated energy to electrons and protons to helium and hydrogen to stars to supernovas and heavier elements to planets to one celled life to animals and then to us, it is all a case of increasing complexity, culminating (so far) in sentience and its most important product : culture (what Christian called “collective learning”).

This brilliant framework for understanding the history of absolutely everything has instantly put David Christian into the same category as Carl Sagan and Desmond Morris in my mind, and those who know me will know that this places Christian in a very elite group indeed, because I hold those two men in such enormous esteem that I feel no hesitation in called them my heroes.

What makes all three of these people heroes to me is the brilliance of their thinking and their communication. Desmond Morris’ book The Naked Ape is the only account of human behaviour that I have ever read that makes comprehensive sense of all the crazy things we humans do. And Carl Sagan, and now David Christian as well, have filled me with a powerful sense of the wonder of the real world and the magic and mystery and spectacular splendor of the Universe.

To me, that is all the religion I will ever need. No rituals, no penances, no obeisances, no mysticisms, no sacrifices, no tithes, and most importantly, no demands of sacrificing one’s reason in the name of “faith” required. The real world is more than marvelous enough for me, and the best part is, it does not depend on my believing on it in order to stay real. It is real whether I believe in it or not.

And who would have thought that it was possible that, after centuries of humbling demotions (from the center of Creation all the way down to some mildly clever monkeys alone in a massive and uncaring Universe) that we would suddenly find us human beings (and whatever other sentient life there may be Out There) at the top of things again?

Because to me, that is the inevitable conclusion of Christian’s speech. As sentient beings with the ability to learn and adapt and accumulate knowledge via culture, we are the culmination of the complexification of the Universe (again, as far as we know). Our big sentient brains make us both the most complex creatures we know of, and the creators of complexity in our surroundings. And if we keep it more or less together, we will some day spread the complexity of Life to other worlds, and thus increase the complexity of the Universe still further when we bioform planets and create interstellar civilization. Creatures like us really are the whole point of the Universe, at least from the point of view of complexity.

Of course, that is simply our point of view right now. For all we know, there is something only vaguely imaginable above us in the complexity hierarchy, something the same order of magnitude above us in terms of complexity as we are above the protozoa. There is no reason to suppose that we are the end of the line of this cosmic complexity process, and to do so would be to suffer a tragic failure of imagination.

Remember, just because we cannot imagine it does not mean it does not exist. We like to pretend imagination has no limits, but the truth is, even crazy dreamers like me are limited by our finite minds and incomplete understanding of the Universe. You can only go so far from the home base of what you know and understand, and all of us are bound by that restriction.

It’s just that some of us can see a little further than others. That’s all.

For example, people like David Christian. I greatly applaud his decision to develop a free syllabus based on his framework and put it online, and I hope science and history teachers all over the world download it and teach it. I honestly think that it could provide the others with the same sense of potent wonder and inspiration as it does for me.

Not everybody, of course. But many. If I were in the business of founding a new religion, Big History would be one of its cornerstones. It would make an excellent cosmology and context for a new religion, one based not on old stories someone happened to put together in a book but on the far more durable and reliable observations of science and what we know to be true of the amazing Universe we live in.

Said religion would still be missing a lot of elements necessary for a new kind of religion, like rituals, a format for spiritual counseling, mood synchronizing and reinforcing gathers, and so on.

But at least it would not fall apart when questioned, and require increasingly large sections of one’s reason to be disabled just to continue believing in it.

It would be a religion that was built to last.

And I honestly think that it could work.

Too bad I am not the sort of person to go around starting religions.

Or am I?