I was going to call today’s entry something involving “potpourri”, but then I thought “Who care about potpourri? It comes in weird little sachets and invariably contains at least one thing that makes me sneeze. It’s supposed to keep your drawers smelling fresh, but I will leave that up to my fabric softener. You know what I like? Sampler platters. I love getting a whole big platter of various tasty fried things and other appies to try. I am going to call today’s entry a sampler. Take that, Evelyn and Crabtree!”

I have a long standing feud with the ladies at E&C. They know what they did.

On today’s platter, in the upper right quadrant, you will find this rather savoury bit of superbly cooked and highly piquant slab of deep fried crispy-skin schadenfreude : A whole half hour documentary about just what a heartless evil job destroying bastard Mitt Romney and his Bain Capital cronies have been in the past.

I know it’s a big helping, but you don’t have to finish it all in one sitting. Watch the first ten minutes or so, and you will get the drift. The rest is more of the same.

I officially hate that son of a bitch now. He does not simply represent the One Percent, he represents the absolute worst of them. Born to privilege, made billions completely destroying lives, businesses, and jobs, and probably doesn’t have the slightest idea why anyone would have a problem with that. After all, everything he did was legal and incredibly profitable, ergo, it was fine. And it’s not like he and his cronies ever had to even look at the people whose families they destroyed. They did it all from some posh Manhattan office.

What makes this documentary a treat, though, is that it will make for very good ammunition for Barack Obama when the right win machine, despite what their base actually wants, goes ahead and makes Mitt their candidate anyhow.

Making the case that Mitt is a horrible person will be quite easy, and while his right wing opponents might feel a little squeamish about attacking him about his Bain (should be spelled Bane) activities because they are actually on record as being for unfettered greed in capitalism, the Democrats will have no such qualms.

But enough of that challenging cuisine with the sophisticated adult taste. In the upper right quadrant of the platter, you will find everyone’s favorite Internet dish : funny cat pictures.

And for just this week, it comes with bonus GBLT content!

This is my GAY CAT STRUT BITCHES!

What is it with me and calling people bitches like that, anyhow? I seem to have a fascination with it. I have this desire to burst in a group of nerds and shout “Roll for initiative, bitches!” and see if anyone lunges for their dice bag.

I have a weird inner life, even by my own standards.

Anyhow, isn’t Pride Cat great? I am trying to figure out just what that pose suggests. I first thought “INVISIBLE DIVING BOARD” but the pose is not quite right for diving. It more suggests something highly dramatic, like opera, or figure skating. “INVISIBLE OPERA HOUSE”? Nah.

Moving to the lower left quadrant of our platter, we find another Internet staple, the tried and true taste of very silly animated GIFs. To wit :

I bet she had to think of a wonderful thing first.

Imagine the fun this gal must have had making this silly little clip. For those of you unfamiliar with camera magic, the way you make something like this is quite simple. You record yourself jumping in the air and making that flapping bird pose in four different locations on your bed, and then you edit together only those frames which have you at the right height and motion, and voila, you have what appears to be a person in her adorable pajamas flapping about her bed like she’s a chicken.

What I particularly enjoy is how the bedsheets seem to be pushed down by the force of her flight. Of course, they are really just pushed down by the force of her kerboinging on her bed, just like your parents always told you not to do. But it really sells the silly effect.

I love that kind of thing.

And now, at long last, our gaze turns to the lower right quadrant of the platter, where you will find this highly exciting and stimulating science news story en croute : turns out, every star has, on average, at least one planet orbiting it.

Is that not kewl? This means there are scads and scads more planets than was previously thought, and of course, the more planets, the more likelihood that one of them has another intelligent life form.

Or heck, just life in general. We are not in a position to be picky. Just finding some alien slime mold would be a million thrills at this point. But what we really want, of course, is another sentience.

Needless to say, Drake’s Equation has never looked so good. There might well be millions of other races out there for us to meet.

If you take a look at Drake’s Equation…..

A truly magnificent work of definitive, scientific guessing. Click to enlarge.

… you will see that what has changed is the F_p variable, the fraction of stars that have planets. When that goes up, so does N, the likelihood of there being intelligent life within radio distance of Earth.

Wow, I almost sound like I know what I am talking about, don’t I? Well, it’s just basic algebra, adding probabilities and so on. Don’t get intimidated by the subscript, it’s just there to identify each variable when there are only so many letters of the alphabet and mathematicians refuse to use two without making the second one hide below the line.

Anyhow, I am super stoked at this development. It is great news for us in the “Go Aliens Go!” group.

Of course, we really have no idea what the rest of the variables represent. What fraction of planets have life on them? What fraction of those will have intelligent life? Who knows? We can only make speculate wildly.

But still, the odds of finding more sentient life forms out there has gone up, and that’s enough for me.

Talk to us soon, Space Brothers! Preferably over the Internet, in our email inboxes.

That would seem friendly enough, right?

Found some fun stuff on Fark today, and thought I would it with all you hale and hearty folks.

First off, let’s start the show with that Shakespearian question of whether or not a rose would smell as sweet if it had another name.

Well, what if it’s name was Anal?

New Zealand’s government has released its list of rejected baby names, and there is, by God and all that is holy and industrial strength hand cleanser, an entry for Anal.

My brain crashes when I try to think of what would make someone want to name their baby Anal. The obvious joke must be said : if it had been anal, they would not have ended up with a baby!

That aside, I can only hope that it means something else in Maori, or some other non-English language. That is the most innocent explanation I can think of for the desire to name one’s child Anal.

Of course, this would mean that somewhere out there, there is a language in which Anal means “beautiful flower” or “mighty warrior” or “wise sage” or something like that. Which must cause lots of confusion at the porn store.

Or maybe someone was innocently being a really big Freud fan? Or maybe this is the child of an overly enthusiastic proctologist? It sure as hell can’t be a descriptive name.

Other names that did not make the grade in New Zealand :

The most common rejected name was Justice, with 49 sets of parents trying for that moniker, followed by Princess (24) and King (21). Bishop hit the list with seven attempts and Lucifer with six. Also on the reject list were Messiah and Christ.

Took me a minute to figure out what the problem with Justice was, besides, of course, kind of setting your kid up for a fall when they do not turn out to be steel-fisted street vigilante. But then I realized that “Justice”, like “Princess” and “King”, can be a title, and one of the no-nos in naming is giving your kid a name that implies they have a title or rank they did not earn.

Take that, Major Major‘s dad!

Moving on : let’s fly in the face of taboo and talk about a naked man cavorting with children.

Because, as we all know, if anyone below the age of consent sees genitals other than their own, it kills them instantly and painfully.

In this case, the situation is this : a French mail-order catalog accidentally included a picture in their children’s section that featured four children with linked arms running joyously along the beach, plus one totally naked adult human male who happened to be sauntering by.

I am a little surprised that this cause a scandal in France. Aren’t half their beaches clothing optional, or somesuch? I honestly thought the French were cooler about nudity than this.

And of course, you have to wonder how this got past the editors. I don’t know about others, but I pretty much notice wangs fist when I look at a picture. Other people have different priorities, granted.

Obviously, in my opinion, the only harm done by this kind of thing is done by the hysterical overreactions of parents. It’s just a penis, after all. It isn’t going to leap off the page and throttle your children.

So much of how we treat children has nothing to do with what is good for them and everything to do with protecting our own wounded inner child from the realities of adult life.

And speaking of inner childishness, let’s talk about where poop goes.

Someone has been dumping dirty adult diapers (and by “dirty”, I am forced to assume they mean “used”, and potentially that means “full”) on a highway in Corona Del Mar, California, and the residents are understandably kind of upset about that.

I have a fascination with “wrong things done with poop” stories because where that stuff goes is one of our deepest taboos, so any violation of it is a highly unusual event and that makes it interesting to me.

In this case, honestly, I imagine the explanation is something quite mundane, like someone who is not well schooled in the intricacies of elder care tasked with transporting someone in their declining years and, clearly not learning, repeatedly having to do a quick “road change” of Grandpa and not wanting “that thing” in their care for one second more than necessary.

People can be awfully cavalier about making (or in this case, leaving) a mess when they are outside of what their primate brains consider “their territory”.

Ask any janitor.

And finally for tonight, one of my favorite kinds of news story ever : mugger pics the WRONG victim.

In this case, the agent of glorious instant justice was an ex-boxer named Peter Sandy, who was approached by some cowardly young man who brandished what is described as a “commando” style knife and demanded cash.

Sandy responded with a left hook that knocked his assailant to the ground.

His assailant then fled the scene.

FLAWLESS VICTORY : Peter Sandy.

I love stories like this. What could be more satisfying than a seemingly weak and vulnerable person suddenly turning the tables on someone who sought to victimize them?

That is pure uncut karmic justice joy, in my books. I mean, picture the look on the punk’s face when he realized he had just been decked by an old, old man who looked ready to do it again. Imagine the look of surprise and terror in hie eyes as he picked himself up on the ground. Imagine the shame he felt when he ran away like a little whiny bitch.

And finally, and this is the juiciest morsel of them all, imagine the consequences to the mugger’s social life if word got around that he got his ass kicked by someone so old, they knew Big Ben when he was just Little Benjamin and lent the Druids his level so they could build Stonehenge?

That is what I call top qualify schadenfreude.

Seeya later, folks!

Happy Friday, folks. (Hey, that would make a great name for a chain of pub restaurant after work hangout type places, Happy Fridays. Take that, TGIFridays!)

I have a few science story links kicking about, looking up at me with sad, expectant eyes, wondering when they will make it into the big leagues and finally be included in one of my world famous, globe spanning, really neato blog entries, and so I figured I better take care of them lickety-split before those adorable little misfit ragamuffins form a Little League team that steals everyone’s hearts with their shenanigans and eats me out of house and home.

You know. Like termites.

First up, brace yourself for a trip into the world of the creepy crawlies, as the next story is a spider related story. So take your anti-heebie pills and come with me.

For we are about to learn how male wolf spiders learn to dance from television.

No, they don’t watch an all-singing, all-dancing, all-spider version of Dancing With The Stars on an increasingly desperate Animal Planet. But a recent study proved they can learn mating dances from other male wolf spiders who they have only seen via a television and, presumably, somebody’s really, really creepy porn stash. (Don’t feel bad, dude, I am sure you only watch it for the articles. )

Not only did they copy the ones they saw, but they only copied the ones which where successful in landing the male some spider booty.

This, creepy factor aside, is a pretty mind blowing result, because as far as we knew, invertebrates like the arachnids were in no way sophisticated enough to learn from others of their own kind. We sort of assumed that was a mammal thing, to be honest.

In fact, it suggests that these spiders must have something that functions like our own mirror neurons, which fire in exactly the way it would be required for us to repeat an action we see another human performs, and might well be the basis for one of humanity’s greatest gifts, empathy.

Spiders with empathy? It’s not impossible. For arachnids, wolf spiders are surprisingly sophisticated hunters, hunting in much the way an intelligent mammalian spider might, able to vary tactics according to conditions and follows a number of hunting behaviours instead of having just the one trick, like web spinning or lair building, like most spiders.

Moving away from the fascinating but creepy world of spiders, we come to this story about how researchers in Japan are taking tsunami-ravaged land and turning it into a full automated robot farm.

Is this cool, or what? Check this out :

After salt is removed from the soil of the 600 acre plot, the agriculture ministry’s plan calls for unmanned tractors to work fields lit by LEDs that will keep insects at bay in lieu of pesticides. The robotic tractors will till, plant, and tend to rice, soybeans, wheat, and various fruits and vegetables that will then also be harvested by their robotic overseers.

It’s about time! High efficiency automated farming has been on my “flying car” list for ages. We are never going to be able to get agrarian efficiency up to the point where we can feed the poorest of the world without a radical rethinking of the farm based model. This sort of automation could be as big a leap in farm yields as the invention of fertilizer. Imagine if we could feed twice the people in half the land for half the price!

Finally, a story that has me absolutely riveted with fascination : this in-depth article that suggests, among other things, that most soldiers in war before the modern era would never shoot to kill.

It turns out, human beings have a very strong resistance to killing other human beings, despite what decades of war and crime might lead you to think.

The sort of rigorous psychological abuse that we take as a normal part of military training in the modern era was virtually unknown prior to World War II. Before that, studies showed that only one man in five was actually shooting at the enemy when they fired their weapons. The rest would just shoot in the air, or shoot vaguely at the enemy but without aiming.

Now partly, that might be due to simply the different nature of war. A conscripted soldier in an imperialistic war might behave differently than a volunteer in an ideologically backed war. And so on.

Myself, I am curious about the role of the gun in this phenomenon. Obviously, in the era of the sword, you could not very well just wave your sword in the general direction of the enemy and get away with it. It would be pretty clear that you were not really committed to this whole war thing.

So presumably, this applies to only gun warfare, when you can fire to no effect and still look like you were really trying to kill a guy. Or, even better, you were not firing to kill at all, but to keep the enemy from going where you are firing.

The depressing part of the article is that in the modern era, we have come up with all kinds of ways of psychologically brutalizing our soldiers to make sure that pesky “thou shalt not kill” instinct that makes us reluctant to kill one another does not get in the way of the important business of war.

It makes sense that we are reluctant to kill one another. All dangerous predators have to have such a built in resistance, lest minor conflicts prove lethal.

Oh, and this just in : watch what happens when you drop a Gummi bear into molten potassium chlorate :

Holy shit, right? That is one highly energetic reaction. Intellectually, we know that if something is high in calories, it means it is high in potential energy.

But to see all that energy come leaping out of an innocent little Gummi is quite a different matter.

And is it just me, or does that hissing sound sort of making it sound like the Gummi is screaming?

It’s probably just me.

There’s a bestselling book out called “The Secret” which has millions of devotees and is, by all meaningful standards, a rip roaring success of the publishing world. You probably have heard of it, or seen it on the bookstore shelves.

Its message is hardly unique. Those of us who remember the seventies would know its concepts as “The Power Of Positive Thinking”, and the exact same ideas, phrased differently, have appeared since time immemorial.

Having just watched the first half hour of a rather breathlessly earnest documentary presentation of its ideas (it repeats itself a lot, so I feel comfortable assuming I got the gist), I feel I can present, examine, dissect, and thus glean the worth from what might superficially seem a rather, well, superficial philosophy.

The core idea is simple : the “law of attraction” states that you will “attract” to yourself whatever you think about the most. If you are always thinking about negative things, like how depressed you are, how broke you are, how hard your life is, and so on, you will attract things which reinforce that mood. If you instead think about how lucky you are, how things are going to improve for you really soon, and if (most importantly) you powerfully visualize the things that you want to happen, visualize them so powerfully that it is almost as if, in your mind, they are already happening, then the universe will bring you that very thing.

Like I said, not exactly a groundbreaking new idea. I suspect, however, that is one that has such a strong appeal that it can be sold at least once a generation as thought it was brand new, and the success of this particular incarnation, assuming the book matches the movie, is due to a strong combination of accessible and appealing language, very thorough multi-angle explanations, and the aforementioned breathless earnestness and credulity in selling this as “The Secret” of the ages, which all great people have known, and so forth.

At first glance, it seems like nothing more than the usual lightweight New Age claptrap which sounds good at first but which, to someone with a negative personality at least, seems to clearly be an endorsement of the old moral dodge of the victim-blaming “just world” error that assures people that everyone always gets what they deserve so they shouldn’t worry about bad things happening to other people.

After all, they are only doing it to themselves, right? They deserve it!

And clearly, a great deal of this sort of thinking is clearly just the usual New Age bullwash, demonstrating people’s tendency to mistake metaphorical subjective truth for literal objective truth. Our thoughts do not “attract” anything in any literal sense, your mind cannot somehow realign the entire universe for good or for ill, our brains, as amazing at they are, do now have the power to somehow negate the randomness of life simply by radiating their fantastic thought waves. That’s complete cattle excrement and should be disposed of in the appropriate sanitary fashion.

However, there is a way that such a philosophy could work to improve one’s life and create a lot of the same effects being ascribed to it without the need for any kind of vague and completely illogical and unscientific mid powers being postulated.

It has to do not with the Universe at large, but the world of human relations, the web of social reality in which every human being operates. And it has to do with positive and negative thoughts, but not on any cosmic scale, just how we interact with other humans via empathy.

If you are thinking and feeling negative things, your fellow human beings will feel the same things via empathy. And because empathy is so poorly understood, deep down, this will seem like an attack to them. This person came into the room, and I started feeling bad, and I am pretty sure it’s coming from that person. Why would that do that to me? I have to attack them back to defend myself, and if possible, make them go away.

And so, tragically and immorally but understandably, people react to people in negative mood and mind states with their own negative reactions, which of course makes their target feel even worse, and a very destructive and unpleasant cycle is put into motion.

Furthermore, negative people leave others with a negative impression of them, an unpleasant memory that recurs every time someone thinks of them… and so, naturally, people try not to think about them at all. Consequently, their are not in people’s minds when those people encounter opportunities which may benefit them.

But conversely, people in a happy and positive mindset make other people feel good just by being around. Instead of being shunned or attacked, their presence is actively sought. People respond to this person who is givng them positive emotions by radiating their own positive response, thus reinforcing the positive mood and making the positive person’s world seem quite positive indeed.

They also create a positive association in people’s minds, and thus make it pleasant to remember them. Hence, they stay in people’s minds and, because reciprocity is a basic human response pattern, said people will want to reward them for the good feelings they got from said positive person, will be naturally inclined to help them in any way they can. And when the positive person responds with joy and gratitude to the gifts and opportunities given, that further reinforces the potential for positive interactions in the givers’ mind.

It all makes sense, and none of it requires any dubious cosmic forces or a breathtakingly naive and ill thought out solipsistic worldview. Positive people make others happy and make good impressions on people, and so people like them, feed their positivity, and help them out. Negative people make others unhappy, leave negative impressions that make people avoid thinking about them, and cause others to shun them or attack them.

Whether or not it is possible to turn oneself from negative to positive is another matter entirely.

This is an open letter to all the sad children of the world, especially the ones walking around in grown up bodies trying to cope with the world as it is.

Hello, all my fellow sad children. My, but there’s a lot of us, aren’t there? It seems like you cannot browse a forum or lift a shroud these days without finding more of us. Alone and adrift in this great cruel world, we can’t seem to live but for dying, and everywhere you go, great shoals of us have run aground in the gutters.

Well, not tonight, my dears. Watch closely as I take my extremely magical chalk and draw a big, thick, bold line around all of us, and with a simple spell, I hereby declare that all that is inside the circle is safe, that our personal demons will have to wait politely outside because nothing negatives or painful is allowed inside, and it’s a party day in kindergarten all the time, and nobody has to do or feel anything they don’t want.

And now that we are all together in this great big wide sunshiny room, where everything is wonderful and happy and nothing is gloomy or sad or uncomfortable or weird, it is finally safe to talk about why we are all here, and why there are so many of us.

It doesn’t seem to make any sense, does it? How can there be so many of us floating around without a purpose or even an idea of what we want to be when we grow up, when the world, or at least the modern part of it, has never been so good? Nobody in history has lived as well as we do now. Few of us have ever wanted for food, clothing, shelter, or entertainment. We might not have gotten everything we wanted, but we got everything we needed, and so you would think we would be the happiest people who ever lived.

But if anything, we seem to be going in the opposite direction, don’t we? Filled to the gills with advice and pills, and more connected with each other via the magic of technology than ever more, yet so many of us limp through life like wounded angels who are too tired to fly, but afraid to land.

How can this be? What went wrong? How did we end up bruised and confused and afraid in a cold and lonesome world , instead of walking through the warm and supportive corridors we are sure we were promised one day?

When were we dropped off and never picked up again, and how many of us are, to this day, waiting for a minivan to come pick us up and take us to the next thing?

It can’t just be up to us…. can it? How would that be fair? Is this all going to be on the test?

And just when is the next test, anyhow? It feels like we’ve been waiting almost forever.

How is it that so many arrive at the leap into adulthood without enough momentum to reach the other side? And you know what happens then, right?

Maybe the problem is that by giving us everything they thought we would need, our parents just made all the things they couldn’t give us, or didn’t know to give us, or didn’t know how to give us, all the more evident. Maybe that is the curse of the modern age, to arrive into maturity with great energy but without anything left on the other side any more.

Maybe our parents, and their parents, tore down all that used to cushion the fall, and never even looked back to see what happened to those who came after them.

Maybe it’s not their fault, though. Maybe this is just the way it had to be for society to go forward. It would be nice to think that all our pains are just the birth pains of a new era, one where we rebuild what was destroyed, but this time, with our keen knowledge of what we are missing, we will build a new and better world, full of wamrth and love and nobody ever, ever being left all alone in the dark.

Maybe that’s our job. Maybe that’s why we’re here. We have to build the next level, and take humanity one level higher. Maybe that is all that any generation can hope to do. And maybe, just maybe, everything from the last level had to go first. Maybe those previous generations really did us all a favour, and some day history will look back at this time as the terrible and wonderful era of heroes who fought evil and built the world anew out of the bones of the past, like they did in the era of World War II.

Or maybe all us sad children, the gifted and/or afflicted, needed was a little guidance, someone who could show us the way to the next thing without necessarily forcing us to take it. Maybe before telling us all that we could be whatever we wanted to be, and then leaving us to figure out what the hell that meant, exactly, we could have been handed a few useful and practical hints.

And maybe, just maybe now, we should decide, as a society, that sometimes, settling for less is perfectly fine, and there is no sin in being perfectly ordinary.

Well, that’s enough of the Maybe Game for now, little children. I can see you all drooping in your chairs and so it’s clearly past time we all went to bed. So pick up your play mats and place them neatly on the pile, take your two cookies and your glass of milk, and head up to bed.

I will be up to tuck you all in to your warm, safe, comfortable beds and read you a wonderful bedtime story *about a magical land where nothing bad can ever happen and people are happy and good to each other all the time) in a few minutes.

And don’t worry. None of this will be on the test.

By now, most people are aware of the sad pathology of the hoarder. These are the sad and lonely individuals who we see on the news or on heartbreaking reality televisions shows who lived in houses jam packed with the often worthless items which they compulsively collect. Old newspapers, scraps of cloth, broken toys, and a myriad of other items considered by most of us as being worthless junk. And all stacked to the ceiling in every inch of their home, to the point where all that is left is a narrow path between the piles to allow for access to basic necessities. And worst of all, any and all attempts to help them by removing any of their hoard, no matter how filthy or terrible their living conditions have become because of it or how their unsanitary homes hurt others, is met with unrelenting, irrational, and impenetrable resistance.

These people’s tragic stories and how they reflect the dangers of a society built around acquisition, accumulation, and consumption, are part of the public consciousness now.

But there is another kind of hoarder, one far less tragic and innocent, who is just as compulsive and illogical and unreasonable, but who instead of being doomed to a lonely and terrible existence far out of society’s light, finds instead that their pathology leads to the very height of society’s esteem.

The difference is that this second group of people does not hoard trash, they hoard cash. They don’t collect animals and pets, they collect people in positions of power. And they don’t ruin houses and apartment , they wreck nations and economies.

They are the money hoarders, and their pathology is a constant threat to freedom, democracy, and the values we all hold dear, and we cannot count of them to seek a cure on their own.

We have to bring the cure to them.

In order to understand this public diagnosis, we first must delve a little deeper into what makes the hoarders we are all familiar with live like they do, and what drives them to do what they do.

The key pathology of hoarding is a deep and desperate addiction to the feeling of increasing one’s hoard. All other pleasures are distantly subsidiary to this all consuming addiction. The key word is MORE. More, more, more, always more.

The concept of “more” implies within itself the idea of the hoard itself. You cannot have the concept of “more” without an idea of how much you currently have. From this deduction, it is clear to see how this desire for “more” becomes radically destructive when it becomes so dominant. In order to constantly have more, your hoard must grow and grow, and if the need is so strong that is blots out all other considerations, then, like any addiction, it will soon supersede concerns of personal health, safety, family, public life, social responsibilities, and the effect one’s behaviour has on others.

Hence the sad and lonely life of the hoarder. As their disease takes over more and more of their life, everything else is pushed out, both physically and psychologically.

And as the desire for “more” overwhelms the rest of the personality, this simple desire creates its own perfect antithesis : the terror of “less”.

To a deeply sick hoarder, there is absolutely nothing worse than “less”. This cannot be emphasized too strongly. To a hoarder, absolutely anything that would reduce the side of hoard is far, far worse than death. As the disease progresses, the hoard becomes not only the hoarder’s only source of pleasure but also their own source of identity. They completely lose the ability to distinguish between themselves and their hoard. Hence, any suggestion of removing any part of their hoard meets the kind of deep animal-level terror and resistance that always occurs when our identity is threatened.

To lose the slightest part of the hoard is to lose a part of oneself. And the response to that kind of threat is always violent, irrational, and total.

Now apply this to the modern day money hoarder. They acquire, and display, material wealth far beyond any reasonable use for it. For them, their bank balance is their old newspapers, their empty paint cans, their piles of discarded pizza boxes. It is the hoard which much always grow larger, and never ever ever grow even the slightest bit smaller.

And nothing else matters. Not their family, neglected in favour of the pursuit of “more”. Not personal relationships, fur these are all filtered through the desire for “more”. Not responsibility to others, for such an aggressive and powerful disease allows for no competition of needs. And certainly not any ties to something as vague and remote from self as a nation of origin.

This is why this class, these One Percenters, so violently resists the slightest notion of any kind of tax increase, no matter how small. Like all desperate addicts, they are devoted to the object of their addiction with a fervor matched only by religion devotion. And like all fanatics, they cannot tolerate the slightest desecration of their golden idol.

There is no tax level they will accept. There is no tax break they would turn down. They are addicts, junkies, with a deadly disease that precludes any and all fine moral reasoning. They are, essentially, ethical infants.

So for all the elaborate protestations of moral indignity and declarations of the sacred rights of money, their position basically boils down to that of a poorly raised toddler screaming “No! No! They are my toys, and nobody else is allowed to touch them! I won’t share and you can’t make me!” at his or her kindergarten class.

So don’t be distracted by the bright lights and fancy language that the One Percenters can afford. It is nothing but smokescreen, no more real than the Wizard of Oz and his big shows.

Pay attention, instead, to the morally stunted little men and women behind the curtain, and see them for the pathetic ill-behaved spoiled children that they are.

And be prepared to teach them a lesson by taking their candy away if they continue to refuse to share.

Remember that cool movie Minority Report, where Tom Cruise live in a bluish future where they have these freaky cool bald chicks who can predict crime before it happens and then the cops go and arrest the person for the crime before they commit it?

And then he gets falsely pre-accused of a pre-crime he didn’t pre-commit? and then the rest of the movie devolves into a high tech future action film where the only interesting part is when Cruise is using the way cool future hologram floating in the air computer network?

Well, we’re still working on that bit.

But the whole predicting crime before it happens thing, we got that shit down cold.

Witness this artfully compiled enormous infographic!

Sadly, no bald chicks, floaty computers, or gun battles for computer files are involved. Instead, the miracle of crime prevention by crime prediction is done by boring old statistical analysis.

Turns out, police departments in large cities all over the USA have been compiling and analyzing data on past crimes for decades now in order to create a robust statistical model of crime. This model, in turn, is being used to try to predict future crime and hence be able to concentrate police resources in the area and prevent the crime from happening.

And the amazing thing is, this shit actually works!

The programs have produce solid results. Cities where they actually have less crime with fewer police officers. That is a highly eloquent demonstration of efficiency in policing.

Of course, before we get too amazed, a lot of that might be simple demographics. Crime has been going down across the board since the seventies, and so all this ballyhoo about the effectiveness of advanced police methods of various kinds might be nothing more than taking credit for the heat in the summer.

Why is crime going down across the board? A lot of people claim it is simply demographics. Fewer males 18-15 around, less crime. And there is statistical data to suggest there may be some truth to this. Most violent crime involves male humans between those two ages, and often, the violence they do is to one another.

But I also think that we are simply becoming more civilized. It might not seem like it sometimes, especially with the right wing anarchism running loose in the world right now, but I think that as society advances on a global scale, the ingredients of crime like poverty and a breakdown of orderly society become more scarce, the crime resulting from them falls proportionately.

But back to these crime prediction programs. There is presumably some truth to them, possibly a great deal. And if there is, then we have to wonder at the amazing advances in practical statistical analysis in the modern era.

I have waxed rhapsodic about this before, so I will try to be brief, but I would really like to know what has changed in the last decade that makes this kind of mad statistical wizardry work when before it was a rather sad joke that never did what it was supposed to do, or did it very badly.

I can only assume that it’s one part better maths to five parts simply having the computers to really crunch those numbers in ways unthinkable in the past.

Anyhow, back to the plot. I quite like the idea of cops being able to predict crime and show up in time to prevent it. Prevention is always vastly superior to punishing the perpetrators afterwards. The number one best deterrent against crime is preventing its success. No matter how young, dumb, and full of something you are, no matter how incapable of considering future consequences that youth and testosterone have rendered you, the fact that you will not even get to enjoy the proceeds of your crime for a heartbeat because you will never lay your hands on them in the first place will be a very strong disincentive towards crime.

You won’t get a chance to eat the chocolate bar you stole. You won’t even get it out of the store.

And while young people are capable of a lot of crazy, shortsighted things for a lot of decidedly insufficient reasons, they also give up in frustration fairly easily. A low enough chance of success would be enough to stop most of them dead in their tracks.

But despite the woefully unscientific scaremongering at the end of the infographic about “our rights are in jeopardy”, the answer to the question “Can we punish individuals before they commit a crime” is an obvious NO, and nobody is suggesting otherwise.

See, Minority Report is a work of science fiction. In order to invent and explore pre-crime as an interesting science fiction concept, Philip K. Dick had to invent freak bald psychic chicks who could magically predict crime with such accuracy that it was as though it had happened.

We don’t have freaky bald psychic chicks here in reality, and hence, we will never punish people for something they have not done. That would violate the very epistemological basis for the concept of law and order. People are punished for things they do. If they don’t do it, they are not punished. That is how the whole thing works.

Punish people for things they haven’t done, and you destroy the incentive to remain lawful. If you are going to get punished either way, might as well do it, right?

And that irrationality aside, I see no reason not to view statistical crime prevention as a wonderful thing. It does nothing to put innocent people in jail. In fact, it doesn’t put anyone in jail when it is operating at full capacity because it prevents the crime from happening in the first place.

And there is just plain no downside to that. We all want crime to go away. A world without crime sounds like a nice place to live to me.

All we need to do is realize that not all increases in police efficiency result in a loss of liberty.

Got a troika of science stories to share with you today, and as is my usual compulsion, I will share them with you in ascending order of scariness.

That way, I get to build suspense!

First up, the many uses of…. mollusk blood!

The mollusk in question is the giant keyhole limpet, and the factor in the blood that has everyone in the cutting edge biochemical world excited about it is called keyhole limpet cyanin (KLH) (which has a much larger Wiki entry than the critter itself, poor thing) and amongst its many possibilities is a little one called maybe curing cancer.

How? Simple. Sorta. Basically, your body really doesn’t like KLH. It provokes a very strong immune response. Big deal, a lot of things do that, right?

The difference with KLH is that if before you put it in someone, you attack the chemical markers of something you really want the body to attack, like, for instance, motherfucking cancer, you then get a massive immune response against the cancer.

Now getting the body to stop treating cancer like it is a normal healthy part of the body and start treating it like the nasty and unwanted badness that it is has been a very big goal of oncological research for decades upon decades. It would make an ideal solution.

The big problem with fighting cancer is always “how do we attack cancer cells without hurting healthy cells”. Well, your immune system is very good at that.

Of particular interest to me in that article is the idea that KLH might also be used to fight drug tolerance. I have known for a long time that the real problem with drug addiction is not the drugs but the tolerance. If people did not build up a tolerance to their recreational pharmaceutical of choice, they would not require increasingly large doses to get the same effect and they would therefore never be anywhere near the road to taking toxic levels and eventually overdosing.

So a cure for tolerance could solve much of the problem of drug in one glorious Gordian Knot cutting maneuver. An addict would just get their KLH treatment regularly, and hence retain the low tolerance of a first time user. No overdoses, drug demand would plummet driving down the price so way less crime to pay for drugs… score!

OK, so that wasn’t really very scary. Well, how about a camera that takes a trillion pictures per second?

That is one trillion frames per second, more formally known as 1,000,000,000,000 FPS. (I would do it in scientific notation but I am too lazy to look up how to do superscript.) Now you might think “what the hell do you so with a thing like that, take pictures of light itself?”

And you would be right! This is a camera so fast, it takes pictures of individual photons. How crazy is that?

Here are some people with highly scientifically persuasive accents to tell you all about it.

My favorite part of that video, besides the accents : the phrase “titanium sapphire laser”. Is that a James Bond supervillain phrase, or what?

“A man of the world like yourself, Mister Bond, will no doubt recognize the unique hue and brilliance of my titanium sapphire laser. ”

And it’s a totally real thing, that’s the best part. We really live in the future.

I think the presenters are a little confused about dimensions versus axes, however. One dimension is not a line, it’s a dot. A single axis is a line. That’s just a quibble, however.

I am not entirely convinced that the technology has the uses the Indian gentleman says it does, but I am in the school of thought that says taking pictures of individual photons at a speed that actually lets you see individual pulses of lights is something worth doing in an of itself.

And surely such imaging advances the cause of pure science, and that is also good in an of itself. You never know what knowledge will turn out to be useful. Therefore, all knowledge is power.

Okay, okay, that was scary fast, but not really scary scary.

Well then, how does scientists being able to download knowledge directly into your brain strike you?

Yes, just like in The Matrix! Well, OK, not JUST like in The Matrix, but the first steps towards something like that, anyhow. We are taking the first steps towards being able to decode the realtime brain activity we get via fMRI, and what is more, we are beginning to get an idea of how to take that information and feed it back into the brain.

And if that doesn’t scare you, you seriously need to read more science fiction. Especially the mind control paranoia stuff from the sixties!

Like a lot of modern brain science, I find this all both amazingly exciting and terribly frightening. The positive and the negative possibilities of gaining the ability to hack the human mind, to violate that last sanctum of human privacy and throw open the doors for the mind to decide to change itself.. or indeed, to have that decision made for it… are so vast that I get dizzy even contemplating it.

Imagine being able to learn new things simply by downloading it from the Internet.

Now imagine that knowledge had a destructive virus in it that erases all of your memories and leaves you a drooling vegetable for life.

Imagine being able to get instant psychotherapy via a program that eliminates bad cognitive patterns and replaces them with healthy ones.

Now imagine that it also eliminates thoughts, opinions, memories, and ideas that the government thinks you really have no right to be having.

Imagine the cops being able to stop a crime before it happens because they find a way to detect violent thoughts and can therefore predict when a crime is about to occur and show up to stop it.

Now imagine the wrong thoughts themselves become illegal.

All pretty scary stuff…. isn’t that right, kids?

Came across this fascinating and disturbing article about a game called Love Plus for the Nintendo DS, and was so interested, stimulated, and frankly more than a bit freaked out by it that I felt I just had to write down some comments about it before it fades back into the news stream.

Basically, Love Plus is a dating simulator (a genre virtually unknown here, but huge in Japan) by video game giant Konami.

There have been plenty of dating sims before, but this one seems to be leagues ahead of the others in terms of sophistication and design.

For one thing, you can talk to your girlfriend. And not just in some simplistic “parser AI” way like the Elixa software of the ancient past. No, your virtual girlfriend (a term I do not use lightly) talks to you directly. You put on a headset and connect it to your Nintendo DS, and talk to her through the microphone, and she replies in real human speech via the game’s enormous library of hundreds of thousands of pre-recorded speech samples.

I am curious to see how well that works, to be honest. Having such a huge number of samples solves a lot of problems of speech generation, for example, how even the most sophisticated text to speech generation engine around today still sounds artificial and robotic, and lacks emotional color to its speech. That would not be a problem with samples derived from performances by professional actresses. But still, I have to wonder how realistically the software can respond. Surely that with any finite database of responses, there will have to be times when the responses don’t seem to quite fit what prompted them.

Perhaps the players of the game simply learn to ignore little things like that in order to enjoy the experience. Like how Internet chat users learn to sort of edit out other people’s typos in their mind in order to keep the chat flow going and not get bogged down in corrections and such.

Not only does this “real speech” add to the verisimilitude, but the game also includes real world locations that the player can, if they choose, visit with their virtual girlfriend in the real world.

So you can take your girlfriend to the Atami resort in the game at the same time you travel to the real Atami, and be eating in the same cafe in both worlds. Apparently, this happens quite a bit, which must make working at those particular places a little weird. A lot of “parties of two” where one of them is a Nintendo DS. A lot of Japanese guys making the same nervous little jokes about how their Nintendo DS is a “cheap date” or how you are not to worry, “she’s of legal age, ha ha!”. A lot of worrying that one of these times, one of these guys is going to order a meal for two and start shoving food into his Nintendo DS and saying something like “Come on, eat… you are getting so thin. I thought you liked tempura!”

Think I am joking? One guy actually “married” his virtual girlfriend in an online ceremony. I am sure this made his parents ever so happy. It would be hilarious if, at any point, his mother had yelled at him “Well if you love your Nintendo DS so much, why don’t you marry it?”

“You know…. that’s a great idea, Mama-san!”

“Come back here… it’s called sarcasm, dammit… ”

Jokes aside, the level of interactivity with this software is truly impressive. Your virtual girlfriend can even send you emails, and will get upset with you if you don’t reply fast enough. Piss her off bad enough, and she will throw a virtual snit and refuse to talk to you for a while.

All this high level interactivity is both fascinating and disturbing to me. And there are plans to make it even more engrossing in the future. Of course.

To me, this highlights a very disturbing question : what, subjectively speaking, is the difference between having an online partner who lives very far away and one who is not a real person, but software?

Think about it. If you have an online mate, to you, they are basically a profile, a picture, and some online interactions. You have no absolute proof that this person really exists. That is the most likely explanation, of course, and the one that meets the Occam’s Razor test, but still, you can’t rule out the possibility that they are highly sophisticated software. Or, of course, someone entirely different.

That, to me, is what makes a game like Love Plus disturbing. It could reach that level of sophistication quite soon. Evidently, it is already good enough to “fool” millions of people into feeling all the emotions of romantic love with absolutely no reciprocal emotion from another person. Just simulated responses.

Myself, I find the idea of a piece of software falsely engaging my emotions to be extraordinarily chilling, and disturbing on a deep and ugly level. Already, people are treating their robot vacuum cleaners like pets and buying designer clothes for their RealDolls. Having virtual people in your life seems like a logical, if not horrifying, next step.

But I am of the camp that thinks real world relationships are far more important than anything you can do online, and I am speaking as someone who spends most of his life here on the Internet.

I would give it all up for one decent real world relationship. That is part of why I just don’t do long distance Internet romance any more. If it is not going to turn into a real world thing, I am just plain not interested.

And I fear that virtual relationships will only further the trend of people having less and less to do with each other. Could we all end up locked away in our tiny compartments, hanging out with a group of cvirtual friends, developing a violent aversion to dealing with real people for anything?

It is not entirely implausible.