Hey there fooble fans, and welcome to the fun and frilly world of the fantastic foobles! I have a basket bursting with fooble fun today, and so let’s just open it up and let them go… wait…. there’s nothing in here! Oh no, the foobles escaped! Those pesky little things, now what will we do? We can’t go another week without foobles, literally multiples of people would be disappointed and we can’t let that happen! It would be a catastrophe! It would be a cataclysm! It would be a category! It would…. oh wait, here they are.

Silly me, I had the wrong basket. On with the show!

First up, a crudely animated but still pretty darn funny South Park-ish take on what it is that the people of the “birther” movement in the USA actually think happened in order to make Barack Obama the incredibly success socialist oppressor he is today.

I could take issue with the exact content of their satire, and if I wrote it, it would have been a tad longer and a lot more precise, but that’s just me. Overall, it’s quite funny and is definitely done in the spirit of South Park’s “THIS IS WHAT THEY REALLY BELIVE” segments.

Sometimes, when irony is running at an all time low in the world of the stupid and the malign, the best satire in the world is just repeating what they say.

Hence, Daily Show and Colbert. That’s the price you pay for systemically gutting your brains of all ability to feel cognitive dissonance. You lose the ability to know when what you are saying (and thinking, and believing, and desperately defending with every ounce of your fevered and fractured being) is just plain ridiculous on the face of it.

But enough of those morons, they have enough troubles this weekend. Foob on, MacDuff!

But first, a warning : the following video link contains preserved gherkin related imagery and might not be suitable for all viewers who happen to have a birthday today and whom I love very much as the awesome person she is.

(Happy Birthday, Felicity! Love you, dear.)

Without further ado,

Ladies and gentle men, the Yodeling Pickle. Isn’t it a thing of beauty? I especially love how our noble video demonstrator says “yodeling pickle” at the end in such a smooth and melodious baritone. It just makes the whole thing perfect.

And this is a real, actual product, from those marvelous manic madmen over at Archie McPhee. For just $12.95 plus shipping, handling, and applicable tax, you too could hold within your very hand the glory, the majesty, and the wonder of the one, the only, the original Yodeling Pickle.

I heart Archie Macphee very much. They are the last surviving refuge for all the wacky, crazy, goofy, disturbing, or just plain retarded items of the world, the sort of thing you used to be able to order out of big, dense, colorful ads in the back of comic books.

And just look at the quality. That is one realistic looking pickle! And note that the sound is not simply some cheap, off the shelf, generic sound clip of some moron yelling “yowda lay hee hoo” into a microphone. Oh no. That’s a real, genuine yodel. With the proper glottal modulations and everything!

These are people who take being silly seriously, and that is something I respect.

Let’s see, what’s left in the basket here….. hmmm, no, that’s too serious…and that one… wow, I don’t even know what that’s doing in there… ah! Here we are. One last foob to round out the troika!

It’s the Television Tunes archive of TV music, and it will likely swallow my soul.

But in a good way. They have over twenty thousand themes from every imaginable show, as well as tons of other things like bumper music (I just downloaded every single one of those “After these messages…. we’ll be riiiiight back!” bumpers from the ABC Saturday Morning Cartoons of my childhood. Nostalgia score!

I am resisting the pull for now, but a part of me really wants to go through their entire archive and download absolutely everything that appeals to me. In fact, if I could do it, I would download the whole thing and just delete the stuff that does not appeal to me.

It would be a lot faster, and perfectly logical, once you accept certain obsessive givens.

Well, that’s it. The basket’s empty, the foobs have all been released back into the wild, and another Sunday has been foobified.

Tune in next week, when you’ll hear Miss Fooby say, “Pineapples? I thought you said pinochle!”. Can you handle the wackiness?

{This article is somewhat related to this previous post, so if you want to go read that one first, and then read this one, I would be totally cool with that.

Go ahead. Don’t be shy. I want you to!)

I have been thinking a lot about myself, my worth, my place in the world, and whether or not, in the grand scheme of things, there’s enough to me to be considered functional in any sense of the word.

( I know, I know, thinking of it like that probably doesn’t help, but hey, it’s called mental illness, not mental options, know what I mean? )

And as I try to stumble and shin bark my way to some kind of measurable, detectable self-esteem, I find myself increasingly thinking about Einstein’s wife, and what she would have thought of me.

Don’t worry, I’m going to explain that.

See, the world knows Albert Einstein as one of the greatest geniuses who has ever lived. His ability to think about the most fantastic situations and derive the necessary equations in order to describe the universe in a way that transcended Newton and let us unlock the might power with every atom.

But, it is also well known that the man was a slob. His appearance was often disheveled and unkempt, he was notoriously absentminded, and frequently said that if it was not for his wife, he would not remember to get dressed before going out in the morning.

So, one of the greatest geniuses, a man so brilliant that we now use his name when ironically praising someone who has just done something stupid (“Nice move, Einstein!), and yet also in many ways kind of a basket case.

I can relate on that second part. The first, I leave to others to decide.

But what I want to know, and what I keep thinking about is, what did Einstein’s wife really think of it? I mean, she most likely always supported him in public or even in private, because honestly he was a good man and she wanted him to succeed, for himself and for the sake of her family.

But in her heart of hearts, what did she think?

Did she look at his odd combination of genius and incapacity and find it endearing, even charming? Did she think to herself “Oh, my dear Albert. My poor little lost boy. You can show the world all kinds of wonders with just a piece of chalk and a blackboard, and yet you cannot show me where you left the keys to the house or what you did with my good scissors. You are my funny little man, and I adore you for it. ”

Or was she more bitter and sarcastic? “Oh, sure, Mister Big Shot Scientist, travels all the world giving speeches and fighting for peace and an end to The Bomb, and everybody calls him some kind of genius. Well they would not think he is so smart if they had to deal with the state he gets his underwear into ! And his collars, oy. How can he get them so dirty? Does he drag his head through three gutters before he comes home to me? It certainly looks that way when you look at his hair! Genius? Ha!”

In other words, did she respect him? Did she think of him as a great man with a few lovable flaws that just meant he needed her and she got to be part of something much bigger than what the average housewife gets?

Or did she think he was a pathetic, helpless schmuck who scammed the world, including getting her to marry someone so obviously defective?

This question plagues me because in many ways I identify with poor old Albert. I am no world shaking genius, but this brain of mine can do some pretty amazing tricks from time to time, and I might even be able to make a living at it some day if I am willing to eat a lot of ramen (or pot noodles, or chinese noodles, or whatever you call them. )

But is that enough? What kind of a man am I, let alone what kind of a human being, if the only way I can make it through life is if someone else takes on a lot of the business of living for me?

What good is a hothouse flower, anyhow?

So I sit and I wonder whether being a strange and impractical but talented person is enough.

Here we are again, my beloved readers, in the magical land of knowledge and wonder known as “science news”, where once a week, I share with you the most neato keen science stories that I have come across during the week.

First, let’s take care of old business. This story has been kicking around my browser for a couple of weeks and I figure I had better use it or lose it.

Turns out that half of the world’s heat actually comes from radioactive decay.

Scientists at the KamLAND detector in Japan recently did a highly exhaustive study of the Earth’s radioactive output via measuring anti-neutrinos for six years. (It takes that long to get enough anti-neutrinos to produce a result. )

From this, they were able to deduce that around half of the heat that the Earth radiates into the universe comes from the decay of various radioactive elements like uranium, thorium, and so on.

For some reason, this result freaks me out, kinda, and not just because it leaves us wondering where the hell the rest of our 20 terawatts of output comes from. ^[1]

I guess I just had no idea there was quite that much radioactive stuff in the Earth. Like a lot of modern people, I am a little superstitious when it comes to radioactivity, and the thought of all that radiation coming from the Earth all the time makes me kind of wish I lived on the top floor of a really tall building.

Silly, I know, but I can’t get it out of my mind.

Next up, we have some very interesting news from the world of medicine, specifically research into social disorders like autism and Asperger’s.

Researchers at Standford University have been able to use a cutting-edge technology called optogenetics on mice in order to test a previously untested theory of the neurological origin of autism et al.

The theory is a fairly simple one. The idea is that in people within the autism spectrum of disorders, there is either an excess of excitory nerve response or a deficit in inhibitory nerve response (or both) as compared to the response levels of neurotypical people, resulting in a person who is overstimulated by what is a perfectly normal and acceptable stimulus level for healthy people outside the spectrum.

In other words, autism spectrum people find the world to be an overstimulating place, whether you are talking sensory stimulation or social stimulation, and this accounts for their problems with dealing with modern everyday life.

This is a fairly obvious theory based on the many problems autism spectrum disorder people have with, for instance, situations which are loud, or when too many people are talking at the same time. This experiment, however, was the first to be able to test it empirically.

Through optogenetics, they were able to increase the excitability of certain nerves in the brains of mice, and almost instantly, the mice became antisocial and started to display the distinctive brain wave patterns of autism spectrum disorders.

I have been wondering what role over-stimulation played in a variety of disorders. What I would like to know now is if the over-excitable mice can be treated via some form of targeted inhibitory drug, or desensitizing therapy.

Finally, on a lighter note, scientists have identified the saddest movie ever.

The article does not explain their methodology in detail, but seeing as they have been working on the problem since 1988, I can only imagine that it involves a lot of movies and a whole lot of Kleenex. (All paid for with grant money, I assume. )

So just in case you want to know, according to these fellows, the saddest movie of all time is the 1979 weeper, The Champ, starring John Voight as a washed-up boxer who has to go into the ring and fight one last time in order to get custody of his son, a very young Ricky Shroeder. In the movie, the boxer actually dies during the big fight, leaving his son pleading for him to “Wake up!”.

I am not surprised that this movie came from 1979, as that would have been right in the thick of the rise of the tearjerker. People suddenly discovered the therapeutic qualities of a good cry in the late 70s and early 80s. Television shows, movies, even music was suddenly going for the big cry.

Personally, I agree with Roger Ebert : these scientists obviously never saw the Japanese animated feature Grave of the Fireflies.

Got a few things kicking around from the general category of entertainment type news, and figured I would take a break from heavy pondering and public self-flagellation to share them with you nice people.

First up, a simply marvelous little social experiment. To wit :

As far as I am concerned, these people have devised the perfect way to do that wonderful and magical “Free Hugs” thing.

Sure, it still works if you are just a nonthreatening-looking human being (I would have to lose my precious beard, I imagine) wearing a T-shirt that says Free Hugs. But that might be difficult for a shy person (and we could really use the hugs) to do. What if people reject our free hugs and are really mean about it?

But inside the persona (and costume) of a big fuzzy adorable teddy bear…. who could resist? Well, lots of people, presumably, but still. It would be that much easier to face the crowds, knowing that to them, you’re not a person, you are a big wonderful harmless fuzzy huggable cartoon character.

And those have a way of just cutting right through people’s defenses and reaching the inner child in all of us, who remembers when the world was a simpler, warmer time when the bounds of your yard were the ends of the world and nothing in the world could be better than a big warm hug from your mother.

That video just plain makes me feel good all over. And I can only imagine that the late Leo Buscaglia would be happy to see what is happening these days.

In keeping with the warm and fuzzy theme, we turn now to this odd and charming little story about what may have been the first teddy bears ever made, and their strange fate.

I say “what may have been” quite deliberately, as there are multiple mutually exclusive claims as to who invented the teddy bear and where and when it was invented, and seeing as it’s brought so much joy to so many millions, even billions of children over the years, I would rather avoid the controversy.

But this particular strand of the story involves the Steiff brand and their story of how the first teddy bears were the brainchild of Margrete Steiff’s nephew, Richard, an art student who liked to sketch the bears he saw at the zoo, and who first had the idea of a soft toy in the shape of a bear.

After initial disappointment at a toy fair, Richard was in the process of packing up the bears for good when a buyer from a New York department store, who had been searching the toy fair in vain for something new, saw those first bears and ordered 3,000 on the spot.

The mystery comes in because somewhere between Germany and the USA, the bears disappeared, and if someone had one these days (unlikely, as being a new product they were not built to last) they would be the most valuable teddy bear(s) in the world.

Seems rather besides the point for someone to collect teddy bears and spend enormous sums of money on rare ones, but I am not one to get in the way of people’s pursuit of whatever it is that holds meaning for them.

Sadly, I was too logical and literal a child for stuffed animals when I was of that age. It’s just a doll, I reasoned. I live in a house with real live cats, whom I adore. Why should I care about something that is not even alive?

It is definitely possible to be too damn smart for your own good.

Like, for instance, being a well-intentioned Time Lord and ending up saving Hitler.

When I first read that “Doctor Who saves Hitler!” in a future episode, I was thinking “Oh no, they are going to do that whole thing where if you kill Hitler, it would, surprise surprise, make the world a whole lot worse somehow, and so Doctor Who is faced the the moral dilemma of having to save the life of history’s worst villain!” thing.

But the trailer looks like he does it entirely by accident, no moral dilemma involved, in which case it’s even more lame because it’s just a contrived bit of historical wanking.

“Oh, woops, saved Hitler! Wow, isn’t time travel a wacky thing?”

I guess you can’t do a show in which someone deliberately saves Hitler’s life in order to preserve history in a country that endured The Blitz.

In a move of breathtaking metamedia integration, this blog entry has a soundtrack. It’s this song by The Cure, one of their radio-friendly hits that they do so that the record company is happy and the rest of the album can be depressing arty inaccessible stuff.

So please press play on this video before reading the article. Thanks.

I’m writing this blog entry because I realized something about myself recently and I wanted to make use of this space to explore it a little because I think it might be important.

All my life, for as long as I can remember, I have felt… insufficient.

No matter the task, no matter the field, no matter the axis upon which I am measured, I have always felt like I just plain wasn’t enough. There was just not enough of me to make the grade, not enough to count, not enough to make the grade.

Ironically for someone as obese as I, I have always felt thin and insubstantial and like the cold hard wind could blow right through me. Like I was not a real person, but just a threadbare and unconvincing illusion of one, a simulation, a cipher, a puff of nothing.

On the outside, I might seem like a big, fat, solid (if jiggly) fellow, but on the inside I feel small and thin and insubstantial, like a puff of smoke that briefly and accidentally drifted in the shape of a person.

I think a lot of it comes from my extremely lopsided development. Intellectually, I grew in leaps and bounds ahead of my peers, and that continues in many ways to this day. But socially, I grew very little at all. I have had very few of the life experience that cause people to grow as people. Result : a gargantuan mind and a tiny soul.

And only the soul can lend substance to the being of a person. Only true growth as a person can make for a stronger, more substantial person of character and perseverance who can overcome life’s obstacles and succeed in life.

Without a soul to lend it weight, all the mind can do is generate illusions of light and shadow and imagination, very pretty and good for a lonely person who doesn’t relate very well to others and thus needs to generate their own private entertainment all the time.

But not much that actually helps with relating with others, or even getting anything done.

In many ways, I feel like some sort of sad, lost wizard. This mind of mine can perform miracles and wonders in the right conditions. But otherwise, I am not much use.

I often call myself a hothouse flower. In the right conditions, a hothouse flower can become a magnificent and delicate orchid of exquisite beauty and vibrant color.

But out in the cold of the real world outside the hothouse, it’s just a sad plant that soon dies of exposure.

Even the assets I know I have…. intelligence, creativity, wit, a certain breed of charm… someone just don’t seem like they add up to a sufficient sum. I constantly feel like I have to apologize for being alive, like no matter where I go or what I do, I am basically just imposing on people and should be ashamed of taking time and love and energy away from people who lead productive and useful lives.

Now I know this is the depression talking. I know that I am not as bad as I often think I am. I know that not being a very practical or strong person is not the worst thing in the world and that other people like me have managed to somehow make it through life.

But what makes depression a mental illness and not simply a bad mood is that you can know that how you feel is wrong, and it doesn’t change how you feel at all.

And in the end, what you feel will change what you think far more readily than vice versa.

In fact, in my darkest moments, the fact that I have some considerable abilities that others might well wish they had seems like just a cruel joke, a brutal irony to make all the other ways in which I suffer seem unjustified.

How dare I be miserable? I have so much going for me, so much potential.

Add that to the list of reasons to hate myself, I guess.

But I am getting better. Through persistent effort, I can often make myself believe that I am maybe not the toughest fellow around, but I am great in many other ways.

Still not sure if it all adds up to a big enough score, though.

Well, this is awkward.

For the first time since I started this Sunday silly foob thing, I have no silly fun inconsequential links just hanging around in my browser just waiting to be branded with the big foobling iron and released into the world to amuse and entertain the masses.

(You know who you are. )

Instead, all I have is depressing and serious stuff, and not a lot of that. I guess the days in the aftermath of a mass shooting while the fate of the world’s most powerful nation (and if the giant dies, we die too) hangs in the balance because ideological lunatics can’t accept the reality that when you run up a huge bill on your credit card, the payments have to go up some….. I guess these are not days that produce a lot of fun fun stuff.

So what the hell, fuck all that stuff, I will just talk about my so-called “so-called” life.

Let’s see…. oh, Maple Story got over their “unscheduled maintenance” period (someone finally beat the flames out with their Macbook, I guess) and so I have finally gotten a chance to try the darn thing.

My impressions so far : the art is, indeed, cute, and the game seems to be done with a good sense of humour, fun, and colorful imagination. My character can summon up a robo-mech suit twice his size and go clomping about gunning down baddies with a gatling gun or smunching them with big robotic fists right from the get-go, and that is a lot of fun. And there are a lot of characters with amusing lines around, and it is, of course, a simply huge game world with tons of places to explore. So that is all for the good.

But the learning curve is kind of rough. I keep ending up places and having absolutely no idea how to get back where I came from. This is a serious violation of the Two Way Door Rule, which, being someone who is not that great at finding their way around in video games in the first place, is one which is near and dear to my heart. If I go through a door in a video game, I should find myself standing in front of an identical door in the new room that leads right back to where I just came from, almost every time.

This is especially true in a 2D environment where the only thing linking rooms to each other is said doors (as oppose to a 3D environment where you can have open archways, corridors, landmarks, and other things that let one area flow more naturally into each other) and so it is vitally important to keep all these doors (portals, teleporters, whatever) in some kind of sensible relationship to one another.

And despite the game helping you in a lot of other ways, there does not seem to be a facility for telling you how to get from point A to point B, which is especially frustrating when you are trying to complete a quest.

Also, honestly, a lot of the gameplay seems to be “go to this room of a few ladders and platforms and defeat a set number of identical monsters” variety, and that is getting pretty boring. So unless the game perks up some, I doubt it will keep my interest.

What is it with these online games and not explaining anything? Is the common received wisdom that “people have more fun figuring things out themselves”?

Because I am not one of those people.

Leaving video games, we will turn the discussion, instead, to video games. On the Wii, I am still (!) playing Monster Hunter Tri after four months.

I really wish I had just bought the damn game. Then I would be incredibly pleased with myself for the massive amount of gameplay I got for my investment, instead of kicking myself in the ass for having my first ‘rental’ from these fine folks be apparently the hardest game I would ever be hopelessly addicted to, ever.

I know I shouldn’t be beating myself up for not beating the game yet. It’s a monthly plan, after all, so even if I had beaten the game a week after getting it, it would still have cost me the same amount of money.

They just would have sent me different games from the list by now.

But still, I am not used to one game taking this long to defeat. Usually, by now, I would have long since either beaten or abandoned a game.

But every time I think “screw this, I am going to just return this game and they can send me the next one from my list”, another part of my brain says “but what if we tried this?” and then I am back, playing the darn thing.

I often wish I had never seen the thing.

Being an older gamer is complex.

That’s it for now. Later folks!

Now that I have your attention, I would like to talk to you about insurance. Have you given thought to what a burden your funeral costs will be to your loved once right when they need all their money to pay off your assassin?

Just kidding. This blog entry is, quite seriously, about Nazi sex dolls. ^[1]

Turns out that, in order to keep the Nazi stormtroopers from picking up nasty diseases from those filthy old French whores, the Third (and least sexy) Reich decided to bring the power, brilliance, and and economy of the German industrial machine to the problem of the soldier’s need for some good old fashioned kraut-hammering while away from their fraus, and commissioned the manufacture of “gynoids”, or German sex dolls, for der dippen of der wikken.

I would love to get one. That would definitely be a major coup for any perverted collector, and I am at least half that.

Of course, being German, they were to be made as realistic and high-performance as possible, with “organs” that felt exactly like the real thing.

Now I am picturing a very serious and earnest German scientist with a very dutiful and obliging female assistant and an early “organ” model, sticking his shlong in one, looking thoughtful, then sticking it in the other, and taking copious notes, all, of course, while being watched by those helpful men from the SS.

“How is it, Herr Doktor Hundfrikken?”
“Ve are getting closer. Herr Doktor Anuslecken. This time, I can barely feel the seams at all, and the caulking is holding well. Now all we need is to teach it to wash my lederhosen and complain about me to its mother, and my wife will be out of a job!”

And then, the hearty German laughter.

Of course, they were made to match the Aryan stereotype. Tall, pale, blonde. blue-eyed, and like the real Aryan race, entirely fake and made up of artificial parts and the fantasies of little bows pretending to be grownups.

The article is filled with choice quotes like this one :

”The doll has only one purpose and she should never become a substitute for the honourable mother at home… When the soldier makes love to Borghild, it has nothing to do with love. Therefore the face of our anthropomorphic sexmachine should be exactly how Weininger described the common wanton’s face.”

Wow, what is German for “Madonna-Whore Complex”? Remember, these are only to be used for sex, so make sure they don’t look a thing like our good, pure, nonsexual Mothers, and should instead just like filthy, disgusting, wanton whores… so they will turn us on.

I have been saying that fascism is inherently childish for a while now, and this stuff certainly confirms it. It reflects a little boy’s view of the world, where there are Mommies, who are Good, and Girls, who are icky.

Essentially, it is the same view of the world that makes little boys build clubhouses with “no girls allowed” signs on them, with only the absolute minimum acknowledgement of the post-puberty reality of the desire for sex possible.

When you realize this, suddenly all those Old Boys fighting to keep women out of their fancy men’s clubs in the past makes a lot more sense. They are just doing exactly what they did as little boys, but with the money and power of adults.

And how about this little scene :

The idea of our hairdresser to give the doll a “Schneckenfrisur”(earphones of hair) was rejected by Hannussen. He wanted her to have “a boyish hair-do” to underline that Borghild was “part of the fighting forces”– a field-whore and not an honourable Mother.

Apparently, the hairdresser wanted the dolls to look like Princess Leia.

Or possibly “earphones of hair” means something else and the problem is in the translation.

But speaking of homoeroticism, hoo boy, nice work that, Hannussen, claiming you wanted the doll to have “boyish” hair because you wanted to “underline” that they were part of the “fighting force”. Sure. That makes sense.

Or maybe you just wanted to be able to fuck them from behind and pretend you were doing the nasty with a pretty boy instead of a gross and grody girl, huh?

Life must have been rough for Nazi homos. All those hot men being super butch in those sexy uniforms, and if you do anything with them, it’s Auschwitz for you.

But with the right sex doll….. 😛

Hmmm. This Friday doesn’t seem like it is happening right after the previous one. Subjectively speaking, it feels like two or even three days ago.

Good job, reality! (All it needs is a little encouragement now and then. )

Anyhow, on the with the SCIENCE.

First up, we have this article which has been lingering in my browser for a while, so I figure I had better cover it before it completely goes out of style.

Some Israeli scientists have invented a primitive disease-detecting nanobiocomputer that can detect multiple disease-indicating molecules at the same time.

But first off, a little verbal twerk I have to scratch.

Check out the very first sentence in the article :

Wouldn’t it be easier to deal with disease if our bodies just fixed themselves?

Um, they do, Popular “Science”, it’s a brand new innovation called an immune system. Everyone has one except for terminal AIDS patients and bubble boys.

Maybe you should look into it.

OK, that taken care of, we move on to the actual story. Basically, this Israeli team (I love how international science is today, don’t you?) used nanotechnology tools and biological parts to cobble together a simple computer that could react to the presence of certain molecules in a patient’s bloodstream and hence detect disease.

It’s crude stuff, but a very important step towards a wonderful future in which our immune systems are aided by biomachines that detect diseases and automatically release drugs to help fight them.

It would basically amount to making our immune and repair systems far, far more intelligent.

And speaking of the fight against disease, there is some very promising news in the realm of the global fight against AIDS : anti-retro-viral drugs show an extremely high rate of effectiveness in fighting the spread of AIDS according to two major studies.

Turns out, they not only keep AIDS patients from spreading the disease, they also can be used to keep healthy people from getting AIDS in the first place.

This is amazingly excellent news. We already have the disease on the ropes, at least here in the modern world, with people with AIDS living for years, and in a few cases even decades, without a single symptom and with perfectly healthy T-cell counts.

To then be able to keep the disease from spreading to others would be tantamount to a cure, although not a cure in the more traditional sense of a single treatment that eliminates the problem in the patient forever, like a vaccine, but in the more complex sense that with enough different treatments on enough different fronts, the disease can be stopped in its tracks in existing patients and kept from spreading to others as well.

And without new hosts, eventually, the disease would simply be gone. Off in the dustbin of history with rubella and the Spanish Flu, hopefully forever.

The challenge on the global scale, naturally, is to see if these anti-retro-viral drugs can be made cheap and easy to manufacture and distribute enough to be used on a wide scale in Africa, where the real problem is located.

Taking the fight against disease and disorder to a more personal level, in the United States, their FDA is looking to exert some regulatory pressure on the budding field of medical apps for smartphones et al.

Right now, they are merely talking in terms of things like guidelines and advisory documents and things like that. This is the usual first step, as it requires no expansion of powers into a new area, and the FDA is smart enough to know that it would be hard to enforce anything with more teeth anyhow.

The ideal solution would have to balance both the desire for a force against quackery and deceit in the world of apps and the realities of the digital age.

I think the answer would be for the FDA to offer a prominent and well-publicized certification program. With Apple, at least, it could be integrated with their app-approval program. Certified medical apps would be able to prominently display their certification and hence be more credible (and profitable) than non-certified apps, and as long as there is enough publicity so that everyone knows this certification exists, it will be enough for people to be able to make an informed decision about how much they should trust some medical app they got off a website somewhere.

That’s all of it for this week, folks. Tune in next week, when it will be seven days from now.

Not the philosophy of science. That’s another subject entirely.

No, what I am going to discuss in this article is my assertion that there is no dividing line between the sciences and philosophy, and hence no hard line between the sciences and the arts at all, and that any such assertion is nothing but rank prejudice and the most ludicrously laughable small-minded provincialism.

In fact, I will state it thus : philosophy is merely the most theoretical of sciences.

Now, a lot of people on both sides of the entirely artificial science/art divide will immediately leap to their feet to object to this statement before they have even formulated a reason why.

“But… science is a science and philosophy is just… some silly people wasting time in mental masturbation by talking about things that can’t ever be decided scientifically and which don’t really matter compared to the big issues of how the Universe works!” rant the engineers, chemists, and mathematicians from their ivory perches.

“Libel, slander, and lies!” retort the artists, writers, and poets. “It is science that is just a bunch of squint-eyed stiffs in lab coats mucking about with test tubes and funny looking devices obsessing over how many quarks are in a pint, or some such nonsense, when they could be pursuing the Truth, Art, Beauty, and Meaning!”

(“Just leave us out of this!” quietly mumble the psychologists, archeologists, and sociologists caught somewhere in between. )

And all just because people have this pathetic inborn need to imagine that what they are just happens to be the best thing there is to be. That’s an unworthy and disgustingly tiny minded attitude for either a scientist or a true artist.

And truly, philosophy, long roundly abused by nearly all contenders, is the foundation of all science. Before science can set foot on what it calls new ground, the philosophers have been there first, breaking new ground, testing the boundaries, and most importantly, paving the way for a new kind of thought.

That bears repeating for clarification : only the pursuit and discipline of philosophy can possible allow human beings to think new thoughts.

This is evident when you look at the sort of people who are considered giants in the field of science. Freud, Darwin, Einstein… every one of them considered to be unparalleled geniuses whose contributions to science are inestimable and every one of them far more a philosopher than a scientist.

Not a one of them did serious, laboratory science under controlled conditions with suitable controls, strict double blind conditions, and a crisply formatted study submitted to prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Mostly, they just observed the world, and thought about stuff. The same as any philosopher.

Admittedly, in Einstein’s case, some of this thinking involved a certain amount of math. He used the developed system of logic (logic = philosophy) known at mathematics as an aid to his speculations about the nature of the universe.

But he also spend a lot of time simply sitting in his patent office or riding his bicycle, simply thinking about wild notions like “What would it be like to ride a beam of light?”.

What a silly, frivolous, and pointless thing to do. What was he, some longhaired hippie of a philosophy student destined to ask “Do you want fries with that?”

But because his thoughts happened to be about the natural world (what used to be called, quite correctly, natural philosophy), he is considered a “scientist” (and hence, a very important guy) instead one of those useless airy-headed “philosophers”.

Darwin took boat trips and drew pictures. Freud just talked to people. Neither of them ever set foot in a laboratory when doing the work we quite rightly remember them for.

Mostly, they just thought about stuff.

Now I am not running down either the arts or the sciences. I am a writer who loves science, and so I am firmly in both camps. That is what has led to my frustration with the prejudices and vitriol between the two sides of this highly artificial and microcephalic coin.

My point is that the sciences and the arts are one, and the place where they meet is called “philosophy”. Philosophy is, at its base, the purest form of the search for the truth, just like theoretical, speculative leading-edge science, and like most theoretical speculation, most of it will turn out to be false or misleading.

By the same token, however, the pursuit as a whole will be extremely important, for it is only the dreamers and thinkers of humanity who will discover the doors to entire new worlds to explore, whether those worlds are those of ethics or nanotechnology.

And it is within these new worlds that the future of humanity will be found.

I’ve been making a lot of little observations lately, so I figured that for today’s article, I would try something with a little more heft.

So what’s up with this crazy spinning ball of dirt hurtling through the icy void of space with us poor confused naked beach apes clinging to the surface and occasionally suffering through illusions of grandeur where we feel like we might just be running the place?

More important, what the hell is up with us apes?

Well, taking a look around the joint, it sure as hell seems like a busy time. The anthill is abuzz with a lot of busy to-ing and fro-ing, and the amount of violence, shouting, and angry gesticulating seems to be at a peak.

In short, it really seems like these are Historical Times.

Of course, this is a very tricky condition to diagnose. It is quite accurate to say that all times seem historical when they are happening. The now always seems more vital, more interesting, and sexier than the before or the later, and it is quite easy to look around and see all the things that have never, technically, happened before, and all the hubbub and activity and people talking in very impressive ways, and abandon all perspective and declare that this moment, of all moments ever, surely must be the most excitingly new and vitally important “crossroads of history” there has ever been.

But it’s all crossroads. In fact, it is the roads themselves which are the illusion. History is really an expansion in all dimensions at once.

And certainly, the news media, with their twenty four hour appetite, do not help matters by manufacturing urgency and confabulating concern and hence completely obscuring the line between what actually matters and what happens to have caught their attention and therefore (they think) could plausibly be made to catch yours for at least as long as it takes to shoot a few commercials at your eyeballs.

Nevertheless, after a good look around the globe, I can’t help but think that these times are just that much more crazy, heated, and in flux than others I have known.

All over the world, the people are suffering from the dire effects of the massive transfer of wealth from the average people into the hands of the already quite rich which has been radically but deliberately mislabeled as an “economic crisis”, as if it was as inevitable and temporary as a spot of bad weather.

We are all feeling the effects of this radical loss of total standard of living, and we are all pretty sure that we and everybody else know who did it, and yet here it is, three years later, and nothing whatsoever seems to have been done to bring these people to justice or even fix the damn problem in the first place.

Apparently, it’s all very complicated, too complicated for us mere suffering peons to understand, and so we should just keep letting the charlatans run the show, and believe them when they say l’etat, c’est nous and we shouldn’t worry our confused little heads about things that effect us.

This, I feel, has created a massive amount of frustrated anger. The people of the world quite rightfully feel that the basic social compact, that as long as you follow the rules and do what you are told, you will be okay, has been seriously and egregiously violated.

They did nothing wrong, and lost their jobs, their homes, and their standard of living anyhow. This, historically, has always been the factor that leads to revolution.

Meanwhile, the globe itself seems to be heating up. Weather grows more extreme, terrible natural disasters strike major nations and caused further destruction of economy, and while the nations of the world fiddle with figures, Australia burns.

And yet, the news is not all bleak. People all over the Middle East are rising up and fighting for the freedom and democracy we in the First world take for granted. Brilliant young idealistic designers are making the foundations of a modern society cheaper, smaller, and easier to deploy to the areas of the world that most desperately need them,

And scientific revolutions in fields like tissue engineering, nanotechnology, genetic science, quantum mechanics, and even self-driving cars continue to generate tomorrow’s consumer revolutions at a feverish pace.

So I think it’s safe to say that the state of the world is best described as “in flux”.

Truly, things are more like they are now than they have ever been before!