Cats are so much fun.

Not sure if there will be a full article today…. exterminator’s coming, going to be AFK for six hours at least. We’ll see what time I get back to the apartment.

Yes, it’s back! I have a bunch of cleaning to do today, and no particularly compelling ideas for a column today, so I figured what the heck, let’s go back to the wild, wacky, wonderful world of science for inspiration.

First off, we have this interesting little item about a village of dwarves living in the Andes who might hold a clue to a cure for cancer.

No, not with their ancient dwarf magic. Turns out, this small population of dwarfs hardly every get cancer or diabetes, and coincidentally, they also all have the form of dwarfism that stems from a lack of human growth hormone. The theory, then, is that possible human growth hormone and cancer are somehow linked, and suppressing human growth hormone in full adults might just keep cancer from happening at all.

The idea passes the initial common sense and plausibility tests. Cancer is defined as a particular form of out of control growth in human tissues, so the idea of inhibiting it via growth hormone regulation makes a kind of sense, at least to this armchair scientist.

But an isolated popular of 100 is a poor basis for so broad a theoretical leap, and there are so many potential factors involved with cancer and its genesis that it’s nearly impossible to control for them all. So while this seems interesting, I will wait and see if this theoretical model can be backed up with lab work.

A lot of interesting and promising and plausible theories simply fail to pan out in reality. All the world of science can do is track down every lead, like detectives.

Next, scientists want to plant micro-worms in your body.

No, wait, come back! Turns out, these “micro-worms” are actually nanotech tubes that could perform a whole number of useful functions in the human body, like providing real time monitoring of various health status issues, or delivering medication over a long term.

But if ever a technology needed a new name, it’s “micro-worms”. Sure, it’s catchy and probably even descriptive, but nobody wants worms in their body unless they’re a bird looking for lunch. Just the idea of them putting anything with “worm” in its name into my body makes me squirm with discomfort.

And I am a potential client! One of the possible applications for this technology would be to provide that fabulous tech of the future, the “diabetic’s tattoo”, a technology by which an area of skin on the diabetic’s body would have tiny colored nanoparticles embedded in its blood vessels. These nanoparticles would be shaped so that they reacted to blood sugar, and voila, you have an area of skin which reacts visibly and harmlessly to blood sugar and provides an instant visual reading of the diabetic’s current blood sugar level. The more of the color, the higher the blood sugar count.

I would love that. No blood, no testing, just look at my blood sugar magic tattoo and I would get a good idea of how I was doing. Right now, because my diabetes is not too severe, I can get away with hardly ever testing and mostly relying on my own internal sense of how charged my batteries are to give me the cues I need. But I would rather know, and so it would be awesome to be able to just look at my arm and say “Woops, too high… better have the salad!” or “whoa, too low… I need COMPLEX CARBS NOW. ”

But why did they have to call them “worms”?

I mean, the only thing worse than having worms in your body would be if you had some huge alien creature growing out of your spine.

WARNING, link contains a tail of medical horror and entertaining grossness.

So this fellow named Josh Abken (an alien sounding name if I ever heard one!) was having chronic back pain. So he went to the doc, figuring he had a pulled muscle or something.

Turns out, it was a HUGE FREAKING TUMOUR that was so big it was pushing his other organs out of shape. It was, in fact, close to straight up killing him.

But that’s not the freaky part. The freaky part is that it was :

A soccer-ball size “alien” tumor that had become as solid as a rock and even had growing tentacles.

IT HAD FREAKING TENTACLES. That’s where I would start seriously freaking out.

But to his massive credit, Josh Abken did not freak out. Instead, he and his family did what any family would do if they found out their pater familias had a massive tentacled tumour in his back : they named it.

In fact, they named it “Gill” and had “Kill Gill” T-shirts made in the style of Kill Bill posters.

This family is obviously way above average in the field of being completely awesome.

Luckily, thoracic surgeon Costanzo Di Perna was able to remove it before it killed poor Josh. Doctors say that thing had to be growing in there for at least a decade.

I have to admit, the sociopathic mad scientist in me really, really wants to know what would have happened to that thing if it somehow had been left to grow for another decade.

Presumably, it would kill its host. But if it didn’t… say, some mad scientist was able to transfer it to a supportive medium…. say, a big bell jar full of evil-looking liquid… and just let it grow and evolve, would it eventually have grown into a full alien, leading inevitably to the bloody death of the scientist and a really awkward reunion with the human it considers to be its “father”?

Probably not. But it’s fun to think about. I picture it as looking like the exposed-brain guy from the Star Wars Cantina scene, but speaking with an incongruously innocent and all-American teenage boy voice.

“Gosh, Dad, aren’t you glad to see me? After all…. I used to be part of you! Sorry about the cat, by the way. The moment I realized it was yours, I disgorged it. It’s fine, just a little damp. Eventually it will get over the smell and clean itself. ”

When we last discussed creativity, the focus was on the difference between the creative mind and the ordering mind and how the creative mindset eschews structure and barriers in favour of openness to making mental connections, and how the ordering mindset does just the opposite.

This time, I’d like to focus in on one particular aspect of this openness : being open to surprises coming from your own mind. Being open, in other words, to inspiration.

A creative person must be open to inspiration. That sounds obvious, but being open to inspiration involves a great deal more that just keeping an open mind or not consciously rejecting inspiration. It is my belief that maintaining openness to inspiration requires a fundamental structuring of the psyche around creativity that has an effect on every aspect of the mind and personality.

To begin with, we need to take a look at what, exactly, creativity is as a subjective experience of the mind. Roughly defined, it is the sudden bursting into consciousness of the results of a deep subconscious process of searching for connections or solutions to problems. This requires a characteristic inner stillness, a zone of withdrawal from the immediate, sensory world into the inner world, and most importantly, a key opening of the gates between the conscious and the subconscious minds to allow the creative spark of imagination to jump that gap and turn a subconscious notion into a conscious idea.

This stillness, this inner reserve, requires the creative individual to reserve a portion of their consciousness for creativity. This accounts for the oft observed connection between creativity and introversion. If all your mental horsepower is tied up in the immediate, the sensory, the broadly interpersonal, there is little room left for the contemplation and inner correlation that is the basis for creativity. You are therefore more likely the find high levels of creativity in people who are somewhat withdrawn and reserved. They are not necessarily anti-social. They simply don’t have the same sort of mental resources to devote to the here and now, and must make different choices based on that lack.

To a highly ordered and ordering mind, however, this stillness is anathema. On the surface, it seems like mere idleness, or worse, daydreaming. Why sit around “doing nothing”, thinks the ordering mind, when there are so many things that need doing in the immediate sensory word? It seems insane to sit and wait for some mysterious force known as “inspiration” when you could be dealing with real, concrete, known things and reaping tangible rewards.

But even worse, to the ordering mindset, than the idea of the sort of apparent idleness that the creative mind requires is the sudden intrusion of unwilled thought into the conscious mind. This is the sort of randomness and chaos that the ordering mind intensely fears and, indeed, is deeply structured to prevent. The sort of sudden illumination or inspiration that gives a creative person great joy and motivation would leave a highly ordered person confused, shaken, and frantically attempting to reconstruct the deep inner fortress of order and predictability upon which they rely.

So in many ways, the ordered mind precludes creativity. The kind of uncertainties required for the proper creative mindset are actively sought out and eliminated by the ordering mind.

That’s not to say that ordering people are somehow crippled, inferior, or defective. They simply have different cognitive priorities, and therefore, different strengths. What they lack in creativity they make up for in effectiveness. Creative people’s dislike of order and detachment from the here and now often leaves them poorer than average at the day to day business of life, and the sort of inner stillness required by the creative and/or contemplative mindset too often leads to a physical stillness as well. That cool still place in the mind can becoming an inner refuge from external realities, an escape, and such a refuge can becoming a crippling addiction which cripples the creative person’s ability to handle the real world.

Again, it’s all about where your internal cognitive priorities are set. And, of course, moderation and balance.

And of course, I am talking about theoretical pure cases. Nobody is purely creative or one hundred percent ordering. But most of us come down more on one side or another.

The creative and ordered types just need to understand one another better. The ordered people have to understand that there’s some good reasons why the creative types seem incapable of dealing with daily life, and the creatives need to understand the ordered types drive for order as coming not from mere power tripping but a deep emotional desire for safety and peace.

Over the last few weeks, I have been developing a theory as to the psychology of political affiliation, and today, I finally feel confident enough in it to commit it to blogspace. Please forgive me if this theory is a little wet behind the ears, it’s still a newborn.

For those of us with a keen interest in both psychology and politics, one of the eternally recurring questions is the simple question of the origin of political beliefs. What makes one person a liberal, and another a conservative? There are a lot of potential answers, and it is quite easy to fall into moralistic judgment and say “Well it’s easy. Some people are good, and others are evil. ” But serious thinkers and armchair psychologists cannot possibly be satisfied by such a simplistic reduction. What really makes one person lean to the left when another leans to the right?

I don’t claim to have a single definitive answer, but I think, in my ponderings, I may have unearthed a useful axis along which to examine the question.

It all comes down to which is more difficult to tolerate for the individual : uncertainty, or cognitive dissonance.

From this point of view, a liberal is someone who finds the internal conflict of cognitive dissonance to be far more unpleasant than any sense of ambiguity or doubt about the true nature of things. Hence, a liberal tolerates doubt but rigorously pursues the elimination of cognitive dissonance by trying to form a single, coherent, internally and externally consistent picture of the world and how it works.

A conservative, on the other hand, finds ambiguity, uncertainty, and doubt to be far more painful and frightening than cognitive dissonance. Because of this, they are willing to tolerate a great deal of cognitive dissonance in order to create a world view free of the doubt and uncertainty and perplexing complexity that they cannot tolerate. Their world-view need not be particularly consistent or congruent either with itself or with objective reality, as long as it fulfills the deep need for certainty.

Liberal versus conservative, then, is really a battle between two thinking styles, or rather, two different cognitive priorities. Liberals maximize consistency and minimize dissonance. Conservatives, the opposite.

This view, I think, helps to shed some light on the age-old observation that people tend to be more liberal when they are younger and more conservative as they grow older.

When we are young, we are in the phase of our lives when we are still trying to figure out what this world is all about, what is really going on, and what it all means. Our minds retain the flexibility of youth as well as its vigor, and we have not made a great deal of commitments, either to ourselves or to the world. as to the nature of things or the ways of the world. Most importantly, we have, for the most part, not made any substantial investments of time, energy, or wealth based on our views, and therefore the pressure to cling to the philosophies in which we have invested is absent.

As we age, however, things change. The progress from single adult to spouse to parent leaves us with a great deal more in the immediate world to concentrate on, and the increased drain of day to day life on our faculties coupled with the inevitable decline in vigour and mental flexibility that comes with age, leaves little room in people’s minds for philosophical meanderings. When there is so much to do in the course of the day, you have to make up your mind about certain things and simply go with it, come what may, and over time this leads to both the aforementioned increased investment in one worldview or another, and a lack of patience with the sorts of ambiguities a more philosophically inclined mind embraces.

Eventually, the fog of age grows thick enough in the minds of the aging to create significant pressure to reduce and strengthen the world view even further. Previously acceptable levels of ambiguity become intolerable because the more confused and frightened people grow as their faculties dim, the stronger the need for absolute rigidity and certainty in the remaining things they can still understand.

Thus, over the course of their lives, a person moves from a child’s simple, black and white, largely unexamined world view to the troubling turbulence of their teen years, when the child that was wars with the adult that will be, into a certain equilibrium as a young adult, then into the middle years of declining energies and flexibility, into the long dark tunnel of old age, where the emotional need for certainty far outstrips any need for philosophical clarity and the mind retreats back into the simplistic black and white view it remembers from its innocent youth.

I make no claims as to this theory’s completeness or comprehensibility. I only offer it as another angle from which to examine the question, and hence derive a better picture of the whole.

OK, I’m going to try to address this topic again, and I will do my level best to stay calm about this subject and not lose my shit and fly way off the handle like I did last time.

One my my more persnickety and painful pet peeves has to do with people treat mathematics like it is some kind of obscure and arcane thing that they have no chance of possibly understanding, leaving them to make important life decisions based on gut feeling or similarly unreliable methods instead of using the far simpler and safer method of just doing the math.

Now, I am not some math loving Asperger’s patient who like numbers better than people and wishes everyone was more like him. I am not that particular flavour of nerd. I can take math or leave it. I got good marks in math in school, but not appreciably better than the rest of my courses. Math is just OK by me.

Nor am I talking about advanced algebra or calculus or some other blackboard-covering mind-denting level of the science of numbers, values, and relationships. I hit the wall at college level calculus like a lot of people did, and so anything I know, I learned in the regular school system. I am not, for a moment, saying that everyone should strive to be the next Stephen Hawking or Rene Descartes.

No, all I am talking about is the math you learned in elementary school. Add, subtract, multiply, divide. If you made it to junior high, you already know all this math. And thanks to the invention of the calculator, you don’t even have to actually do the math yourself. You just have to know what it means.

But a lot of people seem to treat math like a childhood disease : something you had to go through when you were a kid and are now incredibly glad they will never, ever, ever have to experience it again. (Sadly, a lot of people treat reading the same way, more’s the pity. )

And if math was truly an obscure and largely useless subject that had no bearing whatsoever on people’s day to day lives, that would be fine. History, for instance, is a subject which is very important to society as a whole (history is memory and to fail to learn from the mistakes of the past is to be doomed to repeat them), but in the context of the average person’s daily life, whether or not they remember the year in which the Diet of Worms occurred is not going to have much of an impact unless they are playing Trivial Pursuit. (It’s 1521, by the way. Thanks, Wikipedia!)

But math is considerably more important to day to day life, and for one tiny little reason : MONEY. The world of money is the world of numbers, and those who are not comfortable with dealing with the basics of the world of numbers (math, in other words) are naked and vulnerable when the wolves of superior numeracy who control the world of money with their math skills are looking for sheep to shear. Or worse.

In fact, the entire world is now in financial crisis, with millions suffering worldwide on every level of society, because a small group of extremely rich number nerds came up with a mathematical model so complicated and abstruse that they fooled a lot of other very rich people into buying the financial instruments based on these mathematical models under the sheer faith that these mathemagicians had someone invented a way to make financial risk disappear while maintaining a high return on investment. And by the time they realized their mistake, they had convinced the economy that this was real money, and when they eventually ran out of suckers to spend their real money on fake magic money, trillions of dollars disappeared from the world economy in a flash.

So we can’t pretend math is not important. It’s the heart and soul of money, especially in this day and age when our life savings are just digits on a computer screen. And yet so many people are intimidated by the world of numbers. Why is that?

Frankly, I don’t really know. It might have something to do with some people simply being temperamentally biased towards qualitative thinking over quantitative thinking, and hence the precise and definitive (but strictly limited) world of mathematics seems incomprehensible to them, even at such a basic level as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

And we know it’s not a matter of ability, because again, we all can do these things. We all learned basic math in elementary school. It’s not like we lack basic numeracy.

It’s more, I think, a matter of being comfortable with numbers. Of getting over the feeling that when you are dealing with numbers, you are in alien territory and want to get out as soon as possible because you are outside your comfort zone.

If you can stick with it, you will realize that numbers are extremely simple, so simple it’s almost ludicrous, and once you realize that, you will lose your fear and be able to push numbers around and use them like the simple tools they are.

If enough of us can do that, we can crack the code behind which all these financial world jackals do their dirty business, drag them out into the light, and hold them accountable for their crimes.

If not, we will all remain in the dark about what is really going on, and be at the mercy of the predator who stalk their prey in the darkness of public ignorance.

{The following is my idea of what very well may have gone down over the last few days at Hosni Mubarak’s (thankfully now former) Presidential palace. It is not the most probably scenario, or the most well researched, or the most historically accurate, but it is, in this author’s opinion, the most amusing. }

It is Thursday, February 10, 2011. }

Azizi : I can’t believe it, it’s finally happening!
Dakarai : I know. These last two weeks have been the longest weeks of my life. I mean, we knew Hosehead was not the most reasonable or sensible person in the world, but trying to talk that man into accepting reality and stepping down is like talking to the sand.
Azizi : Except sometimes the sand moves a little!

{They both laugh. }

Azizi : To think, we will finally be free of that terrible man, with his petty demands and his impossible standards and bizarre…. proclivities.
Dakarai : I, for one, know that I can never eat lamb or mutton again.
Azizi : Yes. Or beef.
Dakarai : Or chicken.
Azizi : Or (shudder) goat.
Dakarai : Especially not goat. Never, ever goat. Face it, Azizi… we are vegetarians now.
Azizi : It is true. We should thank Allah that his wandering eye never lit upon a bag of rice or a loaf of bread, else we should both starve!

{They both laugh. }

Azizi : Were you there when we finally agreed to step down?
Daktarai : No, I gave up and went home after the first six hours of arguing. Were you?
Azizi : I was so privileged. It was pure luck, however. Had I stayed at my uncle’s wedding party any longer, I would have missed it. As is, I showed up just when he finally broke down and admitted there might be a few people in Egypt who don’t like him. From there, it was only three more hours before he agreed to make the speech announcing he is stepping down.
Daktarai : You mean, he agreed to step down.
Azizi : I would not go that far. Let’s just say…
Daktarai : Wait, wait…. it’s time! Turn on CNN!

{Azizi grabs the remote control and turns on the television just in time for them to hear the part of Mubarack’s speech where it becomes evident that he is NOT, in fact, stepping down. }

Daktarai : WHAT?!?

{Azizi throws the remote at the television screen so hard that the remote explodes into tiny pieces. }

Azizi : That son and father of a crosseyed goat!
Daktarai : He can’t do this to us. Not now. I can’t go back to working for that idiot now. I have already sold my home in the city and all my belongings. My wife and children and I are moving to my cousin Chisisi’s farm near the sea. It’s a done deal, I can’t change my mind now. My wife… bless her holy love…. would never forgive me. She will give me that look that says “I am forlorn, for I have been cursed with an idiot for a husband. ” She will be rude to me in front of our children and our relatives. . Our bedroom will be colder than the top of Mount Sinai!
Azizi : Calm down, calm down, my excitable friend. All is not yet lost. Some of us have…. anticipated this outcome, and made plans. Do not worry…. by now, they are already in motion.

{SCENE : Hosni Mubarak in another room in the Palace, a room dominated by an extremely large plasma screen television. CNN is on. As a bored-looking Mubarak listlessly watches, the newsdesk interrupts to announce his resignation and play a clip of vice-president Omar Suleiman announcing it. }

Mubarak : WHAT?!?

{Mubarak throws the remote at the television screen so hard that the remote explodes into tiny pieces. }

Mubarak : That traitorous dog! That back-stabbing jackal! That son and mother of a crosseyed goat! I’ll see that he dies the slowest and most merciless death my torturers can conceive! His death will make the ghosts of the Pharaohs themselves cry out in horror!

{Mubarak storms across the room to the closed door, only to find it is locked. He immediately begins pounding on it and rattling the knob. }

Mubarak : GUARDS! Release me immediately! Some idiot locked me in this room! GUARDS! GUARDS! Seize that traitor Suleiman and bring him to me, along with some starving rats and a bucket of soapy water! GUARDS! I have not resigned! I REPEAT, I have NOT RESIGNED! GUARDS!

{CUT TO : Azizi and Daktarai in their office, watching Mubarak rage on their own television. Both men have tears in their eyes and as the cut opens, they are just finishing a very hearty laugh. }

Daktarai : Ah, this was indeed far better than anything I could have imagined. How long do you think it will take him to realize what has truly happened?
Azizi : With his radiant intellect? Could be hours… days even.
Daktarai : We’ll know he has figured it out when he stops raging like a man and starts begging like a woman.
Azizi : Let him rage, or beg, or recite the whole Koran backwards, it will make no difference. The deed is done, the people are dancing in the streets, the whole world knows he is no longer President and the military is in charge, and there is nobody in that entire wing of the Palace to hear his cries.
Daktarai : Truly, you are a man of wisdom and genius, my friend. It makes me wonder why we ever tries convincing him to step down on his own. Surely we, of all people, could not have had an ounce of respect for that blister on a camel’s balls.
Azizi : So are you going through with your plan to retire to your cousin’s farm?
Daktarai : Yes indeed! My wife is so happy, she doesn’t even want to stay to enjoy the parties. By this time tomorrow, she and I and all our children and servants will be on our way up the Nile to paradise.
Azizi : Think they have room there for an old childless bachelor with an inconveniently public association with the most hated man in Egypt?

{Daktarai pretends to think this over, then smiles. }

Daktarai : For the man who freed Egypt…. anything.

THE END

Well, I had no sooner finished the first part of this article that I thought of a bunch more really cool bits of knowledge to take back in time with you when you head back to make yourself Emperor (or Empress) of Earth for all time forever.

So put that brain back in its mason jar, save your place on mineallmine.com, and grab that special book on your bookshelf that opens the passage down to your Cackling Room, because it’s time to learn more wonderful ways to completely crush the primitive humans of centuries past.

Concrete

This one is so huge, I can’t believe I forgot it on the first half of the list. Concrete is one of the basic ingredients of modern society and is well within the capabilities of a Bronze Age civilization, if somewhat complicated to get started because you have to get cement together first. But once you can get all the ingredients together and make it work, your society can now build ramparts and buildings far stronger than your pre-industrial enemies could possibly even dent, let alone destroy. Add in steel, and you could make skyscrapers if you wanted.

Glass and glassworks

Talk about low tech! All you need for basic glassworking is heat and sand. With that, you can blow glass, and once you have blown glass, all you need is the right sort of fine grained surfaces in order to be able to polish glass and make lenses. And from lenses…. eyeglasses, telescopes, binoculars, maybe even lasers if you’ve very clever. Granted, it’s not quite the amazing civilization changer that concrete or steel might be, but still, those prehistoric skyscrapers are going to need windows. Hell, windows! Before the invention of decent glass, there was no way to light the inside of your hovel without either having a big hole in the wall, or using a candle. But thanks to glass, your empire will have indoor sunshine!

Steam power

This is a bit of a dicey one because the art and science of steam power is well known, but actually harnesses the awesome power of steam requires extremely high quality engineering, machining, and people who are willing to go in there and do that amazingly brave, dirty, hot, and dangerous job known as “steamfitting”. It’s not necessarily something you can just jump into without burning through a lot of slaves really fast, and that might not be the best thing for your rep as a semi-benevolent dictator. Still, once you rule the world and have retired to a quiet life of reflection, statesmanship, and orgies, you might find the time to tinker a bit and get at least basic steam power working without too much carnage. At the very least, you can make toys to amuse your masses of progeny.

What coal and oil are good for

And for that matter, where to find them! Think of the riches and power (both political and literal) to be had by knowing where all the good stuff is.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Coal and oil! Aren’t those Bad? I mean, just because we’re power mad megalomaniacs willing to trash all know history just to put ourselves in control of the Destiny of Man, that doesn’t mean we’re not sensitive to the effect our Empire has on our one precious Mother Earth!

Relax. You don’t have to use these things for energy forever. Eventually, you will build up enough modern society to have access to solar, hydro, tidal, and whatever. But until then, you will need a good energy source, and coal and oil really fit the bill. And if you’re still not convinced that you need that sweet sweet crude oil for your globe-spanning empire, I have one word for you : plastics.

Basic human nutrition

I wasn’t sure whether to include this in the “hygiene” section of the previous article, but they are not really the same thing, so what the hell. It might seem like knowledge of the Food Pyramid is not the kind of thing which brings nations to their knees, but remember that the reasons the British are known colloquially (and affectionately) as “limeys” is that they were the ones who figured out that scurvy was caused by a lack of Vitamin C, and so their sailors were given limes to prevent it. And just like that, their sailors were the only ones in the world who never got scurvy, and well… rule Brittania. So between nutrition, hygiene, and antibiotics, yours will be the healthiest empire in the world. And a healthy soldier is a powerful one.

OK, that’s it, I swear. I am totally done with this concept and can move on now. I promise.

(You hear that, brain? No more bright ideas!)

I’ve been going heavy with the philosophy and psychology and shit lately, apart from that thing the rodent behind my eyes made me type, and so I thought for tonight I’d just kick back, pop a cold one, put my feet up, and lay down some sweet, sweet nerd talk with all you nice people.

So without further ado and as little adon’t as we can legally get away with and still stay within federally mandated guidelines for fucked up bloggers, here’s my list of the technological and scientific knowledge I would bring back in time with me if I planned on traveling back in time to make myself a god amongst men.

And women too. These are in no particular order, and included with each item is my reasons for why I think this would make a great time travel’s secret weapon from the future.

Gunpowder

OK, let’s get the obvious one out of the way real quick here. Gunpowder, gunpowder, gunpowder. Why? Because it’s easy to make from ingredients you pretty much always find wherever there are human beings : sulphur (from shit), charcoal (from your firepit) and potassium nitrate, otherwise known as saltpeter, which you can get from urine. Get those together in the right proportions, and you will be sending a hunk of crystal into a Gorn in no time.

Of course, you will have more luck with your gunpowder if you also bring…

The Secret of Steel

By Crom, now we’re talking. As long as you make sure to start off at a nice Iron Age point in civilization, you can outfit your hordes not just with guns that shoot bullets somewhat accurately, but with swords that are so much stronger than anyone else’s that you will seem like your army wields a thousand Excaliburs. And if you are particularly bold and don’t mind essentially dragging people into the Iron Age in order to get to the steel, you could go all the way back to the Bronze Age, where the swords were so weak that they often were dulled into uselessness after minutes in battle. A steel sword with a good edge would cut through that like it was smoke.

Modern hygiene

Now things get interesting. When you think about it, all the basic concepts of modern hygiene and antisepsis are completely within the reach of even Stone Age civilization. Your empire could be the strongest not only because it had steel weapons and gunpowder, but because they were the only ones who knew to boil their water before they drank it, wash the dirt and shit off things before eating them, and in general keep ingestion and elimination as far apart as possible. There goes all those plagues!

The principles of hydraulics

Another one that works in the Stone Age, even. Heck, throw in counterweights and springs as well. Moving weights by moving water (or air, or oil… ) is a very basic trick, and something that you could do with rocks, vines, and leaves if you really had to. Imagine the enemy’s fear as you use your mighty trebuchet to hurl burning rocks into their midst which then (thanks to your gunpowder) explode. Shock and awe? How about shit and run?

The useful properties of certain natural things

One of the great advantages of being from this exact era is that many scientists are working quite hard right now at figuring out exactly which old-time folk medicines and ancient medical practices work, and which are just soo much bullwater. So all you, the prospective time traveling overlord, have to do is pick through their work and memorize the good bits. Heck, just knowing where penicillin and aspirin come from would give you a huge boost. (Moldy bread and willow bark, respectively). Imagine what you could do with the more advanced things being discovered daily! Your healing arts would be as famous as your terrible engines of destruction. And really, what is a wizard but someone who know cool stuff that works?

So there you have it, five areas of knowledge to learn inside and out before you head back to ancient times to use your superior knowledge and towering physique (remember, they were short back then) to remake all of human history to your advantage.

In the next edition of How To Be A Time Lord And Make It Work, we’ll tell you how to get out of those awkward situations when you show up in King Arthur’s Court, right on top of the Round Table, naked.

Until then, remember…. history is yours to shape!

For part II of this list, click here!

One of the most pervasive, pernicious, and persistent delusions of humanity is that bane of nerd, intellectuals, atheists, and Vulcans throughout the galaxy, the delusion of being a logical creature.

Ironically, this delusion is often most vehemently and virulently clung to by those who take pride and not a little sadistic pleasure in attacking the delusions of others. It is a measure of the nakedly absurd nature of this delusion that said individual often then brags about how free of delusions they are, which is hardly a very logical thing to do.

So let’s get this straight. You are not logical. You might try to use logic as your guide to living, you might do your best to keep a skeptical yet open mind, you might even have cleansed a great many of the more popular and obvious delusions from your conscious mind, but you are not and never will be a logical creature. Such a thing does not exist and quite possibly never will. Banish that thought from your mind right along with belief in ghost, the bogeyman, and unfettered capitalism.

How do I know this? I hear you asking. Simple. If you are reading these words, you are a human being. That means that you are a complicated patchwork of monkey and man and wolf, with an oversized brain and a jury-rigged body both filed with uncertain compromises between animal and human, between tree monkey and hunting ape and civilized sentient, and that means you are struggling in the dark like the rest of us. Becoming more enlightened about certain things does not free you from your basic human nature, and the very idea that it could is nothing but ludicrously obvious bathetic hubris.

As human beings, we are certainly unique amongst all the myriad life forms we know of that have evolved here on this magnificent planet of ours of being capable of logical thinking. Our impressive forebrains allow us to plan, reason, decide, discern, and cooperate with a level of sophistication and power that is unrivaled in both quality and quantity anywhere else on Earth. But there is a vast chasm between being capable of logic and reason, and being led entirely or even predominantly by it.

Still not convinced of your own irrationality? Fair enough. Let’s attack this problem from another angle, namely the philosophical angle. Let us examine the logical nature of motivation. After all, a logical person is only moved by motivations of pure logic, right?

But what, exactly, is a logical motive? Examine any action taken by human being, and you will soon hit a purely emotional motivation if you simply follow the chain of motivations high enough. It is like the child’s game of simply asking “Why?” over and over again until the adult you are pestering gives up in exasperation and assigns you extra chores.

Believe it or not, this childish game is actually quite philosophically illuminating. No matter what starting point you choose, eventually, you end up at the final irreducible answer : because they wanted to. Because like all creatures, they sought to gain pleasure and avoid pain. They did it because it seemed like a good idea at the time. All motivations are, ultimately, purely emotional.

Logic can help us sort through possibilities, pick actions that are more likely to lead to the outcomes we desire, provide invaluable assistance when finding our way through the maze of life, but it cannot provide a reason to care. To logic, life and death, pleasure and pain, good and evil are all exactly the same. It is only our irrational animal emotions which cause us to value one over the other, and which can provide the meaning, motion, and motivation that turns the cold blueprint of logic and knowledge into the living, breathing reality of action.

No action, no matter how noble, altruistic, self-sacrificing, or downright insane it seems, is done for any other reason than to seek pleasure or avoid pain. Despite our high ambitions and even higher opinion of ourselves, ultimately we human beings are no different in that respect than the amoeba flowing towards the paramecium in a petrie dish. The ways we pursue our pleasures and flee our pains are undoubtedly more complex and our powers and abilities to do so of vastly different magnitudes, but in the end, it’s all about the purely emotional desire for pleasure.

Physical pleasure, emotional pleasure, intellectual pleasure, even spiritual pleasure. But pleasure, nevertheless. And logic alone provides no reason why ecstasy is better then agony.

It is a purely human preference.

Often, when we intellectuals become frustrated with all the myriad aspects of human society that our highly developed abstract reasoning minds and comparably underdeveloped social minds make incomprehensible or inaccessible to us, we rail against the perceived irrationality, unpredictability, and general stupidity of our fellow human beings, which is a lot like a hammer complaining about screws.

Just because your tool doesn’t work on something does not, necessarily, mean there is something wrong with it. Perhaps you need more tools.

First, the whole railing against the human race aspect of intellectuals rage is entirely wrongheaded. For one, of course, everything you say about human beings you are saying about yourself. Misanthropy, therefore, has a strong self-defeating aspect to it. If we humans are so terrible, how can you be so sure that your judgment is accurate? After all, you are not an alien. You’re just as much a crazy, irrational, illogical beach ape as I am, cousin.

For that matter, how do you judge an entire species anyhow? What criterion can you possible use to judge all of humanity? We’re the only sentient species we know of. We have no basis for comparison. As often as science fiction likes to cast humanity as, in galactic terms, the inbred raging hick cousin you keep in the basement of the Galaxy compared to all other alien races, we haven’t the slightest proof that this is true. For all we know, in that glorious future where we leave our solar system and explore our neighborhood and meet many alien races, we will find we’re actually the smartest, strongest, and most enlightened sentient race we can find, and it’s the others who will seem like poo-flinging savages to us.

So humanity sucks…. compared to what? Some say “compared to its potential”. So now you know exactly what humanity’s potential is, and know it so well that you can confidently giving a failing grade to every single human being living, dead, or potential? Nobody can back up that kind of sweeping generalization. An even cursory glance at the full diversity of human thought, culture, attitude, behaviour, civilization, and philosophy should banish any thoughts that you know enough to judge the entire species. In this sense, misanthropy is the ultimate bigotry.

Especially given the well established fact that our ideas of what constitutes “human nature” are almost always hopelessly limited and provincial, and based entirely on our culture, our upbringing, and our life experiences. We based our opinions of our entire species on the five hundred or so we will meet in our lifetime, and then pretend we know enough to confidently state that humanity sucks rocks.

As for our supposedly illogical natures (thanks, Mister Spock, like you’re any better), again, compared to what? We are the most logical species we have ever met. Compared to even our clever cousins the chimpanzees, we are the most cool headed, rational, sensible species in existence, as far as we know. Sure, potentially, we could be a lot better. But isn’t that true of everything? What person every lives up to their entire potential? Even top students don’t get 100 percent on every test. And yet misanthropes feel they can declare humanity a failure simply for not scoring full marks on their exam.

What is really going on is that the misanthrope has simply not gotten over that troubled time when we are late teens and young adults and get our first real sense of the world as it is, and find out it’s a much more complicated and unpleasant world than the safe and stable one in which we grew up. There is war, starvation, crime, injustice, and all other manner of ills in this imperfect world, and learning the truth of this is hard for every person.

But instead of accepting it and getting past it, the misanthrope stays there. They continue to judge the world, humanity, and life itself with the simplistic, uncompromising, and inflexible mind of a child.

The mature individual learns the truth of the ills of the world, and loses their innocence/ignorance and becomes sadder… but wiser. They learn that there is both much good and much bad in the world, and all we can do as human beings is try to increase the good and decrease the bad.

But the immature person becomes a misanthrope, and decides that if humanity isn’t perfect, it’s awful.

What a tellingly human mistake to make!