Just one story on the FSR this week, because this one’s a lulu.

Now here is two words I bet you never thought you would here together again, ever : cold fusion.

Yes, amazingly, it’s back in the news. Those of us who were around back when those two words first came together in the public imagination will likely remember those heady few days between the first news story concerning this amazing scientific breakthrough which was going to change the world and finally solve all our energy problems forever, and the inevitable realization that it was all a bunch of crap and the whole thing was a big sad cruel joke created by overenthusiastic scientists and an ever more overenthusiastic media.

Well, hang on to your hats, because apparently it’s 1988 against and we’re getting on this ride just one more time for old times’ sake.

This time, it’s a pair of Italian scientists named Rossi and Focardi who are claiming to have invented a phenomenal new process that will yield tons of free energy via a room-temperature reaction that produces neither carbon emissions nor radioactive waste, and produces eight times the energy you put into it or possibly a lot more.

Now, as an open minded rugged skeptic who prides himself on being both open to anything and fooled by nothing, the first challenge this sort of story presents is as simple as it is profound : not immediately dismissing the whole thing with a derisive, mocking laugh out of leftover bitterness from the first time around.

It’s very tempting, and would be both easy and very satisfying. It would be the simplest thing in the world to just say “Hah! We’re not falling for that again, you sad, sad losers! Find a new scam!”

It felt good just typing it. But as easy and fun as that would be, it’s not logical or right. Just because in one rather famous case, the effect turned out to be bogus and the media looked foolish for getting us all excited over what turned out to be nothing does not mean the cold fusion is impossible and that anything bearing that label must, perforce, be a completely and total fraud. These guys could truly be onto something, and it would be a global shame if we dismissed a revolutionary technology that could lead to many wonderful things simply because the field it’s in is somewhat disreputable because of something that happened 23 years ago.

That said, Rossi and Focardi are making a lot of very bold claims, and not providing a lot of the crucial details needed to let other scientists judge said claims for themselves, and so the possibility that they, too, are entirely wrong, or worse, frauds, still remains.

Interestingly, they claim they do not understand how their reaction works. That is, in and of itself, quite damning in many people’s eyes. It is always tempting to jump to the conclusion that if you can’t explain how something works, it doesn’t work. But that’s letting intellectual hubris get in the way of real science. Science does not require an explanation of how something works, it merely requires a demonstration that it works. The explanations can come later.

After all, humanity used fire for thousands of years without having the slightest idea of why it did what it did. They knew that it worked, and how it worked, and what you could do with it. Theories about combustion, oxidation, and chemical energy didn’t come along till quite recently, and it didn’t get in the way of us using fire to found civilization at all.

So have they demonstrated that their process works? Sadly, that’s where things get muddy. They certainly seem to think they have, and they definitely demonstrated something at a big press conference last week. Some other scientists were there and claimed that they verified that it was not a chemical reaction, but the real meat of the thing, the explanation of how it all works and, most tellingly, the means to independantly verify their results via repeating their experiments, remain undisclosed.

This quote from the letter telling them that their patent had been rejected sums it up nicely :

As the invention seems, at least at first, to offend against the generally accepted laws of physics and established theories, the disclosure should be detailed enough to prove to a skilled person conversant with mainstream science and technology that the invention is indeed feasible. … In the present case, the invention does not provide experimental evidence (nor any firm theoretical basis) which would enable the skilled person to assess the viability of the invention. The description is essentially based on general statement and speculations which are not apt to provide a clear and exhaustive technical teaching

In other words, if you are going to make this kind of claim, which would seem to deny the laws of physics, you had better be able to offer more than vague statements and extraordinary boasts.

Their defenders might well claim that Rossi and Focardi are just doing what they have to do to keep others from stealing their brilliant idea and claiming it for their own. But that might be how business works, but it’s certainly not how science works. In science, you do not claim what you cannot prove, and more importantly, what you cannot allow other scientists to prove.

So is their claim real? Are they truly the revolutionary, world-changing scientists they claim to be, or just some of the boldest fraudsters the world has ever known?

I don’t claim to know. I am not qualified to understand their theoretical arguments, and if the world’s top scientists can’t figure out if they are lying, neither can I. It all sounds very fishy, but there is no “fishy soundingness principle” in science. There is just proof or disproof, and if their claims are legit, Rossi and Focardi are doing themselves no favours by playing this so close to the vest.

But who knows? Maybe we’ll all be using one of their reactors in our homes come 2020.

Well, do you? Because I sure do. They’re not totally gone yet, but they are clearly on their way out, and I figured that I would write down a few words about them before go the way of the record store.

To the young people of today, actually going to a brick and mortar store and looking over their selection and then renting something you have to return by hand must seem kind of old-fashioned and clumsy. They probably roll their eyes as their Generation X parents (people my age, in other words) drag them to Blockbuster excitedly and try to get them interested in the whole movie selection process, saying “I used to love coming to the video store when I was your age!”, like that made it any less lame. And even worse, parents my age telling them how getting stuff in the mail from Netflix is just “not the same”.

You’re right, Dad. It’s not the same. It’s better.

And it is better. That’s the thing. Heck, even old school Netflix is looking pretty old in the tooth now that you have things like Netflix Instant, which stream hundreds of thousands of titles to homes without a physical disc being involved in the slightest. No stupid “Netflix queue”, no waiting, no finding a mailbox, no not knowing what you will get, just instant access to the world of video content.

It’s so efficient it hurts. But it’s a good kind of hurt.

Well, don’t worry, kids. I am not going to try to convince you that the Good Old Days were somehow better for being slower, more complicated, more expensive, and all around stupider. I am not, by nature, that nostalgic. I know that life is ever unfolding and that to ask the world to stop just because I am growing older and it is getting harder and harder to adjust to change would be both sad and wrong. Everything I love in the world was born at the expense of something my parents’ generation loved, and what they loved replaced something their parents loved, and so on back through time. There’s nothing so special about my generation’s toys that makes them any different.

But I do want to think on video stores a while, simply because they are something that did not exist when I was born, came into existence well after I entered school, and are now fading with the sunset. They are, therefore, the first major cultural institution that I can think of that will have come and gone during my lifetime (first of many, I am sure) and so, for that alone, the video store deserves some recognition in the pages of my life.

And I was no casual bystander in the video store years. I was a very eager participant. In fact, I was on the front lines, or at the least, had relatives there.

You see, my grandfather, Clifford Gaudet, had C. J. Gaudet’s TV and Stereo Sales and Service, the small town electronics store that brought pretty much everything to my home town. He founded it way back in the days when radio was king, and each successive new thing (black and white TV, long playing records, color TV, stereo sound, the first VCRs, quadraphonic sound, and so on and so forth), so when the video revolution came along in the 80’s, my grandfather’s store was the only place to buy a VCR, and the only place to rent the videos as well.

And because my mother was my grandfather’s daughter, we always got good deals on the Latest Thing, and therefore we had a VCR, and rented videos, a little before others.

Of course, other video stores soon sprang up, and they became a frequent haunt of mine, replacing the video game arcades that I formerly inhabited. Now, instead of hanging around in arcades to get my video game fix, I just rented cartridges for my NES.

The drug was the same, but the dose per dollar was much, much higher.

In fact, for me, the video store was overwhelmingly the video game store. I rented movies now and then, but with limited allowance funds to invest, it just made a whole lot more sense to rent a video game that would give me dozens of hours of entertainment over a movie that would give, at most, two.

Besides, cable television provided all the passive viewing action I could ever have wanted. Muchmusic (Canadian for “MTV”) alone kept me busy a lot of the time.

Nevertheless, I spent a lot of time at the video stores in my area. They just seemed to be where things happened, and best of all, they were the place where I could, if I was lucky, talk to other people about the movies and video games I loved.

Back then, as now, good conversation was one of my primary needs. So hanging out at the video store had many benefits for me, even if I got chastised now and then for “pestering” people. Heck, I was used to it from my days as an arcade brat anyhow.

But then the Internet came along and suddenly, getting my video game fix at home was just a little piracy away. So the trips to the video game store petered out over time, and I would have to say that my days of going to video game stores ended at almost exactly the same time as the end of the SNES.

Video stores and I had a great time together, and I will always look back on those times fondly. They were islands of mental stimulation and color in my sleepy little town. I felt almost at home in them.

That said, I don’t really miss them. How sad can I be about them passing when it has not even occurred to me to go to one in at least six years? And I have one quite close to me. I could go any time I wanted. It’s not even a block away. I just have no use for them any more.

So farewell, video stores. I won’t be there when you finally go, but I was there at the beginning and I am glad for all the fun times we had together.

If there is one aspect of the manifold manifestations of the mind that seems to directly fly in the face of all logic and sense to the average person, it is the existence of masochism.

It would seem that the most basic rule of behaviour in all creatures, from humans all the way down to the lowly amoeba, is that we avoid pain and seek pleasure. Even plants, in their slow and simple way, react to some stimuli by trying to avoid it. So what on Earth went wrong to make some people seek what most people would clearly understand to be painful stimuli?

There are a lot of potential answers to that question, and for different human subjects the answer might vary quite wildly, but on a purely physiological level, it makes more sense than you might think.

In order to reach the answer, however, we first need to understand the nature of physical pain as it is experienced by the human body.

Any painful stimulus causes your body to release some fairly potent internally generated chemicals called endorphins. They are powerful painkillers, and your body is assuming that the pain your are feeling is as a result of real damage being done to the body by a danger which might very well be happening and you can’t afford to be debilitated by pain, so it sends these painkillers into action to delay the pain and let you deal with the danger before the pain gets to you.

And your body is not too fussy about the dosage. It pretty much dumps whatever endorphins it has on hand in only vaguely proportionate amounts relative to the pain, and tends to assume “better too much than too little”. And as many an addict can tell you, if the amount of painkiller exceeds the amount of pain, the result is a very unique and powerful kind of pleasure.

This system works quite well for the rest of the animal kingdom, and for the most part, works quite well for us human beings as well. Even masochists mostly avoid pain and seek pleasure. It is just that the pleasure they seek is that wonderful endorphin rush mentioned above.

This is aided by a simple fact of physiology : pain is a product of nerve trauma, and hence, it gets to our brain immediately via our lightning fast nervous system. And if the stimulus is brief, so is the sensation of pain. But the endorphin response is a product of our much slower and less finely tuned endocrine system, which is chemical and not electrical, and hence comes sufficiently after the pain for our minds to separate the two sensations and treat them differently.

Add to that the fact that we tend to remember the last part of an experience more strongly than the first, and the masochistic pattern begins to emerge. If the pain is brief and first, and the pleasure is long and second, it is quite possible for the human mind to fixate on that pleasure and develop a preference for what seems, on the surface, to be a painful stimuli.

The stimuli is indeed painful, otherwise the endorphins would not be released. But the response is pleasure. It’s all a matter of how your particular brain sorts and interprets the sensation.

And with repeated painful stimuli that are briefer than the pleasure of the endorphin response, the excess builds in the bloodstream and creates a state of mind almost exactly like the haze created by the abuse of various narcotics, and all from one’s own perfectly natural body chemicals. Legal too!

This neatly, if subtly, dodges the logical absurdity inherent in the idea of someone who “likes pain”. In a common sense manner, that just makes no sense. If you like it, it’s not pain, right?

Well, yes and no. The masochist does indeed seek painful stimuli, which seems entirely illogical. But it is not the pain that they like. It’s the pleasure that the pain releases.

In fact, in theory, if the painful stimuli was extremely brief but extremely strong, it would come and go so fast that your conscious mind would barely register it, yet you would still reap the substantial endorphin rewards. All the pleasure with (almost) none of the pain.

In summation, while masochism seems to fly in the face of the most basic rule of animal behaviour – seek pleasure and avoid pain – it is really entirely consistent with it.

It’s just that the pleasure sought is initiated by pain.

[Note : For the purposes of this article, a ‘writer’ is someone whose artistic expression takes the form of stringing together words, and an ‘artist’ is someone in whom it takes the form of manipulating various media in an attempt to create a specific visual image. ]

As a writer, for a long time, I have envied artists. From my admittedly biased and self-centred point of view, it has always seemed to me that they have it a lot easier than us poor scribblers.

The biggest advantage they have is in convincing someone to experience their work. They can just point at their painting or sculpture and say “Hey, look at this!” and the moment people do, bam, they have experienced the art. They might love it or hate it, they might understand it or completely miss the point, they might ‘get you’ or totally misunderstand you, but damn it, they have experienced your work, so you have at least cleared that hurdle with relatively little effort.

We writers don’t have that luxury. Even the most succinct of us, the poets, have trouble convincing anyone to read our work. Reading something is just way more of a commitment than just looking at something. Looking at someone’s carefully constructed image takes a moment. Reading your friend’s poem… that takes time. Minutes! Maybe even a whole bunch of them!

Plus, the levels of involvement and intimacy are, in general, radically different between art and writing. Love it or hate it, the experience of looking at someone’s painting or sculpture will be a brief and fairly undemanding experience. It’s over fast, and for the most part, does not penetrate deeply.

But with writing, you are going to be spending time with the piece. You have to accept it into your mind fairly deeply in order to make sense of it at all, and that means that not only are you asking people for their time, but asking for access to their brain in a way that artists do not need to worry about.

And that’s a heck of a lot to ask of a person, even if they are your friend.

In our society, people are saturated with images. They are quite used to the visual medium, as it is all around them at all times, and so one more thing does not seem like much to ask of them.

But, as hard as it is to imagine for a lifelong reader like me, a lot of people barely read at all. A lot of people, in fact, consider reading anything more than a road sign to be a onerous and despicable chore to be avoided with the fervor and zeal a child uses in avoiding eating their vegetables… and largely for the same reason. At some critical age, they were forced to read, and it put them off it forever.

So not only are you dealing with asking someone to spend a fair amount of time with your writing and let you into their brain to boot, you are also facing the possibility that someone is not only not someone who reads for pleasure, but who actively avoids reading in all forms and considers it a good day when they didn’t have to read so much as a sign on a rest room door.

Obviously, you can’t spend a day without looking at things. Not if your eyes work.

Now I know that these observations are only part of the story, and there’s a lot of down sides to working in the visual medium that writers do not, in general, face.

For one, the visual medium takes a great deal of technical skill that does not come standard with a modern education. Nearly everyone in the modern democratic world gets a firm and early education in the basic skill of writing. It’s called literacy. Most people are literate. But most people can’t draw more than a stick figure.

Also, the ubiquity of the visual medium often causes people to completely devalue it. No matter how much work and talent and sheer artistic hell went into the making of an image, a lot of people will just shrug and say “So? It’s just a picture. What’s the big deal?”

The written word, on the other hand, is more valued because people can more easily see the effort involved. They might not grasp just how hard it was to get that specific shade of blue out of watercolors, but they can at least understand that writing something 1000 words long took a certain amount of time.

Still, with the provincialism of all specialists, I can’t help but envy the visual artists for the ease with which they get people to experience their craft.

And I really want to thank you all for letting me into your brain by reading this entire article!

Logic. It gets brought up a lot but few people really grasp its nature or how it works. People misconstrue it as something cold and emotionless, misapply it during open debate, and misunderstand its basic simplicity and think it is something fit only for Vulcans, nerds, and computers that lose to Doctor Who.

In other words, logic gets a bad rep when it’s really something people already know and understand already, otherwise they would be incapable of functioning in the world at all. Because logic is not some abstruse and remote discipline, it’s the basic rules of how things work and what makes sense, and that is something anybody can use in their life.

So this article is my first attempt at giving the reading public a quick and uncluttered lesson in the basics of logic so that they, themselves, can apply the power and enlightenment of clear logic to their lives.

Logic is your friend! Trust me. Now let’s begin.

One of the major misunderstandings that plagues discussions is either ignorance of, or incomplete knowledge of, the concept of “necessary but not sufficient”. People bring it up and try to apply it, but either don’t really get it, or use it dishonestly as an intellectual smokescreen to try to intimidate their opponents into not questioning their arguments because they don’t know what the term means, exactly.

It sounds impressive, but it’s really quite simple. All “necessary but not sufficient” means is that sometimes, more than one thing is necessary in order for something to be true.

Take your basic ice cream float. It has two ingredients : root beer and ice cream. If you have both of those, you can make yourself a nice frosty treat. If you are missing either of them, you can’t.

Simple, right? Anyone can understand that. And if you understand that, you already have “necessary but not sufficient” in the bag.

When you want to make an ice cream float, both ice cream and root beer are “necessary but not sufficient” conditions to your success. You can’t make an ice cream float without ice cream. You can’t make an ice cream float without root beer. Both parts are necessary, but neither is enough by itself to get the job done.

They are both necessary, but not sufficient, for the task of making an ice cream float. Easy, right?

But in the heat of debate, people get themselves all mixed up and confused because they don’t really get this simple concept, and too much either/or type thinking makes them get lost in a completely pointless and unhelpful side argument about which of two or more things is the MOST necessary.

Think about our ice cream float. Which is more important, the ice cream or the root beer? The answer, of course, is “neither”. You can’t have an ice cream float if you have both. No matter how good the ice cream is, without the root beer, you have no float. No matter how much root beer you have, you still need ice cream or the cool and refreshing treat you crave simply will not happen. Both are equally necessary. Trying to compare the two is meaningless.

Yet in arguments and discussions, people will get entirely sidetracked with “ice cream versus root beer” arguments. The problem is that once the question is framed that way, it’s hard for people to realize the trap they are in and get out.

People are used to true or false questions, this or that questions, A versus B questions. It takes a certain amount of imagination and will to answer “Neither, and the question itself is stupid. ”

And then stick to it. Even people who get that it’s a trap can be baited into falling for by the person who simply ignores their objection and says “Whatever, which one is better?”. The secret is to simply refuse to answer inane questions, and if the person persists, ignore them.

Some games are rigged, and the only way to win is to refuse to play in the first place.

So the next time you are debating with someone, and they keep insisting that two things can’t be equally necessary to something and that you have to choose one or the other as the one that is the REALLY important one, feel free to show them this article and try to get them to read it.

And if that works, offer to make them a root beer float.

it really is that simple, folks!

Being a writer myself (hey, if after a million words, I’m not a writer, nobody is), I’ve perused a lot of the literature online and in print about how to be a good writer, a better writer, a published writer, a writer with a better standard of living than a Calcutta street beggar, and so on.

And there is a lot of highly valuable advice out there about how to put together a professional looking manuscript, how to tighten up your writing to make it more succinct, how to convince editors that you are literate (I should use good grammar? Really? Wow!), how to come up with ideas, how to write convincing dialogue, and even some idea about how to write something worth reading.

And that is all very important stuff, but it’s really only half of the equation. And the problem is that because so much of the advice in the world about writing covers only or primarily that half, it can give a young writer the false impression that writing is all about rules, technique, precision, and a lot of other details which, to a certain mindset, can be extremely off-putting. It makes it seem like writing is an art form for accountants, lawyers, and other highly detail-oriented people only, and if you are one of those kinds of people, you might as well just not bother typing a single word.

And that is just not true. Sure, all those things count for a lot. But none of those things, by themselves, make you a good writer. It is the difference between writing as a skill and writing as a talent, between the little details and the big picture, between something you don’t particularly mind reading and something you actually enjoy reading.

This is an obvious truth, when you stop to consider it. None of the great writers who are universally admired today won their immortality and respect by having the fewest typos in their manuscript or by having the fewest split infinitives, the least number of unnecessary adverbs and adjectives, or the most “according to Hoyle” paragraph structure. If it was that easy, there would be a lot of people tied for first place.

Obviously, there must be something more to writing that precision of execution and the ability to follow the rules, and it’s that portion of the endeavour that is the subject of this article, and that I refer to when I speak of “the other half of writing”.

Part of the problem, of course, is that the other half of writing is much harder to learn and ever harder to teach than the half you usually see in writing manuals and advice columns. It’s a lot easier to educate people in writing cover letters and finding markets than it is to somehow teach imagination, insight, understanding, empathy, wit, and that sine qua non of je ne sais pas of writing, having something interesting to say.

Those are all highly subjective and ephemeral qualities that cannot be learned by rote or mastered through intensive study, and only a fool would claim to be do more than just point you in the right general direction or give you some potential fruitful food for thought.

Nobody and nothing can truly teach these things to a person, and so the books and websites stick to what can be taught, and thus unintentionally give the impression that writing is that, and nothing more.

Every writing manual, every helpful blog entry, every “how to get published” guide, and every writer’s group nugget of advice should begin with “This assumes that you have a good story to tell, a beautiful dream to share, or something interesting to say. ”

And of course, many do. A lot of these manuals do include something along these lines in their introduction. But the way it’s phrased is often quite harsh and negative, taking things from the “fuck you if you can’t write” end of the stick, as though to crush as many people’s dreams as possible.

My point, and I do have one, is that the real message for potential writers is not “you probably suck and don’t even bother”, but “if all these rules and regulations seem too much for you, if it seems like you have to be a detail-obsessed nitpicker to even stand a chance of getting noticed, relax. If you are good enough at the other half of writing, editors will forgive the occasional imperfection in your technique. ”

After all, that’s why editors exist. One of the little secrets that writing manuals won’t tell you is that a lot of very famous and important writers made a lot of work for their editors. They have (or had) poor spelling, grammar, typing, you name it. On the writer manual scorecard, they scored very poorly.

But once all the surface imperfections were fixed, once the grime and dirt and dust were wiped away and the nature of what was underneath was revealed, what the editors found was solid gold.

That doesn’t mean you should just type any old thing in any old way and fire it off without even proofreading it and expect the editors to line up at your door to kiss your ring. You still have to make it as good as you can before sending it off or showing it around, if for no other reason than to show the editor that you respect them enough to do as much of their work for them as you can before dumping something on your desk, and thus, give you word a chance to appeal to them.

But if the best you can do is still a lot less than perfect, do not despair. That doesn’t mean that you completely suck at writing and shouldn’t even bother trying.

After all, you might be very good at the other, more important half of writing.

And if you are, the rest of it will not matter nearly as much as you think it will.

For a long time, I have harbored a deep impression that, for all their evil and stupidity and spite, the forces of reactionary conservatism, conformity, and opposition to social progress are, essentially, child-like.

When you think about it, the desire to suppress individuality, freedom, and diversity is essentially a desire to force the world to be like you thought it was when you were a kid, before you learned that the world was a far more complicated, scary, and dangerous place than they ever could have known when they were small.

No wonder these people have such a huge problem with sexuality. Their entire philosophy is essentially a rejection of adolescence. In our teen years, we get the balance of our sexuality and sexual development, and the balance of our mental and psychological development as well. We lose our childlike innocent and become painfully cognizant of the world outside our little slice of the universe. We find out just how big the world is, and how small we are.

Social conservatives are simply people who have failed to make the transition to a mature adult acceptance of these truths, and instead, like mad gods, seek to cut the world down to size until it fits into their immature minds, rather than expand their minds to include the real world.

If you have to expand your mind one iota, the terrorists have won.

The true crux of the tragedy, of course, is that they, as hard as this is to believe, actually think that the world really was like they thought it was as a child. They think that it really was a safe, nice, gentle, orderly world where bad things never happened and everything was wonderful all the time. They lack the most basic of faculties required to grasp the world : the simple ability to recognize we were wrong in the past, and we know better now.

Often, these are people who cannot ever admit being wrong about anything, ever. Like the child who continues to insist he did not take a cookie from the cookie jar when the cookie is right there in his hand, they have a magical faith that if they don’t admit it’s true, it’s not true. That’s how naive these people truly are, and how philosophically bankrupt. They think and act as though their personal reality is reality, and therefore if they never admit they were wrong and never believe they were wrong, they were never wrong, period.

Doesn’t that sounds like an angry and spoiled child to you?

If you can’t even grasp that when you were a child, you were ignorant of the world and unable to really grasp it and hence got a false impression of its nature through no fault of your own, you are tragically and vastly under-equipped to handle even the most basic hurdles of adult life.

And to compound their ignorance, these failed adults don’t just think life really was like they thought it was when they were kids, they think the world was like how they remember it being, after the transition to adulthood and many painful years of responsibility and obligation have caused nostalgia to wipe away all the bad parts of childhood and make them think that when they were kids, everything was great all the time, and hence, something must have changed in the world since then.

Of course, nothing has changed all that much in the world. They just grew up… or failed to do so.

But no, it must be the world that has changed. After all, they have never been wrong in their life, even when they were barely old enough to walk upright. Logically speaking, it’s the world’s fault.

And doesn’t this explain a great deal about conservatives in general? The incoherent anger is just a temper tantrum on the adult scale. They think they can bully reality into being what they want it to be if they just shout loud enough and stomp their feet and hold their breath till they turn blue.

And the more evil old reality creeps in as their fragile and ridiculous world view is steadily eroded by sanity, reason, and that part of their mind which is still trying to grow up, the louder they shout and the harder they stomp their feet and the tighter they plug their airs, and the greater the pain they experience from the massive cognitive dissonance they are so tightly repressing. This enormous conflict grows and grows over time, like an infected tumour, and as it grows, it gets more and more tender and sensitive, so that even the slightest breeze of disagreement across its surface hurts so bad that all they can do is scream and lash out in primal rage at the thing that hurts them and try to KILL IT KILL IT MAKE IT STOP!

So the next time some rabid ranting ridiculous right winger is making you want to commit a very un-liberal act of violence upon their person, just remember that they can’t really help themselves.

They are just little children, after all.

OK, first off, let’s talk about the trip to Mars that is taking place right now.

Granted, it’s a simulated trip, and all the crew members are staying right here on Earth. But other than that little detail, the experiment is rigged to simulate the problems of a trip to Mars as faithfully as possible… including locking the crew into their metal capsule for six month there and six months back.

So far, no murders from SPACE MADNESS.

The idea is that they will, in simulation, make the trip there for six months, assume orbit on Feb 1, land on Feb 12 and spend the next two days exploring a simulated Mars surface, and then get back in the metal box for the six month journey back home.

They can communicate via email and video messages, but those are realistically delayed in order to simulate the effect of speed of light delays as the Mars capsule gets further and further from Earth.

One thing I like about this experiment is that it is highly useful science, and yet, low budget. NASA style spending is a thing of the past, and modern space programs are, quite rightly, focusing more on making space flight practical and affordable, rather than throwing enormous amounts of resources into flashy projects that prove what we already know : that it can be done.

We are past the explorer period of space flight, and far overdue for the practical era, where space flight is made as rational and reasonable as airline travel.

I have to note, though, that there is a flaw in their experimental model. It’s unavoidable, but still, it makes one wonder what the real usability of the data will be.

The thing is, the “crew members” all know, deep down, that they are on Earth and if anything bad happened they could be out of the experiment in a moment. That won’t be true in space, and I think the knowledge that rescue is as close as the next room does a lot to reduce the tension on the “crew members”, and makes it a lot easier for them to just be chummy and wait things out rather than get into personality conflicts.

Still, a lot of good science will come out of this study, and as a bonus, Americans are not involved.

Face it, you guys act like you own space!

Moving into the realm of a more modest form of transportation than space flight, we have the first very preliminary positive results in trying to develop the “road train” concept.

The idea is fairly simple. Instead of thousands of people individually piloting their individual vehicles over the exact same roads in their daily commute every day, one lead car would do all the piloting and all the other cars would simply do what that car did until it’s time to drive from the car train’s route to your job.

Put another way… imagine that you are driving to work. But instead of driving the whole way, you sit by the side of the road for a minute waiting for the road train to go by, and then your car connects wireless to the road train and, all by itself, joins the train. You sit back, put your feet up, and relax, not doing a single thing to pilot your vehicle, until the system beeps and tells you it is time to drive from road train to work. Same thing on the way home.

Sounds cool, right? But something bugs me about this idea. It seems wrong somehow. Like a problem is either being half-solved, or over-solved.

For instance, how does it handle a red light, where half your road train will make the light and half won’t? If your road train is many blocks long, it could get sliced up in many places. What then?

And trusting some other person in the lead vehicle with your life and the life of all the other passive cars is one hell of a leap of faith to ask of people. I am not sure the ability to have an easy commute while not having to relinquish the autonomy og your own vehicle is really worth it.

And a surprising amount of progress had been made in creating the self-driving car lately anyhow. Perhaps this would make sense from the point of view of the traffic controlling computers in a full-on self-driving car scenario, but within the confines of the current everyday driving work, I don’t know.

Finally, from the real world to one of my favorite world, the world of video games, and one editorialist’s cautious endorsement of the future of 3D gaming.

I’ve been kind of dubious about the idea, informed largely by how excited everyone got about “virtual reality” way back in the 90’s. But the points he makes in its favour make sense to me.

One, he’s right to say that single-player gaming has no problem with 3D needing to be focused right for one person or one small part of the room. I play video games by myself, and that would not be a problem. It only has to be focused for my eyes.

And he’s somewhat correct in saying that gamers do not mind putting on dorky accessories to play games. Admittedly, headphones and wrist straps are a far cry from something that is going to completely cover my eyes and render me blind to my surroundings, but if the results were good enough, if I was sufficiently impressed and enchanted with this new level of immersion, I could get used to it.

His best point, and the one that really struck home for me, though, is that current 3D technology is a lot more convincing when applied to animation than to real objects, and what is a video game’s visuals but a constant flow of animation? It makes sense. Animation, unlike the real world, is simplified, has a single visual style, and uses fairly predictable tricks to simulate 3D. So why not turn those tricks into actual 3D visuals?

Of course, nothing 3D like that is going to be showing up in my price range (hint : LOW) any time soon. But still, it’s good to know that my beloved video games are ready to break into that third dimension.

Virtual reality, twenty years late.

One of the core concept underlying modern life is the idea of hard work. We work hard, we say, and that means we deserve certain things. You will rise to the top as long as you work hard. Everyone values a hard worker. We work hard for our money. And so on.

This concept underlies a lot of our beliefs about work and its role in society, and hence, our role in society as well. After all, if there is one thing that unites people, it’s that the vast majority of people have jobs. Even in tough economic times, no more than ten percent or so of the population is unemployed. The rest have jobs, bosses, responsibilities, stress, and the daily hurdle of convincing yourself to get up, get ready, and go to work when it’s the last thing in the world you feel like doing.

So the idea of hard work is key to the entire social machinery that society relies upon to function by putting what people do with most of their days on most days in some sort of meaningful context. Being a hard worker is a good thing. We want to be hard workers. So we get up and go to work.

But the fact is, modern life has made this concept practically meaningless, and it’s high time that we examined the concept and learned, for ourselves, what a leaky ship this tired old idea has become.

Hey, I work hard, right?

It’s something that nearly everyone says at one point. They work hard for their money. They work hard period. Generally, it’s said either defensively, or as a preface to their claim of some sort of entitlement, privilege, or special consideration from society.

But when you think about it, it’s a meaningless statement. Honestly, can you imagine a single person with an actual job who could say this and you would disagree to their face? You might think, naively, that their job doesn’t sound all that hard compared to yours, or that you are glad you don’t have that job because it sounds like it sucks hot rocks, but is there anyone with a job to whom you would say “Bull muffins, you don’t work hard for your money!”

Of course not. It would be extraordinarily rude and invite a lot of bitter comparisons and ill will. But if absolutely anybody who works for a living can make the exact same claim and have it go unchallenged, what does it really mean?

Basically, when you say “I work hard for a living”, all you are really saying is “I am employed.” It does nothing to distinguish you from anyone else with a job. Everyone who has a job works hard because everyone who has a job would rather not have to work for a living. It’s a meaningless distinction.

Work hard, and you’ll make it to the top!

It amazes me that some people still think this is true.

Think of your job. Now think of your boss. Do you really think he or she got where they are by working harder than everyone else?

That idiot? Not a chance. They just sucked up to the right people, made the right friends, and had less dignity and honor and self-respect than you. Them work hard? Hah.

Well, what makes you think it will be any different for you, or for everyone? The skills of your job and the skills that will actually get you promoted are not just entirely different, sometimes they are totally at odds with one another. Hard work barely makes the list.

And even if your boss is qualified and competent, do you really think it’s hard work which got them there? Imagine you are a boss with several employees. One of them is an amazingly hard worker who is more productive than two average employees. The other is an average worker, but everyone knows him and likes him, and he seems to be good at motivating people to work.

Who are you going to promote? One way, you lose all that productivity for your department and thrust someone who has never shown the slightest sign that they would make a good manager into a management position, and the other…. makes sense.

Hard work does not get you ahead. Social skills, maybe.

Society rewards hard workers

Society rewards work, in that our society works on a money-for-labour economy. But after that, hard work is one of the last things it rewards.

Think about it. Do you think someone who makes twice as much money as you do works twice as hard as you do? Are you paid less because you are just too lazy to work as hard at them?

Like hell, right? They just do different work than you. They are probably one of those middle-management suckups who don’t contribute anything to the bottom line and just serve to make sure the people at the top never have to talk to the people at the bottom and risk getting exposed to actual work.

Or even if they aren’t… why does a doctor make so much more than a McDonald’s employee? Is it because they work that much harder? Really? When a doctor can make more in four hours than the french fry chef at McDonald’s does in a month? We begin to suspect that there is something a little more than hardness of work at play here.

The answer, of course, is that the doctor makes more because he can get more. Society sees the job of doctor as more valuable and difficult as french fry cook, and so doctors can ask for a lot more money and get it. It’s a higher status job, and therefore gets paid more dollars. It’s that simple.

Doctors often argue that they get paid so much because they have people’s lives in their hands. And it’s true, they do. But so do a lot of other jobs that don’t get paid nearly as much. If a tow truck driver doesn’t attach that chain correctly, they could cause a huge traffic accident and kill dozens of people. If the cleaning staff skimps a little when cleaning a restaurant’s kitchen, the food could become contaminated and make hundreds of people very ill. Even that french fry cook could wreck people’s days by doing his job wrong and getting away with it.

But these jobs are not paid nearly as well, because in society, dirty, manual, labour-filled jobs are considered low-status and hence not paid very well. It doesn’t matter how hard our french fry cook works, he could be doing the work of three people and putting in eighty hours a week, doesn’t matter. The doctor is still going to make a hell of a lot more than him.

And how about those fatcat CEOs who make millions of dollars even if the company is in the red? Do you really think they work millions of times harder than you do? Or are they just raiding the piggy bank?

Hard workers are better citizens

Not so much better that we pay them more, of course. That would be silly.

But a lot of people seem to think that their stalwart claim that they are hard workers somehow makes them better than other people, and that means society should recognize and value and reward them above others.

But as we have already seen, it’s a meaningless distinction. Anyone can claim it, and nobody will challenge them, and so all you are really saying is “I have a job!”

And the strangest part is, the people making these claims are often conservatives. The self-same conservatives, mind you, who are so ready to defend social Darwinism, the law of the jungle, the market, and so on… and now they are saying that society should think they are special for being a good little worker and doing what they are told? And that this somehow makes them special?

What a bunch of collectivist bullcrap. Why should I care, Comrade, how good a worker you are? It doesn’t make my life any easier, nor does it put more money in my pocket. Unless I work with you directly and your quality of work (or lack of it) directly influences how much work I have to do, or how much stress I have to put up with, why should I give a crap how hard you work?

Admit it, you think you contribute more to society and therefore society should treat you nicer and make you feel all special. But unless you are willing to endorse the rest of the collectivist ideology that says we have a responsibility to help one another that supersedes our individual desires sometimes, like for instance our desire to make obscene amounts of money regardless of consequences… you might want to rethink just how proud you are for being better than the tiny proportion of people in society without jobs.

Hard work is a joke

So as you can see, despite the deep roots that the phrase “hard work” has in our culture, it’s really a joke. Society does not value or reward people based on how hard they worker, anyone can claim to be a hard worker and it doesn’t mean anything, and the idea of how wonderful it is to be a “hard worker” is a sham that serves the powers that be by making sure they get qas much labour for as little money as possible. You want to be a good person, right? So work harder for the same amount of money! Suits them just fine.

It’s really all about who has better social skills, who has a higher status job, and who has the power to vote themselves a raise. Hard work is barely a blip on the radar.

Enjoy your drive to work!

No really, you do.

See, you’re a human being. And human beings are social animals. That means we are born with a host of strong drives that bind us together into communities which work together toward common goals.

To be a human in modern society is to belong to many of these overlapping and interlocking communities, from apartments to internationally alliances, from families to Fortune 500 companies, from friendships to fraternities and well beyond.

And one of the most important drives which binds us together in so many ways is the our desire to contribute to the community we are in. We not only desire to belong to a community, we vitally need to devote our energies to said community. If we cannot, we feel empty, purposeless, and isolated.

Modern life does such a poor job of arranging for this deep need to be vitally met that most people think they only work for a living because society forces them to do so. They assume that if people did not need money in order to survive, life would be one long vacation that never ended.

This is a perfectly understandable from the point of view of the average tired, stressed, harried worker. Whether you are the mailroom drudge or the top boss, there are many days when you really don’t feel like going to work in the morning and wish you were anywhere else but at your job. The average person of today does not love their job, even if it’s the one they chose as a career in their college days, and from the point of view of the leisure deprived masses, an endless supply of what they feel they get so little of sounds like the best possible thing in the world.

It’s like a person suffering from dehydration thinking nothing could be better than a lake of their favorite beverage, or a child dreaming of a world of unlimited candy. It’s perfectly understandable. But in the end, it’s not really very realistic.

Realistically, eventually your need is sated and other drives come to the fore. You have enough to drink, you get tired of the candy…. and you have had enough vacation, and want to get back to work.

If you are still not convinced that we have a very strong drive to contribute our labour to a community, ask yourself this : why are little kids so eager to try to ‘help’? It is universally known that wee ones are always trying to participate in what the people around them are doing. They want to feel included and valued. It is only later in life that we become jaded and guarded and lose contact with this desire, as school, jobs, and other obligations put us into a permanent state of leisure deprivation, and we dream of that unlimited vacation with nothing to do and nobody to answer to at all.

But really, wouldn’t you get bored? Don’t you remember getting bored of summer as a kid and kind of wishing school would start again? If you could have the exact same income with no work, what, exactly, would you DO all day? There is no leisure activity which would not grow tiresome after a while. Sooner or later, just pleasing yourself would grow very boring, and you would get tired of deciding what to do with your time all the time, and you would look for something more meaningful to do.

This, incidentally, is a major cause of malaise amongst the wealthy, especially the so-called “leisure class”, especially amongst the generations which come after the founding of the family fortune. It is a patently cruel thing to expect human beings to do nothing meaningful with their lives simply to fulfill some ancient patriarch’s fantasy that “his children won’t have to work for a living”. And the cruelty is compounded tenfold by society’s firm insistence that their lives are wonderful, the best lives possible in our society, and how dare they not be blissfully happy when they are living out our dreams?

And this malaise plagues society in general, because our jobs are cold and impersonal and almost never give us the feeling that we are valued and recognized for our labour. They just reluctantly cut you a paycheck and that is supposed to be it.

And society on a larger scale requires nothing of us at all in terms of labour. It doesn’t even ask us to pay our taxes. It just takes them. In days gone by, our communities required some degree of labour from all citizens in order to function. In a primitive society, everyone has a defined role, things they are required to do in order to keep their society functioning. But in modern times, all we do is vote. One question asked of us every four years. That’s a fairly thin diet by anyone’s standards.

So really, you do want to work for a living. It’s just that modern society does such a lousy job of making you feel connected to your community and valued and recognized for your contributions that you lose sight of all that and dream, instead, of a permanent vacation which would likely turn into a nightmare.

The real secret is in doing what you want to do, not in doing nothing at all. And being a human being, what your want to do is work hard at something which is meaningful to you and be recognized and valued for it.

Human beings want, and need, to work.