Well, here it is, Friday again already, and time to take a look at what’s up in the world of science.

First, from the realms of Creepy Science (which is, I think you’ll admit, one of the more fun kinds of science), we have the Kraft Foods Dinner Decider.

Imagine this. There’s a little display gizmo in your local supermarket. You walk past it, not thinking much of it, but then notice that as you get into its range, the ad it is displaying seems oddly appropriate. You’re a mother of three wondering what to make the family for dinner, and wow, there is an ad for a Kraft product that would be just perfect and a family sized recipe suggestion to go with it. Wow, how did it know?

It knew because it scanned your face with a digital camera and then used facial recognition software to figure out your demographic via your age, gender, and so on. And of course, this is a Kraft technology, so everything they suggest will be a Kraft product. That’s not so huge a deal, though, because Kraft has like a zillion products. But still, nothing’s keeping you from taking the suggestion but making it with cheap generic products instead to save money.

Anyhow, does this sound like some kind of marketing team’s wet dream, or what? Look, we can demographically target each consumer on the fly! Think of how much more effective our ads will be now that we can READ THEIR MINDS! Well, OK, maybe not read their minds per se. Yet. But I have our IT guys working on that as we speak!

I honestly think it sounds like a waste of technology, and creepy to boot. I doubt it will make their ads more effective, and probably will just be something that comes and goes more or less unnoticed. It’s the sort of thing that gets made because marketing types desperately want to believe that this kind of thing can work, but the consumers honestly could not care less.

From the creepily commercial to the kinda creepy but ultimately very cool, we have Fruit Flies Are Smarter Than You (at one little thing).

Turns out, deep within the highly primitive brains of one of the world’s simplest creatures, the fruit fly, is a highly sophisticated neural network that does a very efficient job of arranging the fruit fly’s sensory bristles (told you it was simple) in such a way that the fruit fly’s sensory bristles make a very efficient network, with some bristles acting as “leaders”, processing and redistributing information to the other bristles.

By studying the way the fruit fly does this, scientists have come up with an equation, apparently an elegantly simple one, that can be used to make modern communication networks and distributed computer processes similarly efficient.

What impresses me the most about this story is that they got an actual, functional, useful equation out of their study. So many of these “let’s study a biological model and figure out how it does X” type studies end up with very vague or contradictory results. They start out with the right idea, but either the subject is simply too complex for basic analysis or the researchers start off with the right focus but then get bogged down in the details.

It’s like all those people in the olden days who tried to invent a way for humans to fly by imitating birds. It sounds logical on the face of it, but without understanding the actual principles involved in bird flight (like, for example, Bernouli’s principle and that all important lift-to-weight ratio), it was tragically and absurdly doomed to failure.

And speaking of the tragically absurd, did you know that DNA can electro-magically teleport?

That is what a Nobel Prize-winning medical researcher named Montagnier is claiming. He put some DNA in water in one test tube, and some plain water in another test tube, stuck them in a Farraday cage to filter out interference from the Earth’s eletro-magic field, put a copper coil around them to generate a weak electro-magic field around the tubes, and waited.

Then, one night, when the moon was full and the stars were aligned and the garden faeries were dancing widdershins, he checked Test Tube #2 via PCR and lo and behold, there was DNA in there!

Obviously, it must have gotten there from Test Tube #1 via some completely unknown process that violates all known laws of physics and chemistry! That’s the only logical and sensible explanation! Not, you know, that maybe the water in Test Tube #2 was contaminated in the first place, or they did the PCR test wrong, or a million other less magical explanations.

Seriously, if this guy hadn’t been one of the people who got the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine for definitively linking HIV with AIDS, nobody would have even heard of this malarkey. If I was the Nobel people, this crap would make me wonder what exactly this guy contributed to that award winning study.

I’m guessing he brought the pot.

One last thing. I like this little snip from the article on PopSci :

The full details of Montagnier’s experiments are not yet known, as his paper has not yet been accepted for publication.

Oh really? What a surprise that such a sterling and well founded study has not yet been snapped up for publication by all the most respect scientific journals in the world! Surely, any minute now, we can expected this groundbreaking revelation to be reproduced worldwide and then published in Nature.

Because that’s the thing : this is an amazingly easy to reproduce experiment. Lots of universities have the stuff for electromagnetic shielding lying around, and they all have PCR (used to reproduce DNA samples so they are big enough to study) now, and after that you just need a known DNA sample, some test tubes, some copper tubing, a wire, some batteries, and a faucet.

A first year chemistry student could put that together in an hour.

Personally, I would love to see Mythbusters take this one on. It would be hilarious.

I know, I know, you are quite probably sick of hearing people’s pet peeves theories about the Tuscon Massacre by now, but it’s the sort of thing that takes the public consciousness a while to full absorb, and I, as a humble tiny organ on the body politic, feel I must do my share.

As a shocked and reeling world combs through everything about Loughner’s life in its attempt to understand what happened and answer the eternally evasive and perhaps unanswerable question of “Why?”, one thing is becoming quite clear to me.

Loughner might not quite pass the sniff test to be a Republican, but he was clearly a Libertarian.

It has been de rigeur since the days of Reagan for all conservatives to don a coat of libertarianism in order to give their base cruelty, greed, shortsightedness, ignorance, and evil a paper-thin coating of legitimate self-righteous populism. It’s not that we’re unevolved reptiles who hiss with anger and confusion at mammalian concepts like “compassion” and “cooperation. Honest! It’s about, you know, freedom and stuff. Government is bigger than you! Aren’t you scared of it? If we make it smaller, it’s like you getting bigger!

And you love money, right? Well it turns out, you can use your vote to get more money! It’s not technically legal for us to bribe you with our own money for your vote, but it’s totally legal to bribe you with your own money to vote for us! We love that, it’s so cheap! You know, for us.

Of course, for most of them, it is complete and utter bullshit. When their guy is in power, expanding government power is the right and true and patriotic thing to do, and anyone who mentions “rights” is a dirty commie homo traitor who should be drug out in the streets and shot. A Democrat get in the White House, and suggests that maybe we use government power to help people instead of killing them with war or the electric chair, and suddenly it’s the Democrats who will send jackbooted thugs into your home.

Think about it : there is no way any libertarian could support the death penalty. If the government does not have the right to take your money by force, then it sure as hell does not have the right to take your very life by force, no matter what you’ve done.

Clearly, the important part is enjoying watching people die. To these people, the right to life is not nearly as important as the right to keep your money. Money has rights. People do not. As long as it involves good reptile-brain friendly things like war, police beating people up, fear of foreigners, alpha males becoming massively powerful, or anything else involving people in uniforms making people suffer.

Now, with an event like the Tuscon Massacre so clearly glaring at them accusingly, though, suddenly conservatives are taking their dusty old pre-Reagan conservatism (what I call “Establishment conservatism”) out of the closet to try to distance themselves from the killer.

And it’s true that Loughner is no Republican. That’s because he’s a real, actual libertarian.

After all, by trying to kill Gabrielle Giffords, he was really just striking a blow for the little guy against massive bloated over-powerful government, right? One less Congresswoman means one less government official sponging off the people and pushing the USA towards tyranny and death panels, right?

So thanks to Reagan and his wrapping up all the petty and mighty evils of conservatives in a blanket of libertarian self-aggrandizing righteousness, the modern day American Right simply cannot claim that they have no connection at all to Loughner and his anti-government insanity.

The real crime, the connection by which the American Right is condemned for this atrocity, is that what Loughner did was perfectly in keeping with the literal truth of what Sarah Palin and Fox News says.

When the only difference between an insane killer like Loughner and the actual Republican Party is that Loughner acts on the words they just say, something has gone seriously, seriously wrong.

Did overheated and immoderate rhetoric on behalf of Glenn Beck and the rest of the Fox News alternative-reality crew directly cause Loughner to go commit his crimes? No. Crazy people are crazy no matter what, and the news of the day might trigger something, but if it hadn’t, something else would have.

But there is simply no way the American Right can completely disavow any connection with a fellow libertarian who did the very thing a lot of them have been openly discussing for a decade.

Taking government by force.

One of the most persistently popular forms of Internet email lore is the Drinking Game. In it, fans of a particular movie, video game, comic book, television series, book series, or series of hilarious decorated telegrams can combine two things they love : pithy reductionist observations about the thing they love, and getting really, really drunk.

But wait… there is a fatal flaw in the system! Sure, you can giggle your drunken ass off at the Drinking Game of choice once you know all the rules, but what, pray tell, do you use as an excuse for your rampant alcoholism while you are reading the rules in the first place? This is a serious problem, and could lead to such problems as confusion, nervousness, and sobriety.

Well, fear not, intrepid Internet adventurer. We here at the MJB blog (both of me) are here to save you from the perils of momentary non-distraction by providing you with this, the Drinking Game Drinking Game, the Drinking Game you play while reading other Drinking Games.

The rules are simple, and go as follows :

If you found the Drinking Game on your own, take a drink,
If you found the Drinking Game via a popular fan site for the media item in question, take two drinks.
If you found the Drinking Game via the forums on said web site when someone made an obscure reference to said drinking game and you had to Google it to find out what the hell everyone was talking about because nobody would deign to explain it to you, take three drinks.
If you “found” the Drinking Game by following a link sent to you by one of your “friends” who doesn’t remember that you told him you had SEEN this drinking game a million times already, take three drinks.
If you were sent the link to the Drinking Game by one of those helpful older relatives who emails hackneyed Xerox humour to dozens of her relatives who were foolish enough to supply her with an email address and who vaguely recalled you are “into that sort of thing”, and you are, take four drinks.
If, on the other hand, she got her vague idea that you were “into that sort of thing” by overhearing you say how much you hated it with every corpuscle in your bloodstream, finish the bottle.

If the Drinking Game contains genuinely funny and informed insights into to the media item it is based around, take a drink and toast your extraordinary luck.
If it instead contains only fairly obvious insights that would be familiar to any fan, but still gives you the occasional amused chuckle and a warm feeling of connection with other fans who would also get the joke and hence share something in common with your, take two drinks.
If it, sadly, contains only the most blatantly obvious and inane and even somewhat inaccurate insights that any moron who has even heard of the show could make and makes you feel like an idiot for even reading it and makes you want to smack the author with a shovel, take three drinks.
If it, maddeningly, not only contains no insights of any level of wit, and instead contains references that make no sense to anything but the stochastic signal generator of the author’s Four Loko-soaked brain and force you to spend hours researching them on the Internet just to find out in what strange and fell universe they make any sense whatsoever, finish the bottle.

If you are reading the Drinking Game solely for your own amusement and entertainment, take a drink.
If you are reading the Drinking Game because you are looking for funny insights with which to wow and amuse your friends who are also into the same thing, take a drink.
If you are reading said Drinking Game because you want to see if the author’s insights into your favorite media are as awesomely hilarious and LOL-worthy as yours, which of course they WON’T be, because they suck and you RULE, take two drinks.
If you are reading the subject Drinking Game because it is the only way you can experience the warmth of human connection by imagining you have friends, take three drinks. Hell, take my drink too.
If you are reading said Drinking Game with plans to use it in some form that actually involves drinking, finish the bottle and go look for another excuse to drink, you sodden sot.

Well, there you have it, folks. The Internet has once again swallowed its own tail and gone meta. You now have a Drinking Game for Drinking Games. May we all know mercy.

Before we begin, I have to make one thing absolutely crystal clear :

Nothing I am about to say, in any way, shape, or form, violates the principle of freedom of speech that we quite rightfully hold sacred in modern pluralistic democratic society. I am suggesting no new laws, I am proposing no new government policies. I am not suggesting your fellow citizens rise up and do anything.

In short, I am not, in any way or on any level, suggesting that anyone should control or coerce what a person says, writes, or otherwise expresses any more than the current accepted standard in your nation and/or culture. The only force in the world which should restrain your expression of your ideas and beliefs is your conscience, and I am, I repeat, not suggesting anything else imaginable.

If, despite this strenuous and probably entirely excessive preamble, you insist upon thinking I have said something in this article that violates your freedom of speech in any way, then you are either being deliberately disingenuous in order to make my points easier for you to argue against, or you are too thick in the head to actually read and comprehend what I am saying and are merely compulsively squirting out words in response to the emotional potentials created by certain buzzwords in your primitive brain.

Either way, I don’t give one single tiny damn about what you think about what I say.

Many of you will have already figured out what I am going to talk about.

After the Tuscon Massacre yesterday, the full sphere of public opinion is vibrating with debate over freedom of speech and the far less popular and famous implied responsibility that such freedom entails.

The question is “How much responsibility do the people who use and spread very, very angry and violent rhetoric about a person or group of people bear for the actions of a lone lunatic who takes their words very literally and commit terrible acts like the Tuscon Massacre based on them?”

The answer, or rather my answer anyhow, is : “Legally, none whatsoever. Morally, a very small and subtle but very real amount. ”

Clearly, the perpetrator of this horror is a deeply disturbed and unhinged individual. His public writing and videos are disjointed, confused, rambling, and incoherent. To me, this clearly points to someone with a serious mental illness, possibly paranoid schizophrenia or psychosis, and so arguably, it is pointless to hold people responsible for the acts of someone who is quite likely non compis mentis in the first place and hence not even legally or morally culpable for their own actions.

Still, there is such a thing as temperature level in public debate, with different eras and different spheres of debate lying on a spectrum between the completely calm, reasonable debate which promotes mutual understanding and respect, and well…. now, honestly.

In my nearly 40 years on this globe, I have never seen anything like what the right wing routinely says about its opponents. Anyone not completely in line with the Fox News approved line of received wisdom is vile, evil, less than human, a mere freshy shell for a heartless demon bent on destruction of everything good and sacred for no other reason than to please their black and withered hearts, which pump not blood but pure liquid evil through their bodies.

Nowhere is the other side given even the most basic forms of respect. Democrats and liberals don’t even deserve to live, let alone have a right to their own differing opinion and the respect due to fellow Americans with whom you share a culture and a nation and a long history of freedom. The concept that “we all have the same goals but differ on the method” is long gone.

And nobody can claim that they have never heard of a case where violent and aggressive rhetoric had caused some lone lunatic, or group of them (Oklahoma City), to do terrible things. So nobody can claim complete ignorance of the potential consequences of choosing the more extreme, intolerant, and counter-modern path in public debate.

So everyone who promotes this kind of hate-filled and dehumanizing rhetoric shares some form of responsibility. It is the diffuse responsibility of people in a riot or person-crushing stadium crowds in a panic, but the responsibility is there, nevertheless.

It’s easy to point at Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News and blame them for the whole thing, and no doubt about it, their share of the blame is bigger than someone who merely write the occasional cranky rambling letter to the editor of their local newspaper.

But when a crowd goes bad, you can’t just blame the ringleaders. All must bear the burden of blame. There is no speaker or media outlet so powerful and so persuasive that they can make people do or say things against their will.

Hopefully, the eagerness with which the left wing pundits are picking up the Tuscon Massacre and using it as a cudgel against their long time foes will not entirely dilute the potential impact that this event might have in rectifying the grave imbalance that had driven the American right wing well past the point of insanity and create that vital teachable, reachable moment where sanity and moderation can kick in and start to push back against the pandemonium.

It would be far too easy for this terrible tragedy to have no lasting effect because the parties involved get caught up in slugging it out over minutiae and trivia instead of us on the left simply giving the right wing the time and space they need to think about what they have done.

That is what is required in order for some good to come of this terrible tragedy.

I hope that we have the wisdom and courage to learn from it.

I have, thus far, been refraining from using this space for pure commentary and reportage, because I have wanted to stretch my literary muscles and nudge myself towards creating more challenging and more broadly appealing material than merely my opinions on the day’s news.

But this is one of those historic days where commentary seems mandatory. It feels like to not talk about today’s tragedy would be foolish, like ignoring the white hot meteor that is not the top floor of your house just because you’d palnned to work in the basement today, and I want to get my thoughts down fresh before I have had too much time to think about it.

For those who have not yet heard : In Tuscon, Arizona today, a gunman shot and killed six people, including a prominent judge, and twelve others were wounded non-fatally, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

Here’s my thoughts, in no particular order.

1. Not of primary importance but worth getting out of the way first : It bothers me a little that if a tragedy happens to a group of people, all of whom are equally valid living humans in the eyes of the law and ethics, nevertheless, the headline will be “Most famous person in the group has tragedy occur to them! Also, some other people, we guess. ” Six people are dead. None of them are in the headline as it is being reported around the globe. The headline is about Gabrielle Giffords, who is alive, despitebeing shoot clean through the head. Admittedly, she was the primary target of the attack and from a sociopolitical point of view that is extremely important. But I still have to wonder what the families of the people who were actually killed by this madman are thinking about the press furor completely ignoring their departed loves one because they were just not famous enough to be interesting to the press, even dead.

2. After the Republican congressional victory in November, I predicted that there would be an incident fairly soon that would be a jarring, game-changing incident which would finally make people step back from all the superheated rhetoric and venomous vitriol and start to think about consequences and temperature. My biggest dear since Obama won in 2008 was that this would take the form of another Oklahoma City type event, something so enormous and horrible that it would be like another 9/11 and people would be picking up the pieces for decades.

After all, the Oklahoma City bombers were right ring extremists during an age where the intellectual and political leadership of the right wing of American politics were screaming for Bill Clinton’s head on a plate, trying to impeach him, and vilifying all Democrats. And that was nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to the madness surrounding Barack Obama’s rise to power. The level of rage and frustration and uttery insanity that is both represented by and in responsible for the Tea Party movement and the eager and rechless stoking that Fox News provides in bulk dosage 24 hours a day.

But after the 2010 election, anoher poissibility antered my mind : not another Oklahoma City but another Kent State. I could quite easily imagine a group of angry Tea Party protestors, drunk on group outrage and that evil nector self-righteous fury, in a tense standoff with state troopers trying to keep them from storming and looting some government building, and one of the younger troopers thinks he sees a gun, and suddenly a dozen or so middle-aged white people are gunned down in a hail of trooper fire, and everything gets one whole hell of a lot worse.

Today’s incident is nothing like that. This is more like the random senseless act of some Weather Underground style radical fringe group at the height of tension in the late 60’s. It’s a sign of how bad the times have gotten, but it’s not quite the epoch-shattering event that Kent State became.

But hey, the Republicans have only held Congress for what, three days? Plenty of time left for the right wing to completely fail to learn anything from this, continue to build the pressure up, and have some nutcase pop off and do something that will make today’s incident an almost laughable footnote, or perhaps a widely quoted warning tremor before the major earthquake.

3. Having just seen it for the first time ever recently, I can’t help bu think of the De Niro classic Taxi Driver. Travis Bickle was just a lone nut who wanted to kill a Senator for complicated person reasons that were only marginally political, or for that matter, sane. And yet, that movie brought so much of what was going on in the world of the late 70’s into focus that it became far more than just the story of one lonely and disturbed man’s descent into self-righteous madness. It became the film that made an era really look at itself and ask where all this was headed.

I am sure that before this spring is over, there will be the big budget movie based on this incident. I will be curious to see how the incident is spun in it.

Well that’s my thoughts for now. Maybe more later, but for now, I will forget all about it and try to go back to a non serious life.

Here it is, Friday already, and there’s some pretty amazing science going on the world today, so I thought I’d share some of it with you nice folks.

A North Carolina company called Freer Logic has come out with a remarkable gadget called the Bodywave which you strap to an arm or a leg and which monitors your brainwaves in order to steer you towards a more focused mental attitude. The idea is to train people to be more aware of their awareness level and eventually learn to become focused and alert at will.

First off, the fact that can read your brainwaves via a device strapped to your arm or leg is pretty remarkable in and of itself. Figuring out that your entire body pulses in time with your brain cycles was a pretty sharp insight, and making it work on a consumer electronics level is nothing short of spectacular. It strikes me as something that could have a lot of uses outside this product.

But it’s the product itself that is the star here. The idea of a device which uses biofeedback to artificially expand and enhance one’s metacognitive functions just plain blows my mind. I’m burning with curiosity about the long term psychological effects of this self-calming technique. Would some people people psychologically dependent on the device, clinging to it for its calming effects eyond what would be medically effective? Would others come to resent it, even hate it, for judging their thoughts with such cold and impartial finality? The very notion of introducing an electronic device into the mind’s self-correcting regulatory process, an entirely external factor, is just plain astonishing.

What’s next? One that teaches you to make yourself happy?

In other medical type news, China is poised to be able to mass produce what might just be the big trend of the future : a substance known as light water.

Now if you’re like me, your first reach to that phrase is “What the heck is light water? Besides, obviously, the logical opposite of heavy water?” After all, water is already pretty light in a lot of sense. Old jokes about the health conscious paying for “diet water” spring to mind.

And as it turns out, it really is the opposite of heavy water. It turns out that regular old tap water, the kind you and I drink every day and which is in everything we eat and drink, contains very small amounts of heavy water. That’s water in which the hydrogen is not regular old friendly hydrogen, with one electron and one proton, but deuterium, sometimes called heavy hydrogen, in which that proton and electron have been joined by a neutron, vastly increasing its mass (hence, heavy) and making it an unstable isotope.

So light water is simply water with that small amount of heavy water removed. Supposedly, there is a not insignificant number of medical studies suggesting that light water has a number of health benefits, boosting the immune system, promoting longer life in terminal cancer patients, and so on. Current methods for taking the heavy out of our water are expensive, complex, and difficult.

But China has hit upon a simpler method using a platinum catalyst that could make mass producing light water a reality. And seeing as people are already quite used to paying for bottled water, imagine how much they would be willing to be pay for light water?

And after all, it seems entirely plausible that water free of unstable isotopes is more healthy. That’s why I don’t trust it. It seems a little too plausible, a little too much like the exact sort of thing that would uses its patina of scientific plausibility to fool people who would normally be a little too skeptical to fall for such hocus pocus magical thinking.

I mean sure, it sounds plausible. Even reasonable. But that doesn’t mean it works. For all we know, the tiny amount of heavy water in our drinking water is harmless, or worse, highly necessary for our long term health for some reason we cannot even guess without our current knowledge.

I’m not going to buy into this light water is healthy idea unless there is some serious, cautious, rigorous study into how, exactly, getting the heavy out of water makes it more healthy. Not just correspondence studies that say “well, we did X and Y happened”. Those are too easily misconstrued, cherry-picked, or otherwise used to mean something that they do not actually prove.

I’m talking studies that actual explore and explain how the effect works.

Until then, I’ll consider this just so much health food industry voodoo.

Finally, and most amazingly, a potentially epoch-making event in medical science occurred recently : doctors were able to treat a previously untreatable and very sick boy through decoding his genome.

The poor boy has been extremely ill with a radically inflamed intestinal tract since he was a toddler. He has had around a hundred operations to try to treat it, including the removal of his colon, and doctors were at a complete loss as to what was wrong with the boy and how on Earth to treat him.

The situation was getting desperate, so it was time for radical and novel solutions. They sequenced the boy’s entire genome and searched it for mutations. Once they found the mutation, they were able to arrange a bone marrow transplant using umbilical cord blood, and that brought the poor boy back from the brink of oblivion.

It’s not a miracle cure, and genome sequencing is still a very expensive and complicated process, but in the future, it might well be that we all have a copy of our very own personal genome map attached to our medical files, the sequencing done once a year to check for any deviations, and this could lead to a quantum leap in the treatment of the many diseases which are either entirely genetic or have a genetic component to their pathology.

In the future, we might very well be able to write-protect our DNA.

Zoos confound me.

Click the above image for a full sized version.

I love animals. I am one of those people who love nature specials, cat videos on YouTube, calenders with puppies in hats on them… and zoos. As a kid, I grew up in a house full of cats, and loved them all. I delighted in befriending the various dogs along my paper route, each of whom had their own vibrant and unique personality, and some of whom had never been friends with any stranger that regularly violated their territory before. I collected little cards with pictures of various animals and facts about that animal on them. I loved National Geographic in exact proportion to them amount of animals in each issue.

So you would think that, given all that, I would love zoos. The opportunity to see all those animals I have learned about from books? The chance to see lions and zebras and fennecs and wolves and elk and things with my very own eyes and watch them do their thing, living and breathing and moving and such right in front of me, just a few yards away? What could be better?

But I’m also the sensitive and thoughtful type, and I can’t help but think about the animals and how happy they are, living all cooped in in pens and cages and not able to roam free and live the lives their instincts lea them to crave? Is it really fair for us to capture and cage living beings which are capable of happiness, pain, emotions, and longing for freedom just because our human social instincts are so broad that we like to look at them and watch them?

Perhaps that’s just projecting out human desire for autonomy and freedom on to them. After all, the argument goes, they might be perfectly happy in captivity. Just because we human beings would be miserable living such a restricted life, and long for freedom all day, does not mean that a creature such as a leopard of an elephant couldn’t be quite content living the life of a zoo animal.

But I don’t buy it. I think freedom is an instinct, and if you need proof, just ask yourself what, exactly, it is that drives an animal to immediately try to escape if someone is foolish enough to leave the cage door open? After all, if the creature is perfectly happy, why need a cage at all? Happy creatures would stay where they are. They would know a good thing when they happened upon it and cages would be completely superfluous. Certainly, leaving the cage door open would not be a big deal.

But we all know that any animal brighter and faster than a snail will try to get out of its cage the moment it realizes that it CAN get out of the cage. Why? Because they want freedom. They want a bigger world, they want to explore, they crave novelty and stimulation and adventure. Just like us, they grow bored with a limited life with only the same stimulations day after day.

They are not really happy in there. They might be zoo-born and therefore have no idea that their lives could be any different than they are. But that just means they don’t know why they’re not happy. (How many of us are in the same situation?).

But I can’t con myself into thinking that locking up these marvelous creatures in cages and pens does not come at a cost for the creatures involved. I can’t convince myself it is perfectly okay. I know better.

So, that makes it simple, right? Zoos are bad. They lock up cute animals and make them sad! Animals should always be free and anything else is just plain mean. I might want to see the animals, but that doesn’t excuse abusing the animals just for my pleasure. Zoos are just plain bad!

But the thing is, it’s not nearly that simple. I have seen those nature documentaries. I know what it’s like to be an animal living free in the wild.

And the truth is, nature is a cruel and nasty bitch.

The life of creatures in the wild is brutal, stressful, dangerous, unkind, unjust, and just plain bad. Even predators have a life of constant toil and strife, danger and stress, terror and tiredness. And all creature know what it is like to be the hunted, to be vulnerable and helpless against great forces that wish to destroy and devour you, because even the mightiest hunters are prey when they are young.

So are the okapi in my local zoo really that bad off? They might long for more freedom, and wonder what is on the other side of the fence, but they have one another’s company, a completely reliable food and water supply, medical care when they need it, and no danger of being eaten by a predator or dying from the hardships of migration.

so it’s not as simple as all that. Modern democratic free society’s default position is always that freedom is the most important thing of all, but that is only true from the point of view of someone who already has material security in a safe, modern, orderly society. Once you have all that, it is freedom you want the most. But without that, freedom doesn’t mean a god damned thing. You don’t give a crap about freedom until you have security. You need freedom from the worries of survival before freedom of choice matters.

“Freedom from” trumps “freedom to”, every single time.

So even though the critters in the zoo might long for freedom and get very bored, the argument can certainly be made that they are, in many ways, far better off than their compatriots in the wild, and it is better to be bored and stifled than dead and digested.

So what’s more important, freedom and danger, or captivity and security? Are the animals in the zoo better off than the ones in the wild, or is that just foisting human values on nonhuman animals?

Zoos confound me.

One of the longest lived struggles in philosophy is the one between objective versus subjective reality. Is there such a thing as true objective reality that exists entirely outside our minds, or could we all be just brains in vats, experiencing nothing real?

As with a lot of these ancient dualities, the answer lies somewhere in between, and is invisible to those who are mired in an excessively either/or a/b binary mindset.

We are all, truly, brains in vats, experiencing nothing like pure objective reality. It’s just that those vats are our skulls, and through said skulls, connect to the rest of our bodies and hence to the world.

Objective reality, or at the very least a highly reliable and remarkably durable and convincing illusion thereof, does indeed exist. But there is no way to experience it “directly”. The question itself is meaningless, What would experiencing it directly mean? No matter whether your mental inputs come from the usual five senses, mental telepathy, or the whispers of angels directly into your neocortex, they are being mitigated by your senses. That’s what senses are. They sense things. So all the rationalist folderol about “pure reason” outside the senses is just so much nonsense. There is but solipsism, or senses.

In fact, despite the rationalists’ pooh-poohing of them, the senses themselves cannot be in error. They are mindless, mere machines, and can no more make an error than a bedspread. Only the mind, the realm of “pure reason”, can make a mistake, because it is only in interpretation of the input from the senses that error can occur. A machine like the senses might be broken. But it cannot be ‘wrong’.

But it is clear to any even casually active observer of the human condition that we human beings have a lot more going on than just sensing objective reality. We have rich and complex inner lives filled with all the thoughts, emotions, ideas, memories, and other vital and inevitable functions of the sentient mind hard at work dealing with its own complex subroutines, and in between this inner world and the outer objective world there is often a great deal of tension, a tension that sometimes leads to error when we get confused as to what exactly belongs to each world.

This is the human dilemma, and the result is what I call human reality. Neither entirely objective or entirely subjective, neither wholly white nor completely black, we instead live in the thin, taut layer of existence that is formed by the tension between outer and inner worlds.

We call the resultant state “consciousness”.

Because neither force is ever entirely dominant except in the cases of the catatonically insane or the very intellectual impaired, the human lot is a complex and manifold one. The difference between what we think about something and the thing unto itself can be subtle indeed, and because we ourselves shape the very tools we use to parse the input from our senses and our inner lives, we are quite capable of developing a mental apparatus that is completely incapable of perceiving those things we desire the most.

The truth, then, of the objective versus subjective debate is both more complex and in many ways more tragic than the binary alternatives would suggest. Regardless of any objective or universal truth, no matter how solid and durable the reality of reality might be, we will always be suspended between it and out own complex inner lives.

It is the price of sentience. A subsentient animal might live entirely in the world of its immediate senses and instincts, with no inner conflicts to plague it or doubts to make it hesitate. But it will never know it.

And even if we were nothing but consciousness in the void, we would still be constrained by the limits of the very structure of our minds. The very formation of consciousness itself involves certain choices which are both unavoidable and limiting. The unbound mind simply does not and cannot exist.

So let us resolve to abandon this fruitless talk of objective and subjective reality, and the juvenile dickering and bickering over which one is “better” or “more real”.

Because no matter what we conclude, no matter how elaborate or clever our sophistry or devastating and witty our rationalist putdowns might become, at the end of the day, we will still be living in same mishmash of inner life and outer world we have always lived in.

It’s the only reality available to us : human reality.

And the sooner we realize that, the sooner we can move on.

Look… we have enough democracy. Just accept it.

Granted, it’s hard to imagine having less democracy. After all, we only get to vote for one person to represent all our interests at the highest levels of government once every four years or so. We don’t even get to vote on specific issues most of the time. We just get one vote on who will go to the capital city and try to represent thousands of us, and just hope that they will choose what we would choose more often than not.

And of course, we all know that once they get there, they will start living a fancy life, with limousines and parties and people with a lot of money spending it to get their attention. And those people will be right there all the time, with lots of great things to offer to make the politicians feel grateful, whereas we the people won’t get a say in the matter for another four years or so.

What chances does one say every four years or so have against money and status and fancy life right now? They’re only human.

So it’s hard to imagine how we could have less democracy and still think we live in a democracy. Elections every six years? Just getting to vote for King, and that’s it? Would it really make that big a difference?

Still, that’s more than enough democracy for the likes of us, right? We should be glad that the people in power give us any democracy at all, and let us feel all powerful and special because every once in a while, we each get to have a tiny say in which ones of them will be officially in charge.

After all, they don’t have to let us play at all, right? With all their power, they could run things without us. But they have decided we will be easier to manage and control if we are given the absolute minimum amount of the illusion of control over our destinies, and so they have graciously allowed us the rare and unheard of privilege of participating in the most minimal way possible in our own governance as infrequently as they can get away with.

We should just be happy we get anything at all, and not complain or cause trouble.

And after all, it’s only been a century or two since they gave us this tiny, precious gift of voting. We can’t be tired of it yet, and we certainly can’t start thinking that we want more democracy than that. They gave us the least they could give us hundreds of years ago, and already we want more? How ungrateful!

And sure, the system they set up for themselves just a few centuries ago was based on a time when the fastest way for information to get from place to place was by horse and buggy, and so the best you could hope for was to get people to come into town once in a while and pick some guy to make the long journey to the capital city and make all our choices for us.

And obviously, we could do a lot better now. Well, we’ve been able to do better since the invention of the telegraph, really, but especially now, with cell phones and the Internet and the automobile, it seems pretty silly to send some local person who nobody really likes anyhow all the way to the middle of the country to make a bunch of votes on things we the people could decide ourselves with nothing more complicated than a phone call, or getting money out of an ATM.

I mean, in a world where you can buy a car over the Internet, how hard would it be to let us vote that way?

But still, we should be glad we get asked what we think (well, not what we think, but who we think might think the same thing, now and then) at all. With all the money and power concentrated at the top these days, they could take what little democracy they have allowed us back at any time.

We shouldn’t be talking or even thinking about asking for some more democracy. We should just thank the people in power very kindly for letting us pretend to be involved, clutch our precious tiny occasional ineffectual vote to our chests firmly and reverently, and quietly go back to our orderly and obedient lives.

After all, what more could be possibly want?