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

It is Thursday, February 10, 2011. }

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

{They both laugh. }

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

{They both laugh. }

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

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

Daktarai : WHAT?!?

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

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

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

Mubarak : WHAT?!?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE END

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

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

Concrete

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

Glass and glassworks

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

Steam power

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

What coal and oil are good for

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

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

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

Basic human nutrition

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gunpowder

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

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

The Secret of Steel

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

Modern hygiene

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

The principles of hydraulics

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

The useful properties of certain natural things

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

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

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

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

For part II of this list, click here!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is a purely human preference.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What a tellingly human mistake to make!

Those of us who are lucky/unlucky enough to be, by the standards of society, more than a little weird have often felt the wrath of the human instinct towards social conformity in a way that those higher up on the bell of the bell curve will never know. We often have very strong negative feelings about this urge towards social conformity, cursing people’s apparent inability to tolerate individuality and diversity when it comes to their precious little social worlds, and deriding their sheeplike stampeding all in the same direction and eagerly jumping for their master’s treats.

But rarely do we stop and simply ask… why? Why do people act like this? What so unsettles people about someone different that they react with hostility? Why do we have this urge?

In order to find the answer, we must begin with a simple but often overlooked fact : modern urban society is, from a mammalian biology or even primate behaviour standpoint, extremely unnatural.

By this, I mean that it is highly unusual for any species, no matter how social, to live in highly concentrated groups where simply to function, we must move amongst dozens or hundreds of total strangers without becoming either frightened of them or attacking them or both.

Nowhere in nature do you see socially grouped animals freely intermingling without even tension, let along conflict or violence. Even our closest cousins, the chimpanzees and the bonobos, who form close-knit communities much like our own tribes or villages, react to strangers of their own species with hostility and suspicion.

But we humans are intelligent, and adaptable, and so we learned/evolved to get along with those we do not know. A modern urban human can walk through a mall or a crowded subway station past hundreds of complete and total strangers and not even notice them, let alone have the kind of reactions our primate cousins have to anyone they do not know.

We would never have made it past the family/clan stage of civilization had we not developed this ability to get along with those we do not know. We would never have invented trade, protocol, commerce, and practically everything else that paved the road to the modern world as we now know it. We would have remained scattered nomadic hunter-gatherer groups, constantly at low-level war with each other.

Nevertheless, this innovation in human behaviour is relatively new. For the millions of years that lie between the dawn of homo sapiens and the rise of civilization, scattered hunter-gatherer groups was, indeed, all the we were. It is only in the last half million years or so that we even lived in caves, and only in the last thirty thousand of those that we have lived in anything like villages, let alone cities.

So this ability to not immediately attack and kill all strangers is a relatively new upgrade, and as such, it’s more in the software than the hardware. We have learned to act in such a way that it minimizes the still very present and active xenophobia in each human being’s psyche, and thus, we can get along with one another without freaking each other out.

Which brings us to conformity. It is by acting like one another, and most especially by acting in a way consistent with the expectations of one another, that we calm one another’s fear of strangers, and it is this predictability that allows civilization to exist. We don’t fear the strangers passing us on the street as we make our way through daily life because deep in our minds, in a place well below consciousness, we know that all the other people are likely to be members of the same civilization and hence fairly unlikely to club us over the head and take our food, women, and territory.

The security we used to get only by personally knowing (and hence, being able to predict) every single person who we were likely to encounter in a day we now get by having a more vague but flexible and broad sense that while we might not know that stranger, we know enough about them that we do not consider them a threat, or even worth noticing in some cases.

But this security is a delicate thing. The trust we have in strangers is fragile and unstable thing, balanced as it is on a tottering tower of unspoken and often unacknowledged assumptions we make about others, and seemingly trivial things can upset that delicate balance and cause the slender plank to sway and bring all this fear and distrust of strangers right back again.

Plus, everything takes place against whatever the background level of conformity is in a given situation or group. What may seem like outright insanity in a time or group where conformity is extremely high might go without notice against a background of broader standards. This, by the way, is what leads to the impression that small town people get that big cities are full of “crazies and freaks”.

And along come us strange types, who for whatever reason don’t quite pick up all the conformity signals that the others are obeying without even thinking about it. We, in our innocence, can’t understand why we are treated badly by people to whom we pose no apparent threat. They, in their innocence, can’t explain why they treat you because they don’t know why your weirdness upsets them so much. They just know that you frighten and anger them.

Turns out, strange ones like myself are upsetting the very delicate balance which allows human beings to live in groups larger than the number of people we can know personally despite being less than a million way from attacking and killing strangers on sight. In order to become the modern city-dwelling ape, we exchanged fear of the stranger for fear of the strange, and the more strange you are, the greater the fear.

This does not, of course, condone the abuse of those who are different. It merely explains it. It is my hope, in fact, that through understanding the nature and causes for this reaction, we can develop ways to bridge the gap and help both sides understand one another, and make everyone much happier and more secure.

Perhaps, in the future, if we open our minds to the true understand of what is going on, and open our hearts to the possibility of things being better, we can make a future where everyone is included and understood, and nobody is pushed to the margins at all.

{ Credit goes to a conversation with my friend and ex-roomie Ryan Hawe for sparking the idea for this article. Good luck with Jenn in the new place, Ryan! }

Boredom is a negative emotion. We spend a great deal of the time we do not spend earning a living on things to avoid boredom. As a curious, neophilic, stimulation-seeking species, human beings need a constant variety of things in order to be happy and avoid the dreaded boredom. Even the most stodgy reactionary conservative old people doesn’t read the same newspaper over and over again.

In fact, boredom’s pain is so increase that it can lead some people to do things which seem downright counter-evolutionary. Without an understand of boredom, an alien race would be at a loss to explain why we Earthlings are willing to do extraordinary things like climb mountains or jump out of airplanes just for the excitement of it.

But hell, sure beats being bored!

In fact, it is possible that one might use boredom as a useful metric for intelligence. The more mental effort it takes the individual to stave off boredom, the more intelligent they are. Certainly, I’ve noticed that my fellow intellectuals and I share the characteristics of low boredom tolerance and a tendency to prefer activities which offer a great deal of mental stimulation and/or require a great deal of mental effort in order to keep the boredom at bay.

And it’s precisely this combination of boredom intolerance and hunger for mental stimulation that gives boredom such amazing power. Because when we smart types get bored and set out in search of something interesting to do, the gates of possibility are thrown wide open and anything might happen. And as luck would have it, some of that something usually turns out to be useful.

It was boredom, after all, that led the first nomadic primitive man to find out what it was like in a cave and then come back to the tribe and grunt “wouldn’t it be cool to sleep someplace dry for a change?”. It was boredom that led a bedridden Descartes to stare a fly crawling across the ceiling of his bedroom and get the inspiration for inventing a little thing called calculus. (Trust me, that was a good thing. ) And it was sheer boredom that led many an imaginative child to create worlds in their minds, populate them with characters who had grand adventures, and some day become our greatest writers.

Of course, you cannot have boredom without its root cause : leisure. If it takes absolutely every bit of your energy and your concentration and your mental effort just to barely scrape by in subsistence living, then you are unlikely to have an opportunity to get bored. You might even forget what bored was like.

But for most of human history, human beings have had a little leisure time at least, even if it’s just that brief, blissful period in between collapsing onto your straw pallet at night and actually falling asleep, and boredom has always been there, pushing us to wonder why things are how they are, and how they might actually be better if they were different.

So boredom spurs innovation, innovation spurs progress, progress leads to greater leisure time, and that leads to more boredom. And so the cycle continues.

And now, it’s the Internet age, and the true power of boredom has truly been unleashed by the power of what I call the One Bored Nerd factor. With the power of the Internet, all it takes is one bored nerd to create a program that makes millions of people’s lives easier, or come up with a solution to a problem that without the Internet they might have never heard of, or an invention that bring fresh water to millions.

The efficiency of innovation has never been higher in the history of the world, and it’s still on the rise. In recent years, people have even begun creating video games that allow people to help find a cure for cancer by applying their gamer’s ingenuity to various protein-folding solutions.

So clearly, the boredom of the masses has never been more powerful. Nobody likes to be bored, but without boredom, we would not be spurred into so much innovation and discovery, and we would likely still be sitting in the cold gnawing on raw meat, shivering from the cold with a cave right next to us.

And we certainly wouldn’t be here on the Internet, reading one another’s blogs, would we?

( Note : Due to circumstances too dull to go into right now, there will be no Friday Science Roundup today. Perhaps tomorrow. No guarantees. }

This article is the first in what I hope will be a series of open letters to my fellow nerds addressing things I think that we need to talk about, as a subculture and as a subset of the general population. Or at the very least, things I very much want to say to my neridsh cohorts.

The first thing I want to say to my fellow nerds is this : you are not an alien.

Nor are you an elf, a dragon, an angel, an immortal demigod, or any of the other attractive but entirely fictional subgroups that appeal to our deep nerd natures and resonate with our deepest pain.

Due to the criminally abusive childhood most of us faced, filled with bullying, social isolation, and a society that sees us as the lowest of the low simply for the crime of being intelligent, sensitive, and awkward, many of us wind up with an intellectual rich but emotionally and socially desperately impoverished upbringings which leave deep emotional wounds in our minds then never entirely heal.

Instead, they become deep scars, so deep, in fact, that they distort all our development and end up forming the skewed foundation of our lives well into our adult years.

And part of this terrible inheritance is a deep desire for a place where we will fit in. Not fitting in is more than a mild inconvenience for a human being. We are tribal creatures, down to the very core of our natures. We need an accepting social group in order to be happy and feel secure. A lot of us nerds use the sour grapes defense and claim we don’t need it or even want it, such rugged intellectual loners are we, but that’s bullshit, we all feel it, we are all hurt by it, and we differ only in how we try to cope with it.

Some become true loners, members of a gregarious species that, tragically, have come to see their fellow human beings as more threat than solace and seek to distance themselves from their own species in order to reduce the perceived threat level.

Some find their peer group online, where the magic of the Internet allows even those with the most personal and obscure intellectual interests cn usually find at least a small group of people who feel the same. The importance of the company of like-minded individuals cannot be overstressed.

Others find a place in more formal online communities. I think part of the massive, life-draining appeal of World of Warcraft and its host of cohorts is that it takes the online community and adds the ability to be part of a team, with a role, a job, that the system assures will be at least minimally rewarded (you get experience points no matter what) and which can furthermore be recognized by one’s clan and provide that thing that modern society rarely provides us nerds : a tribe where we belong.

But for some of the worst cases of social isolation. the only conclusion they can draw from the massive trouble they have relating to their fellow human beings is that, somehow, despite their appearance, biology, and all the other factors they share with their species, they are not, in fact, human.

Generally, this conclusion is reached tentatively at first, but strengthened immensely once the individual find, in their beloved fictions, a group which resonates with them. Elves, dragons, werewolves, androids, Klingons… the possibilities are endless. Suddenly, there is a single light in the darkness. The fact that these groups are fictional is no barrier at all. Many of us inhabit the world between our ears far more than the one outside out skulls, and in there, the difference between imaginary things and real things can sometimes seem very small indeed, and the fictional often seems better.

And it’s not so big a leap, given enough imagination and enough pain, to imagine, fleetingly or very seriously, that despite outward appearances, we are not human beings. There is another group, somehow ‘discovered’ by the writer(s) of the fiction, where the individual truly belongs. A group where they would be accepted for who they are, not meant to feel like dirt because they don’t fit in. Their true tribe.

Most of us, of course, do not take this sort of thinking to the point of developing a mental illness like dissociative identity disorder or species dysphoria. But I think this feeling that we are not entirely human lurks in the minds of all nerds, and this troubles me.

For the sad truth is that we are not aliens, merely alienated, which to me is a far more tragic fate than being a stranded alien or a reincarnated werewolf. The fact that we human beings can be so damaged by social deprivation in childhood that we feel like we do not even belong to our own species speaks volumes to the silent tragedy of the “normal” way nerds have been treated for many generations.

If you are reading these words, you are human. You may not feel human, but that does not make it any less true. The sun still shines on a blind man who cannot see it.

And as tempting as these fictional alternatives may seem, the only true salvation for the socially damaged human will be found with your fellow human beings. There is no substitute, no replacement, no pill to take to heal the wounds and fill that deep dark void inside caused by the hunger within for connection with others.

You have to learn to forgive humanity, and try to learn to get along.