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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mostly, they just thought about stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We nerds are the whipping boys (and girls) of society. Just like when we were in school, everybody feels free to pick on and abuse us. We are easy targets. Everyone knows we are fat socially awkward virgins who live our parents’ basements and wear our Spock ears to bed every night. We get kicked down all the time. We even do it to ourselves.

So why, then, should a self-respecting media star court such an audience? After all, stars are like everyone else. They don’t understand those nerdy types and never had anything to do with them growing up and going to school. And being celebrities who make their money largely on their public image and who are extremely sensitive to how they are perceived, so why on Earth would they want to associate with the social lepers and risk contracting their socially awkward disease?

Plus, they have likely heard that as a group, we are weird, embarrassing, demanding, and frighteningly knowledgeable about the shows they like, and expect you to be the same. Otherwise, they mock you and make you a laughingstock of the Internet.

Wouldn’t they just be better off leaving us well alone? Like everyone else?

Some of those rumours have a grain of truth to them. Others are total misapprehensions based on bad information and people interpreting our actions and reactions through the dark and dirty lens of their own prejudices and jaundiced judgements. But that’s not what I want to talk about in this article.

Instead, I want to talk about the great advantages we have as a fan base. A smart star looks past the prejudices and tries to find the fans that others haven’t claimed. And having nerds as your fans has a lot of advantages.

For one, there are a lot of us. Granted, we are not the majority of the population. But there are a lot more of us than people think. And we are amongst the highest consumers of media out there. Movies, television shows, video games, DVDs, music, and of course merchandise… we nerds spend a great deal of our considerable disposable incomes on the very industries that let a star be a star.

And we are also a highly intelligent and surprisingly influential group. It may not seem it when you see the stock footage of us dressed up like Klingons at a Star Trek convention, but being an academically gifted demographic, an awful lot of us are doctors, lawyers, computer professionals, scientists, and so on. We wield great influence on media via the Internet, and increasingly, we are the taste-testers and king-makers of society. Where nerds go, society is sure to follow. Odds are, we were there first.

But of all our assets as a fan base, perhaps none other outstrips our least obvious one :

When nerds like you, we like you for life.

If you make it into the hearts of nerds by being in something that appeals to us, you will be there forever. You will be part of our lives till the day you die, and beyond. We might not have social approval, but we have excellent memories, and what we lack in numbers we more than compensate for in longevity.

No matter how far your career slumps, you will still be a big star to us. It might just be for one thing you did many years ago just to pay the rent, something most people in fact have completely forgotten, but that won’t matter to us. You will still be, in our excellent minds, that person who was in that thing we liked, and we will be eternally loyal to you for that very reason.

If you appeal to us, there will always be a minimum to how non-famous you can get. Even if the rest of the media world has abandoned you, we will still be there, welcoming you to our conventions, lining up to get our copies of your book signed, treating you like a great big star, because to us, you are, and you always will be.

There is only one caveat : you can’t say anything against us. Being the victims of abuse all our lives, we are intensely sensitive to disparagement, so if you want to keep our good favour (and you do), simply refrain from participating in public nerd-bashing. Otherwise, our eternal love can turn in a moment to eternal hate, and our sharp minds and long memories will no longer be your friends.

But really, how hard is it to just not participate in the hate?

And in return, you get millions of lifelong fans who will always love you.

Doesn’t that sound good?

More random stuff from my Internet peregrinations, which I have nicknamed “foobles” in a move I hope you will find charmingly eccentric and whimsical, as opposed to, say, frighteningly imbalanced and certifiable.

First up, a comic some person put together on a subject near and dear to my heart : Disney’s The Lion King.

Click the picture to see it full sized and readable!

Sadly, it is also about the heartbreak of childhood disillusionment, which is why, in my mind, I have labeled this comic “The Truth About Lions”.

That’s just how lions are, kid. Most lion prides are a single family group, all related, and they don’t exactly have an Africa-wide dating network in order to meet up with other lion prides and trade genetic information, if ya know what I mean.

So a single rogue male might entice a lioness out of an existing pride and found a pride with her, and when his female offspring come of age…. well, it’s him, or her brothers, and you know what?

Lions just don’t give a shit.

And if his daughters have daughter, he will jungle bang them too, when they come of age. And so forth and so on, until he’s an old mangy elder who doesn’t get real excited by anything any more, and one of his sons had taken over the pride and harem.

Of course, the real explanation, if you want to be wanky about it, is that, if you watch the Lion King closely, you will see that it is at least implied that there are a lot more lionesses than the two in the comic. They are just never named.

But honestly, realistically?

Lions just don’t give a shit.

Next up, a video that makes for perfect Internet fodder, in that it is relatively short, has a lot of entertainment value, and is awesome.

When I first watched it, I didn’t get why the reporter didn’t react to having made a spectacular over the shoulder half-court basket, and his expression was so strange that I wondered if something else was happening to him. Something bad.

But then I figured it out : he has no idea he scored the basket, and that weird expression is actually him looking at his crew and wondering what the hell they are freaking out about. So in reality, it’s him that is thinking something weird is going on.

That, to me, makes the clip all the more charming on repeated viewings.

And of course, being a guy, his immediate reaction when learning he just did something very awesome in front of a camera is “Did you get that?”.

I would be enjoying the glory of that for days and days! And I don’t even give a shit about sports. But come on! That was killer awesome.

I think it is important, in life, to enjoy what good fortune comes your way, and that includes having the sense to milk dumb luck for all it’s worth.

Last up, check this wacky place out : it’s called the Garden of Cosmic Speculation. .

Sounds pretty psychedelic, right? And it is. It is a private garden in Scotland, near Dumfries, and it is theme around science and mathematics.

And, presumably, at least a little bit of drugs.

Just ask Alice. When she's ten feet... tall.

Most of the pics in the article are pretty, in a kind of Alice In Wonderland meets Tim Burton but not like in the Tim Burton version of Alice in Wonderland way, but there is one image that I absolutely love.

It is this here staircase.

That is just so beautiful

I absolutely love how that looks. The effect is one of the stairs flowing down the side of the hill just like a banked river. The rest of it is nothing I have not seen before. That sort of art, the geometrical explorations and the stretched grids, became quite common in the psychedelic sixties.

Although this curlicue into the water is pretty cool.

See what I mean about Tim Burton?

But that staircase…. that is just gorgeous to my eyes. I love how it conforms to the landscape in a way that seems natural and yet is also quite unique.

More ideas for my all too commodious mental “things to do when I am an eccentric billionaire” file. So many weird things to do before I die.

My bucket list is written on an actual bucket.

One thing I have noticed in discussing life, growing up, depression and other mental problems, and other issues with people of my generation is that there is a distinctive pattern of dualism in how we view our parents.

Namely, one parent is the Good Parent and the other is the Bad Parent.

Now I don’t mean this in terms of parenting skill, exactly, although there is a very heavy overlap between the two interpretations.

It is more like one parent is the villain and the other the hero. In extreme cases, it is almost like one parent is an all-loving God and the other is the sum of all that is evil and wrong in the form of Satan.

I have found that the hero role is more often filled by the mother and it is the father who plays the role of the villain, but there are plenty of cases of the opposite as well.

But hero and villain don’t even begin to describe the nature of the duality. What is seems to be most often is a case of the Good But Weak parent versus the Strong But Angry parent.

And the stronger and more divergent this duality is, the more psychologically damaged the children will be, in my opinion.

Let us talk about the two types. We will call them Parent A and Parent B.

Parent A is kind, loving, nurturing, and benevolent. The love they offer is broad and unconditional. They are always sympathetic and patient, and rarely say anything harsh or upsetting. As a result, they are rarely the disciplinarian and offer their support without condition or force.

But they are passive. They do not initiate much of anything, they do not take on responsibility voluntarily (although they are diligent about what they do take on) and they are not very likely to deal with their children honestly and clearly when they feel the truth may hurt their children.

Parent B is impatient, angry, demanding, and often abusive, at least verbally. They rarely ever show approval or acceptance, and indeed, often seem to be working hard to give their children the impression that they hate them. They are often very critical and withholding of their children, and as a result, they are cast in the role of villain.

But they are assertive. They might not do all the work, but they almost always take all or most of the responsibility. They look after household finance, they make the tough decisions, they bear the burden of providing discipline and enforcing the rules.

This duality forms the bedrock basis for the children’s entire view of reality. As they grow, their entire world view becomes polarized. Naturally, they gravitate toward the accepting parent, Parent A, and become avoidant of Parent B.

Parent B senses their children pulling away from them, but so caught up in their role that they can’t react by becoming more loving. Instead, this only reinforces the sort of angry and impatient behaviours that have them playing the villain in the first place.

For you see, these roles reinforce one another strongly. Inside the mind of each parent is the deep conviction that they have to be how they are in response to the other.

Parent A thinks “I have to be soft and supportive and passively protective in order to balance out the aggression, anger, impatience, and harshness of Parent B. ”

Parent B thinks “I have to be the harsh one in order to compensate for the passivity and lack of structure and abdication of responsibility of Parent A. And I very much resent the role I have been cast in, but I don’t understand how to change it. Somebody has to do these things and I know it won’t be Parent A. ”

And over time, Parent A will become more Parent A in response to a perceived increase in Parent B’s Parent B-like activities, and then Parent B responds by becoming more Parent B, and the whole family moves a little further out towards the ends of the teeter totter.

And because this duality naturally expresses itself in ethical terms, it is nearly impossible for anyone involved, whether they be parent, child, or innocent bystander, to see that that problem is not the Bad Parent, but the duality itself, and the roles said duality force upon the parents involved.

The true villain might well be Parent A’s unwillingness to accept any part of Parent B’s role, or vice verse.

And of course, it’s the children in between who suffer the most. They invariably pick sides, and suffer from the fallout of their hopelessly unbalanced childhoods for their entire lives. Often, they even repeat this same dualistic mistake when they, themselves, become parents, because they know no better.

It is only by accepting the need for both ends of the scale and cooperating as parents so that neither parent plays villain or hero all the time that we can resolve this problem and keep it from echoing down the ages.

The opposite of insanity is not the opposite insanity.

The opposite of insanity is sanity, and that means meeting somewhere in the middle.

Here we are at yet another Friday Science roundup, with still more hot and juicy exciting science news for all us big time science fans!

And there’s a lot to cover this week, so we’d best just tuck in and go at it.

It’s a great week for science fiction becoming fact. Take this development : a find and replace mechanism for the human genome.

Yes, with this technique, scientists can perform large scale edits to the genome of a cell in much the same way you would do “find and replace” in your favorite text editor or word processing program. Is something in that genome TAG when it should be TAA? No problem, just load the two strings into this process and ZIP. Fixed!

Now this is not going to be useful for therapy any time soon. Science fiction visions of rewriting every cell in your body to make improvements are still just that, science fiction. But what it will do is speed up genetic research by making testing a new genome for a cell that much faster.

Besides, I am not sure how a human being would survive having their genome rewritten. The transition phase, as the body slowly replaces each cell (and some replace way faster that others) would likely kill you.

So until we can put ourselves into suspended animation, it’s not going to happen.

But that’s just boring old biology. How about some freaky bending of the laws of nature and the rules of reality itself?

Scientists at Cornell have (believe it or not) built a little amusing gizmo called a space-time invisibility cloak.

They created conditions in which time and space were suspended. The physics is slightly beyond me (in the sense that the Andromeda Galaxy is slightly beyond the city limits of Waco, Texas) but according to the article, the Cornell team managed to compress light in such a way that they created a space-time nonevent.

Granted, it was only 110 nanoseconds long. But hey, it’s a start.

And of course, you know what I am thinking, right? STASIS PODS.

Stasis, the idea of being able to freeze a thing or a volume in time, has been a favorite science fiction trope of mine for a long time. Imagine being able to order food that had been frozen not in a freezer but in time right after it was made. Imagine donor organs (while we still need them) frozen the moment they were removed.

And of course, imagine “time travel” by having yourself put into stasis for ten years.

Who knows, this might be the start of all that.

But even that pales in comparison to another science fiction idea bursting into reality : the 3D scanning and reconstruction of crime scenes.

The British, always on the forefront of law enforcement, are the first big power to adopt this system. The 3D laser scanner gathers up to 30 million data points per sweep, with each sweep taking four minutes. They plan to make four sweeps per scene.

Then the information can be loaded into a computer and used to create a highly accurate 3D reconstruction of the scene.

Right now, it is planned mostly for auto accident scenes. That way, they can streamline all the complicated insurance and liability issues and clear the wreckage off the scene earlier, and restore proper traffic flow.

All very practical and cool. But what blows my mind is that this is a real thing, and not just a science fiction idea that I have had in my head for the longest time.

Not that I am the only one, of course. Once computers had scanners of any sort, the idea of something that could digitally record every detail of a crime scene for later investigation via virtual reality is a natural one. I have been envisioning such a system in my mind for a long time, with bored looking cops waiting outside the door of a crime scene while the scanning team does their work.

I find it interesting that they are beginning with auto accident scenes. At first blush, you would think indoor crime scenes would be easier to scan.

But in reality, a room in a modern house is far, far more complex than a scene involving a few cars and a stretch of highway. Just look around the room you are in right now and try to count the number of surfaces, reflections, objects, and so on.

No way a scanner is going to be able to handle all of that, not at this early stage in the advent of the technology.

But just think of where this all could go in the future!

What am I saying…. the future is now.

I have not indulged my love of the cute fuzzy animals on this here blog in a while, and I came across some great animal pictures recently, so I figured, what the heck.

Throw open the Ark doors, pop the locks on all the cages in the Zoo, let all of God’s creatures wander free today, and let the animals come out to play.

First up, a personal favorite of mine, the red fox.

Everyone knows foxes are clever, elusive, and of course, downright adorable.

But did you know they are also heavily into Eastern religions, including meditation?

Here’s the proof :

Ommmmmmmmm..... arf. Ommmmmmmmm..... arf.

When reached for comment, a spokesfox, going only by the name “Mister Fox” (obviously an alias… elusive, remember?), said, in a soothing and rich yet accessible baritone, “We foxes, as a rule, find traditional Western religions too restrictive and oppressive. Only the ancient disciplines of Eastern religion offer the combination of freedom and spirituality that fits with a modern, urban fox’s busy and complex lifestyle. ”

“Mister Fox” then danced a happy, carefree, freeform dance in a small suburban supermarket that was closed for the night, while the credits rolled.

Next up, a picture taken candidly by one of our secret agents, who spent months under deep, deep cover to get us this tantalizing picture of an inter-animal conference in progress :

So this year, it's going to be potbellied pigs, but next year, the new hit pet will be.... are you ready for this?.... porcupines.

Our hearts go out to the friends and family of our brave photographer, who is recovering in a local pet grooming center after being nearly fatally fluffed in the line of duty.

Judging by the deep look of concentration on the dog’s face, we can safely assume that this is a conference of deep international significance and, had the audio recording not been interrupted by our brave journalist being apprehended by the tiny-little-jackbooted thus of the International Pet Conspiracy, no doubt we would know even more.

Still, remember : buy shares in porcupines. They are only pricks on the outside.

Our intrepid reporter was also able to take this picture, but I think from the expression of exaggerated innocence on one of the participants’ faces, it is clear they were only too aware that they were being photographed.

Still, here it is :

Kitten : Nothing weird happening here! Dog : I WILL EAT YOUR SOUL.

Just look at that menacing glower on the muzzle of the canine participant. Clearly, this cabal does not take kindly to the innocent intrusions of the forces of truth and accountability into their shadowy world of secret deals, international skullduggery, and Friskies-fueled sex orgies.

Or was it sex-fueled Friskies orgies? Either way. Scandalous!

You just have to take one look at that dog to know that he’s a Killer.

Or maybe a Rex, or a Prince, or possibly even a Fido, if he’s owned by a comic strip artist.

And just look at what they did to one of their numbers when he made the mistake of talking to the press, or as they call it, “barking out of turn” :

I don't know what's worse, the punishment, or the pun

Truly, we are dealing with savage, powerful individuals who will stop at nothing in order to protect their secret world of power, privilege, and Purina. Who knows what sinister actions they take under the cloak of secrecy?

Must be something pretty juicy for them to go to all that trouble, right?

And for the truly dirty work, the real black-ops bag-over-the-head wetworks kind of stuff, they have their elite team of super deadly agents who pack an unbelievable arsenal of high tech devices and master any number of bizarre and deadly skills :

Seen here : one of their deadlist assassins, fleeing the scene of another nefarious deed

So clearly, we are dealing with powerful forces when we stick our noses into the crotches of the great and powerful and take a hearty and informative sniff.

Still, we shall not be intimidated by their Gestapo tactics, nor tempted by their offers of free international travel and enormous wads of untraceable international currencies….

Wait, they are seriously offering that? Is the travel first class? CHARTERED? Hmmm….

Actually, never mind anything I just said. There is no international pet conspiracy and there never has been, and this article has been merely the product of a bored comedy writer inventing a ridiculously over the top context for a bunch of random cute animal photos he found on the Internet.

Now if you need me, I will be in Monte Carlo.