Monthly Archives: April 2012

From The News

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Tonight, continuing the non-introspective streak for an unprecedented two in a row, I will be discussing two interesting items from the news in order to warm up for tomorrow’s regular Friday science jag.

It does me a lot of good to get over myself get away from myself for a few days and let my introspective muscles rest for a while. Too much of that, and you lose all sense of perspective and proportion, and that is literally the worst thing in the world.

Well, enough introductory palaver. Time to get on with the news items!

First one : I just love the word “palaver”.

But coming in a close second….

Catholicism Remembers Compassion

I have a lot of problems with the Catholic church. Things like protecting pederast priests, living in golden palaces filled with priceless works of art while billions starve, and worst of all, their entirely nonsensical and extremely counterproductive opposition to contraception are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. I cannot decide whether they are a net force of good in the world, or evil. There are just too many variables.

And complicating the issue even further is when a story like this one about the Vatican condemning the Paul Ryan budget in the USA comes along and shows that despite their appearance of unrelenting and hopelessly antique and backwards evil, the Vatican does do a decent thing now and then.

Here is a clip :

“Affordable housing programs have not been protected in various budget and deficit agreements, and as a result many families are at further risk of being pushed into poverty,” said one letter, written by the Rev. Stephen Blaire, the bishop of Stockton, Calif. “We urge you to draw a circle of protection around the programs that serve ‘the least among us.’ ”

And that is exactly why I can never entirely condemn the Catholic church. Not just because they do this sort of thing (in this case, via the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) but because they seem to be the only one of the large Christian sects which remembers Christ’s actual teachings about helping the poor and being compassionate.

At the very least, they remember to pay lip service to it. Eric Ryan claims to be Catholic and that his Catholic faith “informed” his budget, but it would seem the Church does not agree. All reports say that is a distinctly cold hearted budget, which ignores the true financial score in favour of just cutting all the things social conservatives do not like regardless of how much that will save versus how much misery it will cause.

It is good that the Catholic Church seems to at least faintly remember that Christ said to sell all you own and give it to the poor, and that nobody who calls themselves any kind of Christian can possibly spew hatred of the poor when their Savior, the one their entire religion is supposedly about, taught them to love their neighbor and give of themselves freely.

And even to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. You know, taxes?

Making Homelessness Illegal

And speaking of massive right wing abuse of the poor, how about the laws passed in Hungary recently making it illegal to be homeless?

That is the effect, anyhow. Technically, the set of laws in question merely make it a crime to habitually reside in a public place or to store belongings there. And we all know that without laws like these, everybody would do that all the time, right?

Wrong. This is the result of a concentrated two year campaign to make homelessness illegal, presumably driven by the kind of people who, out of sheer moral laziness, think homeless people, like all poor people, are just lazy, and could change their position in life any time they wanted to do so.

That is a classic response from the morally bankrupt who will gladly believe absolutely anything that gets them out of having to care about someone who is not themselves. They are doing well, so the world must be fair, and they got where they are via the prime empty virtue of our modern world, hard work (funny how many supposed rugged individualists still want a pant on the head and a dog treat for being good little worker drones), ergo anyone not doing as well must not be working hard to the exact degree they are less successful.

Ergo, homeless people must be the laziest people in the world. Anything else would mean caring! And even worse… maybe actually doing something, or… the worst thing of all… SHARING.

And sharing means you have less stuff, and if you have less stuff you are more poor, and if you are more poor that means you lose social status in the incredibly minutely competitive world of the middle class, and losing social status is, to middle class people, worse than death.

So clearly, this sort of thing is reprehensible. But to me, the irony of it all is that the next result is clearly just going to be a lot of homeless people into jail, where they will be inside where it is warm and out of the elements, and getting three meals a day plus free medical care, and guards to protect them from other prisoners somewhat….

… in other words, it will improve their lives immensely by turning all prisons into really, really expensive homeless shelters.

So apparently, these people would prefer to spend far more money (homeless shelters are way cheaper than prisons) in order to satisfy their puny punitive reptile brains that they are cracking down on the problem, rather than risk seeming even faintly compassionate (higher brain functions pain them so) by just increasing the number of homeless shelter beds and thus solving the problem more cheaply, more humanely, and more practically.

Well, that is all the rant I have in me tonight. I had forgotten how exhausting it can be to have opinions. No wonder I got out of the habit.

The Most Hated Man In The World

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After yesterday’s big emotional roundabout, I am once again bored with talking about myself, so I thought it was time I did something other than root around in my navel lint looking for gold, and actually talk something outside my head for a change.

No doubt this too shall pass, and I will revert to form and go back to sorting my entrails soon enough. But for today, we will be discussing some interesting news items I have come across recently.

I hope the sudden shock does not cause any of you undue stress or anxiety.

Now let’s continue.

With the recent centennial anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, there has been a flurry of media and public interest in this most famous of all disasters at sea.

Much of this has just been the repeating of facts already well known. But recently I came across this fascinating article about J. Bruce Ismay and how, as a result of the Titanic disaster, he became, for a time, the most hated man in the world.

Ismay was the chairman of the White Star Line, the company that built the Titanic, and was on board the night she struck an iceberg and sank.

But building the doomed ship was not the crime for which he was pilloried. It was getting on the initial (scant) lifeboat launch with all the women and children that was the nail upon which he was hung in the press and in the court of public opinion.

To further compound the matter, it became clear that he had been responsible for the Titanic’s excessive speed (he controlled the often vilified captain of the ship), and, most crucially and damningly, his decision to reduce the number of lifeboats on the vessel far below the number necessary to carry all the ship’s passengers to safety because he “didn’t want the decks to look too cluttered”.

Well, the ship was unsinkable, so really, why have any at all? Just to make it look more like a ship to the passengers, presumably. After all, you expect to see lifeboats on the deck of a ship, right?

To finally cement his position as public pariah, he refused to talk about his experience on that fateful April night and absolutely refused to take any responsibility for it whatsoever, even to the point of claiming he was on board as an ordinary passenger and had no idea why Captain Smith handed him an ice danger warning shortly before the disaster.

As a result, he got hate mail, he got blackballed from his club, a close friend turned him away at the door, and he lived the remaining 25 years of his life as a shadow of his former self, reclusive, nervous, depressed, and plagued by such horrific nightmares that his screams woke the whole household.

Granted, he was still a rich man. But he was not a happy man, and what else is money for?

I find the story fascinating because it is such a pure personal tragedy to come from the much larger tragedy that is the story of the Titanic. The fact that Ismay went from being one of the most rich and powerful men in the world to a shattered and crippled figure living out his days in misery makes him a highly tragic, though not sympathetic, character.

And all for basically acting exactly like any other rich person who was used to being treated like he was far, far, far more important than anyone else and so he just did what came naturally to such a person. He put himself first.

I think anyone can see by his psychological reaction, especially the nightmares, that despite what he said, he felt incredibly guilty over the entire thing and that this guilt, plus the shock of his sudden reversal of position in the world, were simply far more than he could handle. He could not face it either publicly, privately, or in his own mind. And so for the rest of his life, he was a man living the fragile existence of a soul incapable of facing a terrible, terrible truth.

And it is this profound lack of character that makes him a tragic figure to me. He is a man who failed the test of history and hence became a pariah and a nervous wreck. This is both tragic in the literary sense, and just. Inasmuch as the Titanic disaster was any one person’s fault, it was his, and his failure to take even the pro forma “the buck stops here” responsibility of any leader, let alone any shred of personal responsibility, quite rightfully made him a detested figure in his own life, and will insure his place in the history books as a coward and a failure and a victim of that most classically tragic of attributes, hubris.

And you can see how this sort of thing might happen. I have written before on the corrupting and indeed infantalizing effect of wealth and power, and how there is genetic social programming that emerges from the human psyche when one becomes socially dominant that is entirely unknown to the common citizen who lives in a state of relative social hierarchical equality with his or her peers.

To me, it seems clear that the tragedy suddenly placed an enormous burden of conscience on a man who had grown quite used to the sort of complete lack of accountability available only to those at the very top of their respective heaps. He went from socially dominant to the bottom of the heap, the pariah, the leper, the criminal in all but law, so fast and so unexpectedly that his enfeebled character simply could not take it and as a consequence, he made his situation far worse by refusing to face it, therefore failing one of the most basic tests of human leadership and the chain of command, and thereby condemning himself to that very special circle of social hell reserved exclusively for our failed and disgraced former leaders.

The sheep have no mercy for the shepherd who throws down his crook and runs away.

Mourning lost life

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Today was a therapy day, the first in two weeks, and so I guess you know what I will be talking about today. Slow cooker recipes!

Prepare it in the morning and eat it in the evening!

OK, for this easy and economical recipe, you will need to brown two pounds of stewing beef, add three cup of bacon broth and a cup of mandrake root, then dance around a blazing bonfire naked with obscene Celtic poetry written on you with the blood of the Old Ones….

Woops, sorry, wrong recipe. That is for…. something else.

Actually, I will talk about what went down in therapy for a change.

I was talking about how hard it is for me to get over my horror at contemplating how I am pushing 40 and have done absolutely nothing with life, no job ever, no relationship ever, no nothing, just endless video games and Internet.

I told him about how I can not get over how pretty much anyone would consider someone who had gotten to the age of 38 (39 next month) without ever having a full time job or supporting himself to be a great big loser to beat pretty much all losers.

And even outside of that, just the realization that I am approaching middle age, half my life gone forever, and I have nothing to show for it… even just that realization is like an enormous weight pressing down on me and holding me down, and how I just did not know how to sift that enormous weight off myself so I could move on.

And my therapist suggested that what I was experiencing was grief for the lost 15 plus years of life that depression has taken from me, and that what I needed to do was to mourn them. Take the time to think on them and what they meant to me and experience the loss, and then eventually, find a way to let go of them and bury them in the past where they belong.

And he is right. That is exactly how I should treat this problem. Especially the thinking about it part. I have mostly avoided thinking about it because it horrifies, shames, and depresses me and if I think about it, it give me self harm type thoughts.

So I thought there was no point thinking about it, it could only end in badness. But if I think of it as grieving, then suddenly there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Grieving ends. You might not know when it will end, but eventually, it ends. You bury the dead and move on. You do not forget them, but you let them go, and go forward with your life.

And that sounds pretty good to me. It means I have to spend a lot of time thinking about something which is very painful to me, but I think I can do it if I feel like there is some kind of point to it all.

Of course, oce I rid myself of that burden, I will have to face what lies beyond, and who I would be without it, which might be far harder than the first part. That is the other big thing we talked about this morning : identity.

One of the problems with having a life like mine, with nothing to hang my identity on but my depression, is that I really have no idea who I would be without it. Depression has been with me for so long that I am not sure I know how to separate myself from it. And the idea of going into the future with no defined identity whatsoever is terrifying. (And sort of exciting, in a way. )

I honestly think that issues of identity are the biggest barriers to the personal change people crave. We reject things which do not conform to our sense of ourselves, things that do not “fit” in our image of ourselves, even if those are the very things we want the most in life. You cannot change who you are until you change your idea of who you are, or at least, who you can be.

Luckily, I have been slowly developing an idea of who I could be without the depression and social anxiety holding me back, so I would not be heading into an identity vacuum were my mental illness to disappear into thin air like smoke tomorrow.

In fact, in my better moments, I am pretty sure that I have it in me to be a pretty amazing guy. Funny, sweet, charismatic in a quirky way, lovable, intelligent, creative, and one heck od a good cuddler.

Sure, there are a lot of attributes I do not have. I will never be particularly neat, or good with my hands, or organized, or decisive. (Or will I?)

But I have a lot of assets. I could really make a name for myself in the creative fields. I am not the useless pathetic individual my depression (and the voice of my sister Catherine from so long ago) tells me that I am.

And one of these days, I will get myself straightened out enough to silence the chaos of choice multiplication inside myself, take some decisive actions for a change, and somehow get myself to a place where I can do myself some good and connect with like minded people.

There is probably a lot of soul searching and therapy between me and then. When I can remember to have it, I have faith that if I continue to unburden myself of the deadened, leaden weight of old frozen emotions and continue to try to unlearn the bad thinking in order to make room for the good, eventually I will simply rise from my grave and simply walk away with it, the path pleasant and clear in front of me, and my grave filled instead with my dead forgotten past.

And I will never look back.

Between dark breaths

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Having a Bad Awakening following the usual Bad Sleep, and so I am not feeling so hot right now.

Specifically, I feel distinctly out of breath. I must have been deep into the sleep apnea this time, because I woke up feeling like I had spent a few years in a dusty closet with a couple of moldy mops and a bucket of soured rinse or ten.

Even as I type this, I am experiencing bouts of intense desire to yawn, and that is always a clear sign that you are not getting enough oxygen to the brain. That is what a yawn is, basically : a special reflex used to make you take a great big breath and get that oxygen deep into your lungs.

So here I am, feeling half smothered, with blocked up sinuses (stupid hayfever, that is probably what brought this sleep apnea bullshit on) and a feeling not entirely unlike death deep down in the core of my being, trying to yawn and use deep breathing exercises to bring myself back to within at least a stone’s throw of the land of the living.

Mostly, what I want to do right now is just lay back down and try to pull myself together in a nice dark room with maybe a little music on so I can just chill out and concentrate fully on slow deep soul breaths and then maybe get myself back together a bit.

But, it is Writing Time, and that is something I never miss no matter how I feel. Managing to put a thousand words a day out is the only thing that makes my life worth living, sad as that is, and I absolutely refuse to let anything deflect that.

I am coming to a period of dissatisfaction, though, when I become increasingly discontent with the usual daily diary diarrhea and want to put together something more substantial, like an essay, or even better, a short story of some sort.

Or heck, even a poem, if it is long enough.

So hopefully this will percolate in the cast iron kettle of my brain for a while and then I will come up with something besides this useful but meaningless drivel.

I have been struggling to find a way to translate the backup I made of this blog into something readable. I wanted to just use Blogbooker, a very cool website that turns your WordPress XML backup into a nicely formatted PDF book, but it says the XML backup this blog spits out is full of XML errors and I do not know a damn thing about XML so I don’t know how to fix it.

It is a pity, too, because Blogbooker did a lovely job with the backup of the Million Word Year and I was so looking forward to having something similar for this blog to take with me should I decide to depart for Tumblr or whatnot.

But alas, it seems it is not to be. I might get an XML debugging program and see if I can ferret out the errors that way, hoping to more or less bluff my way through, or I might not. We will see.

Then I tried a plugin that said it would export my blog to text, which is exactly what I want, just a big text file with all the posts in it, in order, with subject lines and dates.

But no, instead, it put them in a tab delimited database type format suitable for importing into a spreadsheet program like Excel or OpenOffice Calc.

But I didn’t want a spreadsheet, I wanted a text file, or a PDF, or the like. Something readable by humans, specifically, me.

Oh well. I have the XML file and this tab delimited thing, and I can always beaver away at those until I come up with something. I managed to open the XML thing in OpenOffice Writer (the word processing component of it) in such a way that it is more or less readable if you ignore a bunch of XML garbage in between the entries, and so if I wanted to go through that and extra the Good Stuff, it would not be too onerous a task.

The main point is, I will lose no writing if I decide to jump ship and go blog on Tumblr or Blogger or something like that. It will all be there on my hard drive, waiting for me to sift through it all and pan out the gold from the river silt of my ramblings.

Tomorrow is Tuesday, Therapy Day, the first in two weeks. Last week my therapist was on vacation to spend time with his grandchildren, and let me tell you, I have not enjoyed the extended time between visits. I really missed it when I did not have therapy to go to last week, and I hope it is a long time before he has to take another Tuesday off.

I have come, it seems, to rely on that once a week chance to really express my emotions to someone who can help me birth those deep down dark demons that weight me down. It is not always a pleasant experience, and sometimes he drives me nuts with the whole “I think you know the answer… ” routine that therapists seem to love.

But in the long term, it does me a lot of good, like writing a thousand of these soul searching diary entries all at once in terms of therapeutic release, and I look forward to tomorrow’s session.

Afterward, I will cash that GST check, and hopefully do that lab work I keep putting off. It all depends on if I can stand to (and remember to) go ten hours without eating.

That is always the hard part, the fasting. It is unpleasant, to say the least. Getting blood drawn and providing a urine sample, those are not fun but they are no big deal.

But going ten hours with no food, only water… that sucks.

Wish me luck with that.

The Coming Change

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As I wrote about yesterday[1], I am having a spot of trouble with finances, my web host, and reality.

The reality issues are routine but the other two are news.

So I am anticipating a big change soon. I may decide to hang it all and just be a Tumblr blogger from now on. It is not like I am making a fortune off of ad revenue, and Tumblr is free and seems to have a large userbase and a certain amount of cachet.

Or I may go find me a brand new and far more reasonable web host. Only being able to buy web hosting a year at a time is just plain madness. I can’t think of another service that would make you do that. I have already looked up a few other web hosts that not only let you buy by the month or quarter, but they charge less per month as well.

So my current web host people, FatCow, might just lose my business. I have not made up my mind.

Now you might be wondering, “but yesterday’s blog entry made it sound like you would never be able to post to your usual blog again! How is it you are back? Did you pay up?”

Nope. I just sent a very nice email to FatCow‘s billing department apologizing for the delay in payment, and they were nice enough to give me my website back for a few days so I can get my finances in order.

So of course, the first thing I did was download a backup of all my web entries here. I am not stupid. I want all my options open, and if I decide to leave FatCow, I want to have my backup export file in hand so in theory at least, I can get another host, import the file, and carry on like nothing happened.

And I may do that. I like Tumblr, and there would not be a huge problem if I decided to just blog there from now on. It is certainly the cheaper option. But I have grown used to WordPress, and having my very own domain name, and at least the theoretical possibility that I can make money via Google Ads, and so forth and so on.

In fact, honestly, I wonder how Tumblr’s business model works. There does not appear to be any way for them to get revenue. There is no ads on my blogs as far as I can tell. Could they really make enough on the for-pay blog themes to pay the bills?

I guess they must!

Speaking of business models (one of my fave subjects), I may have figured out what the deal with this FatCow only letting you buy your web hosting a year at a time is. [2]

I figure some bean counters at FatCow realized that the single and multi year contracts were the ones that were the most immediately profitable, so they had a Genius Moment and said “I know, let’s just do those ones! Screw attracting new customers, we will just assume that all our existing customers will have no choice but to keep paying us years at a time forever!”

And who knows, maybe that is working for them. I don’t know. But it does not work for me, at least, not at this time in my life.

If I was even a little more financially solid, maybe I could just go with the flow. After all, it was not a huge problem before now. The bill would be due right about when I would be getting a GST cheque and a yearly tax return, and I would just use some of that and not think about it much.

But with my rent going up by $80/month this year, things are considerably different. Some of that tax money is already spoken for, and the rest is needed just to see me through the month, more or less. I was kind of hoping that I would have enough left over to treat myself to a new kitchen gadget, namely a bread machine, but that is looking unlikely right about now. How depressing.

What I really need to do is get started trying to get on full disability. That would solve a lot of problems. It might even let me go back to school and complete my education, which would be huge. [3]

But it involves making a phone call and asking for things, both of which are not easy for me with my mental illness hanging around my neck, so that explains why it is taking me a long time to “remember”
(that is, “work up the nerve”) to do it. I will get there eventually. Maybe tomorrow, who knows.

But regardless of what happens, I will continue to write things and post them online. Maybe it will only be at free blogging places, but it will go on. Writing every day is far too much of a habit for me to stop now, and part of that is posting it online.

If it was just a file on my hard drive, I would not be motivated enough to do it. I have to fill my little balloons with the hot breath of my words and then let them loose into the big blue sky of the Internet in order for the whole thing to work.

Sure, maybe only three to six people read said words at all. But it is still better than nothing, and maybe some day, I will figure out how to draw attention to myself and attract a larger following.

And then, well, just watch these words of mine grow wings and soar to new horizons.

[[3]] Or as Donald Trump would say, “yooj”.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. If you missed it yesterday, do not worry, there has been some back-posting magic going on which I will try to explain in this entry eventually↵
  2. Let’s pretend that sentence did not end with “is” and move on.↵
  3. ↵

That Fat Cow!

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Well, it finally happened. My blog was taken down because I have not been able to come up with the $107 it would take to bring it back again this year. Not yet, anyhow.

I really do not want to pay it given how FatCow has treated me over this issue. Once I can cash my GST, I will have the cash to do it, although that will take most of it and I had planned to use that money to pay Joe back for my room at VancouFur. And spending that much of it will leave me pretty well entirely broke until the 25th, once I take out the $40 I had to borrow from Joe just in order to get this far into the month.

I am not mad at FatCow for taking the site down, although the sudden shock of not having it there was like icy fingernails across my heart. It would have been nice if they had said “Pay by this day or you are cut off”, so I could be ready. I could have warned my reader(s) that I would not be visibly updating until I got things sorted out. That would have been easier to take.

But regardless, I do not blame them for taking my site down, after all, you do not get what you do not pay for. I would do the same in their shoes.

No, what pisses me off is how asshole like they have been by not letting me pay by the month or even quarterly. It has to be the whole year, or nothing, and that just fucking sucks. I mean, what kind of bullshit is that? I have been a good customer for five years, and they could not give me even that little bit of slack. That is why I am pissed off at them.

So what I really want to do is switch companies. There are all kinds of web hosting companies out there that still let you pay by the month or the quarter, and a lot of them are also willing to give me a really sweet rate in order to get my business.

But if I switch, I am worried that I will not be able to transfer files from the old account to the new one because I am locked out of the old account and there is no reason they should let me at my files without me paying them first. And if I have to pay them, why switch?

Maybe that is why they do not give you a specific time when they will shut you off. This way, they can hold my files ransom and there is nothing I can do about it.

So then the choice becomes, do I pay them despite how I have been treated, or do I simply accept that I have to start my blog anew and lose all those blog entries I made since the Million Word Year?

Given how incredibly painful it is for a writer to lose anything he has written, odds are pretty good that I will cave in and bow to the forces of evil. I don’t want to, but I would be losing at least two years’ worth of writing if I do not.

And trust me, that would hurt like a bitch.

On the other hand, I could just say “Screw this private web hosting crap, I will just host the blog on Tumblr from now on and save myself the hassle and expense. “

And that is damned tempting on many levels. Maybe I would come up with the $20 to have my own private domain name, maybe not. My blog would have a unique URL either way, it just would have “tumblr.com” after it if I chose not to bother.

What I really wish (stupid hindsight) is that I had thought to back up my blog to my hard drive once I realized I was in hot water with FatCow. It is very easy to do, and if I had done that, I would be able to just tell FatCow to go fuck itself, gotten new hosting, uploaded my blog to it, and kept on going exactly as before without a problem.

But it is too late for that now. Lesson learned. I will try not to beat myself up over it. After all, what with the whole Zombie Finger incident, I have had a lot of my mind lately. I can be forgiven for imperfect perspicacity on that score.

Finger is doing fine, by the way. The area of the incision is still a little nasty looking, and the rest f the fingertip is still a little reddish and raw. I have Band-Aid over it currently, but that is just for cosmetic reasons. People do not want to see that.

Anyhow, right now, I dunno. It is not like I have thousands of readers and they will all be pissed off and confused if I switch to Tumblr without warning them. I can email the two people I know for sure are readers of mine and give them the new URL, and no real harm done.

And at least I have the Million Words backed up. And in PDF form, no less. Plus, I have all my fiction backed up as well. So while I would lose writing, I would not lose my short stories, which are what I hold most precious.

I have also written some essays I am fairly proud of, though, and I would be sacrificing those if I took the “clean break” route. Plus, of course, all my day to day ramblings, musings, navel-gazings, and therapeutic belly aching. That is something to consider.

Oh well. I will not be able to cash my check until Tuesday anyhow, and so I do not have to make up my mind about it until then.

Until then, I will be readable on LiveJounral and Tumblr at least.

Hope I will see you there, folks.

Friday Science Orgy, April 13, 2012

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Yes, here it is, yet another Friday the 13th [1], a date which has scientifically proven to be, by far, the unluckiest day of the year on which to juggle flaming chainsaws on a tightrope over the Grand Canyon while naked, drunk, and suffering from a severe inner ear infection.

We have plenty of hot, tender, plump when you cook them news stories for you today, including freaky creepy robot footage, tidal energy facts, and a frightening new frontier in reproductive science.

Wow, this must be your lucky day!

Uncanny Valley Days

There are a couple of creepy (but extremely function, I should add) robots hanging around the world these days, just waiting to give you nightmares.

Like take our old pal PETMAN.

As you can see, he does push ups as well as stairs now, all in that horrifying “Terminator in physical therapy” kind of way.

I mean seriously, couldn’t they pretty the thing up a little before taping? Or is that hardcore robot skeleton look part of what gets them the funding these days?

It sort of looks like it cheats on the stairs to me, too. Like it has not so much mastered stairs as learned to make evenly spaced hops. Not the same thing.

Or how about a creepy robot octopus?

Kind of looks like a smoke detector got raped by an order of steamed bean sprouts.

In reality, it is the product of the creatively named Project OCTOPUS, and it uses all kinds of high tech wonderful stuff like memory alloys in order to make those tentacles twitch.

Fascinating in theory, but I am having trouble imagining it working out in the long run. The goal is obviously to make a robot which can manipulate objects in its environment without having to deal with something as complicated as a hand or as limited as a claw. And octopi have proven extremely good at using their tentacles.

But the human hand is complicated for a reason. It is an extremely sophisticated manipulator, far beyond anything we can create artificially. I think getting the robot to be able to do anything useful will prove to be far more complex than people suspect.

But who knows? For simple but tedious jobs like underwater cable or pipeline construction and inspection and/or even simple repairs.

Power from the Ocean

Moving on to alternative energy (which is so much hipper and cooler and edgier than mainstream energy), Pop Sci has recently published this interesting article about how one form of ocean thermal energy might work in the future.

I am fairly interested in this alternate energy prospect. It is true that the initial costs are quite high, but that is true of nearly all forms of public energy. We easily forget this in modern times because we tend to be getting our energy from an infrastructure bought and paid for by both the vision and the funding of many generations ago.

But all those dirty coal fired power generators, as well as the incredible amount of wire and pole that it takes to get it from the power plant to your home, did not come cheap. We have to think in those terms when we think of the energy of the future, and be glad that past generations had the will and the foresight to invest in the future for us.

I particularly love this part of the article :

A 3,200-foot-long, 33-foot wide pipe is not something you could build in a factory, haul out to sea and drop into the water, Meyer explained.

Well DUH. Obviously it would be built slowly and methodically like an underwater pipeline or cable.

Hey, maybe the OCTOPUS could help!

I’ll Take a Dozen Large Caucasian Eggs, Please

Finally, we have our Frightening Science Story of the Week.

In this case, it is the scary truth that we can now manufacture human ova in a lab.

Unsurprisingly, this involves stem cells. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have managed to prod some ovarian stem cells into turning into immature human eggs, and the really freaky part is, later this year, they plan to fertilize them to see if they are viable.

Not exactly the science fiction horror scenario of human eggs being produced on an industrial scale and human reproduction eventually not requiring the involvement of any human beings at all (mass produced ova, sperm, artificial wombs, clone armies… ), but it is still a strange thing to contemplate.

Using stem cells to produce medically needed body tissues is one thing. Nobody seriously has a problem with a future in which we can use stem cells derived from shed skin cells in order to generate a genetically identical new heart or kidney or spine for somebody.

But when you begin to involve human reproduction, things get far less clear. Suppose a corporation legally buys some blastocysts and sperm, then uses them to generate a zygote, then hired a surrogate and implants it in her.

Does the corporation then own te resulting child? They owned all the ingredients that went into it and all the equipment and labour as well. Nobody doubts that if a bakery makes a cake, they own the cake.

Well what about whipping yourself up a whole new person? What kind of rights would said person have?

And what happens when you implant extra eggs in a woman approaching menopause? Women have a finite number of ova, and when the last one goes, that trigger menopause. Would an unlimited supply of implantable ova keep a woman from experiencing menopause, period[2]?

And if so, what effect would that have on the woman’s health and aging in the long run? What happens if you put an important biological signal on hold like that?

The future is a strange and freaky place, to have such questions in it!

That is all for this week, folks!

[[2]] No pun intended, I swear.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. I feel like we just had one recently, but I suppose nothing says these things should be evenly spaced out through the year↵
  2. ↵

Why I am against abortion

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I usually avoid talking about this topic altogether, because being an anti-abortion liberal is not exactly easy and I know the sorts of arguments I will get into if I air my views.

But a recent piece on the Daily Show angered me enough that I feel I have to put my views and the reasoning behind them into words in order to clear my mind and let my emotions settle down again.

The first thing you have to know is that my position is, unequivocally, not a religious one. I can say this with total conviction because I have no religion, and I have never had one. Both my parents are atheists and I was raised entirely without religion.

So no, I am not against abortion because my church, my holy book, my religious leadership, or my God or gods tell me so.

I am against it because my conscience tells me so. It tells me that abortion is murder, or at least, something very close to it.

Now in order to illustrate the reasoning that led me to this conclusion, I am going to paint a somewhat harsh picture, and I apologize for that, but it is the best way to get my point across.

I want you to imagine the waiting room of a busy obstetrician’s office. On every chair sits a pregnant mother. All stages of pregnancy are represented, from the ones for whom the news is quite recent to the ones for whom birth could happen any moment now.

The atmosphere is calm and tranquil. The women smile to one another in mutual understanding. Tips and stories are exchanged, giving the newer mothers valuable insight into what it is like further down the line. They all make frequent trips to the bathroom, and laugh about it with each other.

Into this happy scene comes a young, ambitious abortionist, who addresses the room :

“Hello ladies! Sorry for interrupting, but I just wanted you all to know that if any of you want me to jab a surgical instrument into that inhuman growth in your womb so I can chop up its little arms, legs, heart, and brain and then suck the pieces out with a vacuum, I am just next door. ”

The women, of course, are shocked, horrified, and enraged. How dare he offer to do such a horrible thing to the precious lives growing within them? What kind of a monster would do that to a baby?

But that is just the problem. The only difference between these ladies at the obstetrician’s office and the ones next door at the abortion clinic are that they want their babies, and the ones next door do not. To a happily pregnant woman, there is absolutely no doubt in their minds that what is growing inside them is their baby , even if they have only been pregnant for days. But for the women waiting for an abortion next door, it is a part of their body, a growth, to do with as they please.

So it is a precious baby when the mother wants it, and an inhuman growth when she does not.

And that is absolutely unacceptable.

We would not accept that a child is a human being only if its parents want it, even in the case of a newborn baby still covered in blood from the trip.

So how can we call it a baby when it is still inside its mother if she wants the child, and go along with her naming it, finding out its gender, buying presents for it, and in all senses thinking of it as a precious human being growing inside her, and then turn our backs and pretend it is not murder if another woman at the exact same stage of pregnancy has an abortion?

Either no fetus is a human being, or they are all human beings, whether the mother wants it or not.

And what about premature babies? Were a deranged lunatic to kill all the babies in the premature baby ward with a knife, thee would be no doubt said lunatic was a mass murderer and guilty of infanticide.

So how is it different if an abortionist does the same thing while the child is still inside its mother?

And medical science continues to push back the time when a premature baby can survive outside the womb. Eventually, we will be able to take a baby all the way from conception to “birth” entirely outside of a woman’s body. And what then?

Will we draw an arbitrary line saying “Unplugging before this date is not murder, but after, it is?”

Or will we simply err on the side of humanity and assume that which will become human is human?

Ask a woman who has suffered the profound tragedy of a miscarriage if she feels that she lost her baby.

Ask a woman who has only recently gotten pregnant after many years of trying with her husband whether or not she feels like there is a baby inside her now or not.

Ask all those ladies in the obstetrician’s office “Who here has a baby inside them right now?”

No matter how you examine it, there is simply no way to rationalize the idea that it is fine to think of it as a baby if the mother wants it, and something else if she does not.

Women bear a unique moral burden because they can have another human growing inside them. This burden can be a terrible one in the case of unwanted pregnancies, especially in the case of rape or incest.

But surely the solution is not the murder of the child, the genetically, medically, and scientifically unique human being with its own fate and destiny, within her?

Yes this places a burden on women that is not shared by men, and that is unfair. But surely we cannot slaughter innocents in the name of fairness. What is more important, fairness or human life?

It is not for the mothers to decide whether their children live or die, inside the womb or out.

And that is why I am against abortion.

It Came From Dimension Negative Z

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Woke up from the deep dark dungeous of my shattered and scattered sleep, managed to lug myself into the main area to eat some reheated homemade chicken rice pilaf, watch some Futurama on Netflix, and the slouch back to the computer to write to you lovely people about mt life and my day.

It just occurred to me, though. My bad sleep involves intense, surreal, otherworldly visions along with feeling really hot and sweating profusely. There is only one possible explanation.

I am my own sweat lodge. That would explain so much, would it not?

Except my lack of spiritual progress.

Had wacky dreams, but I still cannot seem to develop any enthusiasm for retelling them or even retaining them at all. I am sure they all mean something or whatever, but at this phase of existence, I honestly feel like paying the slightest attention to them would only encourage them.

Blah blah, getting lost, yadda yadda, not being able to find some important thing, whatever whatever, not able to actually complete thins, rah rah sim boom bah, who gives a shit. I am too tired for transcendence and so all this is just random graffiti on the projection screen of my consciousness.

All it does is make it harder to see the picture. There might be cast cosmic clues in there but I di not give a fuck, I am through with guessing games. Either tell me or leave me alone. I am not going to jump through hoops trying to guess what you mean just because you cloak you sadism in the idea that you are encouraging me to stretch myself and grow.

Fuck that. Tell me or leave me the fuck alone.

I am so sleepy right now. These words are coming slow and hard. There are days when doing this is effortless, like breathing out words, and other days, like this, when each letter is a hair I have yanked from my head and pressed to the page.

Honestly, if it was just a little earlier, I would just go to sleep right now and finish writing this when I awoke. But it is 9 pm, and I might well sleep past midnight if I did that, and then I would have missed the deadline for today’s diary entry.

And that would not be acceptable. One thing I have learned is that, for an undisciplined wretch like me, discipline has to be ramrod rigid. There can not be the slightest flexibility or it will just snap. A small flex turns into a big flex and the nest thing toy know, the purpose and direction you had when you were abke to sustain the focus and drive to do something are a lone distant bittersweet memory.

So I will do my best to fill my thousand words before I pass out completely and end up in a heap of sweat, drooling on my carpet, curled up around the wheels of my computer chair like a liquored up Stephen Hawking passed out after a math bender.

Half way there.

Hada pretty normal day. Letting Zombie Finger take in the air sans Band-aid or other covering. Feels good to let that whole area sweat and breath freely. There is still enough dead skin in the affected area that it feels like I am wearing a tighter than skin tight glove on it, but it grows better all the time and I am sure I will feel better there soon enough.

The area of, um, excess zeal in cleaning the area up still hurts a little. A good reminder not to mess with that area at all, even though I have been sorely tempted a few times today when I could feel the dangly end itching, calling out for me to give it a tug.

But last time I did that, I started to bleed and it hurt a lot and most disturbingly, a chunk of flesh horrifyingly close to the fingernail starting coming with it, and so far it looks like I will keep that finernails despite Doctor Wong from the Er’s warnings, and I want to keep it that way.

Must feel pretty weird to have a finger with no fingernail on it. At least that would be one finger that did not need cleaning under the nail all the time, I suppose. But still, I bet it would make people stare. You would have to get some of those Lee Press On Nail for that finger only, just so it looked right to other peole,

75 percent there.

Been skipping meals again lately. It is a bad habit, especially for a diabetic like me, but the truth is, it is an easy way to get my blood sugar down. And it must work, because it almost always ends up making me feel somewhat better, at least until the crash.

So I suppose it is sort of like a drug addiction too. High on blood sugar instability, yay!

And what the hell, maybe it will even help me lose weight. I sure can spare some.

Still no sign of my two tax checks, one federal one GST, that should be coming in the mail soon. I really, really need the money. Got to pay the internet bill, pay off Joe for the hotel room at VancouFur, and hopefully still have enough left to cover my life expenses till the 25th, my next cheque.

Damn I need to get more money into my life. Lack of funds is one of the biggest causes of my depressiopn and anxiety. I feel like I am always up against the wall with the wolves at the dorr and saran wrap in lard on all the doorknobs.

Boy, that would smell gross.

Well, that’s it for tonight, my dear friends. Thanks for reading my sleepy rambling thoughts and being a part of the closest thing I have to a job.

You do not have o do, and you do.

Now I lay me down to sleep.

Most peculiar, Mama

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Bonus points to whoever knows what song I am quoting in the title, sans Google.

Well, another dull day here on Planet Earth. Had a little excitement of the not so wonderful kind earlier. Learned the hard way that cleaning up Zombie Finger is not as easy as it looks.

I got a little to close to the cuticle, tugged on something I really should not have in my quest to remove all the dead skin from the area, and instead gave myself a nasty owie that bled quite freely for a while.

So, lesson learned. Leave that area to heal on its own, even though it is all craggy and ugly and is pretty much the only eye-catchingly horrid area left on Zombie Finger at this point.

In fact, honestly, I think I will leave the whole area wrapped up in a Band-Aid just so I am not tempted to mess with it.

I have a lifelong problem with picking at things.

I am sure you all are really glad to know that.

Meet the Muppets

Here is a treasure from the past : a clip from the original pitch reel for the Muppet Show!

If I was a television executive, I would buy the hell out of that show. And not because I actually believed all that Leo there says, but because with just a talking puppet and some cheapo graphics, they demonstrated such wit, energy, and unstoppable charm that to me, they were obviously television gold.

Of course, I am a huge Muppets fan, so my impartiality might be questionable.

And here is the thing : practically everything Leo says came true. They probably thought they were exaggerating wildly, but they really did a lot of those thing. I am positive that they must have gotten that 40 share at the height of the popularity. The executives names did not exactly become household words, but I am sure it helped their careers big time. And money? Scads, darling. Absolute scads.

And the best part is, it also delivers all the businesslike show pitch info about demographics and pedigree and such at the same time it is being hilariously fresh and entertaining.

No wonder the whole franchise has such long legs. We recently got the latest Muppet Movie on DVD, and I just cannot wait to see it.

My dream is to some day, some how, make something that damn good.

Ethics and the Brain

Talk about a perfect article for me! This Psychology Today article presents a theory of ethical development based on brain science.

And ethics and brain science are two of my favorite subjects in the world!

And as theories go, it is not bad for something built from observation up. As a philosopher, I find it a little simplistic and ill formed, and lacking in rigor. But no doubt it was conceived by scientists, not philosophers or ethicists, and so I am willing to cut it a fair bit of slack.

And it dovetails neatly with a lot of my own moral thinking, which is always a plus.

For instance, this notion that early childhood problems can cause a tendency to favour Safety Ethics certainly fits with my observations. I have been pondering a fundamental life variable that describes how fundamentally safe you feel, and how that informs every single other aspect of your psyche. If you feel the world to be fundamentally unsafe or even hostile, you will tend to be psychologically conservative. This could easily lead to shyness, depression, anxiety, and so on in later life.

And if the trauma is severe enough and violent enough, then the oversensitive stress response will tend towards neither flight (anxiety) or hiding (withdrawal), but fight (aggression). The person will come to believe that the only safety lies in constant vigilant hyper-agression, making others too afraid of them to consider aggressing against them.

And that feeds into another recent line of thought of mine, that certain influences “counter-civilize” people, forcing them to adopt a more primitive, even savage point of view. This is as true of a violently abusive childhood as it is of soldiers returning home from war.

It is nice to know that modern brain science backs me up on all of this.

Canada Kicks Ass

I am a day late on this, but I still feel like I have to note it.

Yesterday was the 95th anniversary of the Canadian victory at Vimy Ridge, the day when Canadians, no longer just the colonials serving under someone else’s flag, did what 100,000 other Allies had died trying to do and took Vimy Ridge in France away from the Germans.

And we did it by doing something that sounds clearly insane : by shelling the German machine gun nests which had taken so many Allied lives, and then moving in directly after the artillery strikes, when the German machine gunners were still too afraid of getting blown up by our artillery strikes to even think about leaving the deep trenches for the relative exposure of their machine gun nests.

It was called a “rolling barrage”, and it took a brilliant mind to think of it, and a hell of a lot of guts, determination, discipline, and faith in your fellow soldiers to pull it off.

And though it cost us nearly 3,600 men, we did it. We took Vimy Ridge when nobody else could. And that made the world sit up and take notice of funny old Canada, and won us the respect of the rest of the Allies and gave them something to remember us for besides maple syrup and coldness.

And in turn, this gave Canada a sense of pride and worth in itself, and formed a basis for that most precious of all things, Canadian identity.

It must have been a heck of a day to be Canadian, ninety five years ago today, the day after Vimy Ridge. We had put our mark on the world, and Canadians from East to West must have been bursting with pride.

I know that today, 95 years later, I sure am.