Monthly Archives: January 2013

Another grab bag

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Feeling a little lazy and self-indulgent. despite a liter of diet cola. Gonna share links today.

Please hold your applause until the end of the performance.

First off, something cool and sciencey that I just could not bear to sit on till next Friday because it is not just cool and science-tastic, it is about one of my all time favorite scientific arenas, the Thunderdome brain science.

Check out this neato keen little video and we will discuss it when you return.

Don’t worry, there probably won’t be a quiz.

(By the way, have you heard the one about the professor who was fond of giving particularly brutal pop quizzes that he called his “little quizzies”? This prompter one fresh new student to exclaim “Wow, if these are your little quizzies, I can’t wait to see your big testies… ” )

Pretty neat stuff, huh? It is amazing to think that just imagining doing something can give you any of the benefits of doing it. But it makes sense, given what we are learning about the fascinating world of mirror neurons and the plasticity of the human mind.

Mirror neurons are the prime way we learn actions by observing others. We can watch someone doing something and imagine doing it ourselves, and studies have shown that when we do so, the same areas of the brain light up with activity as if we were doing it ourselves.

This particular form of motor empathy is particularly important when we are children and first learning how to walk, talk, and handle objects. We learn these skills much faster when we have other people around to monitor and imitate.

So it makes sense, at least to me, that we can get some of the same effect by simply imagining doing the action ourselves. In a way, we are copying the actions of everyone else we have seen doing similar actions. After all, we have all seen people playing the piano, even if only on the screen. But in another sense, we are copying off ourselves and our own imaginations.

So really, the video should have been called “the power of imagination”, but let’s not quibble.

I also find the video interesting because it deals with an aspect of the brain I find fascinating, which is the vital distinction between internal and external stimuli. After all, the people imagining that they were playing the piano knew they were not. There was never any doubt. And yet, they got some of the same benefit as actually doing it.

Clearly, then, while their consciousness knew they were not doing it, other parts of the brain were fooled, so to speak.

As someone temperamentally inclined to sitting and imagining things rather than doing them, I find I take great comfort in this idea.

Next up, we have a hilarious story from the annals of deep nerdity. Darling of the Internet Felicity Walker sent me this story of notoriously bellicose and thoughtless (not to mention touchy) comics legend John Byrne actually attacking himself.

For those outside the blessed circle, John Byrne is a big deal comic artist and writer who has been around forever.

But unlike most other legends of the comic world, he seems quite fond of the Internet (well, kinda…) and especially the forums on his own personal website, where he wields his power as the head honcho supremo of this little universe of his own like the flaming sword of an archangel, punishing those who offend him by casting them out of the light and into the outer darkness via banning them from his forum.

And it does not take much to set him off, the prickly old crab that he is, and if he is not actually banning people, he is usually attacking them for being so very Less Than Him.

So to see that his attack dog instincts have finally progressed in their pathology enough that he attacks statements that he himself made is downright hilarious. BYRNE BURNS HIMSELF makes a kickass headline.

I think we should encourage this as much as possible. All the fans currently surviving on his form should scour the archives for the most outrageous and offensive things he has said, and re-post them as their own thoughts, and watch him flame himself into tiny floating embers.

It would be priceless.

Finally, here’s a fun list to read if you are interested in biological exuberance : The 25 Gayest Animals.

I will not go into the thought processes that lead me to type “gayest animals” into Google, as tracking the way my mind works would require some sort of N-dimensional grid, so we will just call it “a whim” and leave it to that.

But for a lot of reasons, most of them obvious, I find the recent revelations of the prevalence of homosexual activity in the animal kingdom very interesting.

After all, being gay myself and somewhat of a scientist (at least, in theory…), I have wondered what is up with homosexuality. On the surface, it does not seem to make any evolutionary sense. What purpose can there be in sex that is so clearly nonreproductive?

But my theory is that nature has decided (via natural selection) that it is better for animals to be so horny they will mate with anyone willing, or even an inanimate object if it is the next best thing.

After all, Mother Nature does not give out instructions, only impulses. Drives. Urges. And the urge is to take care of that maddening sensation in your genitals, so to speak.

Exactly how it is taken care of is not that important. As long as most of the animals take care of it in the reproductive way (and most always will), some slippage is irrelevant.

Nature would vastly prefer some “false positives” than have there be any risk of there not being enough sex to keep the species going come mating seasons.

So it does make sense that evolution has selected for horniness rather than eliminate all possibilities of homosexual attraction and activity.

And that does not even taken into account the benefits of non-competing members of a social species.

Well, that’s all for today. Later folks!

External Lies Inc

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Been brooding on the issue of externalizing emotions today.

It is clear that, for mental health as well as physical, there needs to be a healthy amount of expression of emotions. It is my feeling that for human beings, every emotion is a signal, something we developed in order to transmit information to the rest of our primate group, and as such, like all communicative urges, remains with us until expressed and received.

This is easy to define in a simple primate society like a troupe of monkeys. One monkey sees a predator and screams in fear, alerting the rest of the troupe of the danger and summoning their aid.

The monkey did not have to think “Oh, a predator. I better make the predator alert noise!”. It just did what came naturally, expressed the emotion it was feeling at the time, and that was sufficient.

Now imagine said monkey sees the predator but knows there is no other monkeys near it to hear its scream. It might well hold on to that scream as it raced back towards its troupe and only seriously start screaming when it was sure some other monkeys would hear.

Again, no need for the monkey to think this out rationally. It only needed the instinct to make sure it was heard for this system to work. The monkey will not feel right until some other monkeys hear its scream. They might well scream themselves, again their natural emotional response, but also confirming that they have received the emotional information and will act accordingly.

Soon, the predator might find itself confronted with two dozen screaming angry monkeys, and decide to look for easier prey elsewhere.

Now, of course, we human beings are far more complicated than monkeys… but we are still the naked beach ape, social primates to the core, and we have the same instincts and the same needs and desires.

We just have vastly more complex ways of pursuing them.

So I think we human beings have this same desire to express emotions to other humans. Who, exactly, we desire as recipient of our emotion is not clear. One answer would be “anybody at all”, and it is true that we will get some emotional satisfaction from having anyone at all receive the emotional message.

But I think a case could be made that most emotions that are caused by other human beings have those human beings as their intended recipient, positive or negative.

And if you are wondering whether this truly applies to human beings, you only need to observe children to see how a child will injure themselves and their eyes will fill with tears, but they won’t actually start crying until their mother can see it.

Why? Because the external expression of the emotion is meant to signal distress to the child’s mother in order to elicit a nurturing and comforting response.

This is, incidentally, the importance of a mother “kissing it better”.

And this distinction between feeling the emotion and expressing it, externalizing it, is key. But more on that in a minute.

So human beings feel and express emotions. But not always, and the reason for that is sentience.

With sentience came the ability to think about our situation, to calculate our options, to choose amongst them, and thus, frees us from the narrowness of simply doing what emotion and instinct tells us all the time. We can pause, reflect, and choose.

This is, in fact, what allows us to have free will. But it also means that we suppress some or all of our emotions in given situations. This suppression is vital to our sentience, but it means that we inevitably accumulate a backlog of these unexpressed emotional signals, and as far as I can tell, there is no way to get rid of them except by expressing them.

So these emotions are trapped awaiting expression, and the longer we live, the more we have. To a certain extent, we can remove the energy from these trapped emotions via secondary means. We can get catharsis via art, for one thing, and thus cheat the system a little by releasing the emotion because a similar emotion has been triggered in us and the repressed emotions come out at the same time.

Taking it to the next level, you can express the emotions via creating art yourself. In doing such, the artist translates the emotional message into art for others to receive, and hopefully understand the message and maybe even derive catharsis themselves.

That applies to the solitary arts alone, of course. A performer translates the emotional message as well, but for an immediate audience.

One question that intrigues me is what, exactly, is the biochemical reality of emotional release. What changes in us when we successfully express an emotion? Is some tiny electrical potential released somewhere in the synaptic jungle of our brains? Is there a coil of compounded neurotransmitters somewhere in your brain that contains your unexpressed feelings about your mother? Where, exactly, in my body would I find all I want to say to my father?

And if we could figure out how and where repressed emotions are stored, could we come up with a catharsis chemical that releases all unexpressed emotions in a might flood of emotional release?

And would that be a good thing? It might well drive a person insane. Or turn them into some sort of saint or holy person, someone who walks the Earth unburdened and seems to us mere mortals like an angel because they carry so little of the weight of the world on their shoulders.

And what if we could remove the repressed emotion entirely? My guess is, we would also have to remove the entry in our emotional index for the memory, otherwise we would be filled with a terrible feeling of something being missing, of having forgotten something terribly important.

Hmm. You know, there might be a pretty interesting science fiction story in all this.

Check ya later.

Friday Science Gastropod

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Hey there hi there ho there, science fans! Here it is, Friday during a picturesque winter sunset, and that means it must be time for me to once more tip the vessel of science and pour out it multifarious bounty into our eager and willing minds, and thus, be enlightened and entertained.

This week, we have the oldest rock in the world, the best birth control ever, a knock it out of the park home run from Canadian medical science, and something that is “multi-omniphobic”, whatever that means.

All this, and my crisply ironed and cozy commentary as well.

You people are so lucky.

For starters, let’s take a look at the oldest rock in the world.

How old is old? 4.4 billion years, that’s how old. This tiny zircon was found inside another rock, and when it was tested, it was found to have formed 4.4 billion years ago.

You astute mavens out there will have already noted that the Earth itself is only 4.5 billion years old, meaning this teeny tiny rocklet was formed within 150 million years of the formation of the Earth.

Mind blown. Kapow. Never thought we would find anything from that period, because back then, this mudball of ours was just a big sphere of molten, raging goo.

But wait, there’s more. When the scientists took a further look at this Rock of Ages, they realized that it had crystallized in a way that only happens when a zircon forms in the presence of liquid water.

So apparently, there was liquid water on Earth when the Earth was only 150 to 300 million years old!

This changes a lot. For once thing, where there is water, there is at least a chance for life, and this could seriously change our idea of how long life on Earth has had to come about.

And that, in turn, improves the likely of finding life elsewhere in the universe via our favorite equation and friend of the column, Drake’s Equation!

Ta da! Isn’t science cool?

Next up, we have the best birth control in the world, and it’s for men.

It is a simple in-office kind of procedure that takes only fifteen minutes, and is incredibly cheap and simple. I won’t describe it to you because ouch, but it’s a few simple chemicals injected into a man’s vas deferens and bingo, sperm can get through (otherwise it would just cause a blocks, and yikes) but the nature of the chemicals means the sperm get all ripped up by a micro-electric charge (nothing you will feel in a million years, boys, uncross your legs) and hence are useless for fertilization.

And the procedure lasts at least ten years, and is easily reversible should you decide you want to start making some babies.

However awesome that is (answer : fairly), it still faces the same problem as all internal male birth control methods and that is the problem of trust.

A woman must trust that the horny young man she is considering having sex with is telling the truth when he says he has had the operation, and horny young men lie all the damned time. And so she would be better off just getting him to wear a condom “just in case”, and if he is going to have to wear a rubber anyhow, why get the operation at all?

However, this seems like an excellent option for voluntarily limiting family size within married or committed couples. It is cheaper and less invasive than tubal ligation and what’s more, it’s reversible, so if you change your mind about kids later, no problem.

And to be honest, guys, volunteering to be the one who goes under the knife to keep unwanted babies from happening is the least you can do, considering how much of the reproductive burden she carries.

Now up to bat : kickass Canadian medical science in the form of a possible vaccine for Alzheimer’s.

This story is particularly meaningful for me because a) it’s Canadians on the threshold of a major medical miracle and b) I fear Alzheimer’s terribly, even though there is no family history of it.

And it is more than a vaccine. It could also be a treatment. Basically, the injection would stimulate the body to produce more of a substance called MPL that eliminates the nasty amyloid beta molecules that are the real culprits in Alzheimer’s.

Those nasties are immune to the microgilial defenses that normally patrol our nervous systems, and so they accumulate in the brain in something called “senile plaques”.

But check this shit out :

In mice with Alzheimer’s symptoms, weekly injections of MPL over a twelve-week period eliminated up to 80% of senile plaques. In addition, tests measuring the mice’s ability to learn new tasks showed significant improvement in cognitive function over the same period.

And not only that, this marvelous MPL stuff can also be incorporated into a vaccine that would teach the body’s immune system to take out amyloid beta itself.

A cure and a treatment for a previously implacable and horrible disease?

GO TEAM CANADA!

Finally, let’s get into this superomniphobic business :

The idea is that these folks have come up with a fabric that repels all liquids, period. As the video shows, this stuff does not just keep the liquid out, it violently ejects it like an angry bouncer.

And that could have tons of uses, like the video shows.

But seriously. SUPER omniphobic? Omniphobic already means “afraid of everything” (I knew we were in trouble when water-resistant stuff was called ‘hydrophobic’), and there is no way to intensify an absolute like “everything”. It’s like saying someone is “extra dead” or “super pregnant”.

And besides, it’s an inanimate object. It’s not afraid of anything. So really, science, stop macking on already established language from psychiatry and getting your grubby physics hands all over it.

Still, looks like pretty cool stuff, n’est-ce pas?

That’s it for this week’s FSW, folks. Hope you enjoyed reading it as much I enjoyed thinking about large amounts of money while writing it.

This man is a genius

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I had a bunch of stuff I was going to write about today, but then this one particular news story came along and so completely blew my mind – kabang! – that I just had to devote a huge chunk of my time to it.

It is the story of a visionary leader of our time, although to be fair, he probably just thinks of himself as a guy who got caught doing some insanely clever and wishes he had been just a tiny bit more clever so he could continue to gloat over how god damned clever he was.

But then again, then nobody would have known how clever he was, and where’s the fun in that?

It is the story of the man who outsourced his own job.

Known, at this point, only by his new Internet nickname of “Development Bob”, this man had the idea to get a job writing code for Verizon, then simply hire a Chinese firm to do the actual code writing part, paying them just a portion of his salary.

Thus, “Developed Bob”, hereafter referred to as “DB”, could sit on his computer watching cat videos and surfing Reddit all day while earning not just his salary, but glowing reviews of his performer as a coder, producing code hailed as “clean, well-written, and submitted in a timely fashion”.

He was, in fact, hailed as the best coder at his workplace for several years. Hey, let’s hear it for Chinese code, huh?

(I wonder… do they code in English? Or were they coding in some strange form of Chinese C and then had to translate it? Or did they just send him the executables?)

Reports suggest (but don’t confirm) that he was pulling this beautiful, magnificent con at several workplaces, pulling down “hundreds of thousands” of dollars in salary and only paying the Chinese firm about $50K for their work.

That sounds a little too good to be true. But even if he only worked one job this way, I still consider the man a genius and a leader of our ages because he outsourced his own job.

And if he can do it, anybody can do it! Well, OK, not anybody. Actually, the vast majority of jobs require physical presence and cannot be outsourced. You can’t hand people their orders at Burger King via computer.

It is only a specific set of information heavy high level jobs that could possibly be outsourced this way.

The basic rule is this : if you can telecommute, your job could be sent overseas. Something for a lot of well paid professionals to think about, I would think.

But anyhow, the point is, DB outsourced his job himself, and thus it was he who pocketed the profits and not the global megacorp for which he worked.

And that, to me, is a revolutionary act. He took the profit for himself, just like a corporation would if it had done the outsourcing itself, and I think this is not only brilliantly subversive, but a sign of how corporations are happy to behave like sociopaths themselves, but when their worker drones dare to act that way themselves, it is the blackest of sins.

After all, there’s no I in team, right drones? You must sacrifice for the good of the group that would never dream of sacrificing anything for you, but is more than happy to sacrifice as much of your time, energy, hope, dreams, and anything else that it can!

And that hypocrisy is, I believe, the weakness to be exploited in changing corporate culture and thus society for the future.

I think that every worker simply needs to declare themselves to be an individual corporation that sells labour to their employer. Incorporate and everything, if you can afford it, with your own stationery and business cards and everything.

Then go and renegotiate your contact with them from this basis. You are not an interchangeable cog in the great machine of business. You are one corporation negotiating with another. Your labour is your cost and your salary is revenue.

Sounds scary, I know, but this is where it gets good, trust me.

See, as owner and sole shareholder of the corporation of yourself, you have a fiduciary responsibility to yourself to maximize your profits.

That means you are legally obligated to do as little work as possible for the same salary!

Anything else would be corporate malfeasance! After all, corporations keep telling us that they have no choice but to do whatever will generate the most value for their shareholders, regardless of ethics.

Well, fair is fair. Let’s do the same thing to them. Become your own corporation and not only bargain extremely hard for your labour, but once you have the contract, do only what you are legally compelled to do, and do absolutely everything in your power to maximize your effective wage.

After all, if you are paid for 40 hours a week but can get away with only doing 30, then it is the equivalent of a 25 percent hike in hourly wage, isn’t it?

You are getting paid the same amount for lower cost. Sounds like an increase in profits to me. It is just like when a corporation boosts profits by cutting costs.

It is just that your costs happen to be labour.

And just imagine how the corps will react to their employees treating them exactly how they treat their employees (and everything else). They will scream bloody murder, and yet… what exactly can they say?

What argument could they possibly summon up for why your corporation should treat them better than their corporation treats you?

Any attack on your behaviour would be an attack on the very justifications they use for their own selfish and amoral behaviour.

So three cheers to DB! I think more people in his position should do what he did, and what is more, I think it should be perfectly legal.

After all, his employer got exactly what they wanted from him.

He just used a very high level programming language called “money”.

Thoughts on a bad habit

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The usual one. Sleep.

I came face to face with my madness this afternoon, which is always an emotionally unpleasant but existentially revealing and potentially spiritually stimulating experience.

What happened was this : I woke up at around 10:30 am. I was extremely hungry, because I had not eaten in something like nine hours. I ended up eating lunch a half an hour early because of this, at 11:30 am instead of noon, which for me is a huge deviation from both plan and habit, and noteworthy because of that.

So I watched an episode of Bones, and ate lunch, like usual. Then afterwards, at around 1 pm, for lack of a better thing in mind, I laid down for a nap.

I was not tired in the slightest. And as I lay there, I was thinking to myself, “Why am I here in bed? Why am I trying to force myself into a nap that I know damned well I do not need? What the hell is wrong with me that I am doing this?”

And yet, I napped. In fact, I slept through the whole afternoon, only waking up in time for supper. So I basically skipped the period between meals, which is extremely sad and worrisome on a few levels.

One, the thought that meals are the most interesting thing that happens to me most days is profoundly depressing. The idea that I would rather sleep than be awake actually doing things is more depressing still. And I definitely feel that my nap today was motivated by a desire to retreat from reality.

A desire to not have to deal with things. To not face the meaningless void that is my life. To not face having to figure out what the hell to do with myself.

I caught myself in the act, in a sense. A lot of the time, these things happen so fast in my mind that it is hard for me to confirm my theories as to my own behaviour with direct observation of my mentation.

But this time, I had reached the point of self-awareness where I could confirm. Yup. I am definitely afraid of reality and having to deal with it. And when I am low on ATC, or Ability To Cope, I sleep.

Even when I am not tired at all. I think there is an element of another problem of mine in there too, the strange compulsion to fulfill intentions even when they are no longer relevant.

So when I am waking up and still feel all tired and reluctant to leave my nice warm bed, I form the intention “I will get back to bed ASAP because I am still sleepy”, and that becomes “the plan” that I find it very hard to deviate from even when I get up, get moving, and am clearly not even sleepy any more.

But it is so hard for me to change plans once I have made them. This compulsion is very strong. It really feels like something terrible will happen if I do not follow it. If this is the sort of thing people with OCD go through, I completely empathize with them now.

It does not matter if I know that my intention is stupid or inane or no longer relevant. If I planned on doing it, I will do it, and in a way, I feel like I am not truly in control of it. That is the nature of compulsion, I think. It operates on the same machinery in our brains that superstition exploits, as well as phobias, PTSD, and OCD. That nebulous but overpowering deep pattern recognition that we share with all higher mammals that links action to stimuli without the necessity of high brain function.

The deer does not have the time to stop and think of why the sound of a human footstep makes it instantly panic and flee.

But we human beings lead complicated lives. The simple machinery can’t handle it, and yet, there it is, operating at the foundation layers of our consciousness.

And so I have this strange “intention compulsion”. Contrary to what I just said, I suspect that if my life
was not so simple and devoid of external structure, I would not have this problem. The compulsive part of my brain would be too busy with real actions to coordinate and execute with an external structure (like, you know, a JOB, or a LIFE) to get caught up in little petty intentions.

And all of this just serves this sleep habit I have. Which is what I set out to discuss.

I am hoping that, as I confront this compulsion of mine to use sleep to avoid reality and do my best to face it head on instead of just avoiding it (this avoidance shit is complicated), I will master and conquer it via defusing the emotions involved and confronting the need that drives them.

A lot of my therapeutic thought lately had centered around “staying with” things. My nature is so avoidant that the only way I can proceed is to force myself to stay with negative emotions, practically tying myself down and forcing myself to experience them fully and hear what they have to tell me.

That is the only way I will be able to untangle all the incredibly complicated knots I have tied in my skein of existence in trying to avoid having to deal with my shit.

Well, enough of that. Way past due for an internal cleanup. I want to build a giant pyre of all the garbage in my soul and then set it ablaze as an offering to the sky.

How is that for some mystical imagery? You don’t have to actually believe in mysticism to be a mystic.

You just need the soul of a poet and just enough self-absorption to write your soul on the wind with a pen of cold carbon steel and words of delicate fire.

See, there I go again. Another attack of poetry.

Screw this, I am going to go take a nap. (Joking! Probably. )

Inspiration level : zero

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But it’s that time of the day, so what the hell, let’s write this damn thing.

Still not quite sleeping right. Current theory is that temperature is a factor. It gets fairly cold in this apartment, at least by how my body measures it, and I think I have been in that same “cold but not really feeling it” zone that I got into when I did my tragically crappy sleep study. The zone where I am vaguely aware of feeling sort of cold, but I don’t realize that this is what is keeping me from getting any sleep.

The human body, rather intelligently, doesn’t let you fall asleep if you are cold. Unless you are so hold you have end stage hypothermia, but what are the odds of that in an urban setting?

Then again, I did have some caffeine last night, so it might be that. My relationship with the black energy is certainly complex. I drank some with supper last night because I was feeling pretty logy and was not sure I would have the energy to get the writin’ done, and I figured, well, that’s what I keep diet cola around for in the first place.

You know… consciousness management.

And it worked. I felt quite perky last night. But when it came time to sleep, I barely felt my quetiapine, and I slept shallowly and not for the usual amount of time.

And that has been it since then. I keep worrying that the hammer will fall and I will suddenly lapse into one of my super sleepy periods and lose time that way, but so far, so good.

Still working on ripping out the old bad plumbing in my brain. It is a long and dirty job suitable for Mike Rowe, but still, it feels good to be rid of it, and finally have the space upstairs to slowly but surely move myself into a more healthy and positive environment.

I have been saying for a long time that there was nothing in this brain of mind I wanted to keep. Now, I am doing something about that. But it’s tiring and tricky work.

Part of it is finally letting myself developed that “big head” that my siblings were always worried I would get. Well, they sure did a good job of that. I hated myself for decades. Mission accomplished.

But you know what? I am a pretty amazing guy. I have no reason to hate myself. I can hate my life, my circumstances, my poverty, my total lack of social status, my feeling of lack of control over my life and influence over reality… but hating myself? Whatever for?

Because I am seriously awesome. And it’s high time I learned to enjoy it. To own it. To live it. To let it buoy me up when my demons are trying to drag me down.

I will do my best not to turn into an egotistical asshole, but I think the odds of that are fairly low anyhow. I will always be a sweet guy.

I just want to be a sweet guy who doesn’t hate himself. Is that so wrong?

And it really does seem to be the case that there is no middle option. You love yourself, or you hate yourself. You can’t just remain neutral and choose not to have an opinion on yourself. That self worth register in the brain needs a value entered into it, and if it’s not a positive one, it’s a negative one, and no two ways about it.

So I feel like I have been slowly gathering things I like about myself as I brush all the excess crap out of my mind, and sweeping the good stuff into a small but vital pile, and from this pile I shall construct the shaky but somehow absurdly elegant skeleton of my self worth and sense of self.

I just have to repeat to myself : I’m good enough. I’m smart enough. And gosh darn it, people like me.

In fact, I am smart as hell. I just lack focus. Time to get my poop in a group.

Or not. Whatever. Another part of this whole retrofitting of my consciousness is an outright rejection of the sort of overwrought, over-taut internal pressures that have ruled my life until now. If I am to do something, it will be out of a calm, clean, clear desire to do it, not because my hysterical panic factory happens to be making me jump to the left instead of the right that day.

And as I increase inner mastery, I hope to be able to use that self-control to ignore my fears as well. Go sell crazy somewhere else, you nasty little internal demons. I am more than you can handle now. You are Lilliputians fighting my Brobdingnag. You do not stand a chance.

Even right now, I feel that the bulk of many of my fears is gone, and all that is left of them are monuments to where they once stood, and tape lines marking their former boundaries.

For now, the tape lines are enough. I still do not know how to live without those fears, and my cautious and hesitant nature keeps me from just throwing myself into the void with a scream and a shout.

But I am moving, albeit slowly. The slow moving viscous fluid of my being is slowly and painfully flowing into a new configuration, feeling its way in the dark as it goes.

Maybe this is all leading to some profound transformation. I think I am capable of transformation, especially if I learn to trust my intuition more.

Or maybe it is simple a matter of a slow and steady drip of substance from one container to the other. No big surprises, just one day, there is more in the new place than the old, and the balance shifts.

And after the tipping point is reached, gravity will be on my side for once.

How do I get out of this gravity well, anyhow?

This is now

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Shitty title, I know, but what the heck. I am in one of my “in between moods” moods where I don’t really know what I am feeling, so I am playing things a little looser than usual.

Not that I am exactly the most rigidly organized dude even at the best of times. The only part of my life that is tightly organized is my mind, in the INTJ sense, and even that feels debatable some days.

I am so absent minded I could plan my own surprise party. But I suppose that is not so rare a trait in us super smart intellectual types.

I just find it to be an impediment to my struggle for dignity and some kind of positive self-worth. The evil voice in my head that says that no matter how brilliant I am, it doesn’t matter because I am an incompetent fool, has yet to be fully silenced.

And that voice is a real prick.

Got a few things I would like to share today, like this rather good little short story called Love Should Grow by Canadian writer David J. Lamb.

At least, I assume he’s Canadian, given that his story is on a Canadian science fiction site.

I really admire (and envy) the writing style of the story. Very clean prose, every word necessary, telling the story in a way that makes the act of reading completely disappear, leaving just the story in its odd beauty for the reader to enjoy.

It is exactly how I wish to write myself, some day. All meat, no filler. So far, I have been hampered by my disinclination to rewrite. But I feel myself warming up to the idea of progressing past the rough draft, so we will see what the future holds for me.

As for the story itself, it took me a bit of time to figure out what was going on, but once I did, it was quite enjoyable. Nobody writes really good pod people sex comedies any more, and I think that’s a shame.

Then there is this rich gem of a video from the ultra cool science dude Michael at Vsauce :

I have been sitting on this video for nearly a week because it is just so dense with goodness that I just did not know where to start to talk about it.

So in no particular order : How many cool new words and terms are we learning, huh? “Limerence” for that crazy feeling you get when you have a crush on someone. “Homogamy” for the tendency of people to see mates who are like themselves. “Bateman’s Principle” for the whole notion that females have to commit more resources to the production of offspring, so they are “choosy”, which means males have to be “competitive”. The list goes on and on.

And his conclusions match my own observations as well my experiences. The “nice guys finish last” phenomenon is easily explained by the labour theory of value. We value things in proportion to how hard they are to get. If you make your affections very easy to get and maintain, people just plain will not value them. There truly is a lot to say for playing hard to get.

But this simple truth is very hard to swallow. For one, it flies in the face of the basic concept of pro-social justice, where the better a person you are, the better society/life/people should treat you. And being a nice person is obviously a lot better than being a mean person. That’s kindergarten level ethics. So how come being nice does not get you laid? How fair is that?

It also conflicts with the basic hierarchical mechanism of our social brains which says that if you are submissive towards someone, they are supposed to be appeased and not hurt you. But if you are nice to someone and they still turn you down, it feels like you submitted to them, made yourself vulnerable, and they hurt you anyhow.

But take it from me, the truth is, being “easy” appeals to people in the short term and might very well get them to like you or feel fondly towards you, but it does not get their respect, and respect is the necessary foundation of all romantic relationships.

Last, I will share this tidbit of information : Hitler did not take people’s guns away.

If anything, his regime was far more gun-friendly than the one it replaced, the Weimar Republic. After all, Germany lost World War I, and had brutally tough terms of surrender forced upon it. Part of those terms were incredibly tough anti-gun laws designed to make sure German partisans did not have a chance to raise militias and threaten the new peace.

Hitler actually made it a lot easier for German citizens to get guns by adding a ton more groups to the list of those allowed to have guns, including any member of the Nazi party.

Because what do you know…. childish fascists love guns.

And the idea that if the Jews had been allowed gun, the Holocaust never would have happened, is definitively ludicrous. Hitler conquered all of Europe, steamrollering over nations with tanks, machine guns, air forces, bombers, and all the rest of the modern warfare machinery.

So what good would a few pistols and rifles have done the Jews?

All guns in the hands of Jew would have done is make it easier to justify killing them. Look, they are armed and dangerous terrorists. They killed three police officers in a firefight. See why it was necessary to bomb the ghetto flat?

Told you Jews were a terroristic people!

So shut the fuck up about how Hitler Took Guns, Alex Jones and all you other scared little boys. No, he didn’t. You are just afraid the big bad Nanny State wants to take your purchased and unearned masculinity away from you.

Real men do thing to earn feeling strong. They do not buy it at a store, whether that store sells guns, SUVs, or Harley Davidson mouse covers.

Grow the fuck up.

Head in a vise

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That’s how I feel right now. Like my head is in a vise. But don’t worry, folks, it’s just a sinus headache. The pressure is from the inside, not the outside, and I know how to deal with it.

Just have to clear the drainage routes, and let the rest sort itself out. Gross but effective.

Just woke up from some really interesting dreams that I don’t remember. Isn’t that a kick in the pants? I know they were really interesting, so interesting that not only did I want to go right back to sleep to continue them, but I distinctly remember thinking “Wow, maybe I should write about this!”

But then my mind cleared away the cobwebs and now I have no idea what they were. Dammit. Of all the cheap lousy tricks for my brain to play on me! Oh well. Perhaps something will trigger the dreams and they will all come flooding back. That has happened to me before.

Or maybe I will be lucky, and dream more about the same dreams.

I should really keep a notebook near my bed for capturing these dreams. It definitely feels good to write them down and thus release them into the world.

Mood has been not great today. I have felt frustrated and trapped and irritable. I am taking this to mean that I need to do something more than just this daily writing soon. I need something more to do with all supercharged mental energies.

Time to open up the pathways inside and write some fiction. I have notes for a short (ish) story regarding teleportation. It will be the next thing I write, unless a red-hot brilliant idea strikes me with meteoric force before that and just plain forces me to write it before I can get any rest.

It could happen.

I probably won’t start writing the story today. Felicity is coming over tonight and I will be spending the evening in her charming company. But soon, my precious, soon.

Told my therapist I was going to swear off caffeine for a week and see how I felt. Completely failed to do so, in fact, was consuming diet cola during my ill-fated White Spot lunch.

I am beginning to wonder if I have some sort of caffeine habit. At the very least, it is hard for me not to order a drink while I am dining out, and the only option available to me in such circumstances is diet cola. That is the only sugarless option in 99.9 percent of all restaurants.

Well, I could get herbal tea or juice or something, but I am not really into hot beverages and juice tends to be expensive and with no free refills, either.

And I am as addicted to the carbonated beverages as everyone else. There must be some logical reason why making things fizzy is so addictive. But I am hooked, and none of the other options are fizzy.

So I end up drinking diet cola there. Throw in the occasional 2L of diet cola I get to accompany my nightly snacking habit, and that naughty caffeine ends up in my bloodstream fairly regularly, especially considering the fact that I am not a coffee drinker.

I might even drink some tonight, with dinner, in order to perk myself up for a social evening. Oh, the tangled web we weave when our brain chemistry we deceive!

And who knows, my whole theory that caff causes my super sleepy days might be entirely false. I have no idea. And I will not truly know until I can do the only meaningful experiment available to me, and go without for a while.

Trickier than it seems, apparently.

I ma a little depressed about financial matters. Once more, a five week month will cancel out most of the benefits of my GST check showing up this month.

Granted, with superior forethought (and skipping a stupid lunch at White Spot), I could have taken my usual amount of spendable cash and stretched it over the five weeks somehow.

But no matter how hard I try, I never seem to see these five week months coming. I only just today took a look at the calendar and said “No way is my check coming on the 16th…” then looked up my official check date. Nope. Not till the 23rd.

Isn’t that just lovely. No job would expect you to accept occasionally getting the same amount of money for an extra week’s work. But we are the poor, the desperate, the disabled, and we are at society’s mercy, to be tortured at its will.

After all, having the occasional five week month makes things easier for the bureaucrats who run the system, and so what if it makes life harder for the people who have no choice but to beg for crumbs at society’s feasting table?

We should be glad we get anything but a kick in the head, right?

My therapist says I should try to get onto full disability, and he’s right. The last time I tried, I got all wrapped up in bureaucratic confusion and gave up. This time, hopefully, I will do better.

Being so easily discouraged is a real problem of mine. It is very hard for me to summon up the motivation to do things anyhow. I am always so hesitant and cautious and frankly cowardly.

Then when I do commit to doing them, I only have a certain amount of conviction, and if that gets all used up in complications or fear, then I slink away and it is a long long time before I can try again.

It is sad, really, and it has kept me back for a long long time. I hope to learn not to do it. Learn to just commit to something and stick with it until it is done, come what may.

But even typing those words, I feel a clutching at my chest like I am being trapped in something.

Yeah… trapped in success.

Internet video EXPLOSION!

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By a strange quirk of fate, I have ended up with a web browser stuffed with cool video content, and so tonight, I will share this sudden bounty with you, with, of course, suitable commentary.

First off, let’s start with a very solid science fiction short film called R’ha.

Now that impresses me. A lot of these “must see” science fiction short films are just mindless action sequences with CGI effects to make it “science fictionish”.

But this is a true sci fi story, told carefully and well, that just happens to have some special effects eye candy like a cool alien, a scary evil robot, and some very ophidian looking spaceships.

But the truly amazing thing about R’ha is that it is almost entirely the work of one person, Kaleb Lechowski, who did it all in his first year of animation school.

So all those visuals are the product of one guy’s efforts. The only things Kaleb did not do himself was the voice acting and the music.

That makes it even more impressive to me. The film is the product of the singular vision, toil, and genius of Kaleb Lechowski, and I have to expect that.

And this is no mere demo. I was quite riveted throughout the whole flick. The ending is a little corny, and admittedly the whole “the machines turn against us” deal is not exactly original.

But I still loved it overall. Amazing work.

I can’t wait to see what this guy does in his second year.

Next up, a video full of surprising facts about Morgan Freeman.

Now isn’t that cooler than those tired old Chuck Norris facts? And this time, it isn’t some right wing Bible humping (not a typo) douchebag being honored.

(At least I hope Morgan Freeman is not secretly a right wing asshole. If he is, don’t tell me. )

And of course, the fact that Morgan Freeman himself is narrating all this silly (yet uplifting) “facts” about himself just makes the whole thing that much cooler.

Way to go, MF. You are so very cool.

Next up, we have this little heartwarming flash performance in an unemployment office in Spain.

Wow, it combines two things I love, compassionate flash performances, and The Beatles! I especially approve of their choice of Beatles tunes. That is the most uplifting and beautiful Beatles song I know, and that is truly saying something coming from me, a guy who practically worships McCartney’s musical genius. That song is just plain made of happiness.

And the people of Spain desperately need it. I learned today that unemployment in Spain is a mind gibbling twenty six percent, and amongst the 25 years and younger set, it’s nearly fifty percent.

That is a staggering statistic, and it really brings home the truth of this global financial crisis. We here in Canada have it easy because our banking system is extremely sound. We never had to bail out any “too big to fail” institutions.

Our banks are, compared to the USA, kept on a very short leash, which is exactly how it should be. Banks are too important to the economy to be let just do whatever fool thing pops into their pointy heads.

But a place like Spain is experiencing conditions like the Great Depression, possibly worse. And their fellow EU members are all milling about trying not to get stuck with the tab for Spain’s mistakes.

These are people who could use some orchestra-backed Beatles to make them feel good and give them the feeling that sunny days are just around the corner.

Way to go, Carne Cruda (Raw Meat) 2.0!

Next up, we have this video from an up and coming institute of higher learning.

Well, OK, it’s actually an ad for the new Pixar flick, a prequel to Monsters, Inc. call Monster University. In it, the two principals from the first movie, monsters Sully and Mike, are 18 year old college rivals who become the best of friends and learn warm values.

Yeah, I know, sounds pretty corny, but I trust Pixar to pull it off. Corny is not inherently bad, it just means that the bar is set really high by all that has come before it.

Oh, and check out their very well done website for their fictional university.

A lot of people are saying “Hey, that’s a better website than the one for my university!”.

And speaking of fuzzy monsters (sorta), here’s some cute fuzzy creatures dancing to a brand new song that just might make the charts someday.

Furry Gangnam Style! from EZwolf on Vimeo.

Oh all right, it’s Gagnam Style, the “it” song of 2012, and we are all getting a little sick of it by now despite the fact that it is still a pretty good song, musically speaking.

For all I know, the lyrics are also brilliant, but I wouldn’t know, ’cause I don’t speak Korean.

And I like the video a lot. It’s fun to see furries cutting loose and letting their fur down and having fun. The fact that they are Dutch furries makes a little more fun for me, because I am all about the virtual travel to far off places.

I would rather go there myself, of course, but it will be some time before I can afford to travel at all, let alone according to my desires for a minimum level of comfort.

I don’t need silk sheets and room service, but I do need regular meals, a room of my own with a decent bed, and someplace quiet to write.

As is, I can’t even get home to Prince Edward Island on my own. All the “cheap” ways to travel are anything but, because the cheaper, the slower, and the slower, the more days of meals and shelter you have to pay for, and anything savings you make by going by, say, bus are completely wiped out.

Frankly, I don’t know how people do it. They must be heartier and more resourceful and less scared of the unknown than I.

Plus they have support networks, and I… do not.

Friday Science Autogyro, January 11, 2013

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Ugh. That is the first time I have had to type the year 2013. Such an ugly year.

Anyhow, hey there hi there ho there, science fans! Time for another installment of everyone’s favorite science bulletin, the Friday Science Whatever, and time for us to all bask in the glorious glow that is Dame Science and her paramour, Lord Reason, and see what interesting babies they have had this week.

Sad, really, that the children are all born out of wedlock, but ever since Lord Reason started hanging out with asshole skeptics and Ayn Rand devotees, marriage between him and Dame Science has been off the table.

She might be a little stiff necked and conservative sometimes, but Dame Science is not THAT bad.

For our first item, check out this interesting view of our place in the universe :

Love the music. Anyhow, I quite like the animation of what you get when you add our solar system’s motion around the Galactic Core into consideration. It really makes you think about just exactly where we are going at any moment.

In fact, I have pondered that question ever since I was a kid having his mind blown by science class. We all know that we are never truly standing still. We know that the Earth spins on its axis, so we are all rotating with it. And we all know the Earth goes around the Sun, and so we have that momentum as well.

But things get especially crazy when you try to factor in the Solar System’s movement around the Galactic Core (which the makers of that video did), let alone the fact that our galaxy is moving incredibly fast relative to other galaxies, and the whole kit and kaboodle is moving relative to the location (so to speak) of the Big Bang… well, just exactly which way are going, man?

I don’t think it is possible to add all those vectors together in a meaningful way.

As for this bullshit about life being a vortex or the solar system being a vortex and all that, I would not pay too much attention to it, except as an object lesson in what happens when you mix a little science with a lot of magical thinking in order to get something that is really cool to think about when you are stoned. That stuff has no place in science or scientific thinking.

Our next bit is not strictly about science, but it is science-adjacent and I am quite intrigued by it, so you are going to hear about it.

It is all about a drug called Mediator and the scandal surrounding the deaths of 500 people from heart valve damage linked to the drug in Europe.

It makes for a great case to illustrate just what a bind modern drug companies are in. If they come up with the next phenomenal wonder drug, they can reap quite enormous profits from it. But the investment in R&D is substantial due to potential side effects (if you are going to mess with people’s bodies, you better be damned sure the benefit outweighs the harm), and even if they do their best to predict all the side effects of their latest super pill, the pill’s very success means that it gets used on millions of people, and previously undetectable side effects emerge due to large sample size.

But the really interesting thing is that the French are investigating the 90 year old founder and CEO of the drug company that makes Mediator for manslaughter.

I thought that only happened in episodes of Quincy or Law and Order. Investigating and maybe prosecuting a CEO for the effects of their leadership?

Way to go, France!

That said, a case like this presents a thorny Utilitarian dilemma. Sure, the drug killed 500 people (at least), but how many did it save? Is it possible for a drug like that to actually be a net positive?

It is probably beyond our moral understanding to figure such things out. Utilitarianism tends to have its biggest problem with dealing with the issue of the sanctity of human life, something which we culturally assign an effectively infinite value.

And Utilitarianism, being comparative, does not handle infinity easily.

Lastly, we have this fascinating bit of news from the Mars500 project.

To quickly recap : the Mars500 Project was an experiment where an international crew was subjected to the same conditions as those that would face astronauts on a 17 month journey to Mars and back.

Well, the first scientific papers from the experiment have been released, and no surprise, the subjects became very lazy and sedentary during their long confinement.

Even though they had activities like video games to do, and could control their light exposure, the trip was nevertheless very boring, and the result was that the “astronauts” slept a lot more (but poorly), and moved as little as possible.

I find this particularly interesting because I am assuming that these were all active, dynamic young people before the experiment, and not, say, fat depressives like me.

Oh, and the really cool thing : the subjects perked up and started moving more and doing more in the last twenty days of the experiment, even though there was no more to do than before.

Just having the anticipation of release perked them up. The scientists say that the subjects entered a state remarkably like hibernation.

Presumably, all animals have an “energy conservation” mode, where they go into torpor when there is nothing to do and save up their energy for when it is time to move again.

All this sounds real familiar to me. I am not technically locked in a test chamber away from the Sun all the time, but my mental illness makes it very nearly so. And what do you know, I am extremely lazy and sleepy and sedentary.

And when I am awake, what do I do? Play video games!

I am beginning to think that this experiment may have implications beyond the question of space flight.

Maybe some of us are astronauts without even knowing it.