Came across a bunch of pretty cool science stories lately, so I figured I would share.

Let’s start with a rave fave of mine, battery science. Some Japanese scientists have come up with a new battery tech called Ryden dual carbon batteries and from what it says in the article, it sounds absolutely amazing.

First, the specs. The company behind the Ryden battery, Power Japan Plus (totally the name of an anime attack), says that it can charge twenty times faster than the standard lithium ion batteries that power all our devices today. Charge times are important to today’s impatient millennials who consider any time spent disconnected from their smartphones as worse than Hitler death from rancid AIDS.

Myself, I just have the tablet, which takes around 90 minutes to charge from low to full. As I don’t use out of the home much, that is fine by me. But if I was more active, it would become an issue.

Okay, but a lot of new battery techs are promising faster charging. Big deal.

But what about how long it lasts? Power Japan Plus also claims that their Ryden batteries would let your electric car have a 300 mile range, which I am guessing is long enough for even the most ambitious of commuters.

Very good, but not that special. 300 miles is rapidly becoming the norm. What else?

This is what I think is its killer feature : it requires absolutely no rare earth metals. It’s made entirely of carbon. The anode and the diode are both carbon! The necessary difference in electrical potential between the two is created by using different organic electrolyte solutions.

And if there is one thing I know we will always have around, it’s carbon. In fact, we have a rather nasty surplus in the air that is causing all kinds of problems right now. All life on Earth is carbon-based. We have carbon everywhere!

And now we can turn it into the sort of batteries that will keep us from putting even more carbon into the air.

How keen is that?

Next up, dogs and cancer.

Don’t worry, it’s not dogs with cancer. It’s more evidence that dogs can be trained to detect cancer in people with an extremely high rate of accuracy.

And you thought those poor cadaver dogs has a depressing job.

Seriously though, evidence is mounting that some dogs can be trained to detect cancer. The dogs can smell the Volatile Organic Chemicals (or VOCs) that cancers produce in the human body, and can use that to detect the presence of tumours in the patient’s breath or urine sample.

This, of course, immediately makes me imagine an awkward scenario :

Doctor : Now before we begin, Mister Landmann, have you met my dog Rex?
Patient : Um, no…. uh, hello nice doggie. My, he likes to get close, doesn’t he? Why is he pawing the ground and whining? Look pal, your breath isn’t that great either. Look, now he’s pawing at the door, trying to get out. That is one screwy dog you have there, Doc. Doc? Doc? Now where did HE go?

Obviously I went totally Bob Newhart there.

Sadly, this research will not lead to a rise in dog ownership by clinicians. The scientists are merely studying the dogs to see how the dogs are able to do it. When they do, they hope to build an “electronic nose” that can detect those VOCs in something more like a laboratory setting.

Still, it is amazing to imagine having your life saved by a dog with a very keen nose, who detected your cancer way before it was a serious danger and can be handled without chemo or radiation or anything else horrible.

Now that would be a dog that would deserve a steak.

Finally, we have something that seems like it might be kind of important : we know how to make matter out of light.

In fact, we have known this since 1934. A pait of scientists, Breit and Wheeler, figured it out way back then, but at the time nobody took them seriously and thought they were a pair of cranks. And as it seemed, at the time, impossible to imagine how one would smash exactly one photon into exactly one other photon and then detect the results, their theory has remained unproven for 80 years.

But one day, some scientists at Imperial College London were talking, and they realized this idea was totally provable now, and published their method in a journal with the very cool name of Nature Photonics.

Sounds like something Wesley Crusher would be cramming for when he accidentally put the Enterprise in danger which it then had to be saved from by him.

Seriously, it’s weird that they ever let that kid near anything more complicated than an abacus.

Anyhow, the idea that we can turn light into matter seems rather important to me. For one thing, it would make teleportation seem just that little bit more plausible.

But more importantly, it means that would could create matter, actual matter, out of what, to us, is nowhere. After all, the Universe is full of light. Imagine a device that looks like a solar dish, but instead of electricity, it produces coffee.

Or blood plasma. Or… anything, really.

Like my roomie and icon of awesomeness Joe said, the ability to go from energy to matter is right there in Einstein’s theories. Matter and energy are one, and therefore, it is possible to go from one to the other.

But historically, it’s all been one way. We know how to, in a crude way, get certain kinds of matter to give up some of its energy. It’s something we basically understand.

After all, even a caveman standing in front of a fire is using technology to unleash the latent energy in matter.

But going the other way?

That is totally quasi-Clarke level technology.

Well that’s it for me for tonight, folks. Oh… went to the doc today. No bone damage to my knee, phew. It’s likely just a minor issue with the tendon connecting kneecap to leg.

See you tomorrow, all you wonderful people!

Doesn’t feel much different, honestly.

For those who don’t know, today is my 41st birthday. Yay me! It was exactly 41 years ago, at around 10 AM, that a little redheaded baby named Michael was born to Larry and Betty Bertrand of 135 Belmont Street, Summerside, Prince Edward Island, at the Prince County Hospital.

The bouncing baby boy was a surprise to the Bertrands, as they already had three children and had not been planning on a fourth. Indeed, Betty had opted for tubal ligation surgery years before, but Michael somehow managed to defy the odds and get conceived anyhow, and nine months later, he made his debut.

At this point, while he is bright and shiny and new, Michael will be the center of attention for much of his days and he will, in his own shy way, glory in the attention and acceptance of his family.

However, Larry and Betty assure us that they will begin to ignore and neglect him the minute they realize that they have better things to do like jobs and hobbies and raising the planned kids.

Not that I’m bitter.

I was going to do a “where am I in life?” type column today, but I am thinking that would only lead to being very depressed. Truth is, I am exactly where I have been for twenty long fucking year : just some over-intelligent putz sitting in front of his computer, wasting his life with the Internet and video games.

Don’t worry, folks, I always get really emotional on my birthday. I’m just venting.

I just get so god damned tired of this life of mine, the life I can’t seem to escape. I want to have fun and live life and get some passion and joie de vivre. But no matter my ambition, I just end up doing the same shit I always do and the days of my life tick past and I get closer and closer to the grave and an end to a meaningless, purposeless life.

And on some level, I understand that seeing things that way is part of why I can’t escape this trap. Finding my life so depressing, I avoid thinking about it, and if you can’t think about it, you certainly can’t do anything about it.

I feel trapped in a vast Rube Goldberg device of overlapping, interconnected avoidant cycles that, together, form the perfect machine for turning every bit of energy or desire I have into force to hold me down.

I built that machine. It’s my own creation. I designed a machine to keep myself constantly in check, so that no matter what I think about doing or want to do or totally COULD do, nothing ever happens and nothing ever changes.

I want to be able to clear the logjam by simply taking the pressure out of the system and letting things fall where they may. The blockage stops being a blockage if you just stop pushing on it, in a sense.

But I don’t think I can do that yet. I have too much latent dynamic energy craving release to just let go yet. Resolving the inner conflict that way is not in the cards for me yet.

So I will continue feeling frustrated at the pointlessness of my life for a while. I have a lot of things that I need to work out first. A lot of issues that have been piling up on my front porch.

It makes it hard to have a Happy Birthday. Turning 41 just reminds me of how I have wasted yet another year of my life doing sweet fuck all except mental masturbation exercises like this blog. Sure, I love talking to you people, and I can’t imagine how pointless my days would seem without it, but it is not exactly getting me anywhere.

And I have so much I want to give to the world. Despite my self-loathing, I am very confidant in my abilities. I know that I am a funny guy with a talent for words and a crackling wit, not to mention loads of brains. I am a nice guy who really cares about people, sensitive and gentle and kind. I am not totally ugly.

And yet, none of that adds up to being confident in myself. Despite all those tools, I have no confidence in the person wielding them. I try to truly imagine engaging with life, without the filtering effects of fantasy and idealism, and it fills me with terror and dread. The world is so big and I am so small and I feel like I can only be safe if it doesn’t notice me.

If I stay out of life’s way, it won’t step on me. Right?

And yet at the same time, I burn with ambition. I want to do so much. I want to go out into the world and prove how brilliant I am and what an extraordinary person I am. I feel like in the right circumstances, I could be absolutely magic.

It is finding those circumstances and getting to them that poses the problem.

When I try to think about my life and make plans to change it, a terrible anxiety rises up in me and makes it extremely difficult to concentrate. I guess that is how my depression protects itself.

Oh well. Every day, I get a little stronger, a little healthier, a little lighter of spirit. Some day, I will reach the tipping point where I can just empty my soul of all the bad stuff and walk away from it all, unburdened and healthy and clean.

But before that happens, I have ever so many ghosts to defeat. I have this big wide white wound in me that bleeds darkness and daylight and pure fucking poison to heal. I have a long long journey into my own heart to complete.

Until then, I will just have to try to be patient and remember that I am a very ill person doing his best to convalesce.

In other words… happy birthday to me.

Talk to you again tomorrow, folks!

We have traded the privacy of the cloister for the privacy of the haystack.

In a sense, that has been happening since the dawn of urbanization. The rural form of privacy was very simple : the nearest neighbor was miles away and there was nobody (apart from kin) around to have the slightest idea what you were doing.

This was the privacy of the cloister. And it operated in a certain way. Because, most of the time, there was absolutely nobody unfamiliar around, the arrival of a stranger was a welcome diversion from ordinary life. Rural life, even in the worst of times, usually provides at least a slight surplus of resources, and so the stranger’s arrival gives everyone the excuse to break open the reserves, use up everything that won’t last anyhow, and have a good time.

In that sense, the greater physical privacy leads to openness and hospitality. But in another sense, because each family is essentially a homogeneous community, a kingdom of its own, it also leads to great inflexibility and tolerance. Exposure to diversity is very low, and the concept of what is acceptable and normal is therefore very narrow.

When people start living closer together, something changes. Now, prying eyes are everywhere. People know what you get up to. If you have a fight with your wife, the neighbors hear it. If you are too poor to dress your kids properly, everyone can see it. If you get up to some funny business with someone from work who is definitely not your spouse, everyone hears about it.

So already, simply by living in a village or town, there has been a loss of privacy. In small communities, everyone knows everybody and so, without anyone planning on it exactly, everyone is always keeping tabs on everyone else.

This is when the concept of “minding your own business” comes into play. For people to provide privacy to one another by social custom, there has to be defined areas into which you do not seek information and if you are exposed to information accidentally, you either ignore it or file it away deep in the back of your mind.

This is a mutually supported system. You don’t pry into my business and I won’t pry into yours. Everybody has a roughly equal stake in making sure the system works. And so the system works.

You can see this trend in modern life in how many of our boundaries are, in a sense, imaginary. This is my yard, not your yard, because I have fences or driveways or whatever that give you a visual sense of where my private space begins and ends, and I can rest assured that this will be enough because we have all agreed to respect these boundaries. They do not have to physically bar people from entry. All but the most mentally compromised individuals respect these mostly social boundaries.

And in our homes, we have our own rooms, where a completely unlocked (and usually unlockable) door is all we need in order to signal that this is our personal space and therefore it would be a violation of our privacy to enter uninvited.

Another thing happened as our towns and villages grew, however. It stopped being possible for everybody to know everybody. Past a certain number of people in a community, our brains run out of space for new people and so we have to deal in our lives with the presence of strangers.

Now, instead of a welcome diversion, the presence of a stranger is a potential threat. Our small-community instincts, being both communal and insular, tell us that unknown humans are a potential threat. Our territories are much smaller, but the smaller they get, the more fiercely they are defended.

But with strangers also comes the possibility of anonymity. If nobody knows you, then you are, in essence, freed from some of the constraints of your own community of peers, and this affords greater individual freedom of expression. You have privacy not because you are far away from everyone else but because to them, you are just another face in a crowd.

Or put another way, just another needle in a haystack full of needles. You are right there for anyone to see, and yet, you are also just one pebble in an avalanche.

Now we come to this modern age, where we live closer together than ever before and our territories are smaller and tighter than ever before. This has reduced physical privacy more than ever, but at the same time, social privacy has never been greater because we have no idea who our neighbors are. Physical proximity now has absolutely no relationship to community membership. The concept that your neighbors are your community seems absurd now. I’m going to be in a community of people simply because random chance has thrown us into physical proximity? How can that make any sense?

Then add in the Internet. With it, we can form communities with like-minded people from all around the world. They are not quite sufficient to replace all the things we once got from a more physical form of community, but on the other hand, we can form communities of people with more things in common than ever before.

This is why the watchword for the last decade or more has been “social media”. Virtual community is filling the gap left by the retreat of physical community. We are more interconnected than ever before and the rate of connection continues to expand as the crowdsourcing phenomena takes over from the more usual top-down economies of scale.

In this era, people gladly give away information they would protect if anyone tried to take it from them. Sharing is the new form of community, and as we share our lives with another, we become a greater form of humanity, and the insular forces of like-minded communities pale before the far greater forces of global consciousness.

After all, even from our new cloisters of opinion, we end up getting exposed to the same trends and news stories and events via the common stream of sharing and commenting.

And that is one of the many reasons I love the Internet.

I never do end up going where I meant to go with these things, do I?

Talk to your tomorrow, folks!

The concept of shame keeps bursting forth into my consciousness at the slightest provocation, and so I thought that for tonight, I would play around with the idea and see what it has to offer.

First, the personal part. I have felt like disgusting filth since I don’t know when. It is one of the most virulent and sharp-edged facets of my self-loathing, and I have carried this burden, this sense of my own awfulness, for decades.

But it wasn’t an issue I could really grapple with. It was not suitable for rational analysis, no matter how sophisticated and well informed. It’s a deep down feeling of being absolutely, completely, entirely awful, and you can’t analyze that without feeling the taint of it infect your mind.

And that is a very bad feeling.

Purity is always tied to the concept of contamination. To touch the impure is to become impure yourself. I have spent decades feeling like any who touched me would be poisoned by me, like I was toxic waste. Radioactive. Like I can only hurt people by getting close to them.

So I keep people at arm’s length, terrified of hurting them. I cover it with a convincing (even to me) illusion of friendliness and good nature, but deep down I feel like I am a horrible, horrible thing.

And for decades, I felt that purity could not possibly ever apply to me, because there is no such thing as a clean turd. You cannot be cleansed of impurities if you are an impurity.All you can do is keep away from people and carry around a very, very deep sense of permanent shame.

Ashamed of being filth, ashamed of being so repulsive, ashamed of even being alive. I keep telling myself that I had nothing to be ashamed of, and for years I kind of believed it. After all, I don’t have the usual sorts of sexual or toilet hangups caused by a repressive upbringing. I’ve never done anything particularly evil. When I have hurt people, it has almost always been by accident, and do to social cluelessness rather than any kind of malice.

I’m a nice person. People like me. So why should I be ashamed?

But as I have said before, the scales fell from my eyes when I just thought the thought “I have nothing to be ashamed of” and felt an enormous reaction from the rest of my psyche that said otherwise.

It was only then that I realized that I actually felt extremely ashamed of everything. I felt ashamed to even be alive. My lack of the usual, obvious sources of shame (like, say, Catholicism) did nothing to protect me from the deep down sense of shame that I developed all by myself.

It is possible that this sense of shame and vulnerability started all the way back when my father molested me. A lot of survivors of sexual abuse have this sense of being permanently soiled. I naively thought that I was somehow immune from that feeling because I was so smart and sensitive and intellectually rugged.

Ha ha ha. Shame is not a social construct, it exists on one of the deepest if not the deepest level of our social programming. Shame, on the primal plane, is the sense that your tribe does not approve of you, and when in its proper place, drives the individual to seek to redress the cause of the shame via right action.

That can be as simple as an apology or as complicated as a life driven by the need to make up for something you did, something you feel terrible about.

Thus, shame, in a simple social setup, leads to righting wrongs. But even more importantly, the fear of shame acts as our ethical nature’s first line of defense outside of its own sense of right and wrong.

The fear of how ashamed of your actions you would be if anyone found out (thus making society disapprove of you) is the second most powerful force in our moral makeup. The only more powerful force is simple empathy. Seeing others in pain causes us pain over the empathic channel. Even babies are distressed by the sound of other babies crying.

My shame, then, is a deep down feeling that I am repulsive in the eyes of my society. I know that is not how people actually view me, but that doesn’t matter. Our sense of self comes ultimately from ourselves. Outer validation can never over-ride internal evaluation, at least not for very long. Information contrary to your inner sense of yourself simply gets neutralized and disregarded as a matter of course.

I can see now how smoothly this sense of shame interfaces with my social phobia. No wonder I feel like total strangers are judging me and hating me when I am out and about all alone.

I feel like they can see right through me to how awful I am.

I will carry this burden of shame for a while longer. Now that I have identified it, I feel I stand a better chance of getting rid of it over time. That vast inner wound of mine produces a lot of nasty stuff and it will take a while to clean the wound and get it wrapped up in a bandage, ready to heal.

It is a long and painstaking process. It’s not just that the wound exists, but that it has been left untreated for most of my time alive on Planet Earth, and that creates a lot of complications.

Sometimes I wonder if I would recover faster if I was in hospital somewhere. Some peaceful, quiet place with daily individual and group therapy, and supportive and understanding staff all around me.

That does sound nice. But my big fear is that it would be so nice, I would never leave.

And having “written while committed to a mental institution” on the dust jacket of my books would probably limit sales.

Oh well. See you tomorrow, folks!

`Tonight, I am going to do one of those things where I tell you about something that I am in the middle of watching.

As with the Elon Gold special (which finished awesome, BTW), it is something I am just way too excited by to wait until I am done watching it to comment.

It’s a movie called Bunraku (which sounds to me like the name of Usagi Yojimbo’s species) and I am loving the hell out of it.

It is extremely stylized, which I don’t mind at all, but some people might not like it. There is some anachronistic bullshit about a nuclear holocaust (get with the times, it’s global warming that will do it) and in the aftermath, all guns being destroyed (yeah right), but it’s just an excuse to have a movie set in a sort of universe that is like if Frank Miller had been in charge of the 60’s TV Batman and robin.

But hey, I loved Sin City, every minute of it, so I clearly have no problem with that kind of thing.

It’s got everything. You have colorful gangs who all dress alike towards a theme, like there’s a Soviet Russia gang and a Ghengis Khan type gang, and everything is decided by the sword, and everything is all dark and edgy without (thank God) a stupid depressing compressed palate of greys and browns and blacks.

The writing is good and solid. As long as you accept it for what it is, which is basically a live action comic book, and you can just enjoy the thing as an exercise in a kind of extreme form of film noire, where the whole point of the thing is to tell a tale of darkness and badassery, it is (at least so far) a heck of a ride.

And to think, I only stuck it on my Netflix list because I thought it sounded vaguely interesting. The description called it “genre-bending” and I thought, what the hell, I like my genres bent.

One thing that bugs me is that the evil gang that runs the city all dress like Chicago Prohibition-era toughs, but all in red, like they all came from some primary-color version of Guys and Dolls.

And I like the whole flaming blazing red thing…. it makes them very visually distinctive and instantly conveys a sense of aggression and dominance. But the gangster thing… it makes it really hard for me to take them seriously. To me, they don’t look badass or scary at all.

I mean, they chew gum and play with yo-yos. WTF is up with that? They look like the only people they could menace would be immigrant fruit cart workers and maybe the Lil Rascals.

Then again, I have had the theory for a while that you might make your villains even more badass by dressing them in a way that just dares you not to take them seriously, thus creating a conflict in people’s mind when you come around to harass them because their eyes say one thing but their brains, their knowledge of just what your gang is capable of, say another.

It’s just a theory, though.

Other than my Netflix adventures, it’s been a quiet pleasant day. My therapist was fifteen minutes late starting our session, but to his credit, we went fifteen minutes past the usual end time, so it all evens out.

I told him about my knee, which in retrospect was a mistake, because then we got sidelined into a ‘medical advice’ mode when all I wanted to do was unburden myself and explore my problems like we usually do.

So it’s true. Men can’t help but go into problem solving mode when all you want them to do is listen to you express your feelings. We ended up wasting fifteen minutes of precious therapy time talking about my health.

Well I have a GP for my physical health. I don’t go to a shrink to talk about my physical problems. I go there to talk with a professional who knows me but is not connected to me personally so I can be honest with him and he can stimulate me to rethink things by asking questions from an outsider’s perspective.

Outside my brain, that is. It is a unique situation in that I usually protect people from exposure to my demons and their foul radiation, so it is hard for me to believe that I can just go there and take down all the shielding and it doesn;t scare him off or destroy him.

Perhaps I am not as radioactive as I have always thought. I have spent a long time thinking that if I exposed myself to people, my darkness would destroy and devour them, or at least drive them away. The pain inside me throbs with latent energy and it is hard to imagine that anyone could survive my whole truth.

It’s just too damned depressing. I have a real feel of opening up to people and showing them my interior world and having it actually hurt them. It is just so stark and cold and dark and wrong in there. I have seen the effect that even small exposures to my pain can have on unsuspecting happy, healthy people, and it is chilling. I can tell that my world would be toxic to them. If just tiny exposures make them feel like they just stepped onto the edge of a bottomless cavern of ice cold horror, I can only imagine that a larger exposure would be like pushing them in.

And I can’t do that. I am too sensitive for that. When you have antenna like mine, making yourself happier at someone else’s expense is impossible, because whatever pleasure you gain is canceled out by your empathic feeling of the other person’s pain.

I can steal, but I cannot rob.

So therapy it is, at least until I am healthy enough for my interior world to become hospitable for human life.

No wonder I liked the ending of the original Diablo game so much. In it, your hero decides that the only way to protect the world from the demon lord Diablo (the main bad guy) is to take that demon into themselves, where they will always be at war with said demon.

Kind of feel that way myself. Talk about inner demons, huh?

Don’t be fooled by a jokes and tricks and pretty lights, kids. Underneath this carnival there is nothing but miles and miles of lifeless tundra where the wind is always howling and the air is as cold as the surface of the Moon.

A little more melts every day, though, and someday I will have a true springtime of the soul, and all the bad things will be washed out of me, and I will finally be clean.

Talk to you tomorrow, folks!

First off, my impressions of Elon Gold, standup comedian, and his standup concert film Chosen and Taken.

To begin with, a caveat : I am only halfway through said concert, and so for all I know, in the second half of the hour-long show he starts to suck so badly that it will wipe out my appreciation for not just him but several random members of the audience just for being there.

But so far, I am quite impressed. The start of the show was not that great, and there were times when I started contemplating hitting the reject button and stopping video and taking it off my Netflix list.

But then he kind of clicked into gear and started doing his well-honed, well-delivered jokes, and showing off his rather impressive vocal and impersonation skills, and I warmed up to him.

Now his jokes are largely ethnic. For some people, that instantly makes him racist and awful and Hitler-like. But nothing he says or does is meant maliciously, he just points out things about various demographics in an entirely accepting and loving way.

One joke I liked : He was talking about the difference between Israelis and Jews, and he said “Every Israeli is drafted into military service. Jews feel a draft and complain to the service. ”

See? To me, that is just too damned clever and funny to be offensive. He is dealing in stereotypes, obviously, but stereotypes are not wrong in and of themselves. In fact, the right kind of stereotypes, the ones based on observation of commonalities as apposed to assigning negative traits, can benefit a population greatly by giving it a sense of commonality and community that it never had before.

And it is the good kind of stereotypes that he’s dealing with. Italians being very direct, big black women being no-shit-taking forces of nature, Latinos loving the Fast and the Furious movies… nobody can really get offended by these things without looking ridiculous.

My theory is that at one point, Elon was a very intelligent kid who made these observations about various groups, no malice intended at all, and was told that that is the sort of thing you just don’t talk about, ever.

And of course, that is the best/worst thing to say to a budding comedian because that just makes our minds laser focus on the thing we are not supposed to talk about. Instead of making it forbidden, they made it interesting, and now we can’t stop thinking about the forbidden subjects.

Also, when you make something forbidden, you create tension around the subject, and that tension is precisely what is going to fuel the comedy in the future. A lot of comedy, and especially satire, is about relief of suppressed tension, which is why that, for now, sex is still the funniest thing around because we’re so repressed about it.

Anyhow, I am really appreciating this Elon Gold dude and find his approach to ethnic stereotypes quite funny and refreshing. I look forward to the other half of the show.

Moving into philosophy, I have been pondering the labour theory of value versus the capital theory of value today, and I thought I would share said thoughts with you.

Briefly, the labour theory of value says that you earn rewards in a just society via labour. The example I like from my high school economics class is the idea that if you and a friend were walking through the woods and found an apple tree, and you both picked an apple, you would object if your friend then took your apple.

Why? There are plenty more apples. You have only been in contact with that apple for moments. Your friend has as much need of that apple as you do. So why do you object?

Because by picking it, you made it your apple. You invested labour in it, and now it’s yours.

This is the most psychologically simple and understandable form of value. You do, you get. It is the reason the idea that hard work gets you ahead is so prevalent despite the mountains of evidence that this is simply not true.

We really want it to be true. It appeals to our deep communalist instincts. You contribute more to the collective, you get more from the collective. It makes basic sense.

Less sensible is the capital theory of value. There, instead of picking the apple, you bought the tree, and thus took a financial risk in advance of expected apple selling profits.

This makes a sort of sense to people. You put your money on the line and created a business, and you deserve to profit from that. You even invested labour in an indirect way by doing all the step necessary to secure ownership of the tree. So far, everything makes sense to people.

But if, for the rest of your life, you just sit back and collect fat apple profits while your apple pickers live in tin shacks, the power of labour over capital in the human mind starts to kick in.

Why should you get all the money from the apple tree (and this phrase perfectly encapsulates what I am talking about) when you don’t do any of the real work.

This, I feel, is the psychological basis for the tension between labour and capital. We understand the concept of rewarding risk, but only up to a point. Then the whole thing breaks down. You mean the small amount of money you risked gets you the apple profits for LIFE?

That just doesn’t work, on a deep psychological level.

And yet, I see capital’s point. They hire people to do jobs. It’s a fair exchange of money for labour. There is no logical reason for someone you hired to do something to expect anything more than their wages.

The reason isn’t logical, no. It’s psychological. The labour theory of value is embedded deep in our social instincts and thus will always have a lot more power than the capital kind, no matter how much modern society relies on people being willing to take financial risk in order to create the businesses that we all depend on for damned near everything.

Corporations make this even more complicated because, especially after they have been around for a while, you can’t point to a person who took the risk. It’s all this faceless, nebulous entity that, to the ground level worker, seems like it is entirely parasitic and exists only to suck away most of the value they create.

And past the point of return of investment, that argument gets harder and harder to dispute.

That is why I am for employee-owned businesses, and why I think every union’s long term goal should be to buy the company. Then labour and capital are one, and the problem is solved.

Of course, some people don’t want to be in charge of their own destinies. They just want to complain.

I don’t care for that kind of person.

See you all tomorrow, folks!

No particular plan for tonight’s blog entry, so I will just wing it. Sometimes I have plans, sometimes I just have the root of an idea and explore it further, like in last night’s entry, and sometimes I just plain extemporize in blog form.

Luckily, I am a talented communicator, so even my ramblings are articulate and well phrased.

Almost done watching Sword Art Online. Only one episode left. Technically, the villain, Suko, has already been defeated, at least in the virtual world.

But he is such a loathsome sleazebag that I would not put it past him to have some sort of bullshit waiting for our hero Kiruto in the real world.

God, he is loathsome. You end up hating him so very, very much. In fact, and I don’t do this often, I would put him the same category as Kai Winn from Deep Space Nine, in that I hate him too much. There is such a thing as making your villain too villainous. If you go too far, they stop being the villain you love to hate and they become the villain you just plain hate.

Sure, that makes you want to see them die, die, die, but no matter how bloody and spectacular their death (and Suko went down hard), it still cost you more (emotionally speaking) than any satisfaction you could get from their bloody demise.

GIAGBIMOA. (God I Am Getting Bloodthirsty In My Old Age. )

It’s like they can’t die enough.

In almost completely unrelated news, check out this kickass solar road technology.

A lot of people have proposed the idea of a solar road, where entire highways and superhighways are turned into solar collectors and we all get free electricity from all that road surface.

But these people have impressed me with just how thoroughly they have thought things through (always a big hit with me) and just how marvelously they have leveraged the power of design (another rave fave) to make something far more amazing than its original design goals.

The hex-shaped bricks that would be the building blocks (hey, roads will look like hex paper!) not only collect solar energy, they use said energy to both light up the road (and with no blackout areas between lights) and to keep the road surface warm enough that snow and ice can’t form there.

And it’s not limited to roads, either. Any place that is currently paved could use it. Parking lots, playgrounds, rooftops, you name it… it could be solar.

Just think of that. Roads that never ever ever need the snowplow or the ice truck. Think of the money that would save, and the increase in inclement weather driving safety.

Heck, even if it didn’t light itself and produce way more energy than it uses, it might be worth it just for that!

But it does all three, and that makes it a truly magical (in the sub-Clarke sense) technology. It doesn’t just solve the problem it set out to solve. It does so in a way that could truly change the world.

Another fun sort of science related thing I found recently and utterly love : Spurious Correlations.

Someone, possibly named Tyler Vigen (Tiger Vegan?), has gone to the trouble of finding unrelated data sets that happen to graph alike and used them to demonstrate the absurdity of confusing correlation with causation.

For exammple, check this shit out :

Stop NASA before it kills again!

As always, click to enlarge.

As you can see, the chart clearly demonstrates a 99 percent correlation between the amount spent on space travel and the number of people committing suicide by hanging, strangulation, and suffocation.

Clearly, something NASA is doing with that money is driving people to off themselves in horribly strangly ways. Obviously, by increasing our knowledge of just how puny and insignificant we are in the face of a vast and uncaring cosmos, NASA is driving more and more people to strangle themselves in creative ways as a final act of defiance against a cold unfeeling Universe.

It’s the only logical explanation!

Seriously though, that site is my idea of high level satire. It is, admittedly, not for everyone and you have to have a pretty specific mindset to really appreciate it, but for me it is a marvel and a delight.

Is there such a thing as being a logic nerd? Or maybe a high level cognition nerd? Because I am passionate about teaching people to think better about important things.

There is so much confusion and disorder in the world created by the bastards in charge by simply exploiting people’s inability to parse through complex information and thus they have no choice but to trust the thoroughly corrupt priest class of economists, financial advisors, and other people in the graft industry who are there to part middle class people from their money and are most definitely not your friends.

So what is needed is thought leaders who can demonstrate the kind of thinking that negates the obfuscation. It is the sort of thing the Daily Show does, but we need people who can do it on a far more serious, simple, and relatable level.

The sort of people who can destroy the positions of the forces of evil with simple, no-nonsense, common sense questions that anyone can understand. That would go a long way towards stripping these bastards of their remaining rhetorical cover and help unite people against the forces of anti-Christian, anti-moral, anti-The People sentiment.

Honestly, I think it will take a new political movement and a new political party. The brands of all the usual parties, both here and in the USA, are too tarnished to be able to provide a uniting force.

A new party/movement, though, could take the best of all the old options and turn them into a single message, one that could appeal to people of all political stripes as being the one party that can actually provide solutions because they are beholden to nobody but the people.

It would have to be crowdfunded, obviously.

Food for thought. Talk to you tomorrow, all you wonderful people!

I think that, within every person’s soul, there is a door that leads to limitless compassion and ecstasy and love.

Few people find this door, and fewer still are the people who have the courage to open it. To open that door to paradise would mean a very fundamental kind of change. Our entire system of earning love and deserving pleasure would collapse, and with it, our identities. Our whole world would change and we would no longer recognize ourselves.

And the deepest and truest definition of death is the destruction of our identities. On a deep animal level, death means “a world without us”, and the definition of “us” is always the person we are at that exact moment.

So big change seems like death to us, especially deep personal change. Certainly, when we contemplate big changes in ourselves, even ones which we truly believe we want, we shrink from the possibility as though it meant total destruction.

And in a sense, it does. To grow, sometimes we have to be willing to sacrifice all that we are now in order to embrace a newer, stronger, happier version of ourselves. A version so different, we will barely recognize our former selves.

Blessed are those who make such transformations. They are the ones who will find the renewal that makes a soul sing.

But most of us cling to our identities and adhere to rigid definitions of who we are and who we are not. We beat our heads against the wall by crying out for change while also resisting it with every fiber of our being. Anything that involves a change in oneself is treated like an invading virus.

We want the results of change without having to actually change. We want the happiness and renewal, but not if it means doing something difficult or frightening or painful. Often, even if the doors of Heaven were thrown open for us and we would be welcomed in and showered with lower and respect and attention, we linger at the gate and complain about how the angel’s wings look wrong, or how God’s love makes us feel weird, or how we just can’t risk entering because… what if we don’t like it?

And yes, I said God. I speak, of course, not of some nebulous cosmic patriarch but of the God within us all. I think what religions seek to do, in their purest form, is to access that door to joy and ecstasy within in and open it just a crack. Magic in all forms is a system for negotiating a change in the fundamental symbols of our mortal existence, and religion seeks to give people a way to access this inner joy without feeling like their whole identity is at risk.

So there are rules. There are rituals you need to perform, rules you have to abide, a specific state of mind you must enter before you can do something as dangerous as tamper with the fundamental code of your personality.

That way, we can feel safe in connecting to this well of Heaven within us. Going through religion unsures that we will not be presented with the unthinkable proposition of unlimited pleasure and happiness without any effort or work to earn it.

That idea, of completely unearned and unconditional joy, is so threatening to how we think and how our social instincts tell us we are supposed to behave that it even spills out into all forms of social conservatism, where the greatest fear is that if people are enjoying themselves too much, they won’t work as hard, and that means they will be “getting away with something”.

After all, if you have accepted that you have to do certain things in order to earn certain joys, what could be more galling and outrageous than someone getting them for free?

This is why such people have such a problem with sex. Sex is an amazing thing. It is a source of enormous pleasure and satisfaction and even contentment, and for so little investment of effort. The social conservative instinctively reacts to the idea of sexual pleasure as a threat, and wants to bind it up in rules and restrictions to make it safe.

But what if it’s true? What if sex and joy do not have to be earned? What if we all have the capacity to tap into an unlimited supply of everything we need : love, acceptance, forgiveness, solace, comfort, a feeling of safety… everything.

What if we can just throw out all the rules and restrictions and just be happy for no good reason?

The Captain Kirk crowd would tell you that this would immediately lead to people doing nothing but just sitting around with stupid grins on their faces, lacking the motivation to do anything any more.

But I consider that a narrow and provincial view. To me, it is at least equally possible that by giving people unlimited access to everything they need, people would finally become whole and healthy and happy, and they would be more capable than ever of doing the work of life, secure in the knowledge that they are, forever and ever, safe.

Unlimited, unearned pleasure is the most subversive idea in the world. It threatens not just the existing power structure but the very fundamental laws of how we think the universe works. Happiness isn’t something that just comes to you. You have to go get it. You have to gamble all the time on being able to find activities which are profitable : the reward is greater than the effort expended. Life demands that you work hard and sacrifice of yourself in order to even be considered a person.

But what if we all could be as innocent and free as children? What if we all decided that, from now on, we will be happy unless something forces us not to be? What if we make happiness the default?

The doors to Heaven are open inside all of us.

But do we have the courage to go through?

Talk to you tomorrow, you wonderful people you!

Ha ha ha. I am so clever with these blog post titles and things.

So today, I went to the X-ray place to get my bum knee (side effects may include literal bum knee) x-rayed, and let me tell you, it was good that Joe was with me.

See, I knew I would need my CareCard (for you out of towners, it’s the ID you use to get free health care in this province) in order to get the X-raying done, but I thought, no problem, I got my CareCard reissued a while back and it is right here in my wallet. I don’t even have to bother checking before we left for the radiology clinic.

And it was there! Wow, what a lame anecdote.

Seriously though, no, it was not there. I can’t fucking believe it, but somehow I have managed to lose another CareCard. I went through my entire wallet three times looking for the fucking thing, and it just ain’t there.

So I immediately began to panic. When my number was called, I went up to the intake window with my best ingratiatingly vulnerable smile and explained that I could not find my CareCard.

The intake lady said that they just could not take my x-rays without my CareCard or at least my CareCard number, and I went off in a huff and said to Joe “Well, we came here for no fucking reason, because they won’t do it. ”

But Joe had also heard my conversation with the intake lady, and had kept a cool and calm head about him, and so he realized that I had phoned his cell numerous times from my GP’s office, and had done so as recently as last Friday, and so his cell phone would retain my GP’s number.

So he called my GP and got the number, even doing a little acting so he could sound like he was making an official inquiry. I thought I was going to have to talk to my GP’s receptionist myself, and was not looking forward to it given the mood I was in, but Joe handled the whole thing for me, smooth as glass.

He even went over the number several times with the receptionist, something I would have lacked the assertion to do. Number now written on my intake form (the one I got from my GP), and after playing a little 20 Questions with the intake lady so she could be sure I was who I said I was, I finally got in.

Of course, before the actual x-raying, I had to go into a changing booth, drop trou, and don the Garment of Shame that they have making hospital patients wear ever since, back in the early days of modern medicine, they realized how hilarious it was.

You know the one. With the opening in the back? It’s a garment scientifically designed to cover as much of your body as it can while still leaving you feeling naked. One of the many joys of getting out of the hospital after having my gall bladder removed was being able to wear normal clothes and not feel so damned exposed all the time.

A lot of bad, bad shit happened to me during that hospital stay. Some day, I will write it all down for this blog.

I wasn’t in the Garment of Shame for long, though. The very nice Asian lady who was my radiologist was quite quick and professional but still very gentle about it all, something I appreciate perhaps a little more than your average patron.

See, my first exposure to the wonderful world of medical imagining was when I broke my arm as a little boy. The radiologist was a gruff, impatient man and I was a shy and hesitant child, and I guess I was not following his instructions fast enough, so instead he just grabbed my arm… the broken one… and shoved and twisted it around as he pleased.

This, needless to say, traumatized me for life, so that every time I have had to have dealings with radiology ever since, I get all tense and scared and anxious because I feel like someone is going to hurt me.

But no, the Asian lady was quite nice, and was gentle in positioning me this way and that in order to get the x-rays of both of my knees that my GP ordered.

All in all, the whole thing, from them calling my name to my returning to Joe in the waiting room, was probably 20 mins, tops.

So yay for private-public partnerships! The province, in its medical capacity, wants people x-rayed, and the privately owned, for-profit radiology clinics and labs want to get patients through the system as smoothly as possible because they are paid per patient, and it all works out to the patient’s benefit.

And they are gentle and patient-oriented both because that makes everything run more smoothly and because the last thing a privately owned business with a big government contract wants is a lot of complaints.

To me, that is how you do business right. The government is there to pay, to vet service providers, and to set the standards for patient care (and set them high). But by going through a private business, they get the efficiencies created by the profit motive. Best of both worlds.

So now those X-rays exist in the world, and they will make it to my GP’s office, and I will make an appointment to see him after my therapy session on Friday so that my dear friend and emotional saviour Joe does not have to make an extra trip.

After all, this knee thing is not good, but it’s not so acute that it absolutely has to be treated ASAP. It’s not like a toothache or an infection that will torment me until it is fixed.

In fact, to be honest, because of my extremely sedentary lifestyle, I can go hours without even noticing the issue.

It’s when I have to get up to pee, or eat, or whatever that I remember I got a busted peg.

Oh well. It will be fixed in the near future.

Talk to you tomorrow, folks!

Feeling a bit better today. Perhaps it is the sunny weather that is improving my mood.

I made some eBay purchases recently, and one of them is one of those full spectrum light therapy rigs. It basically looks like a very fancy makeup mirror. I am hoping that I can use it to set my sleep schedule to something more normal and healthy.

Maybe even sleep for eight hours… in a row! Imagine that.

Of course, if it turns out to make me happier as well, outside the better sleep, all the better. Admittedly, it will be a while before the local weather fails to provide sunlight on a regular basis anyhow, but what the heck.

It takes me so long to get around to doing things sometimes that I have learned to strike whether the iron is hot or not. My “doing things” window tends to be small and random, so I get things done whenever I can.

Depression is so inconvenient.

Still, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, I will be going out to eat and hanging out with my friends tonight, and tomorrow I get X-rays to fix this thing with my left knee, so things are looking pretty good from here, for now.

The knee still hurts, obviously. My theory (of course I have a theory) is that some vital bit of cartilage has somehow broken or worn away and that is letting my kneecap click against my femur in a way that Really Really Sucks.

See, there is normal pain. And there is pone pain.

I know bone pain well, because I broke my arm three times as a kid. It is a deep and very disturbing kind of pain, Your body knows something is terribly, terribly wrong. The vital framework that holds everything else together now has a discontinuity, and that totally weirds your body out.

Now luckily, whatever the fuck happened to my knee is no big deal, as these things go. I am not in a cast, nor am I likely to be (I hope). The leg is usable, so I am not stuck in a wheelchair or on crutches.

I have been on crutches before, and holy shit does it suck. Especially in a cramped apartment like ours. I mean, it’s actually quite a big apartment, but we have so many bookshelves lining the hallway that it is quite narrow now, and getting through THAT on crutches when I am not exactly nimble to start with would be a nightmare.

Plus, imagine having to support all my ponderous weight on my armpits. Not fun.

So it is not as bad as it could be. But that bone pain is a monster, y’all. It doesn’t just hurt, it makes me feel panicky and nauseous. And it is all about how many steps I have to take in a row, augmented by whether there are stairs involved.

As long as I can rest up, the first little while moving around will not hurt that much. I’ll still feel the pain, but it will be minor, not at the nausea and panic level at all.

But the more I use the injured leg, the more each step hurts and the more I feel that burning feeling of inflammation heating up my knee (actually, both of them, for some reason) and sending me powerful “STOP DOING THIS” signals.

And if I keep it up, the bone ache spreads into the marrow of my bones, and that is when I start feeling dizzy and anxious and like I wanna barf.

Just getting home from the Shopper’s Drug Mart next door was a long journey into pain. Luckily, I found that small pauses in my gait kept the pain down to a tolerable level. But that trip has never been more dauntingly, subjectively long before.

But I had no choice. I needed more insulin. Can’t exactly put that off until I get well. For all I know, it will take months before this thing is fully healed.

I mean, I hope not, but I try to be realistic about this sort of thing.

My main worry is that this is just the first acute symptom of something more broad-spread. My doctor mentioned osteo-arthritis and that sounded entirely plausible. Hence my sudden worry about the calcium levels in my diet.

They say that after 40, your bones start to decalcify on their own, and so you have to increase the amount of calcium in your diet in order to compensate. The only calcium I currently get is the cheese on burgers when I eat out once a week.

That is clearly nowhere near enough.

So I am not sure what form it will take, but I will definitely increase my calcium intake soon. I guess I will buy some supplements just to be sure. But I would really rather get it from food.

Even if that means wrangling the logistics of supplying myself with milk to drink on a daily basis. The problem is that I would have to get it in the right amount, so that I will drink it all before it goes bad.

My first instinct is always to buy in bulk, both to save money and keep from having to get more all the time. So I would want to buy one of those bigassed gallon jugs of moo juice.

But that would probably go bad before I drank it all.

Oh well, I am sure I will work it out somehow. I can see making milk a daily thing. It’s not that I don’t like the taste. Milk is great. I just got out of the habit of drinking it at some point.

A nice cold glass of milk with lunch every day sounds fine by me. Might even help with my chronic acid stomach issues.

I think I am going to be buying myself some milk tonight.

I guess that is all for me for today, folks! Talk to you tomorrow.