Heading out for the eclipse... likely to be messed up by thunderstorms! These things never work out. Anyway, here's a little mini-rant about CYNICISM that might amuse you. BTW for the record, I really approve of the guys I am criticizing here! They are of value to the world. I just wish they'd add a little bit of a song to their messages of gloom. Optimism is a partner of cynicism, if you wanna get things done. It makes you more effective!
== Jeez, man. Always look (at least a bit) on the bright side of life! ==
Carumba! Bruce Sterling and Cory Doctorow are younger than me. But in this interview with Tim Ventura, Bruce goes full – “I hope I don’t live so long that I’ll see the world’s final decay into dull, incompetent worldwide oligarchy.” (Or something like that.)
Dang, well I hope never to become a cranky geezer shouting at (literal) clouds! I mean ‘recent science is boring’? Jeepers, Bruce, you really need to get out more. The wave of great new stuff is accelerating!
Still, when Bruce goes: “I thought civilization would become stodgy…” Well, sure. Maybe? But do you have to be the poster boy?
It’s not that Bruce doesn’t say way interesting things! About half of his cynicism riffs are clever or very informative, adding to the piles of contrarian tradeoffs that I keep on the cluttered desk of my mind, weighing how – not whether – to fight against doom and oligarchy, with all my might and to my last breath!
Example: He asserts that there’s no Russo-Ukrainian ‘war’ going on, in Belgrade? Well, maybe not with overt violence. But expatriate Russians are talking to Ukrainian refugees and learning they aren’t Nazis, or remotely interested in being Russian, and are absolutely determined to be Ukrainian. And Vlad has to fear those expatriates coming home. And talking.
What all of this reveals is the truly controlling factor that underlies all our surface struggles over ideology and perception of the world. That factor is personality.
Want an example? WHY do almost all conservative intellectuals drift toward obsession with so-called “cyclical history?”
Like the current fetish on the right for an insanely stoop'id book called The Fourth Turning?
Likewise Nazi ice-moon cults and confederate Book of Revelation millennialism? Their one shared personality driver is a desperate wish for things to cycle back to changelessness, Especially to counter the Left’s equally-compulsive, dreamy mania to “re-forge humanity!”
But neither of those personality-propelled obsessions hold a candle to the grumpy-dour geezer mantra:
Fie on the future! It’s only an ever-dull muddling-through of more-of-the-same! Oh, and get off my lawn!”
Two last thoughts:
First, Bruce opines that we’ve already lost to the oligarchies (so why bother?) But that’s okay since oligarchies inevitably collapse through incompetence!
Well, that’s half right. Gaze across the last 6000 years, a dismal epoch when feudal rule by owner-lord families and their inheritance brats dominated every continent (those with agriculture).
Across all those bleak centuries of relentlessly-enforced stupidity and misrule by inheritance brats, specific families and dynasties generally did ‘collapse’!
What did NOT collapse was the overall pattern of male-run, harem-seeking called feudalism, which continued, unvaried, almost all that time. For that pattern to change called for both new technologies+education plus determination by savvy new generations.
For 200 years, successively smarter innovators have struggled to overcome repeated putsch attempts by that oligarchic-feudal attractor state. And those savvy, determined, progressive-egalitarian-scientific innovators succeeded - sometimes just barely – at maintaining this enlightenment miracle. Counting on their heirs and successors – we, the living – to do the same.
Moreover, what other Blue Americans accomplished in the 1770s and 1860s and 1960s, we can do yet again, with vastly improved tools and skills plus some of that ancestral grit! Moreover, we’ll do it with or without the help of addictive cynics.
Finally, Bruce is – or once was - a maven of techno-cyberpunk – and yet, what was the most-thrilling article of tool/hardware he chose to share with us this time? A mega Swiss Army knife?
Okay, guy. Enjoy cynical retirement. Us young fools will keep fighting for the dream.
---
Posted in honor of another friend and colleague - older but perennially optimistic. My friend Vernor Vinge.
From their lips to God's ear:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2024/Items/Apr05-3.html
RFK Jr. found himself at the center of yet another controversy yesterday when his fundraising operation sent out an e-mail that referred to the 1/6 defendants as "activists" who have been "stripped of their constitutional liberties." After 2 days' worth of blowback (the first e-mails went out Tuesday night), the Kennedy campaign distanced itself from the messages, and blamed them on the vendor that was hired to help with fundraising.
Truth be told, RFK Jr. has already peddled enough lies that we are disinclined to believe that explanation. At very least, whoever wrote the e-mail looked carefully at Junior's campaign and decided that this messaging was in line with what the candidate is all about. And that brings us to an observation that we already made once this week: The more that RFK Jr. looks and sounds like Trump, the more likely he is to take votes from Trump rather than from Biden.
I'm into Vinge quotes lately:
ReplyDeleteWe humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light.
- Vernor Vinge
On Sterling:
ReplyDeleteWhen watching the video I had the impression that, deep inside, he is angry and frustrated, but has learned to control that frustration by laughing over it. Or has resigned.
Germany does not empty their arsenals for Ukraine, at least not without bitter political discussions, as we deliver to few and to late. And as of now, Putin might get the majority of votes in the next federal election (which could be closer than anyone guesses, since the government is crumbling). Armament production is still in deep slumber.
France: Most nuclear plants are 4X+ years old, and showing very dangerous signs of straining. Also, the previous source of cheap Uranium, Mali, has decided to throw France out and making deals with the new Russian "Africa Corps". (And if you look closer at the nature of economic ties, or better chains, France has still has over it's former colonies, it is understandable why Russian propaganda has so much fertile soil to grow on. And why Macron wants to send troops into Ukraine.)
Serbia: Alexandar Vucic, Serbias president, is Putins ally. If things go south, he may attempt to retake (and depopulate) Kosovo and maybe even Bosnia.
Russians/Ukrainians: I have made the observation that the exiles get along with each other if they mingle at all. I doubt that they need to be convinced that Putin is a liar and mass murderer; feeding it back home is difficult. There IS a large part of the population of Homeland Russians who support this imperialist war of aggression. Like, in Hitler Germany. Or Post 9/11 USA. Interestingly, the tensions are between Ukrainians and German-Russians.
____________________________________________________________________________________
On Science as a career choice:
Sabine Hossenfelder has published a somewhat bitter resume about her life the scientific circus.
Like the arts and games, sciences become dull, repetitive, de-inspiring and somewhat meaningless if they are commodified and commercialized. Yet, it somehow fits into Sterlings viewpoint of progress more and more becoming controlled by the oligarchs.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Swiss Army Knife: I like them, both as an item (though I tend to loose them often) and as a metaphor. Most of us have one of another kind. Look at your smartphone, if you have one. If you are a skilled professional, you ARE that swiss army knife.
Creative Question: What do you think would be new ways to build new kinds of Swiss Army Knives, large or small?
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/belgium-expects-use-24-bln-tax-frozen-russian-assets-fund-ukraine-2023-10-11/
DeleteThe world's smallest language contains just 120 words
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY3Qe_b9ufI
--
Do you think that we have enough of that ancestral grit left in our mollycoddled society?
ReplyDeleteSocial media as narcissism,
ReplyDeletean omnipresent oscillating oligarchy,
the ennui & nihilism of posthumanism,
Leggy Starlitz and the cynic as innovator,
the dichotomy of the Shaper & Mechanist,
and the Superbright who pledge their brains to god:
Sterling has earned the right to shout at clouds.
Best
Very well-read and poetical.... ingrate drivel
ReplyDeleteIf you like Toki Pona (min 120 words), you'll love FORTH (min 25 words). Instead of implied context as the great reducer, it uses a strictly defined machine as the vastly simplified 'world'. Like Toki Pona, FORTH almost entirely removes the barrier for non-English speakers (most words are 1 to 3 letters long).
ReplyDeleteOf course it's true that Toki Pona is a human language while FORTH is a machine language. However, that's not always a bad thing. Almost the entire history of programming languages is a tale of making computers think like humans. The reverse is what Seymour Papert was always on about. [WJCC tome omitted]
Sally FORTH scidata!
ReplyDeleteOff to brave thunderstorms in Dallas in hope of 3 minutes of clear skies.
Dr Brin:
ReplyDeleteOff to brave thunderstorms in Dallas in hope of 3 minutes of clear skies.
My daughter graduates college next month. Back when she was choosing schools, I helpfully suggested either UT Austin (Texas) and SIU Carbondale (Illinois), both of which are in the total eclipse band for this year. She chose neither, but she is trying to drive to Indianapolis on Monday, weather and traffic permitting. Unfortunately, everywhere in the path seems to have a cloudy if not stormy forecast.
Just in case you are not familiar with it, there is a {movement/sub-reddit/aesthetic?} called solarpunk which is the opposite of cyberpunk.
ReplyDeleteBack in the 80s, DC Comics revamped all of their titles, and they did a miniseries in the Batman title around Batman's "Year One". In that particular telling, Catwoman is inspired by the appearance of Batman to don her own costumed identity and commit robberies against other criminals, Robin Hood style.
ReplyDeleteThe problem was that she craved credit, but everyone who caught a glimpse ascribed her antics to Batman, or to "Batman's apprentice". In order to make clear that she was a separate entity from the caped crusader, she escalated to more and more brute violence, even leaving deep scratches in the face of a mob boss.
Why do I mention this now? Because the branch of ISIS who attacked a concert within Russia a few weeks back seems to be in the same situation, as Putin continues to claim that the attack came from Ukraine, or France, or the United States. And I wonder what they're going to have to resort to to prove that the next attack is indubitably Islamic terrorism.
Dr. Brin,
ReplyDeleteI called off my trip to TX due to household emergency (bathroom flooding). Good luck and fair skies, at least at 13:40 CST. Long odds on 'clear, blue and 22'.
Pappenheimer
Alaina like my "Ra Boys" in EARTH?
ReplyDeletefrom a cheap motel room in Dallas, hoping...
Oh hey my Fullbright girl is practicing for her last wedding gig in the US - she has to learn the "Legend of Zelda". Wish I could crash that wedding just to see the decor...
ReplyDeletePappenheimer
Cynicism is obedience (to the status quo).
ReplyDeleteOptimism is a political act.
- Alex Steffen
Doing the climate beat, Alex has been dialling back his expectations of late, but he's still in there. He has mentioned that gallows humour helps.
@David, hope the clouds stay away at the appropriate time. If you can't contemplate the Sun, you can contemplate this... um, conjecture instead. I'm sure the Ra Boys would approve.
@scidata go Forth and swap 'til you drop. A great language for a small CPU, which have their, um, niches. These days, though, even the 'machine codes' are virtual.
...you can contemplate this... um, conjecture instead.
ReplyDeleteHeh. Animism and its nearest siblings are the conjectures that will never die in human minds. You'll know we've become something else when we truly let them go.
To be human requires that somewhere in the depths of our minds we still believe in spirits. They are at the core of how we mentally model everything.
‘Demon’ could simply be a designation for a negative meme. A case history is Paddock, the Las Vegas perpetrator: no motive has been discovered in the years since.
ReplyDeleteHence: demon/bad meme
Tony Fisk: Forth ... A great language for a small CPU
ReplyDeleteFor me, FORTH is much more than nostalgia. Imagine putting 1 million* independent agents (threads) on a chip. My psychohistory processor is built on that Foundation.
* Another treasure from the past was the 1802 microprocessor, which was used a lot in early space probes. It had 5,000 transistors and ran FORTH like a dream. Today's chips can have 5,000,000,000 transistors, which is 1 million 1802s.
Something worth bearing in mind Monday;
ReplyDeletehttps://apple.news/Av7hdTNPWSDaX1Omn7iM90A
Totality will still be memorable, even with clouds.
May all you umbraphiles experience the joys of the rapidly moving shadow and seeing the solar corona.
ReplyDeleteI was in Oregon in 2017 and got to see a calm corona. I remember from one of my classes being told just how big it is, but was still shocked when I saw it with my own eyes.
If you don't have widely clear skies, still watch out for the movement of the umbra across the sky. If you are watching for it, you'll see it much like an inverted beam of light passing through dusty air. Remember why the sky is blue and you'll actually SEE Rayleigh scattering. Not many get to realize it for what it is outside of a laboratory.
@scidata hmmm... I don't think those half billion transistors equate to a million independent 1802s. The main bottleneck would be data bus access.
ReplyDeleteStill, one could arrange for each 1802 'sub-chip'/core to access its own stack set on the chip. You might get 1,000?
How do you propose coordinating them? You mentioned 'threads', which are time-sliced activities. However, the embedded programming I've dealt with recently involves 'asynchronous programming' which seems to specify task swaps at routine entry points (the assumption being that, at some point, a task waits for input, asynchronously)
While I see advantages over multi-threading (eg no need for critical regions locks around common data access), I'm not fully convinced. The documentation for it I've encountered is rather sparse, and has that evangelical flavour of "you know it's a good thing because we've told you often enough". Also, I find the implementation is akin to dragging fingernails on a blackboard. Maybe I'm just old?
@Tony Fisk
ReplyDeleteA few quick points, as this isn't my blog and the SELDON I processor is a) mostly solder and handwaving for now, and b) entirely my private project (not even on github and won't be anytime soon).
- the machines aren't 1802s, I merely use that chip as an example of what 5k transistors can do
- 99.9% of the processing would use internal machine registers, not the data bus
- there would be an on-chip shared stack, a bit like cache, but but only needed for parsimonious inter-machine communication. Like Conway's GoL, only the nearby agents are ever interacted with (an office clerk in Scranton doesn't care what a parent in Joburg is cooking)
- the threads aren't time-sliced, they're parallel
- I'm working on the first few, seminal core machines
- some transistors aren't used as binary switches; they're 'bent' (think Jimi Hendrix); they form a sort of 'memory', especially useful in efficient recursion and local 'learning'
- think of LLM GPU learning, then do completely the opposite
- the foundry stage is many years in the future, probably after I'm gone
- clue 1: the 2nd greatest FORTH programmer ever was Taiwanese
- clue 2: the only President who ever gave a darn about semiconductors is JB
- most importantly, as I always stress, this is NOT a future prediction form of psychohistory. I don't even think such a critter is possible, as I've explained before. This is an analysis tool for historical sociology. I follow more in the footsteps of John Kemeny than of Isaac Asimov
Calculemus!
I really do want to live in The Age of the Pussyfoot. "Interesting times" are nice to read about.
ReplyDeleteBlogger Tony Fisk said...
ReplyDelete"Cynicism is obedience (to the status quo).
Optimism is a political act.
- Alex Steffen"
I think "capitulation" might work better than "obedience."
Howard Brazee:
ReplyDeleteI really do want to live in The Age of the Pussyfoot.
Kurt Vonnegut's 1990s novel Bluebeard notes that people perceive their lives as stories, and that many find it intolerable to be "living in an epilogue".
Me personally, I find an extended epilogue to be quite comfortable, but then again, I'm in the phase of life that would be an epilogue in my biography. I can sympathize with younger people who might desire an epic adventure or two before settling. But I don't sympathize with those who purposely incite chaos just to make the plot interesting again.
I can sympathize with younger people who might desire an epic adventure or two before settling. But I don't sympathize with those who purposely incite chaos just to make the plot interesting again.
ReplyDelete(I hope I did the quote right). I love the idea of young adults having an adventure before settling down. My sister and her future husband bicycled around Europe. Lots of people try life by joining the military (Peace Corps works). But it should be a personal adventure, not something that everybody else needs to share.
Howard Braze:
ReplyDeleteBut it should be a personal adventure, not something that everybody else needs to share.
Yes, I was thinking that, but you said it better. Times can be "interesting" locally without civilization as a whole always being on the line.
"Interesting times" are nice to read about..."
ReplyDeleteYes, a novel I've read (deCamp?) has a character explaining that "Adventure" is synonymous with "Someone else having a hard time a long ways away."
Pappenheimer
P.S. that being said, there's a reason my friend and I turned around while returning from the shoreline path at Volcano National Park on Hawaii and walked towards the sound of explosions, to witness a new (minor) eruption; lava fountaining red-gold into the air and pouring into the sea. Pele was at her work, building new land, and we're all just monkeys coming to look at the new thing.
Pappenheimer, who kept a strand of Pele's hair in his wallet for years (it was falling all around us.)
P.S. I can still remember some other USAF guy staring open-mouthed at me and saying, after I mentioned this, "You keep the hair of a goddess in your wallet?" Apparently there's some kind of folk magic involved where keeping some of a girl's hair in your pocket makes her think more kindly of you...on the other hand, there's another legend where taking anything of Pele's off the Big Island is inviting bad luck, because she's the fiery and jealous type. Dueling mojos.
Pappenheimer said...
ReplyDelete""Interesting times" are nice to read about..."
Yes, a novel I've read (deCamp?) has a character explaining that "Adventure" is synonymous with "Someone else having a hard time a long ways away."
Pappenheimer
P.S. that being said, there's a reason my friend and I turned around while returning from the shoreline path at Volcano National Park on Hawaii and walked towards the sound of explosions, to witness a new (minor) eruption; lava fountaining red-gold into the air and pouring into the sea. Pele was at her work, building new land, and we're all just monkeys coming to look at the new thing."
All just monkeys sounds about right. Sometimes that trait seems little different than stupidity. Like the time a couple of friends and I decided to go surfing during a hurricane. Once we saw the water we decided it was too chaotic for boards, so we decided on body surfing instead. We made a certain amount of progress getting out, realized there was a very good chance of dying, and headed right back in. I was in the water for perhaps 10 minutes and every single second was a fight for my life. In that brief time we ended up about 3 miles North of where we entered the water.
I escaped with only a line of gouges running from my chin down to my crotch and knew I had been stupid, and very, very lucky. I wanted a special firsthand experience of mother nature in action, and boy did I get one.
Darrell,
ReplyDeleteThe one part of N&P's novel "Lucifer's Hammer" that I enjoyed without reservation was the California surfers who saw a massive asteroid impact on the horizon to their west and decided to paddle hard west to catch the big, Big One. If you're going to go out, go in style.
Pappenheimer
Optimism vs Cynicism, it's a tired old dichotomy, typified by the sage words of America's greatest almost living philosopher, Kermit_The_Frog:
ReplyDeleteLife's like a movie, write your own ending,
Keep believing, keep pretending...
A sentiment so optimistic & infantile that it's only applicable to the preschooler who has yet to grasp the 'object permanence' principle.
Peekaboo, I no longer see you, a temporary & often willful loss of vision that some reformers mistake for moral, social & intellectual progress.
Pohl comes to a similar conclusion in his 'Age of the Pussyfoot':
He argues that great moral virtue stems from a combination of blind optimism & one's willingness to cut one's own throat for the benefit of others.
Yet, I remain unconvinced, so I bide my time until I see how many of you choose to follow suit -- and thereby solve climate change -- for the benefit of others.
Now, please demonstrate this Triumphal Optimism of which you speak, and I & my children's children will bear witness to your great virtue & moldering selflessness.
Best
What you write is trivialized by past comments such as, quote: half of CB think they will never die.
DeleteWe’d be imbeciles if we thought so; and you’d be a fool to think anyone here would believe so.
—
Which is it? imbeciles, or fool?
Monkeys indeed.
ReplyDeleteMy get-in-the-ocean-during-a-hurricane experience was on the beach in Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo... at night... alone. I was 31 and those lamps on my brow were supposed to have warned me. They did AFTER I got in the water. I'm damned lucky not to have vanished into the sea that night.
The next night involved my closest encounter with lightning. A big bolt hit the hotel next door while I watched the storm on my open balcony. Crack of Doom! My entirely involuntary response to that resulted in a shower and change of underwear after I retreated inside.
Tiny monkeys watch the Goddess at work.
Was very dramatic with pre-thunderstorm clouds churning about and then, suddenly, a glorious totality. Wunnerful. Greetings from near Dallas...
ReplyDeleteHB “Pussyfoot” was a great and prophetic novel by the archetypal SF author.
ReplyDelete“I can sympathize with younger people who might desire an epic adventure or two before settling. But I don't sympathize with those who purposely incite chaos just to make the plot interesting again.”
Right! Today we heard poems for the eclipse by the world’s greatest living epic poet whose great works are both Homeric and… science fiction! Frederick Turner. Look him up.
Alfred,
ReplyDelete"Zihuatanejo..."
You didn't serve any time in Maine alongside a guy named Red, did you?
Pappenheimer
Congrats on the viewing, all who got to see the Totality. (Grumbling, "grapes were probably sour anyway"). Well, there's always Spain in 2026.
- have to protect my eyesight
ReplyDelete- had to be at home (SW of Toronto)
- wanted to be in the path of totality
- wanted to see the speeding Moon shadow* effect (requires some cloud cover)
- wanted to stand alone* in a field near my home
- wanted to feel the cool-down and watch the birds
Checked 'em all. Glad to see others had a good view too.
* Cat Stevens' "Moonshadow" has deep emotional meaning to many stroke and TBI survivors.
Pappenheimer,
ReplyDeleteI did break out in a smile when they got to that part of the script in the movie. Of course, the real place looks nothing like that anymore. Even 30 years ago it had turned into one of those beach resort towns with a neighbor shanty village. Ixtapa was the resort side and the locals commuted.
——
I was there for an international physics conference back in the day when I was still (kinda) pursuing an academic career. My best non-hurricane story from that conference came from a lunch. Our table had four people seated. Two US-ians, two Canadians, and we were served by a Mexican waiter who was honestly curious if the US was going to sign NAFTA. (They were debating it in the Senate at the time.) One of the Canadians shrugged and in a semi-resigned voice said the Americans would just do whatever they want… strongly hinting the giant paid little attention to where it trod. I said it didn't really matter because Mexico could act unilaterally. (My grasp of banana-republic politics was non-existent.)
When I tell that story, it starts off sounding like one of those "…walks into a bar" jokes, but there is no punchline. The story drags on making the Canadian's point. The giant barely notices. Even when it does, it's not about our neighbors (who find us both a blessing and a curse) but about silly internal politics.
scidata:
ReplyDelete- wanted to be in the path of totality
Where in Canada are you? For some reason, I had you placed in Vancouver.
@Larry Hart
ReplyDeleteI was raised in the sticks, but been a Torontonian for the past few decades.
scidata:
ReplyDeletea Torontonian for the past few decades.
Nice city. Believe it or not, my wife and I honeymooned there. We got weird looks from customs.
The sonovawitch now admits climate crises are utterly real and lethal and someone must sacrifice to save future generations. But rather that slightly inconvenience his feudal lords, he asks us here to die. The jibbering hate-evil is out in the open.
ReplyDeletePappenheimer,
ReplyDeleteYeah, I liked that scene too. And really, why not?
Alfred,
I've had 2 very close lighting strike experiences. Both were close enough that my senses were pretty much instantly overwhelmed and I didn't have time to mess my pants. Talk about adrenaline rush. Missing the 2nd apex of turn 1 at Jennings GP and having a couple of seconds to realize that there ain't no way you'll still be on the track by the time you reach the exit doesn't compare.
We drove 50 miles northwest of Columbus, Ohio to view the eclipse. It...was...AWESOME!
ReplyDeleteIn 2017 we travelled to Charleston, SC to view one, but all we saw was a thunderstorm. There was a veil of wispy clouds, but they did not obscure the view. I did not bother to try and take pictures though we had two phones shooting videos of the area while it happened. I wanted to be in the moment.
Darrell E:
ReplyDeleteI've had 2 very close lighting strike experiences.
Me too, strangely enough.
First, in my parents' car in a Chicago thunderstorm. We saw lightning strike a building and knock a corner off. For a long time afterwards, it was fun to drive by that same building and notice the missing corner.
Then, when my daughter was three years old, lightning struck the house next door. She was watching something on tv at the time, and I was in a different room. When the lightning hit, the tv sound suddenly cut out, and I was sure our electronics were fried. But what happened was, the tv flashed a bit which scared her, so she turned it off. One phone line in our house was affected, but the neighbor (who actually was hit) had all of his electronics fried.
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2024/Items/Apr09-6.html
ReplyDeleteThe problem here is that Ohio state law dictates that the deadline for candidates to qualify for the ballot is August 7, while the Democratic National Convention is not until August 19. So, LaRose is warning that he might just have to leave the Democratic line on the ballot blank.
In 2004, the Republicans shamelessly had their national convention in New York City on September 11. The fact that W was not the official Republican nominee by most states' deadlines for ballot access was shrugged off as a triviality. Of course no state could refuse to have the Republican nominee on the ballot. The very idea was laughable.
There is no point in worrying about how "Republicans will just do the same thing" whenever Democrats think about asserting power. Republicans will do whatever they want regardless of what we do.
And my best hurricane experience, among several, was in September of 2017, a few weeks after the aborted attempt to see an eclipse in Charleston. We flew back to St. Thomas on Sept 5, 2017 the day before hurricane Irma was due to strike. We had been in Ohio visiting family for 2 weeks. We packed up on batteries and other supplies before we got on the plane. Because of my experience with previous hurricanes, I knew exactly what to do.
ReplyDeleteI will spare all of you the tedious details. Irma was a category 5 storm and the center of the eye passed just 11 miles north of our position. Closest approach was about 2pm. My wife and I just laid on the bed in the dark (we had the storm shutters closed) and listened to the wind. Mae said it sounded like we were in a building that was getting power washed while jet airplanes flew by.
Power was cut island-wide earlier that morning but we still had internet...until 2pm. I was in the process of downloading the latest storm coordinates from NOAA and the latest image from WINDY when there was a gust of wind that blew one of the storm shutters in our bedroom open. I managed to get it closed. We were lucky...we were in a wind shadow from hills on most sides around us...we were only exposed to winds from the northwest and at that time, the winds were coming from the west. When I got back to the computer I found that our internet was gone.
The winds died down by 7pm. The aftermath was incredible. The next morning I walked a mile and a half to a co-workers house to check on him. I took photos along the way. Amazing.
Larry,
ReplyDeleteMy first one, I was in my teens working at a palm tree nursery one summer. A big storm was rolling in so I was securing things around the nursery. Just as I went to grab a wooden 'A' frame sign to put in a shed a gust-front hit and yanked it out of my hands. Then I started to feel very weird. About the time I recognized the sensation everything went white and there was a crack so loud I can't really describe it. It took me a couple of seconds to understand what had happened, but during that time I was already running for shelter. Interestingly enough, though the strike was close enough to make my hair stand up I could not figure out what it had struck.
The second one, I was in my early 20s. My future wife and I were living in a nice new built 3rd story apartment with a balcony off the living room. One night while a big T-storm raged we were sitting comfortably watching TV when suddenly, no warning, pretty much the same thing as the first time happened again. Except for the tingly hair standing up sensation. A flash so bright that our vision was whited out and a crack so loud it overwhelmed our hearing. The lightening had hit a post just outside the sliding door to the balcony. After peeling ourselves off the ceiling we spent the next hour trying to coax the cats out of hiding.
Re: Hurricanes
ReplyDeleteA lot of years back, a hurricane nearly sideswiped the Big Island, and I happened to be the only USAF weatherman there*. There were no flight ops at Pohakuloa Training Area because hurricane, but I had a shift to cover so I drove up the river formerly known as Saddle Road from Hilo through rain so heavy I swear my little car's tires occasionally left the pavement. As far as I could tell, nobody else had been thoughtless enough to come to work**, but I continued to take observations and put out a forecast of heavy rain, high winds, scattered thunderstorms, and low clouds and visibility. (This is called a 'persistence' forecast, and I knew it would continue until the big circular thing had passed.) When my shift was over, I called my supervisor and told him I was shutting down and going home. He told me I had to stay until the warning - level weather was over or I was relieved. I thought about asking him to swim over from Oahu and relieve me, but kept my mouth shut, shut down and drove home. I WAS relieved - to finally get home after the worst driving experience of my life.
Pappenheimer
* There should have been 2 of us, but my subordinate had caught a bad case of stupid enough to start doing cocaine while in the service. Which might have turned out badly for me, because AFOSI was all, "was your supervisor taking drugs too?", but the dude had the grace to say "Have you MET him?"
**there were probably still some astronomers up on Mauna Kea, but visual imagery was not happening that day
Regarding youth and adventure -
ReplyDeleteFrom Jethro Tull:
"She longs for the East and a pale dress flowing
An apartment in old Mayfair.
Or to fish the Spey, spinning the first run of Spring
Or to die for a cause somewhere."
Pappenheimer
Pappenheimer: to fish the Spey ... Or to die for a cause somewhere
ReplyDeleteKlingons were obviously derived from Highlanders.
Which is it? imbeciles, or fool?
ReplyDeleteIt can be more than one thing, as Larry_H often says.
The sonovawitch now admits climate crises are utterly real and lethal and someone must sacrifice to save future generations. But rather that slightly inconvenience his feudal lords, he asks us here to die.
Not so much.
My first comment on 'cutting one's own throat' referenced the dramatic ending of Pohl's 'Pussyfoot'; my second comment on Climate Armageddon reflected the alarmism of others rather than my own; and my third comment referenced my virtue ethics-based preference for 'leading by example'.
I apologize if anyone finds the idea of 'leading by example' offensive, even though the alternative conjures up the image of an armed military officer using diktat & the threat of force to 'lead from behind'.
That actual leadership might require some sort of 'leadership' by our leadership caste, I can understand how some jet-setting, fossil fuel-squandering & 'do as I say but not as I do' John Kerrys may find this idea incredibly offensive.
Best
@Alfred Differ
ReplyDeleteWe did not see the umbra, but during the last few seconds before totality we could see the light level dimming quickly. We watched a group of turkey vultures start to circle down towards some trees...they were very confused.
We could see a very bright prominence around the edge of the sun. Way cool!
Scidata,
ReplyDelete"Today is a good day...to fish the Spey." I would certainly go with that option even if I have to wear waders.
Pappenheimer
Tepid, writhing apology NOT accepted. His mad treason cult - now OPENLY raving support for "ex" commissars and "ex KGB officer and Kremlin plans to topple America -- Ran with insane science-hating lies denying climate change so that their plantation master could spend decades blocking alternative energy, for their own, short term greed. That's pure treason-evil enough...
ReplyDelete...but now that he admits that Al Gore was utterly and completely right, all along, he's now telling us to die so the world can be saved for HIM and his masters... Yes, if all the scientists and educated folks and smart people and the others who are sensible enough to heed smart people ALL dropped dead tomorrow, the human burden on the planet would drop by half at once! And withing months half of the other half, too.
Earth would be saved, till the remaining 25% utter morons would launch all the nukes before they failed from poor maintenance. So it's zero-out, after all.
What a maroon.... and a traitor.
-----
Back from Dallas, obviously. Amazing event.
An unknown number (who has done a survey?) on the religious right want apocalypse, or say that we shouldn’t attempt to prevent it—we are talking past them.
DeleteNot even an apology. It's one of those non-apology apologies.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry if anyone finds offensive.
Meh.
---
Lots of cool lightning and hurricane stories, though I'm hard pressed to find in any of them a protagonist who was as stupid as I was. 8)
-----
GMT -5 8032,
One thing I remember from being in the moment in 2017 was all the faint contrails suddenly turning eastward just a couple of minutes before totality arrived. There were a lot of planes above us I had not noticed, but the parallel trails made them obvious.
Cultism/Chaos is a strong candidate for explaining the Great Silence because intelligence seems to contain within it the seeds of its own destruction. As in THE MARTIAN (2015), our best hope may be botany.
ReplyDeleteSaw the eclipse in a little used spot in Buffalo River National Park in northern Arkansas, mostly clear skies, was able to see the solar corona.
ReplyDeleteJust finished watching the 3 Body Problem series. I have to say the cultists are well depicted.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of 3bps, there's an amusing graphic going around at the moment:
ReplyDeleteEarth-Moon-Sun = Solar eclipse
Moon-Earth- Sun = Lunar eclipse
Earth-Sun-Moon = Apocalypse
Scidata - I think cultism is probably unique to our species (which I prefer to call homo credulous) and may have been why our species ended up more successful than our relatives. We uniquely crated huge coalitions based on the BELIEF in abstract ideas (including religions). There is no reason to think there couldn't be Vulcans out there. However, our ability to create huge alliances (rather than the more typical tribal clans) may of course also have contributed to the development of science. So it is not intelligence that is the potential selection critieria, but culture.
ReplyDeletereason:
ReplyDeleteThere is no reason to think there couldn't be Vulcans out there. However, our ability to create huge alliances (rather than the more typical tribal clans) may of course also have contributed to the development of science.
Despite the various retcons of Star Trek history over the decades, the sense I always had from TOS was that Earth/Starfleet was the catalyst for creating an alliance of Federation planets.
Might this be a Brin hit?
ReplyDeletePot, meet kettle:
ReplyDeletehttps://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/hamas-leader-ismail-haniyeh-accuses-israel-killing-sons-109086864
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh accuses Israel of killing his sons in 'the spirit of revenge and murder.'
They can’t find the forty hostages necessary for a ceasefire; misplaced...lost in the shuffle...oversight...
DeleteLightning - I remember dancing in a wet parking lot in a large group because all of our hair had just stood up during a thunderstorm. Bunch of 18 year olds from out of state that did not understand how dangerous it was until the lifeguard at the local swimming pool yelled at us through a fence to take cover, you idiots.
ReplyDeleteSix years later, one of my masters committee members was killed about 200' from the same site in a lightning strike. He was walking down a ridgeline, my (then) wife and I were the two closest people to him, separately on either side of the ridge, down in the valley. His death was a major loss to electronic materials study - he was a bonefide genius.
Hurricane - In 1975, a cyclone remnant hit Oregon with a low of 975mb at the coast. Inland, we had 80+ mph winds where I lived. I gathered my best raincoat and found a very steep dirt hill facing the winds. I jumped off the hill all afternoon, grabbing the hem of my big raincoat so I could "fly" for a moment. Note that this was in a forested area and trees limbs were coming down in the distance.
So, not as dangerous as Alfred, but still very lucky I did not do myself an injury or worse.
matthew:
ReplyDeleteSo, not as dangerous as Alfred, but still very lucky I did not do myself an injury or worse.
And I thought I was bad for jumping off a neighbor's garage roof* onto a cement alley, not knowing whether the fall would break one or both legs. You guys have me way beat. And luckily for me, God looks out for teenagers and fools (pardon the redundancy).
* I had shimmied up between two garages in order to retrieve a ball from the roof of one of them. Then realized that I couldn't get back into shimmying position from the roof. It was either wait for help or take the plunge. Ah, youth.
When powerful Republican committee chairs start complaining about their party being "infected" with Russian propaganda, it's clear the GOP has a problem." What really? I will take bets which GOPpers will turn out to be wholly owned and blackmailed Kremlin agents. Staring with 100% for Lindsey Graham and Moscow Marjory and perv-Gaetz...all the way to those who may be sincere nutters, like Mr. Speaker. But there's one towering fact. The MAGA enemies list is identical in all ways to the list of enemies hated by Vlad Putin. And OOP fanatics are now Vlad's sole hope of survival and triumph.
ReplyDeleteConfederates = commies, now. Top to bottom.
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/key-republican-reps-russian-propaganda-infected-much-gop-rcna146812
Lorraine. Somalia. Yeah. Messes often correlate with who your colonial masters were. For all their sins, former British colonies average better outsomes. Well.... Nigeria.
ReplyDeletematthew,
ReplyDeleteHeh. I recall not understanding why the lifeguards drove us out of outdoor pools and under shelter when thunderstorms showed up. I didn't get it at all as a kid, but that hotel strike learned me good.
----
I love your kid-trying-to-fly story. I never tried that one. Jumping off swings? Sure. Using my coat as a sail while on a bike? Sure. *
After my brief time living in Iceland, I've never really liked high winds. I wasn't a big kid. One winter day I found I couldn't cross the road near school. Car-packed ice covered it and I didn't weigh enough to have any traction. One smaller friend of mine blew down the road. It took a passing adult to stop his car and help us across to get where we were going.
But... that high wind story from when I was 12 didn't stop me from getting in the water at 31. Brow-lamp malfunction. 8)
* I remember well on one of my early birthdays being amazed I had no bandaids on my knees... and had not for some time. It truly is amazing the crazy things boys will do.
Anyone wondering why I like bringing up these stories right now should ponder the 'reforging humanity' notion our host mentions in the original post. My response to those who want to try this is to blow a big fat, sloppy raspberry. Ain't gonna happen. Try it and we shall need a lot more than bandaids for skinned knees.
Humans gonna be humans.
Something worth thinking about these days:
ReplyDeletehttps://buttondown.email/thehypothesis/archive/how-a-science-fiction-obsession-led-me-to/
Not exactly cynicism, but a bouncer for one's open mind, seems in order.
Yesterday the Tsar seized 650k acres of prime farmland:
ReplyDeletehttps://thehill.com/opinion/international/3470381-global-food-insecurity-why-putins-battle-for-ukrainian-farmland-is-so-dangerous/amp/
c. Rhode Island-sized chunk of real estate.
Delete
ReplyDeletehttps://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2024/Items/Apr11-1.html
Joe Biden's team is not going to be fooled by this [Trump's] outburst of moderation. Biden's communications director, Michael Tyler, said: "Trump lies constantly—about everything—but has one track record: banning abortion every chance he gets. The guy who wants to be a dictator on day one will use every tool at his disposal to ban abortion nationwide, with or without Congress, and running away from reporters to his private jet like a coward doesn't change that reality."
I'm not posting this because of the abortion issue. I'm just glad someone is finally noticing that Trump intends to become a dictator on day one, not "for just one day".
Alfred Differ:
ReplyDeleteWe humans will reforge ourselves. But it won't be by intelligent design, for we lack the intelligence. It'll be the old-fashioned way, by trial and error. We'll mutate, genetically and memetically, partly at random, partly by recombination, and partly by botched intelligent redesign. That variation, genetic and memetic, will suffer natural selection. The traits that survive that endless catastrophe will then be inherited, genetically and memetically. Variation + natural selection + inheritance = evolution. On the up side, evolution is creative. On the down side, it requires aeons of suffering.
Dr. Brin,
ReplyDeleteThe Brits were quite capable of leaving horrid, festering messes behind - I'm thinking of India's Partition here, and the land mine planted in Palestine - but looking to the median, they did better than low-budget colonizers like France, Holland and Portugal. Or Belgium, if you want an object lesson in what not to do. That's a low bar though.
That being said, the opinions of racist Imperialists like Kipling and (in particular from my reading) Sir Richard F Burton's assumption that war is a good sorting method for human races that will inevitably lead to the dying out of those unfortunate browner-skinned fellows: those are hard to read today. Burton's blithe words weren't written that long before 1914.
Pappenheimer
P.S. "...on day one." I watched that interview and you could almost see Hannity's sphincter squeeze shut when rumpt said that. "Here I am lobbing softballs to make you sound normal, and you eagerly accept the title of dictator! If my tax cuts weren't on the line...."
Alfred,
ReplyDeleteI learned a bit too much about lightning during my service. There's a reason aircraft refueling gets halted when Weather puts out a lightning advisory for the airfield. Heck, I left an open-air fencing practice at a park because there were storms within 10 miles; I just didn't feel comfortable holding what is basically a small lightning rod with storms within strike distance (while rare, lightning strikes can occur up to 10 miles away from the base of the cloud.)
Pappenheimer
Humans will have evolution via natural selection.
ReplyDeleteBut, as with our livestock, we will evolve via artificial selection.
reason: it is not intelligence that is the potential selection critieria, but culture
ReplyDeleteEntirely possible. I don't have clear definitions for either intelligence or culture. The pilot of the 'newer' OUTER LIMITS ("The Sandkings") was a fun exploration of non-human cultism too :)
Something my mind has worried at on occasion when higher functions have shut down, where to draw the line between natural and artificial selection?
ReplyDeleteThe first obvious solution is selection by an agent capable of modeling the future and choosing between modeled outcomes / no agent involved. If an agent isn't capable of modeling and choosing between models then their effects are merely down to extended phenotype, right? I mean, are ants that herd aphids and farm fungus practicing artificial selection?
So the agent needs to have a certain degree of competency, right? Ants maybe aren't competent enough. Are humans competent enough? Or are broccoli and smooshed faced pets merely the result of an extended phenotype? Perhaps it just comes down to the point of view. What would aliens a million years more advanced than us think about the origins of things like broccoli and smooshed faced pets?
Culture vs intelligence. One of the better supported hypotheses to explain why humans evolved the intelligence we have, why higher intelligence was subject to selection pressure, is that it confers an advantage in social species. There is a strong correlation between the degree of intelligence of a species and the degree of sociality of a species. With one exception, cephalopods, all of the species at the top of the intelligence list are also at the top of the sociality list.
ReplyDeleteAs with most things in reality my guess is that the relationship (get it?) is more complicated than one leading to the other, but rather that intelligence and sociality have had a synergistic relationship. I think sociality and culture are pretty interchangeable in this context.
But then there was that discovery a while back of a single point mutation dating to about a million years ago that resulted in a frame shift, which, in a one in a gazillion stroke of luck(?) resulted in a human specific allele that resulted in a large increase in the size and fold complexity of the cerebral cortex. That right there is almost enough to make you believe in meddling aliens. Or at least a good starting point for a science fiction novel about meddling aliens.
Darrell,
ReplyDeleteYour words goaded me to do some internet diving, and though this subject looks a little more complex than 'single point mutation', I am now aware of the SHH gene, for which I thank you.
For those new to this subject, SHH = Sonic Hedge Hog gene. It affects neural and skeletal development (among other things) in mammals and may be linked to our* divergence.
Pappenheimer
*our = our primate family
"One of the better supported hypotheses to explain why humans evolved the intelligence we have, why higher intelligence was subject to selection pressure, is that it confers an advantage in social species."
ReplyDeleteOr perhaps women deemed it an attractive trait in males, like peacock feathers... in which case, why'd they stop?
Dr Brin:
ReplyDeletewhy'd they stop?
Big-brained babies are rough on the delivery system?
Christopher Hitchens often made the selection pressure argument for the development of humour, one facet of intelligence.
ReplyDeleteMichael Cohen's weather forecast for Monday:
Mostly Stormy, with a chance of incarceration.
Geez. A world without OJ to despise.
ReplyDeletehttps://spectator.org/o-j-simpson-rip/
DeleteRightist rags’ comments sections are overflowing with:
*Grant and Lee were honorable Christian men who agreed to stop the war. But today’s Demokkkratic [“Sheets” Byrd is frequently mentioned] Party wants to keep us all on the Plantation, and we need to fight tooth and nail...*
Welp, with my stodgy mind and mordant sense of humor...if I weren't married, I guess I could glue some peacock feathers to my person. It might work to attract the womens.
ReplyDeleteThe discussion is leaving out a quality that used to work pretty well but no longer does - bravery and prowess in battle. Since the invention of artillery and automation weapons, it's still possible to be a hero but it's become one of those 'can only do it once' things most of the time.
Pappenheimer
*automation weapons is a spellcheck conversion, but may well describe the modern battlefield in a few decades - it does look like we are hell bent (perhaps literally) on removing our hands from the deadman switch.
ReplyDeletePappenheimer
Some PNG highlanders adorn their 'lamps' with bird of paradise plumes.
ReplyDeleteHumour strikes me as something that is part of play. An attitude that signals that this behaviour is non-threatening. Interestingly, play crosses the species boundary, with many recorded instances of animals messing around with creatures they'd normally kill and eat. Of course, intelligence allows a greater range of subtlety in humour.
That right there is almost enough to make you believe in meddling aliens. Or at least a good starting point for a science fiction novel about meddling aliens.
I had thought this was some strange furrae ritual, but now you've got me wondering.
Pappenheimer:
ReplyDeleteif I weren't married, I guess I could glue some peacock feathers to my person. It might work to attract the womens.
Walk with a dog or a cat outside. I wish I had known that in my formative years.
Dr Brin:
ReplyDeleteA world without OJ
I've got some late 1970s Marvel comics which contain advertisements for sports-related items and feature spokesmen OJ Simpson and Pete Rose in the same issue.
In the internet age, it is easy to make such embarrassing evidence disappear the way Disney has memory-holed the Simpsons episode featuring Michael Jackson. But paper copies live on.
I donated a 1930s NYT newspaper to the Hockey Hall of Fame containing an ad featuring a Rangers star extolling the virtues of one brand of cigarettes. the funniest part was his protective gear, that wouldn't pass for junior midget pee-wee level today.
ReplyDeletePappenheimer,
ReplyDeleteNot SHH, but a less well known gene, ARHGAP11B. There were a number of papers on research of this gene published a few years ago with fascinating results. At least fascinating to me. This article, Scientists Make Bigger Monkey Brains With The Help Of A Human Gene, describes some of those results.
This paper, Human-specific ARHGAP11B increases size and folding of primate neocortex in the fetal marmoset, is about verifying the function of the human specific allele of the gene. From the paper . . .
"Here, we provide functional evidence that ARHGAP11B causes expansion of the primate neocortex. ARHGAP11B expressed in fetal neocortex of the common marmoset under control of the gene’s own (human) promoter increased the numbers of basal radial glia progenitors in the marmoset outer subventricular zone, increased the numbers of upper-layer neurons, enlarged the neocortex, and induced its folding. Thus, the human-specific ARHGAP11B drives changes in development in the nonhuman primate marmoset that reflect the changes in evolution that characterize human neocortical development."
This paper, A single splice site mutation in human-specific ARHGAP11B causes basal progenitor amplification, is about the evolutionary history of the human specific allele. From the study . . .
"The mutation of a single genetic letter, namely the change from a C to a G, in the ARHGAP11B gene leads to the loss of 55 nucleotides in the formation of the corresponding messenger RNA,” explained Wieland Huttner, whose lab led all the studies on the gene mentioned in this article. “This results in a shift in the reading frame, which in turn leads to the human-specific, functionally essential sequence of 47 amino acids in the protein.”
“Such point mutations occur relatively frequently, but in the case of ARHGAP11B its advantages of forming a bigger brain seem to have immediately influenced human evolution,” Huttner added."
"ARHGAP11B is the first, and hitherto only, human-specific protein-encoding gene that was shown to increase BP generation and proliferation (23). It arose on the human evolutionary lineage ~1 million years after divergence from the chimpanzee lineage, existed in Neanderthals and Denisovans, and is found in all present-day humans (23–25)."
Needless to say, the chances of any single point mutation leading to a positive change in one step like that, let alone such a significant positive change, is absurdly tiny. Which is why I find it fascinating. Given the apparent function of this human specific gene and when it occurred in our lineage, it really does look like it could have been a very significant causal factor leading to the evolution of human level intelligence.
Of course, this is relatively recent science and it needs to withstand the test of time before those conclusions warrant too much credence.
Pappenheimer,
ReplyDeleteThe discussion is leaving out a quality that used to work pretty well but no longer does - bravery and prowess in battle.
The definition for 'courage' was adjusted slightly a few centuries ago in places that essentially became The West. It isn't restricted to martial combat anymore, but must still involve a risk of loosing everything without it being a foolish risk. It's that last element that has caused some combat scenarios to fail at qualifying as courage demonstrations. Rushing the machine gun (or a modern day drone swarm) is just dumb.
One thing about the definition has remain constant, though. It is a social virtue. You must be seen doing it and stand ready to be judged by those who see the act. Private courage is something else entirely, thought it too is required to attract the womens. 8)
Larry,
Walk with a dog or a cat outside.
I hadn't thought of that one. I do remember thinking that hunting in a bar among other hunters wasn't a good idea. No way to distinguish myself without lots of money (didn't have that) or ripped muscles (definitely didn't have those).
I wound up in a bookstore/coffee shop. Plenty of women show up there who do not tolerate offers of drunken rape. Played chess with others in that bachelor herd while we waited. Played Scrabble with the women I wound up marrying. (Got a little help from the store owner who wasn't above arranging introductions.)
I met a used book seller at that coffee shop who pointed out that he attended art shows for that purpose. It worked apparently.
"Grant and Lee were honorable Christian men who agreed to stop the war."
ReplyDeleteWe are talking about 'unconditional surrender' Grant here, aren't we? Grant 'stopped the war' by encircling Richmond, forcing the Army of Northern Virginia out of its works and pursuing it to utter destruction.
Lee didn't stop the war, either; just his part of it. And he only did that because his army was trapped and nearly out of supplies. He should have surrendered after Richmond fell*. About the only good thing you can say about his conduct is that he refused to order his surviving men who had not already deserted** to take up guerilla warfare - probably because the planter class he was loyal to would take the brunt of US counterinsurgency.
Pappenheimer
*Arguably, he should have surrendered after the battles in the Wilderness reduced half his army to scrap meat and Grant had demonstrated his willingness to relentlessly finish off the remaining half, earthworks or no earthworks.
**Lee was reportedly quite bitter about the number of soldiers who'd already left the ranks without leave but who came out of the woods around Appomattox in droves when US commissaries were set up to feed the surrendering Confederates.
You know I’m reporting the consensus of far-rightists? I don’t respond to them anymore. They all say the Plantation of olde has replaced by the new ‘Libral’ one.
DeleteBut what they actually think is that quote blacks are ugly unquote— have heard it for decades.
Alfred -
ReplyDeleteJohn Barnes' Thousand Cultures series included the planet of Nou Occitan, where young men fought duels over points of honor and art (i.e. no particular reason) with electronic fencing equipment that did not wound or kill but induced the sensations of pain and death. The main character realized early on that such duels were incomplete unless young women were watching them. Yep, it's courting behavior, and becomes obsolete with the introduction of grapeshot and the Maxim gun.
(My son and I were fencing in the park a few years ago when we were startled by a doe who'd approached quite near and appeared to be fascinated by what we were doing. Cross-species voyeurism?)
Pappenheimer
Pappeheimer:
ReplyDeleteYep, it's courting behavior.
I found early on that a swimming pool which felt too cold to enter suddenly didn't feel too cold when an attractive girl/woman was there. I don't mean that I pretended not to care, but rather that suddenly the water felt fine after all.
"It may not be logical, but it is, in fact, true."
Re mutations and brain size.
ReplyDeleteA bigger brain is expensive! - it eats a lot of calories - and in evolutionary terms it must pay for itself.
I expect the mutations to grow a larger brain will be quite common (in evolutionary terms) but unless they convey an actual advantage they will be selected against.
IMHO the throwing rocks hypothesis which means that a bigger (faster) brain would "pay for itself" makes a lot of sense.
Intelligence is always two steps forward and one step back. People hear what they want to hear. For instance, the lyric "to be a rock and not to roll" is heard by some as a call to integrity and truth, while others hear it as a warning against intransigence and solipsism. A 3-lb lump of trained neurons is simply not capable of actually perceiving the real world, the best it can do is to see what it (often correctly) expects to see, manage a powerful and capable biology (including a lifetime extending immune system), process physics faster (eg throwing rocks*), etc.
ReplyDeleteScience is like a pair of spectacles for the brain, and science requires language**. So, I'd rank language as the watershed skill that triggered the steep intelligence ascent.
* though not as impressive as the lowly archer fish and its miniscule brain
** the Civilization series of games is excellent at bootstrapping technology, I hope TRIBES is the same (still haven't obtained it)
Alan,
ReplyDeleteI'm not arguing with you. I'm just stunned by the ahistory and illogic of the statement. I swear, we missed a chance after '65 to break up the plantations of the Solid South into associations of armed, freeholding black farmers. Don't coddle the racist ex-slavers, give them something to really cry about...it's a 'plantation replacement' I could really appreciate.
Pappenheimer
P.S. Duncan,
I'd say our big brains have given us enough of an advantage that we now need to worry about reducing our biosphere to only species we a) really need (which includes bees, which we are putting in danger) or b) can't eradicate. Is there another gene complex we could tweak, as in OGH's 'giving plague'?
You’d have to tell it to them, but ‘24 is not a good year to. Best to wait until 1/21/25.
DeleteAlan Brooks:
ReplyDeleteThey all say the Plantation of olde has replaced by the new ‘Libral’ one.
If they were internally consistent (which I know they aren't), then since they think the plde plantation was a wonderful place where slaves learned a trade and were taught about Jesus, they'd have to admit that the newe libruls are being just as helpful.
They say blacks didn’t know what they were missing, until...well never mind—humans will just have to merge with machines.
DeleteLincoln's choice of Andrew Johnson s VP was tragic. His 1st term VP would have persecuted the southern whites leading to insurrection. Johnson was WAY too lenient.
ReplyDeleteThere should have been a bill that every plantation gets divided into a number of sections equal to the number of people who lived there when the war began. With each farm building = to another section. And the big House = to five. If there were 5 people in the owner family and fifty slaves, then the owners get to choose five sections worth. The rest does NOT go directly to the former slaves, but instead to a pool, with equal shares chosen - alternately - by
1- the state's freedmen's association
2-the NATIONAL veteran's association
3- The state school/education system
#2 is to get the state's veterans on the side of this arrangement, so it's in their interest to side with the former slaves instead of the officer class who betrayed them into crippling war.
scidata,
ReplyDeleteSo, I'd rank language as the watershed skill that triggered the steep intelligence ascent.
Agreed, but a multi-step one.
I suspect a number of animals have a rudimentary language because tokenized meanings come in many forms.
What we've done is produce tokenized abstractions rich enough to go recursive. That takes some size and time to mature.
"What we've done is produce tokenized abstractions rich enough to go recursive..."
ReplyDeleteThis is#1 on my list of 100 theories for the Fermi Paradox.
When we first came out of Africa - around 170,000 y.a. - Neanderthals kicked out butts back to the hot zone. The next time - about 50 kya - we had dogs. But especially we had a new trick of self-reprogrammability through culture that I talk about in EXISTENCE.
New posting soon.
Yes, we've come to realize that language is not an 0 or 1 state. Our vocal abilities as a species stand out, too - probably a self-reinforcing process, but you have to have something worth talking about before complex speech is worth the development cost.
ReplyDeleteI remember having a chat with a psych student - he's a therapist now - about whether animal language is 'symbolic' or not. The original assumption was that it isn't. Not sure that can be said with full confidence in all cases these days.
Pappenheimer
P.S. Being able to speak with the dead - or at least listen to them, through written language - is something no other species on this planet can do, to my knowledge.
Elephants visit the bones of recently-dead relatives and fondle them.
ReplyDeleteAlfred,
ReplyDeleteJust noticed your line "Played Scrabble with the women I wound up marrying."
Now, was this a 3 or 4 player game? Are we talking consecutive marriages, or simultaneous? Were you wearing peacock feathers?
Pappenheimer, who makes so many errors he can't correct them all...
ReplyDeletewith the women...
Does any other language on earth have a word as bizarre as "woman" and "women"? I mean, the singular changes to the plural by changing the penultimate letter, but the pronunciation of that letter doesn't change. Instead, the first vowel in the word is pronounced differently, and furthermore in a manner that a single "o" is never otherwise used.
How did this come about?
* * *
On the subject of linguistic mistreatment of females, the title Mr. can be spelled out as "Mister", but what word does "Mrs." stand for? I've seen it in print as "Missus", but that feels like an affectation--the way Mark Twain would portray Huckleberry Finn's dialogue. I think "Missess" would be more correct, but that doesn't feel right either, and I don't think I've ever seen it actually printed that way. It's like the abbreviation itself has become the word, similar to the tetragrammaton in the Bible.
"Mrs." must have originally derived from "Mistress", but in modern American parlance, that's a different thing, in fact the opposite thing.
My wife comes from a family of independently minded females.
ReplyDeleteWhen considering what the terms 'Miss' "Mrs" come from:
They are both abbreviations of 'mistress'.
But whose mistress?
... my own!
Does any other language on earth have a word as bizarre as "woman" and "women"? I mean, the singular changes to the plural by changing the penultimate letter, but the pronunciation of that letter doesn't change. Instead, the first vowel in the word is pronounced differently, and furthermore in a manner that a single "o" is never otherwise used.
ReplyDeleteEven though I moved around the U.S., I must have been in my 30s before it was pointed out to me that most people pronounced "women" that way. I always heard and pronounced it as wo-men.
Even though this doesn't fit what I just said, I will note that Americans are much more likely to pronounce words as written than Brits are. So many more Americans had ancestors who were literate before they knew the English language, that they learned much of it by reading.
Tony Fisk:
ReplyDeleteBut whose mistress?
Mistress of the house, I would presume.
And kidding* aside, I'm sure you're correct that both Mrs. and Miss derive originally from "mistress". But they've become their own words with distinct meanings. And it seems weird to me that "Mrs." is in effect an orphaned abbreviation for a word with no proper spelling of its own.
* Kidding on the square.
Howard Brazee:
ReplyDeleteI must have been in my 30s before it was pointed out to me that most people pronounced "women" that way.
There's a gag that I know I had already heard about before I saw it on the 1960s Batman tv show which asserts that "ghoti" is actually pronounced as "fish". The vowel sound depends on the "o" being pronounced as in "women". So that pronunciation is at least common enough to expect a listening audience to understand.
Pronouncing "gh" as "f" or "ti(on)" as "sh(on)" is common enough in English, but I think the substitution of "o" for "i" is unique to that one word.
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I always heard and pronounced it as wo-men.
There's a philosophical question as to whether you perceive the same thing that I see when we see the color "green" (for example). It's interesting that there's really no good way to answer the question.
You've pointed out a similar situation in which it is possible to communicate. When I write a word, do you "hear" the same thing as I or anyone else does in your head? I know, for example, that when I see the written word "creek", I hear "kreek" in my head, but my first girlfriend's roommate would hear "krick".
A while back on the list dedicated to the Cerebus comic, there was a heated discussion over whether the title character's name was pronounced "SAIR-uh-bus" or "SUR-uh-bus". I was on the "SAIR-ub-bus" side, which I defended by saying it was pronounced like "cerebral", which immediately set off a recursive discussion on how THAT word was pronounced.
Not much help, but the original 3 headed doggie of Greek myth is pronounced 'care-bear-oos'. How Sim pronounced Cerebus' name would be up to him. Then again, the only writer I remember adding pronunciation guides to his work was De Camp, who bothered to invent linguistic rules for his alien cultures. How else are you going to know how to pronounce Mikardand and the Banjao Sea?
ReplyDeletePappenheimer
a Japanese tourist said he is going to ‘Sooth Dack oh tuh’
DeleteSuch an interesting discussion! Too bad I'll be saying "onward" soon!
ReplyDeleteLarry Hart:
ReplyDelete"There's a philosophical question as to whether you perceive the same thing that I see when we see the color "green" (for example). It's interesting that there's really no good way to answer the question."
My crackpot theory is that when you upload your mind to a computer, qualia get swapped around. Red becomes green, green becomes blue, blue becomes red, sweet is sour, sour is umami, umami is bitter, bitter is sweet, and high and low pitches exchange. Eventually you get used to it, but it's never the same.
Re "seeing the same green" did anyone else notice two nights or so ago when Jimmy Fallon's suit was... green? My dad - a significant journalist since covering Capone in the 30s - told of how he would hand in feature stories that various editors would sometimes call "a green suit," meaning a weird story that no one would want...
ReplyDelete... though they always wound up playing well with the readers! And so the editors shrugged and kept accepting 'green suits!'
onward
ReplyDeleteonward