Generation П
Toss,
Gnaw,
Cut,
Rip,
What.
Life, underground.
It seems to involve a lot of sheet metal,
being cold gnomes,
and shoveling.
cmdr Rule #5: Don't measure anything you aren't willing to correct.
cmdr Rule #3: Always make it easy on the next guy. (3a: you will probably be the next guy)
cmdr Rule #16a: If your dog tells you to shoot the president, don't shoot the president, say "Bad Dog!"
(professions. Here's how I see the world:
Creators: Artists, Engineers
Observers: Scientists, Writers
Others: push material or information around as meaningless life fades to meaningless death)
last month, 'the human project', I feel that was transhumanism from the point of view of someone who likes to create
But what about those who observe?
it's famous: you can show a dog a bicycle, show him every gear, wheel, every last piece connected to every other piece, you can put it right in front of his nose, and he will still never understand why the bicycle goes forward when you push on the pedals.
We could give monkeys books on calculus, show them every theorum, postulate and copostulate in beautiful diagrams and explain it in the clearest, most precise monkey language, again and again.....
...and the monkeys would never understand calculus.
I'm a rationalist. I believe that the physical universe can be understood, that all we need to fully grok it lies around us.
But it also seems to me, we're the dog looking at the bicycle. We could collect and observe for all of human history---take and consolidate notes until we starve or freeze, get gamma-ray bursted or mutually annihilate--and we still won't get it.
The important difference between us and dogs and monkeys
is that we've developed the tools to change ourselves.
And if we change ourselves right, reclaim human evolution not for survival but for enhancement and understanding.
Then maybe someday some 'people' will put it together,
They'll see the bicycle right there, how the crank connects to the gear connects to the chain connects to the wheel, and how they all move together...
That would be rad.
Like, perception: Didn't long car rides feel like eternity when you were a kid? And now, another few hours, you could care less?
There are lots of explanations for the feeling. Maybe it's because an hour represented a bigger portion of your life back then.
But maybe our perception of time passing changes as we age. We know that most older folk have slow reflexes. Could it be that the number of times per second your brain checks on signals from the senses, 'clicks', 'refresh rate', could it be that that slows down with age?
And in that way, time seems to go by faster and faster?
What if you're 22 now, and you're gonna live to 65, but for all intents and purposes, as your clicks slow down, you've already perceived fully half of what you'll ever perceive?
This (as always here)is obviously ridiculous, but what if we weren't separated from aliens by the stifling emptiness of interstellar space, but by the scope of our perceptions.....like, what if our brains 'refresh' our senses so slowly, a whole big convoy of parading aliens found earth, aliens who 'click' way faster than us, and they came down, had a picnic, looked around, decided there was nothing interesting that moved or seemed alive to them, and blasted off and left, all in the blink of an eye.
This gets important when you think about physics, astronomy, huge things, tiny things, things that we want to understand but which happen in slices of time or space (or something else) that are outside our range of perception.
The limited scope of human perception--that's what concerns me, and the drawing last month. I suppose it connects to this month's tack for 'transhumanism'
A girl in Russia told me about how her classmate took apart a summer dress, ran it through a laser printer and got all the applicable mechanics formulae lightly visible on the underside. Then she sewed the dress back up and went to her final exam.
Optics: what if you could work out just the way light blurred as you unfocused your eyes. The you could print all this girl's notes on a contact lens, 'pre-blurred' so to speak, so that they came into sharp focus on the retina when she focused her eyes far away.
That way, instead of suspiciously peeling up her dress or going to the bathroom the 4th time, she could just rest her chin on her fist and focus her eyes far away on the ceiling, as if deep in thought.
Probably would be applications beyond cheating.
Last year I wanted to solve the drifting problem ("outlined in some better thought-out entry from Antarctica") with crashed LC-130s, a spherical station that floated up due to the plasticity of ice, a decommissioned nuclear submarine, buildings mounted on giant pieces of all-thread that could just be 'unscrewed' as the snow level rose.
Now.....I don't want to solve that problem any more.
Even under the pleasant gaze of a g-class star,
(20W panel recovery, look at these Torbjorn and I found poking out on a long ski)
That plume spraying down our collars got so, so old.
Why is it that all matter interacts differently with space, but everything seems to have the same relationship with time? ('things that are fast!' you say. whatever, you know what I mean; linear)
I said 'rationalist worldview'.
But sometimes, out skiing, under fog bows, when I type for 15 minutes and then hit backspace and firefox destroys the journal entry window and I lose everything, I think,
'I surrender to the mystery'
The tent capacitor. Temp. was going from +45F AM (solar gain) to +10F PM. I didn't want stuff to freeze. 35 gallons of thermal mass (blue drum) and it never dropped below 28-29 at night.
If you're mad at the slow pace of social change, at reactionaries, at people who just don't get it,
My brother recently told me about a legal term. It started with an 's' and was long and hard to hear over the radio phone. It refers to how there are legislative devices specifically designed to keep change really slow.
They're in place because, historically and on a social level, no change happens quickly without a lot of trouble.
He learned this in law school.
It got me thinking about chemistry and reversible reactions, how if something is going to occur without energy loss, it occurs extremely slowly.
Maybe it's some sort of unified phenomenology, some sort of multidisciplinary law of life humanity reason and the universe, that if change is gonna take, it's got to go slowly.
More on that later.
Torbjorn, coolest Norwegian on the UAV group, left on this month's plane.
3pm break. ("Don't you sometimes see those fat little dogs, and more than anything you just want to squeeze the little porkers till they pop, and see just how they pop and what comes out?")
(walk back from 3pm break)
Toss,
Load,
Pull,
What.