messiestobjects

Career Day

    This summer I took a Creative Writing course. It will come to no one's surprise that I wrote a rather atheistic short story as a part of my final. My college writing career is getting to be a little one-note, but at least I'm getting it out of my system, right? Anyway, here it is, in all its self-published glory.

 

Career Day

 

Child abuse. Defining what it is and what it is not is a tricky thing nowadays. But it always comes back to a single dynamic—the one between the child and an authority figure. It’s my job as a Deprogrammer to determine on a case-by-case basis the extent of the damage—of a type referred to as iatrogenesis in our business—and whether the State has the right to interfere in such a relationship. And if I determine that it does, I deprogram.

It’s an audacious position to accept in society, and requires no small amount of intelligence, self-righteousness, and tact. It’s a relatively new branch of social services, and practitioners are paid according to its importance in the survival of our society. Let me put it this way: I make more money doing this than any thirty of the highest paid social services employees made all together fifty years ago. In other words, I only make slightly less than teachers do.

But to enter into this career for pecuniary satisfaction is a mistake. If that’s your goal, you won’t last long in the business, take it from me. The money is nice—it gets you through the down times—but eventually you’ll stop getting out of bed in the morning if you don’t view this job as a calling. That’s my job today; to help you people determine whether you truly belong here before it’s too late to make a different career choice. I plan on doing this by showing you what child abuse victims look like, what child abuse means. The following is an excerpt of our initial interview with one Mr. Jacobs.

 

“Mr. Jacobs, do you understand why your son was taken into protective custody?”

“Yes, I understand your reasons.”

“Mr. Jacobs, your son has been routinely abused. He’s terrified, and he may need years of therapy. We’ve brought you here to determine if you were the one responsible. I’m here to help you and your son.”

“Is it abuse to teach a child the discipline and values of his father? Is it a sin to teach my own child right from wrong? I understand the law, but I also know that the bond between a father and his son is sacrosanct and that interference by the law of man goes against the laws of God. I have the right of a father to raise my child as I see fit, to make him see the world for what it is and to prepare him for the horrors that are coming.”

“Perhaps that’s true, Mr. Jacobs. But you’ll forgive me if, from the outside, it looks like a simple case of abuse. Doesn’t the right of a father to raise his child include the rights of the child? In the old days people beat their children black and blue in the name of discipline and ‘raising them right.’ We have found better ways.”

“Perhaps, perhaps not. In any case, I do not beat my child black and blue, Miss Taylor.”

“No, I wasn’t implying that Mr. Jacobs. What you’ve done is in many ways quite worse.”

 

So, you see what we’re up against. It isn’t easy, regardless of the fact that society has largely come out against this type of cult behavior. The saddest part in all this is of course that Mr. Jacobs is not simply an abusive parent. If it were that simple then our jobs would involve a lot less self-recrimination and stress. No, the fact is that Mr. Jacobs is himself a victim. What he did to his son Reuben is only what was done to him first by his parents, and if we had been unsuccessful at deprogramming Reuben then he would most likely have gone on and passed the same abuse on to his children. This is how this particular meme operates, of course. Children are hard-wired by evolution to unquestioningly believe whatever an established, trusted authority figure tells them—and to thus meekly accept whatever harm is done to them—because they haven’t yet developed their full capacity for reasoning. It is because of this that deprogramming children is so difficult. But it’s our duty to break this chain, for the good of society. We are in conflict not with individuals or their bizarre ideologies per se, but with a potent mind virus that has held humanity in its grip for far too long.

Of course, it’s not always as disturbingly complex as separating a child from his family. Because the damage done to a young mind is internalized, symptoms often don’t appear until later in life and so iatrogenesis is more pronounced in older children. In these cases our job is more dangerous, but it’s easier to identify them at least. Teenagers diagnosed with Stygian Complex, for example, are more likely to behave in a reckless manner and may cause real problems in society, lashing out against what they view as a very hostile world. Here is a case study that came across my desk thanks to a school counselor who contacted us when she realized what was going on with a student of hers named John.

 

“John, please tell me why you’ve stopped caring about your education.  Your transcript says that once you were a fairly decent student with a good mind. What happened?”

“It’s all so pointless. School, I mean. What difference does it make if I do well in class?”

“What do you mean, John? A good education is the best way to understand the world we live in, and it enables us not only to succeed, but to make a difference in life.”

“We’re all gonna die anyway. I could die tomorrow. We could all die tomorrow! Judge’s Day will be here soon enough! All that matters is living life according to the Hallows, only people who do that are gonna have a life to look forward to anyway.”

“John…”

“All that science and junk, it’s crap! I mean, it’s fine for what it is. I like watching holos and thank God for the Pont Tubes. But all that crap about climate change and overpopulation; it’s just signs of the end. It’s arrogant to think that anybody can change the plan. And don’t get me started on all these dupes who actually believe that the Universe ‘evolved’ from some primal multiverse somewhere. It’s so obvious, man, ‘Uni’ means one! People who fall for those lies are gonna be sorry. That’s why I don’t care about my grades; all that matters is avoiding the traps, and honoring the Judge of the Quick and the Dead!”

“John, what would be so awful about Universal Evolution, if it were true? What are you afraid of?”

“I’m not afraid of anything, because I’m goin’ to Heaven when I die! You people though, with your arrogance, you have something to fear!”

 

Once we got John to open up about the specific reasoning behind his behavior, we were eventually able to help him see why his beliefs were detrimental to his own well-being, but that’s not always the situation. As in the case of Mr. Jacobs, many people who reach mid- to late adulthood infected with these destructive ideas are nearly impossible to deprogram. They have held on to them for too long and invested too much of their time and energy to allow themselves to be convinced that their entire lives may have been based on a cult-induced misconception.

That is why, as a general rule, the younger we can find victims of abuse, the better our chances of long-term success. Some of you may sense the irony in that statement; after all, we are claiming to fight against childhood behavioral indoctrination by taking them from their families and deprogramming them which, from the outside, is easy to confuse with further indoctrination. There is a crucial difference, however, which I will address after we see what this abuse we are fighting against looks like at a relatively young age. Everyone, meet Mr. Jacob’s son, Reuben.

 

“Reuben, have you ever heard of the theory of Universal Evolution? The Multiverse?”

“What? No…?”

“Hmm. Let’s go a bit further back. Are you familiar with the general theory of Evolution? Natural Selection?”

“Oh yeah, that’s the one that if you learn it, it will kill your soul and the Judge of the Quick and the Dead will spit you out on Judge’s Day.”

“I… H-how about the age of the Earth? Do you know how long our planet has been in existence?”

“Well, Dad says that some people think it’s only six or seven thousand years old, but that’s silly.”

“Well, that’s certainly true at least. How old does your father say it really is?”

“He doesn’t know for sure because it’s impossible for people to know something like that, but that it doesn’t matter ‘cause we’ll find out all the real answers in Heaven anyway.”

“But… Reuben, according to your family’s beliefs, you will have to… what is it…? ‘Die the hallowed death.’ You will have to die the hallowed death here on Earth to go to Heaven. What good will those answers do you then?”

“Well… what good do they do me here? Nothing like that really matters. Life is just a test, and if we fail it...”

“What happens if you fail it, Reuben?”

--

“Reuben?”

 

For those of you who decide to stay with it and devote your lives and careers to the cause of Deprogramming, these case studies and others—including the actual deprogramming sessions—will be examined further in future classes. The methods for repairing the mind of a very young child are at the heart of what we do and will be better understood after you’ve received some basic training. We will delve further into the point-by-point methods of dealing with every mental roadblock you will come across as a professional Deprogrammer.

The difference which I mentioned earlier—the one between childhood indoctrination and Deprogramming—is that as you’ve just seen in Reuben’s case he was sheltered from a proper education by his family, which is a large part of the disturbing framework of what child abuse really is. He was denied the chance to form his own reasonable conclusions grounded in evidence-based knowledge by being pre-programmed with an unprovable and frankly quite primitive belief system which he most likely would have been unable to break free from later in life and additionally, as we saw with John, would have made him incapable of accepting any contradicting information, no matter how factual.

Deprogramming, on the other hand, is the careful breaking down of this mental barrier. That is all we do. Despite some of the media paranoia we’ve weathered, we don’t actually replace old ideas with new ones, their beliefs for ours. We simply make sure that they know they can safely evaluate conflicting ideas without fear of some sort of divine retribution and then provide them with the impartial tools they need in order to do so. In the meantime, however, you can see from what I have shown you the damage that can be caused by indoctrinating a child with a debilitating fear of the afterlife.

Once the idea of an eternity of unimaginable torture and suffering is planted in a young, impressionable mind, it is very difficult to overcome that fear enough to become a fully functioning, mentally healthy human being. Now, if you try to instill this fear in a relatively normal, educated adult who has never before encountered the idea of a hellacious afterlife, he will engage his critical mind—which he will have become well accustomed to using in the weighing of evidence against various claims—and most likely come to the conclusion that it’s an irrational doctrine without a single fact to support any of its assertions, and he will dismiss it out of hand. Most of you here know exactly what I’m talking about. However, the point here is informed consent. If as an adult you were confronted with this particular brand of belief, and you still decided that the idea had merit and you converted your worldview to this outlook, you would be well within your rights to retain your beliefs in that case. But you would not have the right to abuse a child with this idea, not even your own.

But as we now know, the concept of Hell was invented solely as a way to violently coerce impressionable young minds into adopting a pre-determined viewpoint—usually a particular interpretation of a particular religious doctrine—and as such constitutes mental and emotional abuse of the worst sort. I’ve casted a document for you all to read which will help to understand the utter depravity of such a worldview. It’s an annotated copy of one of those doctrines that used to be a publicly endorsed book of acceptable moral behavior, and which was used as an excuse to terrorize children for generations. Now, if you will all please search and open the section titled ‘Exodus,’ chapter 20, verse 5.

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So it's not so much a short story as it is a monologue, but hey, it got me the grade. In any case, before you start to worry that I'm in favor of some sort of Orwellian Nightmare where children are taken away from their families for the crime of Religion, well, actually I see why you might think that. But I got the idea for the story from this news item that appeared at the time my class was starting, and I thought it might be fun to write a little Spec-fi about what such an unlikely future society would be like. If religion were to become considered a mental illness, how would it be dealt with? There are no easy answers to the problem of religion.

 

Nostalgia And Speculative Fiction Go Hand-in-Tentacle

    Still a very slow work period. It's getting on in 2013, and no trips yet. Things are looking up though: I have a few jobs coming up, so we'll see. In the meantime, here's another post in my series of school papers interspersed with old photojunk. This time the pictures are from the ski town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the German Alps, where I lived from 1997-2000. Hover over them for delightfully nostalgic descriptions. The paper in question is my English II final, where the assignment was to take any three short stories that we had read from our text and compare and analyse them. I chose 'The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,' which I'd already written a paper on so, yay. Easy. Also, Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut and The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. If you intend to read this post—and I don't blame anyone at all who doesn't want to—and you haven't read any of them, then you ought to follow the links and read them first. Otherwise reading my paper will be even more painful than it has to be.

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Zen And The Art of Speculative Fiction

    Speculative fiction is an extremely broad genre. In researching the term online, I found many essays which attempt to define what it is and what it isn’t. I even found one person who thought that the film ‘JAWS’ could be considered a member of the genus, but I disagree with that on the grounds that a world in which everything is exactly the same as in ours with the exception of a ludicrously giant man-eating shark who has a taste for beach bunnies is hardly an imaginative or insightful enough scenario to earn the title of Speculative. Horror, yes. Fiction, fine. Speculative, no. So here is the definition I’ve found that I most agree with:

    Speculative fiction is a world that writers create, where anything can happen. It is a place beyond reality, a place that could have been, or might have been, if only the rules of the universe were altered just a bit. Speculative fiction goes beyond the horror of everyday life and takes the reader (and writer) into a world of magic, fantasy, science. It is a world where you leave part of yourself behind when you return to the universe as we know it, the so-called real world. Speculative fiction defines the best in humanity: imagination, and the sharing of it with others. (Bowlin)

I would add two things to Bowlin’s definition. First, I would say that while Speculative fiction (Spec-fi) may frequently go “beyond the horror of everyday life,” it equally as often dives right into it, delving human nature for insights both illuminating and shocking. Thus I would say that the essence of good Spec-fi is that it tweaks reality in order to reveal a previously hidden aspect of it. Second, I would make the distinction that although writers of science fiction, horror, and fantasy regularly dabble in Spec-fi, not all sci-fi/fantasy/horror stories qualify as Speculative and not all Speculative necessarily has to belong to one of those genres. Perhaps Spec-fi became a genre in order to award distinction to those stories from each of those categories that aimed for something higher than mere escapism, though some would argue that important science fiction writers were aiming that high all along.

    The three short stories I will talk about are such speculative fictions. ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’ by Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘Harrison Bergeron’ by Kurt Vonnegut, and ‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson each describe an undignified aspect of human nature. They have each chosen to illustrate these aspects through the useful lens of dystopian societies. In ‘Omelas,’ Le Guin uses a science fiction world as her setting. In ‘Bergeron’ Vonnegut uses a society vaguely set in the future, which is also a staple of science fiction. The world of ‘The Lottery’ is less definable. It could be our world, if not in the present day then in the near past, except that the eponymous social event is so horrifying that it doesn’t really seem to have a place in any known society similar to the one that it otherwise portrays. It could therefore be a science fiction world, or a far post-apocalyptic world, or perhaps even simple allegory, similar to the hellish night of Young Goodman Brown who had a vision of the secret, sinister natures of his neighbors in the Puritan village of Salem. In any case, the inventive nature of the lottery itself in a setting that is still somewhat familiar more than qualifies the story as speculative in nature.

    ‘Omelas’ is a deep story which hints at many ideas, but as I wrote in a previous paper I believe that Le Guin uses the device of a captive child, kept in squalor and degradation, abused and friendless, as a symbol for the dark psychotic id at the center of humanity’s collective consciousness. The story seems to say that although the face we put on for each other in public may be one of civilization—the love of peace, the arts, humanities, progress, and everything positive and hopeful about it—behind it all is the wretched animal at the center of all human endeavor, the monster within ourselves that we try to ignore, but can’t. In the end there are several different ways that one can look at the people who choose to walk away from Omelas after contemplating the child, but the suggestibility of the imagery there only confirms that Le Guin is a master storyteller who has succeeded at making the readers ask themselves what it all might mean, and forces them to look inside themselves for the answers.

    ‘Bergeron’ is perhaps the most pointed, least allegorical of the three. Vonnegut wrote it as a way of taking a certain philosophy to its logical extreme—the idea that natural advantage is unfair and leveling the playing field for everyone in every activity is the way to bring about equality. For example, my young nephew plays in his district T-ball league. The league organizes the players such that every player gets to bat, during each inning, no matter how many outs are accumulated. I found it absurd because T-ball to begin with was meant to be an equalizing force for young children learning the physical aspects of baseball. When I was a young boy I played in little league and we had great derision for the new T-ball league that had just begun for younger kids. But even then, T-ball was played with otherwise regular baseball rules—three outs per team per inning. Perhaps younger kids needed help learning to hit before swinging at live pitches, but they were never too young to start learning and dealing with the rules of the game. Unlimited hitting and playing were for practice, not game day.

    Fast forward to the present and they’ve dumbed the sport down even further. According to Teeballusa.org, here are some of the most Harrison Bergeron-like rules: “There are no walks or strikeouts. Every player bats and plays in the field. An inning is over when all the players have batted once. Scores are not kept for the younger players” (T•BALL USA Association). The rationale for all of this is that it is supposed to build self-esteem, so that everyone can feel like a winner and have a chance to play. The problem, of course, is that life isn’t a game of “organized fun” like that. All that these rules are really doing is preparing children to be unable to deal with failure and teaching them how not to strive to be better; it’s easy to play and pointless to play harder when everyone is a winner.

    Vonnegut takes this kind of trend into a future where everyone must be equal so that no one feels bad about themselves. ‘Bergeron’ shows how when the playing field is leveled, even for those unqualified to play, you wind up exemplifying the lowest common denominator. Different people are talented in different ways, and if you force everyone to be equal in every arena, not only will individuals never find out what they are best at, they will also never know that they are truly bad at something and thus be forced to explore other, better options for themselves. The possible heights of human achievement are thwarted forever in this manner.

    ‘The Lottery’ is a metaphor for blind slavishness to tradition. Jackson is skewering the bovine mentality of the mob that perpetuates certain myths and traditions, beyond the point where they are logical or relevant to the present time. She does this by taking what appears to be an ancient fertility rite—human sacrifice meant to secure a bountiful harvest from the gods—and places it in an inappropriate time period where once again the logical extreme exposes the inherent absurdity of the philosophy in question. The villagers don’t seem to fully understand the purpose of the lottery, except as a vague idea from a saying that seems to have slipped from common usage. A line spoken by one of the characters implies the forgotten nature of the adage, which in turn hints at the fertility aspect of the lottery. “Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.’” This illuminates for the reader the general uncertainty regarding the tradition. The villagers in truth only continue participating because “there’s always been a lottery.”

    My personal take on the story is that she is talking about the folly of religious tradition; a system of belief based on ancient “holy” books written by goat herders who knew less about how the world works than most second graders do today. People and communities still slavishly devote their lives to the outdated traditions of these religions, and they usually do not truthfully understand where these traditions came from, nor why or how they arose in the first place. Considering the vast gap in time and culture between when they originated and now, it is a wonder that anyone still considers the reasons for them to be valid. However, both the nature of belief itself and the human tendency to blindly observe tradition as illuminated by Jackson help to explain the phenomenon. It is possible though that the story could be lampooning any number of other bizarre traditions. Jackson uses the Spec-fi device to expose the irrationality of this tendency that people have to instinctively follow the strictures of society while abandoning critical thought. The organized annual murder of a neighbor may seem extreme—it is unlikely that in reality any such tradition could carry on into the present day—but it does make a striking argument about the idiocy of maintaining rituals simply for the sake of tradition. There is nothing wrong with examining them more closely to determine if they are actually still relevant in modern life.

    The aspect of human nature which each of these stories reveal through a speculative twisting of reality are truths which are not always simple to talk about in other formats. Trying to make the point in a thesis statement that unexamined traditions can be harmful to society, for instance, might need an entire book of material including exposition, facts, and references. But Spec-fi has the unique ability to cut through the empty talk in favor of tradition by using reducto ad absurdum to illustrate its point. By taking real ideas and putting them in an organized setting, reality is exposed. This is how science and philosophy test their hypothesis: by pulling a test subject or idea out of its element and subjecting it to different experiments in order to discover its boundaries.

    Speculative Fiction, then, is the literature of abstract concepts. It is the preferred storytelling method of philosophers and scientists. It is reading material for those who wish to understand something larger and more insightful about everyday experience. It is also material for communicating complex or heretofore invisible truths in a symbolic—i.e. brief and profound, manner. It differs from most forms of literature in that it isn’t trying to tell a story about a time and a place, a person or an event, per se. It instead—at its best—is telling a story about a way of looking at the world.

    Some of these truths may be ugly. But that only makes them even more imperative to communicate. If the Vonneguts and Jacksons of the world don’t thumb their noses at moronic human behavior, and if the Le Guins of the world don’t expose the beasts at the bottoms of our wells, then these dark aspects of humanity will remain unexamined. Only in investigating them will we learn how to overcome them within ourselves. Speculative fiction is a uniquely Zen-like literary format. In altering the nature of reality for a brief moment, like a Zen slap, it teaches the reader something about unaltered reality. It is for this reason that I say that Speculative fiction has a place among the highest forms of literature, and is uniquely capable of communicating big ideas to empty heads.

 

Works Cited

Bowlin, David. greententacles.com. March 2002. http://www.greententacles.com/articles/5/26/. 12 December 2012.

T•BALL USA Association. teeballusa.org. 2012. http://www.teeballusa.org/rules.asp. 12 December 2012.

 

The Ones Who Analyze Omelas

    Being a dummy, I took two writing intensive classes this semester. I wind up having to write something like 5 papers in a normal week. It's insane. So I'm going to dump the occasional class assignment here; the ones I like the most. For English II, I had to write a paper about a short story from our literature book, and being a sci-fi nerd I chose 'The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas' by Ursula K. LeGuin. So you should follow the link and read it. It's only about 5 pages long and it's really really really really really good. Also, my paper really really really really won't make sense if you haven't read it. I assure you that it also is really really really good, and I've taken out all of the really reallys that were in it, beefing up the word count, so that now it is really much shorter than it was.

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The Ones Who Analyze Omelas

      The symbolism in 'The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas' by Ursula K. Le Guin is so pervasive that the task becomes one of winnowing out possibilities rather than trying to beef up a thin critique. Therefore in one sense I've picked an easy target, but in another, I'm using LeGuin's story to attempt an explanation of humanity itself. One thing is for certain: the story is compelling and speaks to your emotions in the same way that a disturbing dream feels full of meaning yet when examined more closely becomes detailed with uncertainties.

      Le Guin's writing style is delightful, and if you know anything about me, you know that I am far too cool to use that word lightly. A life size model of Candy Land constructed with real gingerbread is delightful. Bleh. But what other adjective can you use for a line such as this one, following after two pages describing the sickly-saccharine joys of Omelas? "I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don't hesitate." (LeGuin) This remarkable ability of hers to not only create a world for her fable, but to make the reader ruefully complicit in its design, makes lesser writers tremble in awe.

      Ruefully? Well, you shall see why I chose that word. Omelas is a dystopian place where a child playing the flute is as religious as an orgy, where everyone is happy and fulfilled and guiltless. Except for the child in the basement whose dehumanization every single Omelasian is ruefully complicit in. In exchange for the prosperity of the city, there must be a victim, a scapegoat to take all of the guilt and horrors upon itself without even the balm of understanding why.

      You see, what is interesting about this story is that Le Guin shows us how we are not satisfied with happiness unless there is something sinister also. She doesn't merely tell us that this is so, she shows us by first boring us with a tale of jolly old Utopia, and then pulling the rug out by titillating us with a horrifying conundrum. It is a compelling argument that appeals directly to one's instincts rather than to one's intellect.

      At first read-through, what I took away from the shocking ending of this story was that the moral position belonged to those who walked away from Omelas. By refusing to participate in a society that allowed such travesty, they were posing a rebuke towards those who choose to stay, live with the horror, and reap the rewards. The place where they go is indescribable, apparently, by an author who just spent a mere five pages describing as complex a moral quandary as one could imagine. This confused me for a few moments, and then I realized that it didn't matter. The ones who walked away from Omelas are assholes, too. What good does merely walking away do? They're not much different from those who stayed. The child still lives in an oubliette of pain and loneliness, and both parties remain aware of this and both parties choose to do nothing to change it. You could argue that the leavers are cowards: At least the stayers are willing to live with their choices.

      Of course if instead of leaving, if just one of them chose to free the child, society comes crumbling down, right? Well this is where it ceases to be a useful allegory, in my opinion. The Penn State scandal involving Jerry Sandusky, Mike McQueary and Joe Paterno illustrates why. Science Fiction writer John Scalzi on his blog, referencing Le Guin's short story, says:

      "At Pennsylvania State University, a grown man found a blameless child being put through hell. Other grown men learned of it. Each of them had to make their choice, and decide, fundamentally, whether the continuation of their utopia - or at very least the illusion of their utopia - was worth the pain and suffering of that one child. Through their actions, and their inactions, we know the choice they made." (Scalzi, 2011)

      At Penn State, the very few people who knew about Sandusky's dark deeds did in fact choose to keep the status quo in order to keep their little football valley happy, like the stayers in Omelas. In real life, such a stark, specific situation is rarely tolerated by larger groups of people; the more people that find out about it the more untenable it becomes.

      However, had they chosen to save the child(ren), had McQueary, Paterno and the school president exposed the Sandusky Demon in their midst, Happy Valley would not have ceased to exist as a Utopia; rather they would have revealed an innate courage and moral strength that everyone mistakenly thought it already possessed. It would have self-corrected from what was in fact a Dystopia into something better approximating the Utopia everyone believed they were already a part of. It was in keeping silent, in knowing the children were being raped and in the doing of nothing that became the downfall of Joe Paterno and the Nittany Lions, quite the opposite of what is proposed in the parable of Omelas.

      In order to make a more reasonable interpretation for Omelas, perhaps it is better to go from the specific to the general, from the deductive to the inductive. For instance: The relationship between people in the United States who live in prosperity and the people who live in poverty. The people above the poverty line know there are people in their country, in their towns and cities even, who do not have enough money to have their basic needs met. Of these people, it is estimated by the National Center for Children in Poverty that there are 14 million children in the US below the poverty level. (Vanessa R. Wight, 2010) Poverty contributes to their poor health, increased risk of mental health problems, shorter life expectancy rates, and fewer educational opportunities. In essence, we are living in Omelas. We know, and we do nothing. If we're not actively engaged in freeing these children, we're enjoying our happy lives at their expense. However, as a perfect allegory the story fails again because there is no walking away from it; we either help the children or we don't.

      When Le Guin wrote this story, the War on Poverty in the US was petering out. After decades of US policy from FDR to Johnson focused on helping the underserved in this country, the pendulum swung. People started to deride the Welfare State, and they still do. In fact, the War on Poverty is a thing of the past now. But in 1975, Le Guin was in the throes of the backlash. Omelas still exists, only now we look at it philosophically and say it's a statement on happiness, which can't exist without despair. So it is possible that Le Guin was actually being a little more specific with her penned up child who is described a lot like the images of children living in poverty in Africa. "It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes... Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually." Yet even here I cannot understand what those who walk away are supposed to represent, not to mention that if starving African children were suddenly no longer starving, it is unlikely that it would destroy our civilization.

      Ultimately, I suspect that it is not meant to be an allegory for any particular human endeavor. I believe that it is meant as a parable of human psychology itself. Carl Jung once analyzed a seemingly normal man, who had a dream in which "he saw--precisely in the middle of the room--something white on the floor. As he approached he discovered that it was an idiot child of about two years old. It was sitting on a chamber pot and had smeared itself with feces." (Jung, 1983, pp. 157-158) This, to Jung, represented a severe psychosis buried deep within the man. Perhaps the child in Omelas, sitting in its own excrement, is the psychotic id of humanity, something of which we are all aware yet can do nothing about. Trying to free a part of your id, especially if it is psychotic, would certainly destroy any ego normalcy you'd managed to achieve. "When he told me of the dream, I realized that his normality was a compensation. I had caught him in the nick of time, for the latent psychosis was within a hair breadth of breaking out and becoming manifest." (Jung, 1983, p. 158) Jung quickly ended his psychoanalysis of the man and lied to him about the dream's true meaning, in order to keep the demon in the bottle. Such is the way of the Omelasians.

      If viewed in this light, the ones who walk away from Omelas are a question posed by Le Guin: What if humanity could leave behind the dark psychotic child covered in shit in the deepest dark of our collective unconscious? Is that place even comprehensible? Would it be a wonderful place, or even worse madness? We know that "rescuing ", or "releasing" our psychotic nature could doom civilization, and so we keep it bottled up. Perhaps walking away represents evolving past humanity's psychotic tendencies, which is why Le Guin "cannot describe it at all," and supposes that "it is possible that it does not exist." Evolving beyond the demons in our collective id would take us to a place where it is questionable whether we'd any longer be human.

 

Works Cited

Jung, C. (1983). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Great Britain: Flamingo.

LeGuin, U. K. (1975). The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. In X. K. Gioia, Backpack Literature Fourth Edition.

Scalzi, J. (2011, November 10). Omelas State University. Retrieved September 20, 2012, from Whatever: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2011/11/10/omelas-state-university/

Vanessa R. Wight, M. C. (2010, January). Who are America's Poor Children? Retrieved 09 21, 2012, from National Center for Children in Poverty: http://www.nccp.org/publications/pub_912.html

Area 48... Area 49... Area 50... Area 51! Ready Or Not, Here I Come!

    So leapfrogging back over the last inexplicable post, remember when I said that we go to Europe for castles, history, sexy accents and beer, and that they come here for the amazing landscapes, New York City, sexy accents, and... um. Definitely not the beer? Well, Death Valley has a castle for those of us who can't go to Europe whenever we want, and in case Europeans get homecastlesick. On our way out the next morning (after a fabulous night in the 50s-fancy Furnace Creek Inn thanks to a room upgrade) we hit Scotty's Castle.

    Scotty was a con man who convinced some rich dude to invest in his non-producing gold mine, and the rich guy built the place so he could be near his investment. By the time that the gold mine fell through and Scotty had disappeared, Rich Dude had discovered that the desert was good for his health, so he stayed.

    Interesting place, but not so interesting that we wanted to pay $30 to take a tour. We left Death Valley and took the sceneic drive back to Las Vegas, revisiting a cool place I went to once before...

    Yup. That small outpost of humans just outside of Area 51, Rachel Nevada. In fact the long route from Death Valley goes north, east, and then south for about 300 miles and circumnavigates the gigantic military installation which houses Area 51 as well as the Tonopah Test Range where if you look at it from google maps, you can see the hundreds of gigantic craters left from the nuclear bomb tests they were doing all throughout the 50s.

    The road that travels along the north end of Nellis Air Force Base, State Route 375, is known as the Extraterrestrial Highway.

    Of course we stopped in at my favorite American diner, the Little A'Le'Inn, for lunch. Damn fine cuppa coke, alienburger, and shoestring fries.

    On the last occasion I visited Rachel, I was stopping in at the Inn when this crazy ass Donnie Darko-lookin' storm rolled in out of nowhere, and I got a cool shot similar to this of this tow truck and Inn sign out front.

    After lunch, I chatted up the employees and asked them if they'd mind if I published the shot, if I ever had the oportunity. There's this whole thing about property releases that the sign in the photo necessitates. So the owner, Pat Travis, was in and she came out and asked to see the picture. I pulled out my laptop and showed it off:

    And she said she'd sign a release on the condition that I send her a copy to hang in the diner! She may have simply been being polite, but she does have a lot of stuff hanging on her walls in there so there's a good chance that any future visitors will see my picture in there. And in any case she signed the back of a card for me so, it's a win-win.

    From there, Julie and I headed over to Area 51.

    The famous black mailbox. It's funny because lore had it that it was some sort of secret drop-off box for Area 51, when in fact it's just a mailbox for a local rancher named Steve Medlin. He has had to take extreme measures to make it secure because people keep vandalizing it; he's repainted it since the last time I was here.

    And then the 5 or 7 mile dirt road journey to the anti-climactic border of Area 51.

    I have this juvenile glee for taking pictures of signs that say photography prohibited, and then pulling out my zoom lens for close-ups of seeeeeecret things. Like this strange alien-shaped spy device looking down on us from a hilltop.

    Or these creepy guys in this creepy truck looking down at us through creepy binoculars from a creepy hilltop.

    Rumor has it that if you step one toe over the border into Area 51, these guys will rush down and arrest the fuck out of you and take you to a local county jail, where you have to pay a $500 fine. Kind of not so scary... If I had a bunch of money and I wanted to risk losing my job I'd seriously consider making a break for it, just for laughs. I've been cuffed by military types before; it's more funny than intimidating.

Spoiler Alert! Surprise Surgeries Lead To A Detailed 'Rogue Moon' Book Report

I did wind up getting surgery on my hand; that's one of my before x-ray shots there. I don't think it's narcissistic to post it because it looks cool. See the break on the far right? That's my 5th metacarpal and I now have what looks like a drywall screw and a metal twist-tie holding the bone together. I can't wait to get my copy of those x-rays.

Top view. Thank the *FSM for keyboards, because I don't think writing by hand would be possible with that shattered thing. Did I mention that I'm totally high right now? I had my knee surgery yesterday, and today I am way drugged up on many many pain killers, which are not really stopping the pain so much as making me feel dopey, loquacious, and ready to write a post. According to my boss, who is awesome, I won't be working for a long long while. Which I think many people would be okay with, however I'm really going to miss the travel. But acl replacement surgery is a serious business, I'm told. Bending it will be out of the question for a few months. I'd really rather not spend this post complaining about how my life is going to suck and be different now with far less travel for a while at least, so I thought I'd do a book report post.

I recently acquired the seventy-ish books in the excellent Sci-Fi Masterworks series, which is a series of some of the awesomest sci-fi books ever. Some of my favorites are on the list, but there are many I've never read, and many many that I'd never even heard of. I've been wanting to read them for a while, but until my recent injuries I hadn't the time. Now, I'm all dove in.

'Rogue Moon' by Algis Budrys is bizarre. It was written in 1960, well before the moon landing, and part of what he did in the novel was to envision a future version of Man's eventual moon exploration. In Rogue Moon, we don't use rocket ships to get there, we use what is essentially a beam machine like in Star Trek, but with a few upsetting differences. What the transporter does is, it picks apart and reads every single atom in the object to be teleported and in this process, destroys it. It then sends an electronic signal with every single bit of information about the object's atomic structure to a receiver on the moon, which then breaks down local raw material (moon rocks, i.e.) and reconfigures the atoms from said material to match the signal's specifications exactly. What this means for a human transported this way is that he is actually killed by this machine, reduced to atomic slag. The copy of the human that is then assembled on the moon is so exact that his brain's electrical currents, neurons, etc. contain the exact personality and memories of the original.

The reason men are travelling to the moon in the novel is that there is an artifact of unknowable properties on some acreage on the backside of the moon which, when entered, becomes some sort of bizarre human killing game. If you move the wrong way in the wrong spot, you are killed in a horrible fashion. If you get through one area, the next has its own rules that will also kill you gruesomely. It is not known if it is a natural phenomenon, an alien artifact, a higher dimensional highway intersection, or what. Man's discovery of it is compared to a small beetle who inadvertently walks into a disposed tomato sauce can on the ground. The beetle can't understand why he gets trapped in there, nor can he know if someone has placed it there to torment him, or if it has merely been discarded and forgotten there having nothing to do with him, or even whether it is a natural or artificial construct. Beetles are ignorant of tomato cans and lack the intelligence to comprehend them, and humans are ignorant of this artifact and lack both the intelligence and the context to navigate it. It was impossible to study in any meaningful manner, until...

An accidental discovery. A second receiver is built on Earth, in the same laboratory as the transporter in order that the destroyed man might continue his life on Earth, even if only as a copy. If a man is destroyed, and the resulting signal goes out to both receivers, there are a few seconds of confusion: The copy on the moon and the copy on Earth share perceptions for just a few seconds. In other words, the Earth copy actually sees what the Moon copy is up to because their brains are identical, and action-at-a-distance between them seems to be a consequence. But only for a few seconds as, once the copies adjust to their different surroundings, they cease to be identical and go on their separate perception ways.

So an idea is tested and the Earth receiver is outfitted with a sensory deprivation tank, so that the Earth copy is created directly inside of it. Since he has no overt incoming sensations, he is able to stay in sync with the Moon copy for a much longer time, though not indefinitely as even in a sensory deprivation tank the small differences in perception begin to break the connection.

However when the moon copy is sent into the artifact to explore, and when he dies horribly, the Earth copy is pulled screaming mad from the deprivation tank, and is unable to communicate what happened. So a certain type of man is needed, one who not only has a death wish, but who will not go insane after dying, coming back, and immediately reliving a new death horror every day.

Such a man is found... And then the character stuff is almost as insane as the plot. As I said it was written in the Mad Men decade and every single male character in the book hates himself, and hates everyone around him too. There is a constant war of sizing up, testing weak spots, and ridiculous posturing over one woman in particular who is an emasculating mega-bitch in her own right. The only exception is the only other female character in the book, whose only purpose is to listen to the main character's extravagantly long monologues about what makes himself tick and then inexplicably to tell him she loves him. She has no personality and in fact seems to have no last name.

It's here that I'll have to admit that I have not finished the book, but despite the extreme bafflement and irritation that I experience in trying to understand the childish mentality of fictional 1960's so-called Homo-sapien, I'm really enjoying it. A lot of writers from those mid decades seem to use very similar character ideas of people; using pop psychology in fiction was all the rage, and it seems as though it was usually about pissing contests, ego-trips, and makin' love to brainless women, man. Even so, the lousy mores of those old battles of the sexes can't obfuscate the overall bonkers yet thought-provoking plot. 

*Flying Spaghetti Monster

Roswell Does NOT In Fact End Very Well, Futurama.

"The only thing that scares me more than space aliens is the idea that there aren't any space aliens. We can't be the best that creation has to offer. I pray we're not all there is. If so, we're in big trouble." - Ellen DeGeneres

Third trip to New Mexico is the charm! Roswell, baby. Actually it wasn't all that. I mean, it's cool to be able to say that I went, but other than the UFO Museum and Research center, there's not a lot going on there.

Not that, as a town, they don't embrace the hell out of their notoriety. Visitors are, after all, welcome.

The whole town has crap like that all over the place. Alien head lampposts and see the mailbox?

They need to take a little more pride in their place in history.

But what kills me is that the UFO crash didn't even happen at Roswell, rather 30 miles North closer to a town named Corona. But the military base where the investigation went out from was in Roswell, so there you go.

The museum was... well full of things like this. There is a LOT of reading material in the research room, but who has time for all of that when you're just using up some free time on a work assignment? Hell, who has time for that unless you're totally obsessed anyway?

Not that I'm not intensely curious. But I'm in the camp of people who don't really think that any information that is available to the public can point with any certainty to anything, well, for certain.

I've just finished reading that new book on Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen, and nothing in it made me feel any differently. It's an excellent book, well written and full of information about Area 51 that I didn't know before, including the U2 and OXCART spy plane dramas, but her conclusion about what the Roswell incident was about is a bit... well all she's doing is telling us what some guy who used to work there told her what he was told it was.

Which, if you've read anything about the book online, you'll know is that it was a technologically advanced hover saucer piloted by surgically altered retarded children (altered by none other than Joseph Mengele himself) sent by Joseph Stalin as both a psy-op to induce panic in America and to send a message to Eisenhower that he had wack Nazi technology at his disposal too, so what up?

She calls this a simpler, more Occam's Razor-like explanation than an extra-terrestrial crash landing, but I'm not so sure about that. This explanation leaves a lot of other questions; if Stalin had such advanced hover technology back in '47, and was able to penetrate American airspace with such ease, why wasn't this technology used again or since? I'm not sure that we could have won the cold war if they were that far ahead of us in stealth technology.

Anyway, I'm not saying I believe it was an alien crash. More likely it was something we were working on, and every bit of cover and disinformation ever released about it is just that, including very probably Annie's findings. One disturbing thing she says in the book is that the real reason Area 51 has been kept so secret all these years is because atrocities in the name of National Security have been going on there since the 50's, including human experimentation. I suppose the people involved would rather the public speculated endlessly about Aliens and/or Joseph Mengele than consider for a moment that a US Government-sanctioned continuation of Nazi experiments might be going on. In fact, I much prefer to believe that it is Extraterrestrial in nature.

Knowing what we know about how the corporate-controlled military-industrial complex of a government that we have operates in public, however, I shudder to think what the reality is about how they operate in private.

They're not the Aliens man, we're the Aliens.

In Another Universe, This Post Is About This Universe. (Where This Post Is About Another Universe, Where This Post Is About This Universe...∞

I want to do a book report on Brian Greene's new publication in the worst way, but I'm not sure that I am capable of it. I used to read popular science books quite regularly, and I'd realized that it's been years since those days at about the same time that 'The Hidden Reality' caught my eye. As I was going through it I realized that reading, and keeping pace with, popular science texts is a skill which must be practiced, especially if one is not particularly well trained in physics.

That's not to say that he doesn't do a great job of explaining the concept behind 9 different types of multiple/parallel Universes quite engagingly; he does. It's more that, once I put the book down for a few minutes after every couple of pages to think about the implications of whatever mind-blowing concept he's introduced, the particulars begin to drain away because my poor little head is not lately used to holding on to the strange and complicated concepts behind Infinity, Relativity, Quantum physics, and String Theory.

However I'm going to try because I feel that my motive in writing about this book is more an effort to hang on as best as I am able to the understanding of a beautiful dream that fades quickly after waking than an attempt to convince anyone else to read it. Of course after completing that last sentence, I've sat and stared at the book cover for about ten minutes trying to figure out how to start. Sigh.

So here then; let's begin with the apology. Mr. Greene himself goes to great lengths in the book to make the reader understand that, at the moment, no versions of the multiverse which he posits are actually provable with hard data, and therefore may fall slightly outside the boundary of science. I say slightly, because though their detection may currently lie beyond our best detectors, they are in fact unavoidable outcomes of certain aspects of science which ARE scientifically sound, mathematically speaking.

As a comparison, when Einstein published his theory of General Relativity the technology available at the time was not capable of disproving his math. He came up with that theory using creative visualization, math and perspiration. And whatever other tools of genius he had at his disposal. But he himself did not go out and measure the Cosmic Background Radiation which ultimately helped to prove his theory correct. Now I'm not comparing Brian Greene or any other String Theorist to Einstein, (and neither was Greene in his book) merely the scientific process itself which is at work here. If you follow the math it leads to amazing places which, more often than you might think, describes the cosmos as it is in reality, even though it may also lead beyond all common sense. So this exploration of the side effects and the possibilities of infinity, string theory and math is extremely valid science, even if in the end it turns out that they've missed something and there are other things at work. You have to explore every avenue if you want to find out what's actually out there.

So why bother getting all excited over Parallel Universes if there's a chance it's inaccurate? Because it's exciting. And because, all things being equal, it's probably not inaccurate. It is currently science's best guess, much as Relativity and Evolution once were, and therefore worth a lengthy consideration.

So I'll start with the multiverse which I understand the most clearly, naturally. He calls it the Quilted Multiverse and here is how it works: There is some question in the cosmologist community whether the space that we inhabit is either very, very, very freaking large but ultimately finite, or whether it is in fact infinite. It all depends on the overall shape of the universe, which we don't yet know. (It's important to have a good grasp of the concept of infinity for this one, which I am lucky to have in some finite degree thanks to Rudy Rucker. His book 'White Light' is a rollicking exploration of infinity, and with extremely visual storytelling really helped me to glimpse what mathematicians actually mean when they use the term infinity. I highly recommend it.)

At any rate, If our Universe in fact turns out to be infinite (as the current trend of thought among cosmologists apparently believe is the likeliest scenario) then there is almost certainly another messiestobjects out there, writing up a book report about a publication by Brian Browne, (the last name of the author perhaps being the only difference between that Earth and this one) and positing some strange world where a version of himself is typing up a book report on a publication by a Brian Greene. In fact, there would be an infinite amount of Earths out there, that look just like ours. And there would be an infinite amount of other possible Earths as well. One, perhaps, that was solely inhabited by shrimp. Or one with no shrimp. Let your imagination go wild, like mine!

The reason why this would be so is simply statistical. Matter is evenly distributed throughout the visible Universe on very large scales. What that means is, you can take a really big box, say about 100 million light years cubed and chunk it down here, then weigh all of the matter in it. Then pick it up and chunk it down over there, again weighing all of the matter. Do this in several locations throughout the Universe and you will find that each box-full of matter will weigh in at about equal amounts, and it will be so all throughout the Universe. The idea here is that while matter may be evenly spread throughout an infinite Universe, there is a finite amount of forms that matter can take.

So the implication of this is that matter, as much of it as there is, can only arrange itself in so many ways. It's like a deck of cards; there are 52 cards in a deck, and 52 cards can be arranged in 10⁶⁷ unique ways. That number fully written out is 80,658,175,170,943, 878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000  which is obviously a really huge number. However, once you have arranged those 52 cards in that many unique ways, the cycle will repeat and you will start to get duplicate arrangements. Of course, some arrangements are more likely than others, so you will have odd random assortments of cards duplicate more often than you will see the deck fall out completely arranged from aces to Kings in all four suits, but as unlikely as that is, it will happen eventually.

The same is true for the arrangement of matter. In the entirety of our visible Universe, there are about 10¹⁰¹²² possible particle configurations. Which again, is a totally inconceivable number yet is definitely a finite number. Once you've reached every possible unique combination, the patterns will begin to repeat, and repeat infinitely. Thus, messyobjects is out there, messierobjects, and even an evenmoremessiestobjects, all trying to say hi to me right now. Since our brains and life experiences are nearly completely identical and in some cases absolutely identical, I can say hi to them and they've received the message! I know this because I've received their message, having sent one myself. We're totally braintext messaging across the infinite light years right now. They say hi back, and ask how's the wife and pets and I say oh, the same as yours, pretty much. ad infinitum. (Of course it's not a very interesting conversation, having identical thoughts and all, but there's always a downside.)

Whew. That was the first and easiest version of a multiverse in this book, and believe me they get far more difficult to grasp. The existence of the Quilted Multiverse depends only on discovering the shape of the Universe we currently reside in without calling any of the more unproven forms of science into the matter, but it is important here to note that Brian Greene and other String Theorists did not go out looking for multiverses. They did not read some ridiculous New Age drama and say "Oy, how can we finagle the math to come up with parallel dimensional portal-thingies in order to dazzle the public?" No, the attempt to understand actual observed phenomena through the framework of String Theory led them mathematically all on its own to many other different types of possible multiverses.

The Inflationary Multiverse, which better fits the definition of a multiverse in my extremely humble opinion, is one in which bits of our universe break off and inflate into bubble universes of their own, our Universe having broken off from another "larger" one at its own birth. There are also the Brane, Cyclic, Landscape, and Quantum types of multiverses. I like the Quantum Multiverse; it basically goes back to the Schrödinger's Cat thing, and Quantum uncertainty.

(jpeg of a print by Jie Qi) In case you are not familiar with Schrödinger's Cat, it is a Thought Experiment designed to help one visualize how Quantum Particles behave. The way it goes is, you put a cat in a box, close the lid, and have a radioactive atom timed to decay and open a flask of poison. In the quantum world, there is an equal possibility of the decay happening and causing the cat to be dead or alive when you open the lid. Until you open the lid, the cat is actually in an uncertain state, being both alive and dead at the same time which would be an unsettling thing to witness, I'm sure. The traditional outcome of this little game is that when you open the box, the probability wave collapses and the cat becomes one or the other. Thus the very act of observation determines the ultimate quantum state. (For a more accurate and less confused rundown of the thought experiment in mid-twentieth century science nerd jargon, visit the wikipedia page on the subject)

This is weird. But this type of behavior has been observed in quantum particle physics, hence the Quantum Uncertainty Principle and it does not apply to the world of things of our size, only to the realm of the very, very small. There is a gap between the quantum scale and ours where Quantum Theory breaks down and reality then becomes guided by Newtonian physics and Relativity. If you add String Theory math to this experiment, you can bridge the gap and in fact the cat is actually both alive and dead for realsies, in two different universes! Long, complex, nearly-incomprehensible-to-a-non-String-Theorist story short, the reason that Quantum particles behave so oddly is that we are seeing them play out every possible state of existence across a multiverse.

As an interesting aside, that particular multiverse explanation is where the idea comes from that every time one makes a choice, universes diverge and a separate reality for each choice carries on it's course. It may sound a bit hippie or New Age-ish, but if String Theory turns out to be correct, this in fact may actually be happening, right now, right next to you.

Another multiverse is the Holographic Multiverse, which is conceptually easy, but also very hard to explain the whys and wherefores of. This one is due to the nature of information and how it is stored in the universe, and when looked at closely begins to look a bit as though all matter as we see it is actually a projection of another type of matter on a distant quantum dimensional surface. In this multiverse all of our actions, in fact all interaction between all forms of matter everywhere is a shadow play. We're hand puppets. Don't ask me to explain the science though. It has something to do with Black Holes, very tall drinking straws, and math. Beyond that, I haven't retained a thing. Damn it.

The final multiverse of the book is the so-called Ultimate Multiverse, a distinction earned due to a new twist on the Anthropic Principle, which is the idea that asking the question "How is it possible that our planet, our very universe have the conditions necessary to bring forth life?" is meaningless because life evolves in the place to which it is suited. In other words, we are here both to ask the question and be the answer. I like this one for purely philosophical reasons, as it's an (yet another) answer of sorts in the debate between religion and science, at least for a certain set of debate points. The religious often like to point out that the Universe, Life, and Everything are far too complex to have "just happened" which is about as far as their understanding of the sciences of Cosmology and Evolution usually go. A very sad, limited viewpoint indeed.

At any rate, the Ultimate Multiverse answers the question of why the Physical Laws of our particular Universe are just right in order for galaxy, star, planet, and life formation to "just happen". Because in an infinite multiverse, where every possible Universe that can exist does exist, one with our physical laws and conditions for life merely becomes an inevitability, not a miracle. Therefore there is no "why" of existence, merely the statistical likelihood of it. You'll note that the Ultimate Multiverse differs from the Quilted Multiverse in the sense that, with the latter, there may be an infinite set of volumes with repeating particle configurations, allowing for infinite versions of themselves, however they are all still set in the same Universe as we are and subject to the same physical laws, merely separated by distances too large for any technology to ever cross. The Quilted version answers the question of why there is life on Earth, but does not answer the why of the overall conditions in our Goldilocks Universe and its particular laws of physics being just right in order to allow life to come about in the first place. The Ultimate Multiverse does, however. It states that while there are Universes like ours with just the right amount of density for galaxies, stars, and planets to form, there are also an infinite amount of stillborn ones. Our Universe is the Royal Flush that comes along once in a blue moon... or rather once in a Blue Iteration.

There are solid mathematical underpinnings to the Ultimate Multiverse, as well as for all of the others, but I'm not going there. If you want to try to understand them, or any of the other concepts, I suggest that you pick up a few popular science books and get cracking. 'The Hidden Reality' is wonderful, but unless you've already attempted to come to grips with the ideas behind Relativity, Infinity, or Quantum Physics, you might want to get a more basic picture of the Universe first. 'Cosmos' by Carl Sagan is an excellent place to start for basic Cosmology, that Rucker book I already pimped for Infinity, and Brian Greene's earlier work 'The Elegant Universe' is a great introduction to String Theory. So get busy with the head scratching, braniac!

Another great way to contemplate infinity, by the way, is to obsessively-compulsively watch fractal zoom videos. I've posted about fractals before, here and here. I don't know how, but I'm sure that fractal math figures in to multiverses somehow. This one magnifies the Mandelbrot set 10²⁷⁵ times, and ends up at a copy of itself. Apropos.

 

I Scold Humanity With Science Fiction

If you haven't read 'Childhood's End' by Arthur C. Clarke, I'm about to spoil it for you so continue reading at your own discretion. Childhood's End blew my mind when I first read it many many years ago; it opened my eyes to exactly what Science Fiction was capable of. Before that I was more of a Fantasy geek; I really enjoyed the epic battles of Good Vs. Evil and knew very well how a good fantasy novel could speak to the moral center of your mind. I tended to feel that Science Fiction was a bit stupid; I loved Star Wars but knew that that was essentially a western in space. I hadn't really read much Science Fiction because why waste time with that when I could re-read the Robert Jordan series?

At any rate, I found myself reading Childhood's End and as I said, it changed a few things for me. It's about a race of aliens who appear in a ship one day, and decree an end to all strife and warfare on Earth. Anyone who ignores the warning and starts some international bullying gets a super blast of the alien laser canon of doom from above. It turns out that the aliens play the role of a sort of galactic nursemaid; they are here to supervise humanity's transition to the next step of our evolution to join the galaxy's more civil population. There are a few other things going on in the book but that's enough to be going on with for our purposes.

With all of the 2012 insanity going on these days, and that deeply stupid looking disaster movie exploiting people's irrational fears of the Mayan prophecy, I really think that someone should make a movie of Childhood's End and update it to tie in with 2012. For the record, I don't buy for a second that 2012 is going to be any more dramatic than Y2K was, or the 7th Day Adventist's original belief that the Return of Christ was to occur in 1844. Even the Mayans, contrary to popular belief, don't predict disaster so much as the end of the world as we know it. They saw something more like a sort of renaissance of humanity, or perhaps a disaster or event which leads to a new state of mind. This is a much nicer thought and Childhood's End is an apt vision for this belief. The novel was originally published in 1953, based on a short story that Clarke wrote in 1950, and to the best of my knowledge and research he did not intend for it to have anything to do with the Mayan prophecies of 2012; however it seems to be a perfect fit.

I don't believe that a pleasant state of mind is going to occur in 2012, either, especially if that nitwit Sarah Palin actually succeeds in being nominated for the Republican presidential bid. However I do believe that should humanity survive such a disaster, someday we will reach the next stage in our evolution and it's far more exciting to entertain such notions than it is to watch apocalypse porn. It's time to put aside childish things, humanity.

Snapshots From The Forbidden Zone

I'm in California! For work. Not for fun, of course. Work work work. Don't have time for a full post, (too busy um, working) but here are some black and white photos I took today. Guess where I am.

They film movies here all the time. Planet of the Apes, and Star Trek V, for instance. I think that Sigourney Weaver and William Shatner live in a cave out here somewhere, so that the commute to work is easier.

It's a place 20 miles outside of Ridgecrest, California in the Mojave Desert by the Sierra Nevadas called the Trona Pinnacles. It's totally wild out here.

But I have to get going... I'm out here for another week or so, lots to do. Here's a color photo I took of my first up close look at the actual Pinnacles. I have a mess of them of course, but I haven't had time to go through them all yet. I'll post more another time.

And Along Came A Transrealist

I picked up this book relatively randomly a few weeks ago. Stuff of this nature always piques my curiosity because I like both science fiction and popular science. (Also, I saw it sitting next to a new book of transcripts from some lectures that Carl Sagan gave in Scotland in 1985 which has recently been published by his wife, which is what originally caught my eye.) It's a book of essays by various pundits about what humanity could possibly look like if we were still around in, well, Year Million.

It's not overall a great book; I mean, I thoroughly enjoyed it but it's a bit stale in many ways. Naturally, it's difficult for anyone to guess what even the very near future is going to look like. For instance, go into a Starbucks on lunch hour in any major city, listen to a conversation that the nerdy computer types are having about the drudgery of their IT jobs, and try to imagine what that conversation would have sounded like to you back in say, 1985. I'm sure even Carl Sagan would have been like, "What the crap are you maniacs talking about?" Words that mean one thing back then have taken on whole new meanings in light of technological advances, so to a 1985er, the words might even sound familiar, but the ways in which they were being put together might remind him of a conversation in a particularly dire lunatic asylum. For instance: "I was trying to download some music files onto my cellphone, but Apple's damn proprietary iTunes system keeps messing me up. I've got to figure out a way to hack that shit." Think about what that sentence could possibly mean in a pre-home computing world. It's English, but it's nonsense.

Stanislaw Lem actually wrote a really excellent book on that subject called "Return From The Stars", which in a nutshell is about a Spaceman who returns to Earth after a 100 year mission only to find that he doesn't understand anything that is going on. Looking at the problem in reverse, I just re-watched that fabulous David Mamet movie, Glengarry Glen Ross, which is about the cutthroat business of real estate sales in, I assume, the late 80's early 90's. These salesmen kept having to make telephone calls to potential sales leads via pay phone, and in one Scene Jack Lemmon is calling his family and telling them he won't be able to be reached later and I kept thinking, what? Why are they bothering with pay phones? Can't he be reached by his cell? Major plot hole. It's amazing to me how anachronistic those pay phones seemed, and that it took me a beat or two to catch on to the time frame. I think it was the combination of familiarity and a decade of perspective... I've seen that movie before and all the actors in it are pertinent to my adolescent movie experience, yet give it ten years and whammo, weirdness.

So you can see, the idea of trying to look a million years into the future seems at first glance a bit useless. One major technological advance and wham, everything changes. But in a weird sort of way, looking a million years into the future might actually be easier than looking a decade into the future. You have to ask larger, less precise questions such as, Will we have colonized other planets, or entire galaxies by then? Will our energy source be entire suns, entire star clusters, or dark energy itself? Will we be human, something more evolved, or will our personalities be downloaded into huge programs in which our thought processes will be in effect immortal, and capable of computations greater than our current meat-brains can presently conceive? Well, all of these possibilities are addressed, of course. Some of the essays are more successful at getting the points across than others. But here's the reason I really loved this book:

There are about 14 essays in this book, and the first 10 are all asking questions along these lines. Futures are spun out for us that to a Borg seem like heaven. We have deconstructed entire planetary systems and turned them into so-called Dyson Spheres: technological monstrosities made of "computronium" which would make the Death Star run away with its tiny little tail between its legs. We turn ourselves into gigantic computer minds, more capable of exploring the infinite Universe than in our present, limited meat bodies of mortality. All of which are not necessarily impossible ideas, they just seem to us now as that airplane seemed to those people from the last of the uncontacted tribes in South America. Or perhaps they are impossible; it's a book of speculation, after all. But then, along comes chapter 11. And who is it written by? Why, none other than the greatest speculative mind of our time, Rudy Rucker. I haven't said it enough lately; I love that guy. He is the great-great-great-grandson of the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Not that that matters; his own body of work is genius. He's a well respected mathematician and philosopher in his own right. But I've written enough about him in the past, so I'll spare you.

Except that, his essay in this book is why I love the book and why I think he's the greatest, in a nutshell. All these impressive, impossible to fully comprehend, yet fundamentally bleak views of the future of humanity, and along comes a transrealist. His essay is about how all of that mechanical technology is a real downer and totally beak. It's a great book because it shows the real value of genius, standing him up next to the more mainstream and dull views of the status quo. I'm going to quote him now:

 "Ultrageek advocates of the computronium Dyson-shell scenario like to claim that nothing need be lost when Earth [or any other structure] is pulped into computer chips. Supposedly the resulting computronium can run a VR (virtual reality) simulation that's a perfect match for the old Earth. Call the new one Vearth. It's worth taking a moment to explain the problems with trying to replace real reality with virtual reality. We know that our present-day videogames and digital movies don't fully match the richness of the real world. What's not so well known is that no feasible VR can ever match nature, because there are no shortcuts for nature's computations. Due to a property of the natural world that I call the "principle of natural unpredictability," fully simulating a bunch of particles for a certain period of time requires using a system using about the same number of particles for about the same length of time. Naturally occurring systems don't allow for drastic shortcuts."
Natural unpredictability means that if you build a computer-simulated world that's smaller than the physical world, the simulation cuts corners and makes compromises, such as using bitmapped wood-grain, linearized fluid dynamics, or cartoon-style repeating backgrounds. Smallish simulated worlds are doomed to be dippy Las Vegas/ Disneyland environments populated by simulated people as dull and predictable as characters in bad novels."

So basically what he's saying is, the physical matter of the Universe is already the most complicated calculation there is, and that any desire on our part to harness it for our own small needs is rather ugly and in the long run diminishing. Not that he doesn't predict amazing possibilities for our future. Due to the high calculation potential of every bit of matter, he predicts something he calls Hylozoism, from the Greek, hyle, matter, and zoe, life. He believes that, given a million years, we'll find a way to wake matter up. As in, making it conscious. So that we can communicate with it. You'll actually be able to talk to walls, and it will be more productive than talking to politicians. He even has a plan for it, involving bending certain spatial topologies utilizing the extra dimensions of space. The benefits of waking matter up are enormous, and too much to go into, but they involve the possibility of teleportation, matter duplication, etc. This is a book report, not the Cliff's Notes. Suffice it to say, Rudy paints a much more incredible, surreal, no, transreal, view of the future, and on top of it, shows how it's just as conceivably possible as the deader versions of the typical futurist. If I could buy stock in Rudy Rucker, I'd grab every share I could, because I have a feeling that his ideas are going to be around for a long long time.

"Lately I've been working to convince myself that everything is a computation."

"It's tedious to watch something very obvious being worked out, like a movie that's not particularly good and after about half an hour you know how it's going to end."

"It's soothing to realize that my mind's processes are inherently uncontrollable."

"If you think of your life as a kind of computation, it's quite abundantly clear that there's not going to be a final answer and there won't be anything particularly wonderful about having the computation halt!"

"Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way."

"Unfortunately our nation, nay, our world, is run by evil morons."

  -Rudy Rucker

Seattle; City Of Science Fiction And Improper Diction

"When I die, I'm donating my body to science fiction."
-Steven Wright

"The future isn't what it used to be."
-Arthur C. Clarke

It's my 200th post! So in honor of this rather meaningless milestone, I traveled all the way out to Washington state just to get this photo of the Space Needle. Well ok, I was forced to be in Seattle for work, but I made the best of a bad situation and toured around the city a bit, and spent some time with Jordan and Alison, friends of mine who live in the area whom I'd known from Germany. Jordan is famous for his dance moves at the Bavarian Biker Fest (and has the neck-scars to prove it!) and Alison is famous for her drunken instigation of little Danish hot dog fights. Also I got to see Emily, another friend from Germany, who was in the area on rather suspicious business one afternoon and who is famous for breaking T-bars over fellow snowboarder's heads in fits of amazing pique. Ah good times, good times.

Anyway, Seattle is a very cool city, although I must say that I'm very disappointed to not have seen one single flannel the entire time I was there! Very sad. It's almost as if, collectively, it is a city ashamed of it's grungy flash in the pan. The absolute COOLEST part of the city, without a doubt, and I'm sure you already know what I'm going to say because it's the coolest thing in the universe (that we know of) and it's in Seattle so of course you know where I'm going; is the Science Fiction Museum.

I was soooooo happy when I realized this place existed, and that I was in Seattle to experience it. This museum kicked so much butt. You weren't allowed to take photos inside, which really really frustrated me. Here I was, in the coolest museum I'd ever been in... and I was impotent. The no photo rule didn't stop me from trying to be all surreptitious of course, but the few shots I managed to sneak wound up coming out rather blurry and not worth keeping, because I was too busy looking around for the mean kling-on security guard. I did keep one or two photos, blurry and badly composed as they are. But I'll get to those in a minute. They had a ton of first edition science fiction classics in there that I would steal in a second. (Uh, if I did that sort of thing, which I don't.) By authors I had been sure that only I knew about. James Blish. Fritz Leiber. Theodore Sturgeon. Stanislaw Lem. Pierre Boulle, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick. And... they were in places of honor. It was like heaven. They even had Iain M. Banks and Vernor Vinge, two of my more modern favorites, along with of course all the big easy ones. Asimov. Clarke. Niven. Anderson. A first edition of Childhood's End, (by Clarke) the first sci-fi novel to blow my mind and which made me ravenous for more. No Rudy Rucker though that I saw... a major oversight.

They had displays of movie items too, of course. Props from famous sci-fi movies and franchises; the dress that Sean Young wore in Blade Runner, a Storm Trooper armor suit, the original model of the Death Star used in Star Wars, (Where the no photo rule would have literally had me pulling out my hair, if I had any. As it was, I was in agony. The security ape would not leave! I think he was on to me.) the little talking bear from A.I., the Terminator robot, Robby the Robot. (Robby the freaking Robot!) Captain Kirk's command chair. Anybody recognize this?

Yes, that's right! It's the Pit Bull. Griff Tannen's anti-gravity skateboard from Back To The Future II. Totally. Sweet.

My favorite thing about the Sci-Fi Museum though is that, you know how in normal like, arty-farty museums, you'll see collections of snooty arty-farty junk, with little plaques next to them that say snooty stuff like "Kindly donated from the prestigious collection of Snooty McVandersnot"? Well, it's only at the Sci-Fi Museum that you'll find Star Wars action figures donated from the collection of Gus Lopez!

Yeah, it says "From the collection of Gus Lopez"... kind of hard to read, I know. But I had Had HAD to get this picture, and I was very nervous that that security clown was going to come around the corner before I got the chance. Plus the light was all dark and science fictiony. Oh well.

After the titillating thrill of the Science Fiction museum, the rest of Seattle rather paled. I re-visited Pike Place (I'd been there about 12 years ago on my way back from Alaska) and had a coffee at the original Starbuck's. I don't like Starbuck's coffee... too acidy. I like my coffee stronger and with the coffee machines having been cleaned out every once in a while. BUT, it's the very first Starbuck's coffee shop ever, it's a great success story, it was right there, and I am a traveling glory-hound, after all.

Oh sure, I did other stuff. I went up the Space Needle, rode a ferry from Bainbridge Island to Seattle, saw the world famous Giant Shoe Museum. Hell I even worked a little. But none of it is really as exciting as, well you know. That awesome genius science fiction museum, of course.

Jordan was kind enough to let me crash at his parent's house (they were on vacation) with him and Alison for a few nights, which saved me a few bucks on a hotel room. Very cool. Good to see them. When old Chiemseers get together, many tales of German hilarity along with German beer will inevitably flow. I flew out of Seattle on the 12th straight down to Fort Lauderdale Florida, where I am at the moment. Again for work. It's rather a hum-drum area... I've been here before, back in January. I just think it's neat I went from one corner of the continental US to the other. What a great job.

Oh, just in case not everybody has noticed, something else happened this past week which made me extreeeeemely happy: The military officer who arrested me in Iraq for being snotty to him found and commented on my blog! Specifically on the original post where I told that story. Nothing has made me that kind of happy for a really long time. You can read the post, his comment, and my response in the original spot, here. I really hope he comes back... unless he's going to arrest me for being snotty to him again of course. I won't be needing any more of that.

Shoes of Mystery? Sheesh.

... But Resistance Is Character-Forming Might Be My Favorite Mind Name

"In all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and in every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots."
-Iain M. Banks

It's time for an ode to another of my favorite Sci-fi authors, Iain M. Banks. The above quote is from one of his novels, Use Of Weapons. What's great about Iain is his use of politics and social structures in front of an unusually intriguing hard sci-fi backdrop. He believes that in space, a form of Anarchistic society is not only desirable, but inevitable and necessary for survival, and to that end he's created a series of novels about a Galactic humanoid race known as The Culture. Rather than boring you with any further descriptions of The Culture, I suggest you follow the link to read a fascinating biography on them, if you care about such things. It's long, but entertaining.

I first discovered him while living in Germany; He's a Scottish author and until recently, his books were relatively unavailable or at least unknown in the US, so I had been surprised to find such a well-regarded sci-fi author with such a large body of work that I hadn't yet heard of. I picked up a book called Excession in the Englischer Book Shop in Munich by the University, and proceeded to be blown away. The main characters are not so much the humans as the spaceships that carried them, which are equipped with Artificial Intelligences known as Minds and are vastly superior to the human minds in both intelligence and humor, with distinct personalities of their own and have names such as Fate Amenable To Change, It's Character Forming, Unacceptable Behaviour, Shoot Them Later, Just Another Victim Of The Ambient Morality, A Series Of Unlikely Explanations, Well I Was In The Neighbourhood, We Haven't Met But You're A Great Fan Of Mine, Inappropriate Response, Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall, Lapsed Pacifist, You May Not Be The Coolest Person Here, Demented But Determined, Charming But Irrational, Hand Me The Gun And Ask Me Again, Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory, Ravished By The Sheer Implausibility Of That Last Statement, All Through With This Niceness And Negotiation Stuff, God Told Me To Do It, and many others of similar ilk. (Actually, some of those names are characters in other Culture books, but I love them.) The humans are essentially benignly looked upon by the ships that carry them in the same way as we look upon our blood cells; part of us and necessary, and we encourage them to be healthy and lead meaningful lives, but we don't let them tell us where to go or what to do, at least not without a vote... Ok there are subtle differences in the two relationships, but you get my meaning. The book was about the discovery of a Trillion-year-old Sun, in a 15 Billion-year-old Universe.

If you're intrigued enough to give him a try, you should start with Consider Phlebas however, which is the first in The Culture sequence and is equally astonishing. See that funnel-looking thing appearing to come off of the planet on the book cover? That's actually part of the planet. Strictly speaking, it's not a planet but a 'ringworld', which concept Iain freely admits to having lifted and adapted from Larry Niven, but it's the adaptation that makes all the difference.

For anyone who is into those 'Halo' video games, apparently it's fairly obvious that they in turn stole quite a few ideas from Iain's books and simply renamed them, without any real original adaptation, but whatever. I've never seen those games, myself, but I understand that they are essentially shoot-em-up games for people who enjoy blowing up aliens. And with that in mind, I'll close with another fabulous quote from Mr. Banks:

"To fully appreciate the beauty of a weapon was to admit to a kind of shortsightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by it's place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation, of weapons was a kind of tragedy."
-from Excession by Iain M. Banks

Whirling Dervishes Eat Haunted Donuts

I'm in Atlanta Georgia and I'm bored. I haven't really had a chance to leave the hotel yet, and even when I get a chance I'm not particularly excited about it. I mean, it's Atlanta. Although, one cool thing, I'm about 3 blocks away from this sweet looking Haunted House, which was rated the #1 Haunted House in America by Hauntworld Magazine! So, I will definitely check that out soon.

Also, I finished reading both of those Rudy Rucker books.  Spacetime Donuts was the first book he ever wrote, but 2nd published after White Light. SD was fantastic. It's about the idea that the Universe is shaped like a donut, so that if you were to shrink infinitely, you'd eventually wind up coming back around to our size. In other words, our Universe is contained within itself, in every atom. The donut analogy as Rudy describes it is this:

Say you have this donut laying flat, and you place a piece of paper on top of it. The points where the paper actually touch the donut form a circle and is our size level. Staying on the surface of the donut but moving towards the center, the hole of the donut, the size of the circle you are on shrinks. That's you shrinking down to the size of molecules, atoms, quarks. Continue around and without going backwards, you wind up growing back up in size until you are back to where you started. It's very fractal. Good timing that I just read that book actually... everything is speaking to me through fractals these days. Rudy is often trying to describe the complex mathematical ideas of infinity through his gonzo transreal stories. My brain actually feels massaged every time I finish one of his books. He's very good at it.

I know I know. You're exhausted with my Rudy Rucker blogs by now. Sorry. Maybe you should get off your butt and read some already, so you'll know how awesome he is, too.

Moving on, I was holding off on this until it actually came to fruition, but it looks like it never will, so... I was contacted last February by someone who works in the Religion and Ethics department of the BBC website. He had stumbled across my video and pictures of the Whirling Dervish ceremony I'd attended in Turkey, and he wanted to use them in a piece he was putting together. I of course was flattered with a much enlarged ego. He'd written to me once or twice to say that he was still working on it, and that it could be a while before it came together, but it's been a really long time now and nothing. They did however put my name and website prematurely on their photo credits page, so I've got that going for me! See here! Scroll down to the M's. Very exciting, very nothing.

On Buying Used Books, or, Revisiting Tired Old Refrains

I haven't actually read this book yet, but I've started it and I'm very excited about it. It's an old Rudy Rucker novel that I picked up used from Amazon. I love this guy.

But my point isn't about Rudy this time. My point is that you should always buy used books when you can. Because they're cheaper. And because they need a home. And because they've already got that nice older book smell, no waiting!

And also because, old books are like a box of chocolates... never mind. I got Spacetime Donuts in the mail a couple of weeks ago, and I never got around to reading it until last night. I'd brought it with me on the last couple of trips I've been on for work, including a two-day trip to Virginia I just got back from, (Traffic was hell on the way back; other than that I have little to report on that one.) but I never got the chance to get to it until now, and when I opened it, a snapshot fell out which I assume was being used as a bookmark. I love when that happens. I mean, it probably sucks to be the guy that sold his old books and then can't figure out what happened to his picture, but bonus for me! So here's the snapshot: (Of course I've scanned it already. All pictures must be scanned. I'm like the photo police.)

Crazy right?! It was someone's personal snapshot of the Dalai Lama! Looks like he took a couple of shots to the arm there. Fight Club Dalai Lama?

I wonder where this was taken? Everybody is Asian, except for the cops... so it could be some American Chinatown somewhere, or it could actually be in Asia, because of the pagoda and the Asians, and maybe the Dalai Lama likes to cart Western-lookin' cops around with him? There's no date stamp on it unfortunately, but it looks at least relatively recent, because he's all old. Still, that dude travels a lot, so there's no knowing.

So what, you really think I'm going to let this post pass without gushing about how awesome Rudy Rucker is? Fat chance! I mean really, he's so cool that even the Dalai Lama hangs around his books all the time, trying to be half as cool. His newest book was recently released, and I'll be bringing it with me to gorge on on my next job, which is likely to be in Atlanta Georgia. A good place for reading, I think. God I love this guy. Seriously, if you still haven't visited Mr. Rucker's work, get 'White Light' now. Right now.

Aw hell, while I'm at it, Gun Club rules the most too. Still.

You're So Vain, I Bet You Think This Post Is About You. Well, It Probably Is.

Morality. It's a sticky question. Take a favorite party ethics question: If you could go back in time and kill Hitler before he got his hands on any sort of power, would you? Yes yes we've all heard this one but bear with me. So, before Hitler got power, let's translate that. Would you choose to make his mother have an abortion? Kill him when he was a baby? A young boy? A student? A depressed beret-wearing drop-out from art school? (Ok I'm not sure he ever wore a beret, but Hitler as disaffected art student cracks me up.) Or do you wait until he's actually done something evil, so he knows why he's being murdered by time-travelling history buffs? You don't want to be likened to George Bush's bumbling pre-emptive personality, after all.

I think that most people would answer that question more or less the same. Wait until the famous Munich beer hall putsch, follow him home that night, drag him into an alley and club him. My only point with all the baby Hitler stuff was that you need to carefully assess the question before making a statement on who, when, and with what you'd consider actually killing a person, whatever his crime. But, the thing is, there are very few people who consider themselves moral that would actually decide to let him live. Well, not the type of people who would hang out at the kind of horrid party where such hackneyed questions were being asked, anyway. But you know, killing someone is pretty heavy stuff, especially when the question is asked of an individual. State-sponsored killing is much tidier, because it's harder for any one person to accept the blame if things get fouled up with death-row victims post-execution such as, say, new evidence leading to innocence. For the record, I am most certainly not suggesting Hitler was innocent.

Now take it a step further. Say an interstellar time traveler (which is actually redundant because due to the vast expanse of space and the Universal speed limit of light, all interstellar travellers are also by definition time travellers. But we're talking about one of 'em coming back to our time from the future, and from far far away, a much trickier proposition than bland 'ol interstellar forward time travel. Have I lost anyone to sleep and drool yet? Or merely lost cool points? If I haven't yet, I'm certainly about to...) shows up at your doorstep and tells you that the human race itself is sort of the Hitler of the Universal community. One day, far in the future, our ancestors take power from the Galactic government and send all of the dirty credit-hogging three-nosed Heebajaxers to concentration death planets, and then move on to the rest of the dirty job-stealing immigrant aliens. According to this interstellar whistle blower, you will be in a position in 5 years to start the nuclear war which will end the human race, thereby saving the future of the universe. (I'm assuming they can't find anyone else to do the job but another human. I don't know why, so don't ask. It's a stupid blog-party question anyway.) Would you do it?

It's essentially the same question as the Hitler question, but, you know, on a bigger, geekier scale. Instead of being asked to kill another human being and saving millions of human lives, you're being asked to kill billions of humans and save gagagooglegazillions of extraterrestrial lives. And you're a human with a moral code, so, do you side with the human race out of loyalty and wish your great-great-great grandchildren well in their galactic killing spree, or make the same decision that your moral Hitler-killing code told you to make? Maybe it's not really such a hard question, because you know, it's kind of silly, but it's a thought experiment. And before anyone asks, no, I am not on any pretty-colour hallucinogens, although I think something I ate at the Macungie diner earlier today might not be agreeing with me. These are the things I think about when sitting on the can and questioning my own moral code and decisions, that's all.

POST SCRIPT PIX: Gary posted a link to the below photo in the comments, and I have no choice, due to cosmic moral obligation, but to add it here. Because it's awesome.

Buy One, Get One Free; One For The Missus And One For You And Me. Or, Books I Read This Summer.

That's right, two fer a dollar. I just thought I'd go on to prove even further how dreary life on vacation on a tropical isle can be by not only posting twice in two days, but by quickly sharing with you the three books I've read this week because there was nothing better to do than sit on the beach and read. Ho hum. If you're as bored as I am, read on, because obviously neither one of us has anything better to do.
The first one was a pleasant surprise; who knew that Nick Cave could write? 'And The Ass Saw The Angel' is a pretty gritty southern gothic (of course it is) novel, and for those of us who love bashing on fundies, it's a tasty treat. I swear I didn't know that when I picked it up. I just thought, Nick Cave wrote a book now? Huh. I want one. And it's really good, too. I'm a little confused about the ending, so perhaps I will have to re-read it one day, or better yet have a conversation with someone who has read it and does understand it. I also read Thomas Pynchon's 'The Crying of Lot 49', because ever since I read 'Infinite Jest' by David Foster Wallace, I've been dying to read 'Gravity's Rainbow' by Pynchon to which it gets alot of comparisons. But 'Gravity's Rainbow' is hugeongous, although not as big as 'Infinite Jest', granted. But I wanted to read something slightly smaller by Pynchon first, just to test the water. And so after reading 'Lot 49', I am definitely queueing up 'Gravity's Rainbow'. Pynchon is hilarious, labrynthine, and ingenious.
I saved my most eagerly anticipated read for last: 'Mathematicians In Love' by Rudy Rucker. Have I said how much I love Rucker? I'm sure I have. Actually it's funny; if I had read Pynchon before I posted about Rucker a few back, I'd have said something inane like: Rucker is a mix of Thomas Pynchon, Douglas Adams, a hyper-perpindiculate writer to Philip K. Dick, and something else all his own because no one else has ever done that. All that being said, 'Mathematicians' isn't his best, I think. So carry on and start with 'White Light', but eventually 'Mathematicians' is still totally worth it. It's about what happens when two friendly competeing mathematicians love the same girl, and then discover a proof having something to do with wave functions and predictive systems or something that allows them to put their talents where their other brains are. Fantastic.
So you see, I've got lots of time on my hands. Today I did a little bit of spelunking; there's a really big cave in the middle of the jungle and I got a guided tour. I saw a HUGE cave spider. I got this picture, of course:

Bigger than my hand but not Shelob-size. Also bats, and those stalagmite and stalacite thingies. It took about two hours to crawl through the whole thing. Nifty, but no eye surgery. Then I went on a longtail boat tour of the mangrove mudflats they have on the island here... saw a bunch of fiddler crabs and monkeys. Fiddler crabs are pretty.

I even saw a mudskipper, which I think I got a little too excited about, because I got a lot of funny looks. But you know, Muddy Mudskipper! From Ren & Stimpy!... Right?
Anyway, out of sheer ennui, tomorrow I'm going scuba diving again. Ho hum hum drum.

"Rucker On Acid And Infinite Numbers, Bright Copper Kettles And Warm Woolen Mittens..."

... these are a few of my favorite things. Rudy Rucker is all nines, baby. If you are the type that often stays awake in bed far too late at night trying to wrap your head around infinity, but then get sidetracked and start thinking about who your favorite muppet is (DR. Teeth), (or wait, Zoot.) (No no, Beaker, definitely Beaker.) then Rudy Rucker is your future favorite author, I guarantee it. (Damn it! I forgot about Animal. This is hard.) Start with White Light. While waiting for it to arrive, go to Rudy's site and try to wrap your head around whatever the hell he's talking about. Other awesome mind-exploding books by him are Frek & The Elixir, and he also wrote a sort of sequel to Edwin A. Abbott's classic Flatland, called Spaceland: A Novel of the Fourth Dimension, which was my first experience with Rudy. He is a mathematics professor and he writes this weird sort of mathematical/mescalin induced sci-fi, which, because it's not like any other sci-fi anywhere, has been given the label of Transreal. I just received his latest book in the mail and I can't wait to devour it. I swear, he may be my favorite author ever... actually my favorites kind of go on swing shift. Next time I start thinking about John Steinbeck, he'll be my favorite. And then Herman Hesse. And then Vernor Vinge.
As for music, for those of you who don't know about The Gun Club, go find a copy of Fire of Love. Honestly, I love it more than anything (today), but the first time I heard it, I got really, really, really angry. They sound aLOT like the Pixies, or a certain very distinctive aspect of them, anyway. Then I found out that The Gun Club was around way before the Pixies, realized that Francis apparently didn't totally come up with that sound all on his own, and I got even angrier... I'm over it now. But damn. Getting older is all about having your deepest illusions shattered. But it's probably becoming one of my favorite albums ever, so at least I've got that going for me.
My Dad plays the dulcimer, and is all into the Pocono Dulcimer Club. They put on a concert earlier tonight and I got to see Don Pedi, a master of the Mountain Dulcimer from North Carolina, play. He apparently was in that movie 'Songcatcher' with Aidan Quinn, which I've never seen, as the white-bearded Appalacian dude playing the dulcimer, which is appropriate because that seems to be exactly who he is. But the dulcimer is a really pretty instrument, and it was actually really fun. Tomorrow, I'm going to Philly with Creepy and her boyfriend's band, who are opening for Murphy's Law. So I'm getting the whole spectrum this week. Hoo-ray for spectrum.
It looks as though I won't be going to D.C. to give my deposition, after all of that nonsense... I'm not really sure why. I got paid, and emailed GBG to tell them I got it and that I was ready to go... but then they never got back to me! So, I don't know what's going on there, but I'm leaving for Thailand this friday, so it sucks for them!

(Wait, of course! Statler & Waldorf!!!)