Wassup Doc?
February 16 1999.
Now. It Begins.

2 17 99
When clocks were the newest technology, scientists thought the Universe was a clock and "god" was a clock maker. Before that, the highest technology was large amounts of highly motivated human power (think slaves and armies) and "god" was the lord of "hosts" (battles.) The current "endlessly expanding" universe corresponds to the "endlessly expanding" atom bomb, and dates roughly to the same time as the relativistic and quantum technologies that made the bomb possible.

Now. Computers and instantaneous communication seem to be the main human accomplishments lately (on the plus side, anyway.) This technology is occupying the attention of most humans with the wealth and leisure to afford it, or who have businesses... or for the most part, even in-door work!

So it should not be surprising to hear people speaking of Nature as an "information system," or to meet people who think they caught a cold from a computer virus... The lines between what is tangible and what is virtual are becoming more blurred than ever.

On the other hand, folks have been paying good money for designer label clothing and fancy name cars for a long time. You could argue that these things had value mainly as information, ( "This is how much money I have and this is the sort of thing I spend it on.") And so it will be a short jump from using consumer goods with labels on them to flashing the labels themselves at one another in cyberspace.

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2 18 99
The Rule of the Instrument: When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Cool links I've been promising. They are on the links page, too.
Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive
McDonald Observatory

everymanandeverywomanisastar
2 22 99
More cool digits.
I was just about to write about work. This is bad. But work is where I am these days. Plan - B continue previous thread.

Rule of the instrument. Right.
There's a book by Fritjof Capra called _The Turning Point_ , from which a movie was made whose name escapes me, but it involved three middle aged people wandering in some beautiful scenery discussing the fate of humanity and other deep stuff....
Anyway. Capra makes the point that
"relativism" started in physics with the General Theory of Relativity, and spread out from there...
I have been wondering on this for a long time. I live in an area that is only coming to grips with "relativism" now, and grudgingly. It is possible to see fundamentalism, of whatever religion, as a response against "relativism."
All of this only leads me to wonder what's going to happen when the implications of the QUANTUM universe start to hit home socially. After all, the Einsteinian relativistic universe was upgraded to the quantum universe even before W.W.II, as far as the top brainiacs in physics were concerned...
It might make an interesting essay to try to argue that the net is a manifestation of quantum (or Post Relativistic... you heard it here first, folks.) society, since it collapses time and space. (McLuhan.)
No, Seriously. The distance between me and whoever is reading this is collapsed. As soon as I'm finished, it will be uploaded, and so, like within an hour of right now, you may be reading this... wherever you are. In this sense the effects of time and space are circumvented. As more people live more of their lives online (not recommended except in Winter) they will get used to living in a world where time and space do not divide people at all, but different interests divide absolutely.... since few of us consciously go looking for what we don't want.
And yet, there is a hive-mind quality to this thing....In a good way.

_Lives of a Cell_ by Lewis Thomas. Absolutely incredible. Lots of thought-fodder. One thing he said was that almost all highly organized social animals have a "hive" of some sort, some collective project in which ALL take part , one way or another, whatever their place in the drama. What he proposed as the human collective project was "the language." I see the internet as an outgrowth of the language.

2 23 99
There's that 23 again. Light snow at Arcadia, ice on the rocks in the creek, half moon directly overhead as darkness falls.

DNA is a message. It says, "I exist, and I want to continue to exist."

Life, then, is a means of transferring information from one location in space-time to another.

Wiping out species is like slashing God's bandwidth.

Living within the boundaries imposed by nature is not ultimately something we have a choice about. The humans alive in 100 years will understand this, one way or another, though there may well be a lot less of them than there are of us now.

2 26 99
Yesterday I saw some flowers peeking through, and the air felt like early Spring. The ground was muddy. There has been less mud this year than in previous years, which leads me to believe that we're still not getting the rain we need.
TheSap isRising,
though, and the trees are starting to swell with it. Soon it will be possible to cut into a fox grape vine (aka monkey vine) and gulp down pure filtered water packed with the nutrients it had for a new flush of growth.

The wild grapes bear no fruit,
or if they do, it is so high up in a tree that you can't get it. In the wild, grapes colonize trees, virtually replacing the tree's foliage with their own, but using the trunk and branches of the "host" tree for support. This takes years, of course. The weakened tree becomes a host for other vines, and eventually it dies. Dying, the tree becomes a home to all kinds of forest creatures, like squirrels, bugs, woodpeckers, etc. The dead trunk gives food and shelter, and the vines become cover.
There is something sneaky and parasitic about a grape. Its life strategy depends on having a good strong host to support its weight, and in many cases it will eventually kill the host. Another part of its life strategy is to offer itself to humans as a source of wine. All domesticated plants and animals result from such an arrangement, where humans take care of some need of the plant or animal (cultivation, propagation, fertilization, feeding, whatever) and in exchange the plant or animal fills some need humans have, for food or silk or hides or whatever. (Back to this later. It is important.)
The grape is sacred to Dionysus, the god of wine. Of course Shamen were communing with the grape deva or spirit long before anyone thought of naming it Dionysus, or possibly even before anyone thought to make wine. It does not take a rocket scientist to notice the similarities between the life strategy of the grape vine and the life strategy of many alcoholics. They dart here and there looking for something to cling to and climb up. Then they climb very high, very fast, which they can do solely because they don't have to be strong enough to stand on their own. But they steal the sun from their hosts, and eventually pull them down in a windstorm or an ice storm.

( ... Actually,
the earliest evidence of permanent human settlements, as opposed to temporary nomadic encampments, roughly corresponds to the earliest evidence of making alcoholic beverages. Some Anthropologists put two and two together and theorize that the discovery of how to make wine, and the time that it takes, were the main reasons why humans settled down in permanent settlements in the first place.) So I guess if you think civilization is a good thing, thank a drunk.

Later, after work... Voice of the Buzzard.
Another point in the Capra book mentioned above (gee, maybe there's an appropriate link I could put here) was that something like 75% of all working scientists are working for the military of one country or another. Grok that. Think about what it means.

It means that the creme de la creme of the brain power of our entire species is focused mainly on solving the problem of how a few people can kill or control a great many people reliably and economically.

Or does the military have some function I fail to grasp? Something beyond killing and controlling?

It's possible. It's also possible that the state of near perpetual warfare is just hard-wired into our species.

I have reflected, often while listening to people of various ethnic groups complain that they are or have been victims of some other group, that it has always been the conquerors who have reproduced. Conquest has happened on every continent, for as long as anyone has kept records, and almost to the very misty bottom of our collective memory: our myths. In myths, and only in myths, do we find even the suggestion that there was once a time when humans existed in some state besides near perpetual homicide, control, enslavement.

The fact is, each of us at some point descends from a soldier raping a terrified captive, or a master raping a slave (which amounts to the same thing.) Each of us carries the "genes of ultimate shame," whatever they are to us. Whatever we hate and fear the most is also our ancestors. And so whatever we hate and fear the most is within us.

And so, at least the potentiality to repeat the patterns of the past is almost certainly hard-wired in. Territorialism is effortless. Each of us has an inner slave, since we were bred for slavery (or serfdom) for so long. Each of us has an inner master, since noble blood tended to get around. Each of us has an inner soldier (armed slave who is sure someone else is responsible for his actions.)

In which case it is neither surprising nor inappropriate that the most expensive CPU time in the known universe (the minds of top scientists) is dedicated to finding new ways to kill and control.

But Capra thinks that's going to change. And I do too, usually, or I'd go berserk. But before it can change, we have to be in a place where we understand what we are changing. War will continue, for example, for as long as we think the other guy is the problem, and we won't compromise. War will continue for as long as we 'stand up for what is ours.' (Territorialism.)

(Though it is possible for humans to retain territorialism and the conflict it engenders without allowing the conflict to rise to the level of total war.) ed

Obviously, there is a long distance between the attitudes we have now and the attitudes that would be conducive to a war-free world. Would we REALLY want to go there?

If not, then it makes sense for us to do what we can to be good at war.