The thirty or so recent posts in here were written as a paragraph-a-day writing exercise in September 2019. Sometimes, there were more paragraphs than one in a day!
Thanks to Prof. Teresa Senft! http://www.terrisenft.net/119-2/
Tuesday, December 03, 2019
Miami
I recently read a listicle article about best places to retire, and the top choice was Miami and Florida in general. This article seems to ignore the fact that Miami and Florida in general is going to be one of the hardest places to live in coming years. Its not just that it's in the direct path of more frequent, slow moving hurricanes, but these storms don't even have to make landfall to cause tremendous damage, damage that will not be able to be repaired before the next hurricane. The earth itself is porous, and higher amounts of water, both from the ocean and the rains, work to undermine the strength of these ground itself. Similar, earlier disasters in the Caribbean will force emigration to Florida as the logical place to go for those displaced people.
Social services will be strained. Retirees expecting a comfortable, improving economy will instead find an exasperated municipality dealing with infrastructure failure and social upheaval.
Foam
A bubble is a visualization of the tension of the difference between the air pressure inside it and the air pressure outside it. It's in an uneasy balance. The wobble and shimmer of a bubble demonstrates the equalization of the forces. The bubble skin thins out unequally as well, making ephemeral lenses that bend light into swaths of color. After some time, the bubble stabilizes. Heating it slightly will make the bubble float, as the density of the air inside it is less than that outside it. And so the bubble floats off. The action of movement disrupts the equilibrium, sending ripples of air currents internal to the bubble which need to be stabilized again. The skin defines the bubble, but also visualizes the struggle of forces both internal and external. When two or bubbles collide, the equation changes, and a flat surface appears between them as they merge, which is bent toward the bubble with the lower internal pressure. The act of merging sets off another chain of wobbly motion. Clusters of conjoined bubbles form a foam, which as a byproduct of the forces previously mentioned, and builds a highly resilient structure where all the forces strive toward balance. It is said that the structure of the universe, the placement of galaxies, is that of a foam. This would be the side effect of simultaneous gravitational forces acting as air pressure does.
Building a school
It's the day before the first day of school, so it's a good thing I closed on the property yesterday. I walked out this morning at 5:30 and started building it. Digging the foundation took until 9:00. I poured concrete and framed the first floor by 10:00. Next I set the central rafter and roughed out the roof. I took a half-hour break at noon for lunch. Then, feeling rain in the air, I finished up the roof. Back on the ground at 2:30, I wrapped the sides and brought in the window casements. With a little bit of protection, I went in and installed the plumbing and electrical wiring. By 4:00, I was done with the doors and and had almost finished the shingle siding. At 5:00, I started paving the driveway so the truck with the desks and books could get in at 5:15. I power washed the whole place and was done at 6:30. Students and teachers should start coming tomorrow at 8:30.
How to force laughter
I remember learning how to force a laugh.
The first part of that lesson is to determine when a forced laugh is appropriate. It's something you can actually practice by yourself. If you see something during your day that seems a little funny, but not really, you can vocalize an exasperated nose snort into a nasalized "hmpf." Start doing this often. Soon, you'll be opening your mouth a little, and trilling your vocal chords, working up the a cautious laugh, the progenitor of the fake laugh.
With this technique firmly established, you now need to take it into the public sphere. The best place is away from friends, because strangers often need to be laughed with. You will note that many of these strangers will themselves be fake laughing around what is known in social media as "an influencer". An influencer can laugh about anything, usually, animals' or other peoples' misfortunes. They especially enjoy a laugh when they are the witting cause of this misfortune.
So as you can see, a fake laugh is easy to practice as a complement to an evil laugh. As you express your fake assent for the miserable state of the world, you can at least enjoy a drink or two for a few hours. I know I did.
Where is my food?
Every once in a while, I undergo a ritual I name "Voyage to the Bottom of the Fridge". This cooled pantry device is nearly unorganizable, and having a vague memory of an item placed therein turns into a treasure hunt. Last month, I knew there was a leftover eggplant that I had put in there the week before. After my unsuccessful search, and the purging of other foods way past their sell-by dates - now food for microbes - I gave up in my search, and subsequent to doing so, I bonked my head on the freezer door, which I had left open in an ancillary search operation. Blood was drawn, pain incurred. I hied to the emergency room, and after only a few hours of waiting, had the wound repaired with some dissolving stitches. And that's where my story truly begins.
The stitches did their job well enough, and after about a week, they stopped itching. The area around them was still tender, which is what I expected. Soft, like an inflatable pool toy. I thought little of it, but a week later, the stitches were as tight as ever, while the area near them was much softer, and flexible like a fontanelle. The plates of my skull were softening and separating. It was getting hard to keep my eyes open, and the skin started getting smooth and saggy. Still, with a hat on, I could go through the actions of the day. This morning, though, I had crossed a threshold. The hat now squeezed my head into something of a peanut shape, and it was clear it was not the stitches that were dissolving, but my skull. It's a little grotesque. I hope my face still matches my driver's license.
Hermas
As a kid, I grew up in a small city sacred to the god Hermes.
The major industries there were tourism, messaging, health care, sports equipment, and a suitcase factory. Scattered around town were a number of hermas, which were just part of our landscape. Once in a while, we'd remember to place a sacrifice by them, usually something simple like fresh cut wild flowers or some baseball cards, or a plastic, candy filled caduceus from a nearby bodega.
Each herma was sculpted by a different artist, and they were erected and maintained over a series of hundreds of years. We got familiar with them, assigning each an epithet, like "Hermes, speedy trickster", "Hermes the Border Guard", "Hermes, 3 and 2 in the 7th inning", and so on, based on the style and facial expression each displayed.
Over time, many of their erect phalluses had been broken off, and sometimes there was an offering of dildos at their bases. Their noses also suffered, especially during Christian administrations, so some were given nose jobs with pug noses.
The hermas are still there today, protected in tiny local historic districts, so, for instance, when the Mall was built, some of them were emasculated and incorporated into its walls as atlantes.
Having so many iconic phalluses in daily consciousness made our town a little more "dress casual" or "dress optional" than neighboring towns. Since we were a seaside resort as well, this helped immensely with tourism. Hermas figure prominently in local industry branding, and every fourth day of the month, we'd have a little fest where we'd dress up as Hermes or a herma and hang out in the town square gazebo.
There are a few other towns this devoted to their patron god or goddess (Apollo in Delphi comes to mind), but none quite so charming as ours.
Reweaving
Yesterday's clothing typically gets unwoven at night, cleaned, and rewoven by morning. This is because modern clothing is created out of a few continuous carbon fibers. Carbon fibers are immensely strong, light, and flexible. The fabric created by weaving it can have different properties of lightness, stiffness, air and water permeability, continuously variable within the same garment. Coloring it can be done by manipulating nano scale microgrooves, the same way butterfly wings are colored. Some clothing companies have agreed to international standards, allowing interoperability between home reweaving machines optimized for particular garments from different manufacturers. This technology allows for perfectly fitting clothing for different purposes: layered, quilted clothing for the winter, loose and light clothing for the summer. People's bodies change every day and freshly woven clothes insure a perfect fit every time. Design elements not previously possible, for instance, feather-like textures, micro pleating, air-filled pockets for cushioning, are new kinds of fashion vocabulary that can now be exploited.
Leather
I like leathercraft. You prepare the piece of skin and lightly sketch in the design. With specialized knives, you carve the skin into calligraphic lines and geometric shapes. You can then color it with dyes and further accessorize it with grommets and brads. You can join pieces of leather with strong thread or long laces of leather itself. Skin is surprisingly strong and flexible. It's naturally stiff after the host animal has died. Inuit women spend days chewing on reindeer and seal skins to soften them enough to be used for clothing, shoes, and kayaks. It's something that we do by machine now: giant steel jaws equipped with salivary glands emitting tanning fluids massage the skins of recently living ungulates. Some of these machines are integrated in the slaughterhouses directly: Cattle in this end, hamburger, gelatin, horn products and leather out the other end.
Alarmed
I'm just going to sit here and find out how long I can listen to the phone buzz and ring without looking at it. Message alarms are now filling my life. A single text rings on four devices in my proximity, and were It set up, it would flash the lights and vibrate my chair. One of my phones is now dedicated to receiving calls from script reading agents in a call center, so that one is definitely not getting answered. The phone's message center is filled with expired one-time codes.
My doorbell is idle. I hear the insistent buzz and bump of a wasp at the window, perplexed by the glass preventing her from escaping the room. And on the stove, a tea kettle has reached whistling temperature. The smoke detector is more of a toast detector, and thank goodness, I've not heard from the geiger counter lately. My radio regularly burps a tattoo representing an emergency signal. Outside, whoops of an EMS truck shift in accordance to the Doppler effect. And beneath it all, the cicadas, in synch and out of synch in the August night air.
What is probability?
This morning, when I did my coin flipping, I got 49 heads and one edge. While this is not impossible, it's very improbable.
There's always a struggle to interpret the fall of the coins accurately. So many decisions. The edge flip was particularly disturbing, in that it rolled for quite a while before stopping, neither falling to the head or to the tail.
Usually, in unusual situations like this, the explanation is simple: obviously the coin isn't fair, or something is amiss with the surface it's being flipped onto, or the flipping process itself is biased, like a pitcher choosing what kind of fastball to throw.
Moreover, there's an implicit trust in the laws of probability - is there a way they could have been suspended? Can we be sure the head and tail side of the coin remained so between the flip and the fall? Was I misreading the side it fell on when I recorded the state of the flip, adding a consciousness of Heisenbergian uncertainty in the measuring process?
49 heads - what if I had kept going ? Would tails have come up or were they impossible? Or were they replaced with another head - magic shops sell two-headed coins after all. This isn't one of them, I checked. I'll check again.
Charm
A goldfinch just flew by, followed closely by another goldfinch. Following those goldfinches are three more goldfinches. They fly swiftly, and seem to bounce off the field grasses like flying fish. They are headed for a small tree, where they evidently are nesting. From the eastern corner of the field, eight more goldfinches are approaching. I would say there's enough collected in that tree now to call them a "charm." Wherever a charm congregates, there is sure to be a lot of chattering and flashes of gold. Their late-hatching fledgelings just add to the charm. They perch and circle, making a living mist. In the neighboring trees, other charms are now gathering. Approaching the equinox, the birds are stocking up on seeds, building strength, and training for their migration south.
The Story of the Earth
All our concerns disappear just a few hundred feet below the surface of the earth. The variety of life, the interactions of wind, earth, and water, glorious rainforests, continents of ice, burned desert soil, all are confined to a tiny skin atop the 4000 mile deep depth of the earth. Today, we venture below the surface, deeper than the wells and experimental Mohorovičić discontinuity explorations, to get to the mantle, where the Earth is molten. In the unimaginably deep sea of liquid rock, the petty concerns of nations, rainforests, and glaciers burn off and are dispersed in to the underlying flow. There they push against the surface, breaking though rarely, but pushing the continents around like the skin on boiled milk. The surface, even the atmosphere, complex as it is, is not the story of the Earth.
Tree climbing class
Today's tree climb is going to be exceptionally difficult. We've covered basic aspects or arboreal assessment and hugging techniques, but this particular assignment has an unique twist. In my hand is a maple seed. Today we are going to plant that seed and wait for the tree to grow to its full height before scaling it. This way, we'll be able to experience the progression of its life, see its context in the soil and companion plants, fungi, and animals that contribute to that growth. Today's lesson is patience. We'll do the best we can, as we're only assigned an 80-year slot for this class, but there is a lot to learn and see. Three essays will account for 75% of your grade, and a successful ascent and descent at the end of the term will count as the final quarter.
Change of Seasons
I turned on the tap this morning and was greeted with a coughing stream of brown and rust specked water. "Ahh!" I thought "Fall is approaching!" It's that exciting time of the year when change overtakes the environment. Grasses burst and brown, leaves take on color and drop with the first cold night. And it's also the time when my pipes shed their summer linings and prepare for the winter. It may take a few hours for the water to run clear again, but it brings to mind the season of hibernation and rebirth. Swarms of ladybugs will appear soon, replacing the cicadas of summer. All leading to the day when winter will truly begin, the first spurts of air from my bleeding radiator.
Shoe boiling
Do you boil your shoes every morning to get the bugs out? You probably shouldn't! This is an old wives' tale from 17th century Italy. Shoes back then were much more edible, unlike the steel and plastic shoes of today. Boiling them made them softer in the morning, and helped them break in. Unlike today, when people change shoes every hour, those unfortunates had to wear them all day. Imaging wearing your 11 o'clock shoes at tea time! Boiling your shoes is an unnecessary time waster in today's world. Besides, many of us have figured out that a microwave does the job faster.
Life documents
Nobody's life had ever been so completely documented: A sheaf of legal documents and contracts at the fertility clinic, receipts from the day of insemination and follow up visits, video leading up to and upon the day of birth, a vial containing the umbilical stump and some vernix, a lock of natal hair, blood, colostrum-laced sputum, the birth certificate with its footprint, the hospital-issued striped baby blanket, videos and diaries of a few days of recovery, continuous monitoring during breast feeding and diaper changing, sleep monitors recordings, notes from doctors and followup midwife visits. One week, so far. So much time to go!
Molar
I'm here to complain about my dentist.
Last week I had a little twinge in the back of my mouth, so I thought I'd better take care of it. I booked an emergency visit to Dr. Frost, who is usually really hard to get an appointment with, so I was surprised to find there was one open right that afternoon.
I went in on Tuesday, and he saw me right away and told me I had to get a molar out. "Fine," I thought. So he went into the next room and came back with two hygienists as assistance.
"Hey where's Ruth?" I asked.
"Ruth left in May," he said.
"I'm Sally Ann" said the one on the right.
The one on the left didn't introduce herself. She didn't even have a name pin on.
All this time, I was wondering where the other patients were.
He gave me a shot and talked about golf for about five minutes because, as you know, last week was the PGA. He got out his tools and the unnamed hygienist held me down as he grabbed onto something inside my mouth. He pulled. It was not forthcoming. Ruth grabbed onto my head and held it back while Dr. Frost yanked away. I felt a loosening. He pulled some more and I saw the pliers come out of my mouth, but in its jaws was a small, beating bloody blob.
It looked like a tadpole. It squirmed and wriggled and wrapped itself around the jaw of the pliers. Dr. Frost handed the pliers to the unnamed hygienist who actually had a jar ready for it. He took out a sprayer and rinsed out my mouth.
"All done," he said.
"What about my molar?" I asked.
"It's fine. This little guy", he shook the glass jar, "ate it."
So, I'm wondering if this is legal, and what's going on in that office. Also, if this is covered by my dental insurance.
ESP test
First, make sure there is plenty of room available, then tie a string to a beam or pipe up near the ceiling. About six inches from the floor, tie a weight, like a coffee mug, to the string and cut it off so it just hangs there. The mug should not be moving at all. Concentrate on the mug. The nature of a pendulum is that small movements will phase correlate and work to increase the amplitude of the swing. If there's anything to this "telekinesis", this simple device will pick it up. Just keep concentrating, observing closely. Is that a little movement? Does it work better when you get closer? What about if you think of different ways for it to move, like twisting? Have you compensated for crosswinds, the shaking of the building from passing trucks, and other environmental sources of movement? Is it swinging now? How about now? Nothing? Maybe reading this paragraph is keeping it from working.
The Thing with Feathering
Let's go for a paddle in a canoe. The canoe is placed in the water, and you pick up the paddle, and steady yourself as you sit down. A canoe in the water weighs less than the water it displaces, and a canoe with a person in it still weighs less than the water it displaces. Nevertheless, it's a good idea not to stand in a canoe. Once comfortably settled into the canoe, perhaps sitting on a rush woven seat, you can push off from the shore with the paddle. This will send you forward in an uncertain direction. This is the time to start paddling.
A paddle is an excellent piece of technology. It's designed to cut into the water easily in two directions, but be more or less stagnant in the other orientation. It actually is negotiating two liquids: water and air. The alteration between the ease of its movement and the stability used to add energy is the same in air and water. But paddling in air - which is what wings do, is not as effective as paddling in water. Furthermore, the air provides not a little resistance to the strokes in it as one seeks to reposition the paddle for another pull in the water. Therefore, on exiting the water, a paddle is quickly turned, a move called feathering, so that it may glide unencumbered through the air and then be turned as it enters the water again. It's much more efficient to turn the paddle than it is to overcome the air resistance.
Feathering as a philosophy is something you can apply to life: resisting in situations where you need the power and gliding transparently where you need to pass through it in order to get back into the powered mode.
Feathering as a philosophy is something you can apply to life: resisting in situations where you need the power and gliding transparently where you need to pass through it in order to get back into the powered mode.
Sea Vegetable Fantasy
Sea Vegetable Fuels have just enough energy to power a small car for medium ranges. Typically, processed Sea Vegetable Fuels are delivered dried and whole and pulverized at the filling station. Sea Vegetable Fuels then use a system of hydration to keep them in a near liquid state. Although its's a plentiful and sustainable source of energy, it does tend to cost more further from where its harvested, because wildcat operations can undercut the retail price, set by the S. V. Fuel Board. People's main complaints are that it's fragile and gooey, and dries out too quickly, making it hard to clean in a spill. When the hydrator runs out of water, you can wait for rain or you can illegally siphon some from neighboring cars.
The good thing is that people can grow their own fuel, if they are coastal. The bad thing is that the coast is moving. Rising coastlines are changing the ecosystem for these important fuels, creating new sets of "winners" and "losers" among Sea Vegetable harvesting and processing companies. Experts predict that without consolidation, by 1986, the Sea Vegetable Fuels industry will be in disarray, with consequent chaos on the Stock Market.
Automatic writing about ideas about artificial thought
Human thought is carried out by associating elements of reality to corresponding parts of narratives. When people, things and actions are plugged in, the narrative provides a predictive model that asserts its premises as certainly as a syllogism.
This is an act of faith: the binding of elements of reality to a story with a definite arc. There is no reason for that narrative to be grounded in reality or to be provable by logic, although many are. The selection of a narrative itself is result of more basic identifications to more abstract narratives. The establishment of a core set of narratives to identify with provides the core of personality, that is, how an intelligence frames reality that results in behaviors. Thought proceeds via metaphor.
Steering from one framing narrative to another is the point of influence and education. Narrative choices can easily complement or oppose each other, and be reevaluated while acting on them. Professing loyalty to a certain group of narratives allows others to predict your behavioral choices.
Scientific narratives can be verified by independent measurement narratives which have implicit context. They get refined as that context is recognized. The same is true of more fragile, faith based narratives.
There is an active ecosystem of competing ideas that are applied to frame reality. Like any evolutionary system, the ideas complement and fit with other ideas, they mate and prey upon each other, and while they rely on external components of reality, surviving with random associative elements is also a possibility.
Gummed
Chewing gum was originally a local treat made from chicle. It sated the oral fixations of indigenous Central American workers for centuries. It was adopted and adapted by North American candy makers, augmenting it with more sugar and flavorings, and occasional collectable cards, comics, and trinkets.
Chewing gum play an important part in the American consciousness. But chicle ejecta coats American walkways and desk undersides. It's a hazard for sandal wearers, an eyesore and cleaning problem for maintenance staff, and the tales of fixing complicated mechanical problems with the substance are unsubstantiated.
In theory, it could be dissolved and returned safely to the Earth, but there's no money in that technology. Although it resembles one-celled fauna, it does not hold a place on any creature's food chain, so importing a natural predator is not an option. In fact, for a substance originally so natural - the sap of trees - it's remarkably artificial, and a hallmark of modern civilization.
Frenetic
Why is it that when I take a book off the shelf, other books want to follow it and be read as well? Not only the proximal tomes, but there are visible rustlings all along the shelf. Quartos are especially eager. Bits of labels and notes flutter down, their adhesive tape long since degraded. The shelf is unstable. There is only one book that refuses to move - the Laws of Zoning and Planning. I go to see what's holding it in. Pulling on it trips a switch, and a hidden door opens to a room full of clichés.
Microtransactions
The acceptance of micropayments could be a revolutionary cultural shift. I live in an apartment with a month to month lease. These months have added up to nearly 6 years at this point. Month to month leases are part of the gig economy, and I expect that along with "compensation" that is "minutely" instead of hourly, per-meter taxi ride metering, and restaurant meals charged by weight, culture will also be conducted and compensated in microtransactions. A good example is this paragraph.
An AI using word vector analysis can come up with a metric that corresponds to how closely the ideas in a paragraph correlate. A highly cogent paragraph could carry a higher price than one that doesn't hang together so much. Then a micropayment could be automatically charged when the paragraph is accessed. Of course, the system would get gamed for those who want to get their ideas out more cheaply. Leather is easy to tool, but first you have to soak it overnight. Why else do dice come in pairs?
Good Ball Boy
It's tennis match season, and it's my job to watch a fuzzy 2.57" ball as it volleys from one side of the court to the other. From the perspective of the ball, it's a percussive smack, and then a free deceleration to another percussive smack. The rhythm is rarely regular, and the contrast between what the brain expects rhythmically and the games actual rhythm is a constant source of cognitive irritation. Occasionally - and to the winner's benefit - the ball breaks free of the rhythm and finds its way to the court surface. That's when I leap into action and scoop it up in my mouth.
Knottedness
It's not hard to come upon a knot that created itself. Knots come about not from the end snaking its way around the main extent of the fiber, but when loops twist themselves into existence in the middle part of the string and interlock into self tying clusters. To remove the clusters, you can certainly work from the ends, undoing as you go, but the process of tracing and untangling paradoxically may make them tighter. If you can somehow lay the string out and untwist the intertwined loops as if they were the end points, this process of continuous simplification will undo that natural entanglement process. Patience, and a board with pins to keep them from twisting again, are the tools for undoing and understanding the knot. Understanding this process is also a way to understand philosophical knots: find the twists and pin them out to see the structures they create and obscure.
Peach tree
When I walked by the peach tree yesterday, all the peaches were gone. They were still up last Tuesday. The house is for sale again, someone had apparently mowed the lawn and picked the tree. The peaches are small, their texture is compliant, and they are juicy. The tree is still good looking, even without its fruit. There should be more fruit trees in an urban setting. This little tree produces about 300 peaches. I know this tree well because I planted it and took care of it with stakes and netting for about 7 years. A piece of my son's placenta was buried at the roots, and I was actually walking to meet him when I passed by the tree.
Tooth Fairies
I spent many years transcribing messages from the tooth fairies, and so I'd like to tell you about them, and how their role is misunderstood. Tooth fairies are hard to perceive, and are very small, roughly on the scale of the bacteria that live in the mouth anyway. They do not write notes - they are far too small - but they can dictate them indirectly, just as oral bacteria can also change one's behavior. Nor do they have a store of cash to dole out as a kind of dental insurance for lost teeth. That's clearly done by custodial guardians, for reasons of establishing the idea of insurance!
Tooth fairies also do not move on once all the primary teeth have been lost, they make their presence known later in life. This is due to a fundamental misunderstanding about tooth fairies: they are not there to remove the lost teeth and compensate for them, they are in fact nourishers and gardeners of the erupting adult teeth. They interact with the stem cells in the jaw and cause the new teeth to grow and push out the previous set. They are there for wisdom teeth, long after the primaries have been replaced. These fairies continue their work through the movement of teeth throughout one's life, encouraging and guiding dental growth and mourning enamel loss.
In my family's case, tooth fairies communicated as three personalities: Norman, Fancy, and Flossie. Norman was kind of playful, if dull witted, but enjoyed salvaging lost baby teeth to use as furniture. Fancy was often concerned about how the new teeth would grow and arrange themselves as they grew. Flossie was an advocate for active dental hygiene. The three of them would take turns dictating letters to me, which I wrote down on torn, fan-folded strips of paper, in ink using a flat nibbed pen. When the children noted the messages were in my handwriting, I rightly claimed the fairies were much too small and illiterate to write, but I could transcribe their thoughts and conversations. At the bottom, as encouragement, I'd attach a coin from tooth fairyland, which naturally was one "fare", formerly used by the NYC subway system. When these ran out, I'd use the tiny coins of Denmark or small denominations from defunct Eastern European countries. The notes were secreted in the usual way, and sometimes not found for a day or so.
In my family's case, tooth fairies communicated as three personalities: Norman, Fancy, and Flossie. Norman was kind of playful, if dull witted, but enjoyed salvaging lost baby teeth to use as furniture. Fancy was often concerned about how the new teeth would grow and arrange themselves as they grew. Flossie was an advocate for active dental hygiene. The three of them would take turns dictating letters to me, which I wrote down on torn, fan-folded strips of paper, in ink using a flat nibbed pen. When the children noted the messages were in my handwriting, I rightly claimed the fairies were much too small and illiterate to write, but I could transcribe their thoughts and conversations. At the bottom, as encouragement, I'd attach a coin from tooth fairyland, which naturally was one "fare", formerly used by the NYC subway system. When these ran out, I'd use the tiny coins of Denmark or small denominations from defunct Eastern European countries. The notes were secreted in the usual way, and sometimes not found for a day or so.
Historical Present
One of the many hats I wear is the figurative topper of the president of the Century House Historical Society. I'm no historian, but now I'm dealing with historical issues many times a week. Faulkner once wrote "the past is not dead. It is not even past," and my particular version of this is "History does not stop." Thinking this way allows me to adaptively reuse an abandoned cement mine as a fundraising music venue. However, this realization about history has grammatical consequences, since it results in one of my bugbears, the historical present, that is, treating ancient, completed events as if they were still in progress. This practice calls into question the very existence of a past tense, which consequently calls into question all verbal tenses. The struggle between past and future comes to an end in an uneasy truce. Sequential action is reconceived as simultaneity. With such a perspective, "causality" is either the misinterpretation of a predetermined lockstep of a fatalistic gelled reality or exposed as the capricious Brownian motion of events careening into each other with no long term consequence, just an inevitable journey toward heat death.
I can fall, I know it
I can fall, I know it. I can just lean forward a little to make it happen.
Falling is simple, anyone can do it.
I can see where I'd be falling.
The ground looks soft, except for a few pebbles, which I don't think I'll hit. In fact, I bet I could twist so I don't hit those pebbles.
I did it once, I know, although it is hard to remember. The wind is calm, a good time to fall. I just have to put my mind to it.
My left foot is a bit more forward than my right, and that means, if I start to lean a little to the right, I can get a little rocking going. Then if I rock a little more, in time with my movement, I should be able to build up some momentum and it can go into a kind of positive feedback loop, where all the work will be done for me. When the time comes, I can use that asymmetry to go into a twist and miss the pebbles.
The plan is solid. It only takes the will to do it.
Friday, August 16, 2019
You may have noticed a big bunch of new posts here
You may have noticed a big bunch of new posts here. These are pieces that I wrote that used to be on Google Plus. Some of the political stories are on Medium, but the fiction should be happy here.
I'm a one issue voter.
2017-12-13 12:28:12-0500
I'm a one issue voter.
If a candidate doesn't prioritize laws which prioritize a transition to sustainable economies/ecologies, really there's not much else to say. The basis of civilization - implicit rights to air, food, water, shelter and the ground truth of non-human life that underlies any other rules and customs and narratives - is eroding under human overpopulation, uncontrollable wildfires and storms, melting ices and escaping methane, moving growth zones and migration patterns.
Climate change is not a straw man.
Furthermore, this need not be solely implemented with laws and incentives: it also needs leadership that lives this attitude. The bully pulpit is powerful.
To Keep Our Numbers Up Song
2018-09-22 22:18:03-0400
To Keep Our Numbers Up
Aug 14, 2017
Rev Aug 1 2018
Rev Sept 22 2018
I actually do this in D now!
DM7 Asus7
A:
Asus7 DM7
To Keep Our Numbers Up
D6 Em7
We have to let you go.
A7 F#m7
This quarter, sales are down,
GM7 Asus7 A7
Our price-to-earning's low.
A7sus A7 DM7
So please clear out your desk.
D6 EM7
and fill out all these forms.
A7 F#m7
We're right-sizing the staff,
Em7 DM7 (GM7 DM7)
To calm financial storms.
B:
DM7 Gm7 FM7
Our brick and mortars have to close,
FM7 Gm7 FM7
We're sorry but you have been canned.
FM7 Gm7 FM7
We're training your replacement now,
FM7 Asus7
Disruption is our brand.
A:
We're sunsetting your work
And writing it off as "loss"
Our acquisition group
Has just outsourced your boss.
We're giving all your tasks
To someone in Ukraine,
We're sure that you will find
Employment once again.
B:
Your health insurance you have lost
With COBRA, you'll pay twice as much,
Go freshen up your resumé,
Too bad you aren't Dutch.
A:
Try networking online
And liquidate some stocks,
Th'Economy's not bad,
It's you that's on the rocks!
The Gig Economy
Is what the Job God wrought
It's "Uber" über alles
Experience counts for naught.
Aug 14, 2017
Rev Aug 1 2018
Rev Sept 22 2018
I actually do this in D now!
DM7 Asus7
A:
Asus7 DM7
To Keep Our Numbers Up
D6 Em7
We have to let you go.
A7 F#m7
This quarter, sales are down,
GM7 Asus7 A7
Our price-to-earning's low.
A7sus A7 DM7
So please clear out your desk.
D6 EM7
and fill out all these forms.
A7 F#m7
We're right-sizing the staff,
Em7 DM7 (GM7 DM7)
To calm financial storms.
B:
DM7 Gm7 FM7
Our brick and mortars have to close,
FM7 Gm7 FM7
We're sorry but you have been canned.
FM7 Gm7 FM7
We're training your replacement now,
FM7 Asus7
Disruption is our brand.
A:
We're sunsetting your work
And writing it off as "loss"
Our acquisition group
Has just outsourced your boss.
We're giving all your tasks
To someone in Ukraine,
We're sure that you will find
Employment once again.
B:
Your health insurance you have lost
With COBRA, you'll pay twice as much,
Go freshen up your resumé,
Too bad you aren't Dutch.
A:
Try networking online
And liquidate some stocks,
Th'Economy's not bad,
It's you that's on the rocks!
The Gig Economy
Is what the Job God wrought
It's "Uber" über alles
Experience counts for naught.
The Climate is telling us something.
2017-09-07 13:49:49-0400
The Climate is telling us something.
Politics is a process for the distribution of resources. That distribution is influenced by the common need to externalize risk: provide for the enforcement and definition of property, insure equitable access to resources determined to be common, helping insure stability and predictability in the short and long terms.
Implicit in all these decisions and lawmaking is that there is a world that doesn't burn up, or get washed or blown away, or covered in massive rainfalls or snowfalls, or the cascade of after effects resulting from these catastrophes. This baseline of predictability - the climate of decision, as it were - is eroding. You can't have a rule of law in a world without access to safe food, air, and water. You can't allocate and defend resources that aren't there.
That's why I say we have to reassign priorities in a radical (in its original sense of "down at the roots") way to work, more or less, only on this environmental problem.
Politics is a process for the distribution of resources. That distribution is influenced by the common need to externalize risk: provide for the enforcement and definition of property, insure equitable access to resources determined to be common, helping insure stability and predictability in the short and long terms.
Implicit in all these decisions and lawmaking is that there is a world that doesn't burn up, or get washed or blown away, or covered in massive rainfalls or snowfalls, or the cascade of after effects resulting from these catastrophes. This baseline of predictability - the climate of decision, as it were - is eroding. You can't have a rule of law in a world without access to safe food, air, and water. You can't allocate and defend resources that aren't there.
That's why I say we have to reassign priorities in a radical (in its original sense of "down at the roots") way to work, more or less, only on this environmental problem.
Index Funds as Prudent Investing
2017-08-01 20:06:05-0400
Index Funds as Prudent Investing
I've been thinking a little about the effect of the Climate Crisis on Index Fund Investing.
The operating ingredient of index fund investing is that the aggregate of the component stocks balances out and spreads the risk in a kind of no-brains efficient manner. The brilliance of it is that, although you could make a graph of dependencies between the stocks of the companies in the index, at some level, they are interconnected enough for such subtleties to be superfluous. One might say the same for single payer health insurance, but I digress.
But the values of the stocks underlying those indices, any that actually reference tangible goods, are all at risk of having the rug pulled out from under them. In fact, that risk is really a question of when, at this point.
That is, any company that derives value from stable real estate, predictable cycles of harvesting (including mineral harvesting), secure and predictable sources of water, engineering that assumes which temperature and wind speeds fall into the category of 100-year events, and companies that service and depend on those companies, will all be adversely affected. I'm not sure there are companies that won't be adversely affected.
Assuming there'll be enough of a future to actually use the funds realized by these index investments, it might make sense to try to discover which of the underlying stocks are most vulnerable to the rapid dissolution of their economic underpinnings. You might be able to suss out the more climate-immune stocks by looking at general performance of localized companies after various environmental (and political) crises. You may be able to come up with an index that has a one or two year advantage over the general index.
The clever thing to do would be to use that temporary immunity to shore up the more vulnerable parts of the market, such as transitioning to sustainable energy, conservation by updating transit and goods hauling, on demand manufacturing, insulation and other zero net energy options, and relocation services for refugees of unsalvageable coastal regions. Or you could just buy yourself a big boat with a fridge stocked for a decade or so (you won't be able to count on fish, even), and hope to sit it out.
#gloomanddoom
I've been thinking a little about the effect of the Climate Crisis on Index Fund Investing.
The operating ingredient of index fund investing is that the aggregate of the component stocks balances out and spreads the risk in a kind of no-brains efficient manner. The brilliance of it is that, although you could make a graph of dependencies between the stocks of the companies in the index, at some level, they are interconnected enough for such subtleties to be superfluous. One might say the same for single payer health insurance, but I digress.
But the values of the stocks underlying those indices, any that actually reference tangible goods, are all at risk of having the rug pulled out from under them. In fact, that risk is really a question of when, at this point.
That is, any company that derives value from stable real estate, predictable cycles of harvesting (including mineral harvesting), secure and predictable sources of water, engineering that assumes which temperature and wind speeds fall into the category of 100-year events, and companies that service and depend on those companies, will all be adversely affected. I'm not sure there are companies that won't be adversely affected.
Assuming there'll be enough of a future to actually use the funds realized by these index investments, it might make sense to try to discover which of the underlying stocks are most vulnerable to the rapid dissolution of their economic underpinnings. You might be able to suss out the more climate-immune stocks by looking at general performance of localized companies after various environmental (and political) crises. You may be able to come up with an index that has a one or two year advantage over the general index.
The clever thing to do would be to use that temporary immunity to shore up the more vulnerable parts of the market, such as transitioning to sustainable energy, conservation by updating transit and goods hauling, on demand manufacturing, insulation and other zero net energy options, and relocation services for refugees of unsalvageable coastal regions. Or you could just buy yourself a big boat with a fridge stocked for a decade or so (you won't be able to count on fish, even), and hope to sit it out.
#gloomanddoom
The Rich Are Just Not Rich Enough Song
2017-09-08 11:09:42-0400
I'm working on a new song for May 1st. Or whenever.
The Rich Are Just Not Rich Enough
Revisions:
Apr 13, 2017, May 23 2017, June 28 2017
Verse:
The rich are just not rich enough,
That's why we'll mine our parks for coal.
That's why we must defund the arts,
Our health, our rights, our earth, our soul.
The tax they think is "way too high"
Is sparsely paid in any case.
The representatives they buy
Well represent their wealthy base.
Chorus:
The rich are just not rich enough!
That principle guides our new laws,
Amassing wealth among themselves
They're never satisfied,
They're never satisfied!
Verse:
The rich are just not rich enough,
That's why not everyone can vote.
To do so poses too much risk.
We can't afford not to promote
The well earned income of the rich,
So well earned that they must earn more.
Their labor is more worthy than
The worker's labor in their store.
Chorus
Verse:
The rich are just not rich enough
That's why we now have endless war.
That's why we pay for both sides' arms
And pocket dollars caked in gore.
The rich are just not rich enough,
It's not enough that they are rich,
All others must as well be poor -
Including those who once were rich.
The Rich Are Just Not Rich Enough
Revisions:
Apr 13, 2017, May 23 2017, June 28 2017
Verse:
The rich are just not rich enough,
That's why we'll mine our parks for coal.
That's why we must defund the arts,
Our health, our rights, our earth, our soul.
The tax they think is "way too high"
Is sparsely paid in any case.
The representatives they buy
Well represent their wealthy base.
Chorus:
The rich are just not rich enough!
That principle guides our new laws,
Amassing wealth among themselves
They're never satisfied,
They're never satisfied!
Verse:
The rich are just not rich enough,
That's why not everyone can vote.
To do so poses too much risk.
We can't afford not to promote
The well earned income of the rich,
So well earned that they must earn more.
Their labor is more worthy than
The worker's labor in their store.
Chorus
Verse:
The rich are just not rich enough
That's why we now have endless war.
That's why we pay for both sides' arms
And pocket dollars caked in gore.
The rich are just not rich enough,
It's not enough that they are rich,
All others must as well be poor -
Including those who once were rich.
Consonance
2017-01-11 01:49:20-0500
A Little Music Theory:
I actually think that consonance is related to phase coherence, and so music that wishes to exploit the contrast between consonance, near consonance, and dissonance need to be cognizant of how phase coherence creates tonal fusion, and fixed scales, equally tempered or not, are not going to have that flexibility if you feel like straying far from your original tonal center.
I say phase coherence and not rational frequency multiples because I don't expect tone generators to hold their frequencies constant, and I posit that the process is more like phase locked loops than some kind of magical fraction-applying process. The phase coherence is clearly related to the structure of the partials of the timbres involved, which have no obligation to be harmonic partials.
But I also think you can make music out of anything, and intervals and scales don't have to be perfectly produced to unambiguously be perceived in a preexisting framework of musical possibilities. It is the really lousy EDO scales, like 24 or 36, which help blaze new structures of music, not based on consonance or resolution to consonance, and the elastic human brain can rationalize and recognize these structures as scales and harmonies along the more prevalent (and naturally occurring) harmonically related structures.
My upcoming app PolyHarp is dedicated to exploring these ideas, that "scales" are side effects of chord clusters, and so it builds scales - realized as "string sets" - explicitly out of whatever interval material you would like - expressed as transposed chords. For instance, you can call the harmonic series a chord (and it does, there are H32 and H64 chords included), and transpose them by just intervals to build scales with them. You can also knock out any of those harmonics and transpose them to make familiar chords or unfamiliar ones. Or you can make chords out of a grab-bag of intervals, specified as cents or degrees or equal divisions of any other interval, and transpose them any way you like. You can also add flavor to them by setting up multiple strings per course, and making them equally or randomly out of tune.
http://polyharp.com
But I also think you can make music out of anything, and intervals and scales don't have to be perfectly produced to unambiguously be perceived in a preexisting framework of musical possibilities. It is the really lousy EDO scales, like 24 or 36, which help blaze new structures of music, not based on consonance or resolution to consonance, and the elastic human brain can rationalize and recognize these structures as scales and harmonies along the more prevalent (and naturally occurring) harmonically related structures.
My upcoming app PolyHarp is dedicated to exploring these ideas, that "scales" are side effects of chord clusters, and so it builds scales - realized as "string sets" - explicitly out of whatever interval material you would like - expressed as transposed chords. For instance, you can call the harmonic series a chord (and it does, there are H32 and H64 chords included), and transpose them by just intervals to build scales with them. You can also knock out any of those harmonics and transpose them to make familiar chords or unfamiliar ones. Or you can make chords out of a grab-bag of intervals, specified as cents or degrees or equal divisions of any other interval, and transpose them any way you like. You can also add flavor to them by setting up multiple strings per course, and making them equally or randomly out of tune.
http://polyharp.com
Thoughts on cutting down the size of the USA Military
2017-03-24 11:19:06-0400
Thoughts on cutting down the size of the USA Military:
While it's important to cut the military drastically, you have to realize that it's the USA's #1 jobs program. Outside of its obvious destructive end, for many people in all aspects of the war machine, from logistics, housing, research, legal work it's a steady paycheck that can be brought into any politician's district.Therefore, the transition to a Green economy has to be done, as Dr.Jill Stein says, the way the government took over industry in WW II. It has to be framed as the patriotic thing to do. The process is akin to taking a dangerous object from a toddler: you have to give the child something else, not just take it away. Industries that produce material for the military will need to be transitioned to green manufacturing, distribution, and building and devising green technology. Which is good, since military industry is a large sinkhole of economics: you don't get much of a return on maintaining huge bases and remotely blowing up wedding parties.
In general, people choosing candidates pick them via their issues, and that's good, because you can't be pasionate about everything, and the hope is that these issues - of social justice, truly democratic representation, promoting the general welfare - will become clearer once we have a problem to solve that's actually real, unlike a takeover of the US by foreign terrorists. Droughts and hurricanes, flooding and fracking-based earthquakes do not care if you are a Christian or transgender. (Although I'm sure some will assume these calamities are effects of the Rapture... except in the real world, they have no option other than to be left behind.)
Serious action in the Green agenda - scaling up and refining Green technologies, preparing civil engineering for more extreme weather events, and raising consciousness - will be more self evident courses of action as the climate becomes more unstable.
The last three months have been the hottest historically for their time of the year by significant margins. Houston is flooded right now.
The executive branch has a constrained set of powers in many regards, but it can help to set the narrative and agenda for the other branches of Government, and the Bully Pulpit. The Green New Deal is a straightforward idea - and it's on the table for anyone with political power to consider. This has happened in the past: ideas from a fringe group get implemented by other more mainstream groups.
While it's important to cut the military drastically, you have to realize that it's the USA's #1 jobs program. Outside of its obvious destructive end, for many people in all aspects of the war machine, from logistics, housing, research, legal work it's a steady paycheck that can be brought into any politician's district.Therefore, the transition to a Green economy has to be done, as Dr.Jill Stein says, the way the government took over industry in WW II. It has to be framed as the patriotic thing to do. The process is akin to taking a dangerous object from a toddler: you have to give the child something else, not just take it away. Industries that produce material for the military will need to be transitioned to green manufacturing, distribution, and building and devising green technology. Which is good, since military industry is a large sinkhole of economics: you don't get much of a return on maintaining huge bases and remotely blowing up wedding parties.
In general, people choosing candidates pick them via their issues, and that's good, because you can't be pasionate about everything, and the hope is that these issues - of social justice, truly democratic representation, promoting the general welfare - will become clearer once we have a problem to solve that's actually real, unlike a takeover of the US by foreign terrorists. Droughts and hurricanes, flooding and fracking-based earthquakes do not care if you are a Christian or transgender. (Although I'm sure some will assume these calamities are effects of the Rapture... except in the real world, they have no option other than to be left behind.)
Serious action in the Green agenda - scaling up and refining Green technologies, preparing civil engineering for more extreme weather events, and raising consciousness - will be more self evident courses of action as the climate becomes more unstable.
The last three months have been the hottest historically for their time of the year by significant margins. Houston is flooded right now.
The executive branch has a constrained set of powers in many regards, but it can help to set the narrative and agenda for the other branches of Government, and the Bully Pulpit. The Green New Deal is a straightforward idea - and it's on the table for anyone with political power to consider. This has happened in the past: ideas from a fringe group get implemented by other more mainstream groups.
2016-08-21 00:36:47-0400
I'd just like to update to say that every month so far this year is still the hottest in recorded, human relevant weather history, and those records have not been debatable squeakers, but rather significant departures from the baseline and from last year. Also, now (Mid August 2016) it's Louisiana that is being flooded.
Too Big To Fail Song
2017-01-22 02:13:25-0500
It's May 1st, and it's probably a good day to reveal a song I've been working on, to be an anthem of the Occupy Movement (for lack of a better term). In the tradition of many political songs, it borrows a tune and fits sometimes cumbersome lyrics to it. In this case, the song is a song once considered a candidate for the National Anthem, Chester.
The original Chester goes like this, original lyrics by Wm. Billings, 1777:
1. Let tyrants shake their iron rod
And slav'ry clank her galling chains
We fear them not; we trust in God
New England's God forever reigns.
2. Howe and Burgoyne and Clinton, too,
With Prescott and Cornwallis joined,
Together plot our overthrow,
In one infernal league combined.
3. When God inspired us for the fight
Their ranks were broke; their lines were forced
Their ships were shattered in our sight
Or swiftly driven from our shore.
4. The foe comes on with haughty stride
Our troops advance with martial noise
Their veterans flee before our youth
And generals yield to beardless boys.
5. What grateful off'ring shall we bring,
What shall we render to the Lord?
Loud hallelujahs let us sing,
And praise his name on ev'ry chord!
It's a little too much "God , specifically New England's God, is on our side," but you can't beat the sauciness of verse 4!
It's easy to find Chester performed by various groups on the Internet, but I don't like the arrangements, and often it's ponderous and slow - Chester is a feisty, mocking song! My arrangement is more sprightly and has more color in the chords. I'll put up a recording some time, But I can post the chords which go more or less with the original melody. It's in F here, but that's just because I like F - put it where the crowd's voice is happiest, like "The People's Key: G! (or E, or Bb...)."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Too Big To Fail
Lyrics: J. H. H. Lowengard
To the tune of "Chester" (William Billings)
Dec 2014, Apr 2015
F Dm7 Bb C7 F
Too big to fail, too rich to go to jail!
F6 Dm7 Bb C7
Bad mortgage backed securities ended in default.
F Bb F Dm7
We bailed them out and their bonuses were paid.
Dm Am Bb Bb6 Bb C7 F
Shielding their tax obligations in a foreign vault.
Too big to fail, too rich to go to jail!
Bad mortgage backed securities ended in default.
We bailed them out and their bonuses were paid.
Shielding their tax obligations in a foreign vault.
Fighting a war against an abstract foe,
Eavesdropping without warrants on every message sent
They alienate our unalienable rights
And our treasure trickles up to less than one percent.
Only the little people pay their tax!
Those blessed with lucre ke-ep their wealth in offshore banks.
They pit all others against themselves.
Our infrastructure fails, policemen now drive tanks.
They buy the laws to help secure their wealth,
Mayors and representatives grovel for their cash.
They own the news and they profit from unrest,
But expect protection from a stock market crash.
Even the courts are subject to their will
Now that there are no li-imits, they are free to spend
Buying elections like they are buying wine
Crip'ling governmental programs on which we depend.
Riots and wars, environmental waste,
They sow our amber waves with artificial seed
They put their profits before our need, and
Sacrifice the common good for their own reckless greed.
What can we do to fight this noisome plague?
Protests and signed petitions influence them not -
Let us proceed with a world wide general strike!
And reclaim the people's power that we have forgot!
The original Chester goes like this, original lyrics by Wm. Billings, 1777:
1. Let tyrants shake their iron rod
And slav'ry clank her galling chains
We fear them not; we trust in God
New England's God forever reigns.
2. Howe and Burgoyne and Clinton, too,
With Prescott and Cornwallis joined,
Together plot our overthrow,
In one infernal league combined.
3. When God inspired us for the fight
Their ranks were broke; their lines were forced
Their ships were shattered in our sight
Or swiftly driven from our shore.
4. The foe comes on with haughty stride
Our troops advance with martial noise
Their veterans flee before our youth
And generals yield to beardless boys.
5. What grateful off'ring shall we bring,
What shall we render to the Lord?
Loud hallelujahs let us sing,
And praise his name on ev'ry chord!
It's a little too much "God , specifically New England's God, is on our side," but you can't beat the sauciness of verse 4!
It's easy to find Chester performed by various groups on the Internet, but I don't like the arrangements, and often it's ponderous and slow - Chester is a feisty, mocking song! My arrangement is more sprightly and has more color in the chords. I'll put up a recording some time, But I can post the chords which go more or less with the original melody. It's in F here, but that's just because I like F - put it where the crowd's voice is happiest, like "The People's Key: G! (or E, or Bb...)."
Too Big To Fail
Lyrics: J. H. H. Lowengard
To the tune of "Chester" (William Billings)
Dec 2014, Apr 2015
F Dm7 Bb C7 F
Too big to fail, too rich to go to jail!
F6 Dm7 Bb C7
Bad mortgage backed securities ended in default.
F Bb F Dm7
We bailed them out and their bonuses were paid.
Dm Am Bb Bb6 Bb C7 F
Shielding their tax obligations in a foreign vault.
Too big to fail, too rich to go to jail!
Bad mortgage backed securities ended in default.
We bailed them out and their bonuses were paid.
Shielding their tax obligations in a foreign vault.
Fighting a war against an abstract foe,
Eavesdropping without warrants on every message sent
They alienate our unalienable rights
And our treasure trickles up to less than one percent.
Only the little people pay their tax!
Those blessed with lucre ke-ep their wealth in offshore banks.
They pit all others against themselves.
Our infrastructure fails, policemen now drive tanks.
They buy the laws to help secure their wealth,
Mayors and representatives grovel for their cash.
They own the news and they profit from unrest,
But expect protection from a stock market crash.
Even the courts are subject to their will
Now that there are no li-imits, they are free to spend
Buying elections like they are buying wine
Crip'ling governmental programs on which we depend.
Riots and wars, environmental waste,
They sow our amber waves with artificial seed
They put their profits before our need, and
Sacrifice the common good for their own reckless greed.
What can we do to fight this noisome plague?
Protests and signed petitions influence them not -
Let us proceed with a world wide general strike!
And reclaim the people's power that we have forgot!
How to Open a Bag of Potato Chips
2013-11-02 21:21:00-0400
I didn't realize it was so easy to cut yourself when opening a bag of potato chips. But I though I'd try it anyway. Modern potato chip bags come in three varieties: the ones that are made of heavy, but recyclable paper, the ones in a kind of mylar, and the ones which are sandwiches of various plastic products. The mylar is nearly impossible to rip, and when it does, it makes a tiny, but effective blade. Recently, I've taken to opening the bags with a small blowtorch I keep around for making crème brûlée. Then all you need is a match. This has the fortunate side effect of toasting the chips slightly, enhancing the flavor. This has the unfortunate side effect of occasionally coating the chips with melted plastic. Also, the plastic tends to flow on the bandages on my fingers, which I put on after the mylar blades cut them up.
So if you see a man crunching potato chips taken from a half melted bag, his hands covered in dripped plastic drops, its probably me. Or it could be you, if you tried out any of these techniques.
Climate Consciousness
2012-10-26 23:25:56-0400
The point will probably be missed by a lot of people, but a really big, bad storm plowing through a highly populated area -- probably causing a few days of infrastructure disruption -- can be seen as a portent of how the contentious issues brought up in the presidential debates, while important in their contexts, are very much less important than dealing with the ongoing world wide environmental crises of climate change, soil depletion, ocean death, overpopulation, and side effects of a carbon craving economy.
Our equilibrium is about to be punctuated. These crises will remove a great deal of life from the earth, and rapidly change environmental and geographical conditions, and the adjustment to that situation will be gruesomely challenging. There needs to be a political consciousness raising that realizes this situation and allocates the resources needed to survive even the first generations of this radical ecosystem change, and coordinate these efforts internationally, breaking laws the way a war breaks laws, which is to say a publicly sanctioned lawbreaking.
Parties Indistinguishable from a Certain Perspective
2017-03-26 15:18:43-0400
There are a lot of people who have problems with the idea that the two major parties are interchangeable. It's easy to see that in most cases, the Republicans are a lot worse. But here's where perspective is needed: of all the abuses that the worst of the agendas of the two major parties are capable of - among them, for instance, starting and maintaining unnecessary wars, precipitating "collateral damage" from drone strikes, not prosecuting financial criminals, and packing the supreme court with ideologues - it really pales compared with the real problems of climate change, peak oil, overpopulation, soil depletion, and nuclear contamination - ecosystemic abuses on a global scale that impact centuries of life on this planet. That is, the life we depend on and are part of, plant and animal.
So, yes, we may have a crappy Supreme Court and lose long validated rights. We will continue to fight needless wars. But it won't matter while the substrate of life on Earth is changed faster and more permanently than life can adapt to it. In fact, life may not be able to adapt to nuclear contamination at all. Even the immortal corporations will not be able to squeeze profits from the sterile husk of a once living planet.
It's hard to be hopeful in the face of these problems. It's hard to see how a political system can be leveraged to allocate resources toward mitigating these problems. Politics tends to run bill-to-bill, election-to-election, just as corporations see quarter-to-quarter. These institutions need to recognize that their edifices rest on a foundation of sufficient clean air, water, food, and shelter, and that their currently accepted operations and business plans are eroding these foundations, not only for themselves, but for the institutions they depend on to externalize their risks.
What is needed is consciousness raising, and to stop denying that all these global perilous crises are now in progress. These issues need a voice, and that voice needs to be heard so as to redirect fear based politics at phenomena truly worth fearing.
There must be a coordinated international effort, since there is only one borderless earth, sea and atmosphere. Any remediative action is beyond the legislative power of any single government, and solutions ranging from energy conservation, new sustainable energy sources, and some sort of carbon sequestering may only be the first of many coordinated international changes needed. This means that the politics to accomplish this must also be coordinated on an international level, and they must conceive and put into effect paradigm breaking actions, such as found in wartime, depressions, or other extraordinary times.
So, yes, we may have a crappy Supreme Court and lose long validated rights. We will continue to fight needless wars. But it won't matter while the substrate of life on Earth is changed faster and more permanently than life can adapt to it. In fact, life may not be able to adapt to nuclear contamination at all. Even the immortal corporations will not be able to squeeze profits from the sterile husk of a once living planet.
It's hard to be hopeful in the face of these problems. It's hard to see how a political system can be leveraged to allocate resources toward mitigating these problems. Politics tends to run bill-to-bill, election-to-election, just as corporations see quarter-to-quarter. These institutions need to recognize that their edifices rest on a foundation of sufficient clean air, water, food, and shelter, and that their currently accepted operations and business plans are eroding these foundations, not only for themselves, but for the institutions they depend on to externalize their risks.
What is needed is consciousness raising, and to stop denying that all these global perilous crises are now in progress. These issues need a voice, and that voice needs to be heard so as to redirect fear based politics at phenomena truly worth fearing.
There must be a coordinated international effort, since there is only one borderless earth, sea and atmosphere. Any remediative action is beyond the legislative power of any single government, and solutions ranging from energy conservation, new sustainable energy sources, and some sort of carbon sequestering may only be the first of many coordinated international changes needed. This means that the politics to accomplish this must also be coordinated on an international level, and they must conceive and put into effect paradigm breaking actions, such as found in wartime, depressions, or other extraordinary times.
Dust and Shavings
2014-09-29 01:56:04-0400
Dust and Shavings
The weather was beautiful, but I brushed the pine cones off of the car hood and set off on the 10 hour trip to visit my father's old buddy Richard "Rivet" O'Day. O'Day wrote me a few weeks ago to say he'd found some memorabilia of my father's in the back of an old filing cabinet in his garage, and a few other things he thought I'd like to see. I felt like I needed a break from Amy anyway, so I gassed up - I always carry a few extra gallons in the trunk - and off I went.
Driving through the night is the best way to get to the middle of the desert.
I got into Rivet's at about 10AM, and I was hungry. He lived in an adobe-like dwelling with pair of Army surplus quonset huts and a few tin shacks in the back. There was a working oil rig there too - repurposed to pump water. Rivet was a clever guy with tools. He borrowed a lot of them from work and had quite a collection of precise milling and drilling machines, toolmaking equipment, tiny welding torches, and testing equipment. He was a bit of a fanatic - all his kitchen cabinets have brass labels on them describing the contents, engraved using the classic engineer's Leroy typeface.
We shared breakfast burritos, served on turned anodized aluminum plates, which he had made out of recycled travel cases used by some missile salesmen in the early 60s.
The design of his house cleverly kept the dust and sand out, which was good, since it was downwind of some former nuclear test sites. Solar cells, recycled from some failed government project or other, and a geothermal system he had drilled himself, kept the house pretty cool. "Your car will be happier in the garage," he said, and pushed open the door and a second door, which helped keep the inside cool. I drove in while he switched on the lights.
The garage was filled with finished and unfinished projects. I'd visited here years ago, but now I could really see how densely this room was populated with all kinds of machines. I remembered the smell of oil, acetone, and metal dust. He had presses and wire-making tools. He had a small crucible with a centrifuge in it. He has a few barrels of scrap metal shavings. A few tires were dissolving in vats and the reprocessed rubber was dripping into some glass jars. Nothing was wasted.
It wasn't all antique either, he had a well organized cabinet of computer parts and breadboards, logic scopes, and a few not very out of date computers.
Over a desk on the other side of the room, where some kind of tachometer was installed, was a 1952 pinup calendar. Miss November has just dropped a wrench. Miss November was my mom.
"I'm still working on a few things," said Rivet, "That's how I found your fathers's stuff. Here you go," and he handed me a wooden box. Inside were a hat and coveralls, which I remembered seeing him wear in an old photograph. A box of index cards, a screwdriver set, some papers that looked like contracts or discharge papers.
"That's a nice car you have," he said looking back at my restored Luxia Panther. It looks like a typical car at inspection time, but the whole body is customizable, and I like to replace pieces of it with different styles and colors. Its unique propulsion design lets me cut in up to four separate engines when I need the power. "Just like your dad. He loved cars almost as much as I do. Come back here for a second." He walked to the back of the hut and let me out the back door to the other quonset hut. As we left, the lights went out automatically.
The other hut had four doors to get through. It was clearly more insulated and the last door was especially heavy. Inside, several vehicles were seen covered with drop cloths. Hanging on the walls were a lot of drive belts, bent metal tubes, glass blobs on shelves, and old cans of various oils.
"This one's 'The Shaker'," Rivet explained as he took off the cloth from the closest machine. "It has no wheels, it vibrates the bottom to move around, The top moves in the exact opposite direction, so you never feel it. It has a side effect of tamping down a pretty usable road!" I could see it also had a kind of weed-whacker device underneath to help clear a path.
Another cloth came off. "Stilts," said Rivet. Telescoping legs with a magnetic connection between them could assist your running by growing longer the faster you ran. "You don't want to trip while you're in this thing," said Rivet, rubbing his chin, which I noticed was just a bit asymmetrical.
"Look up," he said and pointed to a kite with sails that could unfurl for more power, "He made this when it was tough to get gas for the motorboat. He also used it with roller skates."
"And back here is something I always think about and I'm hoping you'll take it off my hands, since you like cars."
Under the closest tarp was a pretty snazzy looking '58 Buick Estate Wagon. "Solid," I said as I banged on the hood. It was a kind of a dull bang. Peering through the window, I could see that it had a few extra controls on the floor. The back of the wagon was filled with something squat and cylindrical. "This thing is still ahead of its time," said Rivet, walking over to a cabinet to get its key.
It looked OK for being neglected for a few years. There were a few dead mice under the rear bumper. There was a strange sand-blasted look to the trim.
"Did Hess ever tell you about this car?" asked Rivet.
The weather was beautiful, but I brushed the pine cones off of the car hood and set off on the 10 hour trip to visit my father's old buddy Richard "Rivet" O'Day. O'Day wrote me a few weeks ago to say he'd found some memorabilia of my father's in the back of an old filing cabinet in his garage, and a few other things he thought I'd like to see. I felt like I needed a break from Amy anyway, so I gassed up - I always carry a few extra gallons in the trunk - and off I went.
Driving through the night is the best way to get to the middle of the desert.
I got into Rivet's at about 10AM, and I was hungry. He lived in an adobe-like dwelling with pair of Army surplus quonset huts and a few tin shacks in the back. There was a working oil rig there too - repurposed to pump water. Rivet was a clever guy with tools. He borrowed a lot of them from work and had quite a collection of precise milling and drilling machines, toolmaking equipment, tiny welding torches, and testing equipment. He was a bit of a fanatic - all his kitchen cabinets have brass labels on them describing the contents, engraved using the classic engineer's Leroy typeface.
We shared breakfast burritos, served on turned anodized aluminum plates, which he had made out of recycled travel cases used by some missile salesmen in the early 60s.
The design of his house cleverly kept the dust and sand out, which was good, since it was downwind of some former nuclear test sites. Solar cells, recycled from some failed government project or other, and a geothermal system he had drilled himself, kept the house pretty cool. "Your car will be happier in the garage," he said, and pushed open the door and a second door, which helped keep the inside cool. I drove in while he switched on the lights.
The garage was filled with finished and unfinished projects. I'd visited here years ago, but now I could really see how densely this room was populated with all kinds of machines. I remembered the smell of oil, acetone, and metal dust. He had presses and wire-making tools. He had a small crucible with a centrifuge in it. He has a few barrels of scrap metal shavings. A few tires were dissolving in vats and the reprocessed rubber was dripping into some glass jars. Nothing was wasted.
It wasn't all antique either, he had a well organized cabinet of computer parts and breadboards, logic scopes, and a few not very out of date computers.
Over a desk on the other side of the room, where some kind of tachometer was installed, was a 1952 pinup calendar. Miss November has just dropped a wrench. Miss November was my mom.
"I'm still working on a few things," said Rivet, "That's how I found your fathers's stuff. Here you go," and he handed me a wooden box. Inside were a hat and coveralls, which I remembered seeing him wear in an old photograph. A box of index cards, a screwdriver set, some papers that looked like contracts or discharge papers.
"That's a nice car you have," he said looking back at my restored Luxia Panther. It looks like a typical car at inspection time, but the whole body is customizable, and I like to replace pieces of it with different styles and colors. Its unique propulsion design lets me cut in up to four separate engines when I need the power. "Just like your dad. He loved cars almost as much as I do. Come back here for a second." He walked to the back of the hut and let me out the back door to the other quonset hut. As we left, the lights went out automatically.
The other hut had four doors to get through. It was clearly more insulated and the last door was especially heavy. Inside, several vehicles were seen covered with drop cloths. Hanging on the walls were a lot of drive belts, bent metal tubes, glass blobs on shelves, and old cans of various oils.
"This one's 'The Shaker'," Rivet explained as he took off the cloth from the closest machine. "It has no wheels, it vibrates the bottom to move around, The top moves in the exact opposite direction, so you never feel it. It has a side effect of tamping down a pretty usable road!" I could see it also had a kind of weed-whacker device underneath to help clear a path.
Another cloth came off. "Stilts," said Rivet. Telescoping legs with a magnetic connection between them could assist your running by growing longer the faster you ran. "You don't want to trip while you're in this thing," said Rivet, rubbing his chin, which I noticed was just a bit asymmetrical.
"Look up," he said and pointed to a kite with sails that could unfurl for more power, "He made this when it was tough to get gas for the motorboat. He also used it with roller skates."
"And back here is something I always think about and I'm hoping you'll take it off my hands, since you like cars."
Under the closest tarp was a pretty snazzy looking '58 Buick Estate Wagon. "Solid," I said as I banged on the hood. It was a kind of a dull bang. Peering through the window, I could see that it had a few extra controls on the floor. The back of the wagon was filled with something squat and cylindrical. "This thing is still ahead of its time," said Rivet, walking over to a cabinet to get its key.
It looked OK for being neglected for a few years. There were a few dead mice under the rear bumper. There was a strange sand-blasted look to the trim.
"Did Hess ever tell you about this car?" asked Rivet.
"He said he had built a car once when I was working on that Ford Fairlane in high school, but otherwise no."
"Well this is the car, then." he said, trying the key. A vigorous honk made us jump a little. "Electrical's working apparently. That's a good sign."
The door was a little stiff, but the lights came on. The dashboard lit up, and where the radio would have been was a small group of dials and switches.
"There was a problem we were working on that needed some extracurricular activity," explained Rivet. "Atoms for Peace was a dangerous failure. But we figured the main problem was that we were using atomic energy for unnatural purposes. Explosions happen when the chain reaction in not isolated in a vacuum or magnetic bubble. So we figured out what the tiniest mass could be that would sustain a reaction and then isolated it in a magnetic bubble in a vacuum. The trick was to machine permanent magnets in precise shapes that are the inverse of their 3d field structure. You have to make a lot of these shards and they are pretty small. The two geometries cancel out, leaving a magnetic bubble, with a little magnetic lens on one side. That's it in the back of the car." He pulled a release and the hood popped open and rolled back. "We replaced the V8 with these twin plasma turbines. A stream of ions spins the turbines over here, and are re-compressed on the other side.
We had to rebuild the gearbox because the speed was too high and we couldn't fine tune the plasma stream safely. So we invented this continuous ratio gear system based on hyperbolic conical gears carved in what we'd call a fractal pattern today. The rest of the car is pretty standard."
"So, are you telling my that you and my Dad built an atomic car in 1958?" I asked, picking my jaw up from the floor.
"1961. It was a used car. It was bought as the family car when you and your sister were born."
"But this is insane? How many patents did you take out?"
"We were using the government's patents for some of the milling and refining. The shape of the core is remarkable, and is a tribute to your father's love of origami."
"So this thing works?"
"Yes and no. It doesn't have a reverse gear in the usual sense. The gear design didn't allow for it, so we just put it in neutral and pushed it where it need to go. Also, we were afraid to take it up over 150MPH."
"150!!?"
"Even that was a little suspicious. But then we had to figure out how to slow it down without causing damage to the gearbox, since the turbines spin at a constant 50,000 RPM speed. Incidentally, the gyroscopic effect of those turbines makes for an extremely stable ride. You actually have to tilt them when cornering. There's an extra pantograph welded onto the steering linkage that does this," he continued, pointing to the metal scissors-like contraption.
"So this thing works?" I repeated.
"Let's see," said Rivet, settling into the driver's seat. "Hop in. Hey, look!"
Under the front passengers seat was a plastic rattle. "This belong to you?" he chuckled. Then he turned the key and a vibration started, slowly building into a whine.
"We scraped up enough U-238 to last 200 years. This system is very efficient because it's a closed system. When you shut it down, it really just recycles the alpha particles back in a loop. You can't really shut it off. In a sense, it's been running since 1961. Sometimes the lens gets out of alignment and you can hear the turbine go down from a slightly sharp "B" to something like a "G flat". When that happens, you have to refocus it, with this red knob here."
"OK, into neutral so we can back it out." I noticed that handles had thoughtfully been added to the trim. I grabbed one and pushed it back. For such a heavy vehicle, it was surprisingly easy to move. Rivet opened the back of the hut with an old TV remote.
"How can this be safe? I mean, in an accident, wouldn't there be some concern about, oh, ground zero on Route 66?"
"It's been in accidents. Not bad ones. There's a cage you can see right here and we put in seat belts taken from an old DC-3. There were no radiation leaks, you can check with the Geiger counter dial."
The dial was pointing to a green segment.
By this time we were out in the open. We pointed the car toward a distant box canyon. The fins and tail lights really put me in a space-age mood.
"OK, ready to roll!" said Rivet, adjusting the rearview mirror and pulling my door shut with a back scratcher. From the mirror hung two fuzzy mushrooms. "Your Mom made these," he said.
"Did she ever ride in this?"
"Oh yeah. She drove it in a friendly little race we had. A bunch of dragsters wanted to prove something. You'll see, the way the car accelerates is pretty unusual. It was kind of a surprise to them."
He stepped on the clutch and pulled back on a gear lever. The car inched forward, accelerating slowly. Very slowly.
"It takes about 30 seconds for the gear to build up to speed if you don't want to tear it apart."
Since the hood was off, I could see the twin turbine block starting to glow. Sand blowing onto the block was melting on contact. I wondered if this was a bad sign. Rivet seemed unconcerned.
I was pushed back in my seat as the car continuously accelerated.
Rivet eased back and we could see that we were cruising at 125 MPH.
"These tires are special too, they spread out for better grip at high speeds. Also, the rubber is like memory metal, it grows and shrinks when we want it to."
A puddle of molten glass was building up on the exposed engine block. Rivet saw this and turned on something like a windshield wiper that scraped the glass into a metal bucket on the side of the engine.
Rivet took the car on a wide turn to point back to the hut. The car heeled over to correct for the terrific speed. Gearing down the engine, he glided back to the quonset hut. He turned it off, and the turbines wound down.
He dangled the keys in front of me. In my mind, I was redesigning the gear system to add in the reverse my father had left out. I took them.
I took it out for a spin myself. It took some getting used to. There's also no way you can't feel like a space age rocket jockey knowing you are going that fast in a heavy car with fins on it. I felt like honking the horn. But when I pushed the horn button, I found out, what it really did was tilt the turbine up and immediately the car left the ground. Crazy with fear, I tried unhonking the horn, whatever that is. Something I did got me back down, and decided quickly I had had enough for the day.
I'm happy to say, the brakes were in great shape after all this time.
"Rivet, how am I going to get this thing out of here with no license plate and no trailer?"
"Now that you know about it, get that stuff together and come and get it."
"There's no way anyone will let this on the road!"
"Don't drive it on a road."
"Rivet, this technology - it could have completely powered civilization for the past 50 years!"
"There were already a lot of companies powering civilization for the last 50 years! They liked to talk about 'too cheap to meter,' but where's the profit in that?"
"Can't you just use it to run your house or something?"
"I've already got a little generator like this running the house. It has enough dust and shavings for 60 years or so."
"Maybe you can tell me how to convert it - I don't need to be driving a cruise missile down to the grocery store."
"I guess I could help with that. I'll draw up some plans for next time."
"That'd be great!"
I'm still waiting for those plans.
[repost: edited from sept 16 2012]
"Well this is the car, then." he said, trying the key. A vigorous honk made us jump a little. "Electrical's working apparently. That's a good sign."
The door was a little stiff, but the lights came on. The dashboard lit up, and where the radio would have been was a small group of dials and switches.
"There was a problem we were working on that needed some extracurricular activity," explained Rivet. "Atoms for Peace was a dangerous failure. But we figured the main problem was that we were using atomic energy for unnatural purposes. Explosions happen when the chain reaction in not isolated in a vacuum or magnetic bubble. So we figured out what the tiniest mass could be that would sustain a reaction and then isolated it in a magnetic bubble in a vacuum. The trick was to machine permanent magnets in precise shapes that are the inverse of their 3d field structure. You have to make a lot of these shards and they are pretty small. The two geometries cancel out, leaving a magnetic bubble, with a little magnetic lens on one side. That's it in the back of the car." He pulled a release and the hood popped open and rolled back. "We replaced the V8 with these twin plasma turbines. A stream of ions spins the turbines over here, and are re-compressed on the other side.
We had to rebuild the gearbox because the speed was too high and we couldn't fine tune the plasma stream safely. So we invented this continuous ratio gear system based on hyperbolic conical gears carved in what we'd call a fractal pattern today. The rest of the car is pretty standard."
"So, are you telling my that you and my Dad built an atomic car in 1958?" I asked, picking my jaw up from the floor.
"1961. It was a used car. It was bought as the family car when you and your sister were born."
"But this is insane? How many patents did you take out?"
"We were using the government's patents for some of the milling and refining. The shape of the core is remarkable, and is a tribute to your father's love of origami."
"So this thing works?"
"Yes and no. It doesn't have a reverse gear in the usual sense. The gear design didn't allow for it, so we just put it in neutral and pushed it where it need to go. Also, we were afraid to take it up over 150MPH."
"150!!?"
"Even that was a little suspicious. But then we had to figure out how to slow it down without causing damage to the gearbox, since the turbines spin at a constant 50,000 RPM speed. Incidentally, the gyroscopic effect of those turbines makes for an extremely stable ride. You actually have to tilt them when cornering. There's an extra pantograph welded onto the steering linkage that does this," he continued, pointing to the metal scissors-like contraption.
"So this thing works?" I repeated.
"Let's see," said Rivet, settling into the driver's seat. "Hop in. Hey, look!"
Under the front passengers seat was a plastic rattle. "This belong to you?" he chuckled. Then he turned the key and a vibration started, slowly building into a whine.
"We scraped up enough U-238 to last 200 years. This system is very efficient because it's a closed system. When you shut it down, it really just recycles the alpha particles back in a loop. You can't really shut it off. In a sense, it's been running since 1961. Sometimes the lens gets out of alignment and you can hear the turbine go down from a slightly sharp "B" to something like a "G flat". When that happens, you have to refocus it, with this red knob here."
"OK, into neutral so we can back it out." I noticed that handles had thoughtfully been added to the trim. I grabbed one and pushed it back. For such a heavy vehicle, it was surprisingly easy to move. Rivet opened the back of the hut with an old TV remote.
"How can this be safe? I mean, in an accident, wouldn't there be some concern about, oh, ground zero on Route 66?"
"It's been in accidents. Not bad ones. There's a cage you can see right here and we put in seat belts taken from an old DC-3. There were no radiation leaks, you can check with the Geiger counter dial."
The dial was pointing to a green segment.
By this time we were out in the open. We pointed the car toward a distant box canyon. The fins and tail lights really put me in a space-age mood.
"OK, ready to roll!" said Rivet, adjusting the rearview mirror and pulling my door shut with a back scratcher. From the mirror hung two fuzzy mushrooms. "Your Mom made these," he said.
"Did she ever ride in this?"
"Oh yeah. She drove it in a friendly little race we had. A bunch of dragsters wanted to prove something. You'll see, the way the car accelerates is pretty unusual. It was kind of a surprise to them."
He stepped on the clutch and pulled back on a gear lever. The car inched forward, accelerating slowly. Very slowly.
"It takes about 30 seconds for the gear to build up to speed if you don't want to tear it apart."
Since the hood was off, I could see the twin turbine block starting to glow. Sand blowing onto the block was melting on contact. I wondered if this was a bad sign. Rivet seemed unconcerned.
I was pushed back in my seat as the car continuously accelerated.
Rivet eased back and we could see that we were cruising at 125 MPH.
"These tires are special too, they spread out for better grip at high speeds. Also, the rubber is like memory metal, it grows and shrinks when we want it to."
A puddle of molten glass was building up on the exposed engine block. Rivet saw this and turned on something like a windshield wiper that scraped the glass into a metal bucket on the side of the engine.
Rivet took the car on a wide turn to point back to the hut. The car heeled over to correct for the terrific speed. Gearing down the engine, he glided back to the quonset hut. He turned it off, and the turbines wound down.
He dangled the keys in front of me. In my mind, I was redesigning the gear system to add in the reverse my father had left out. I took them.
I took it out for a spin myself. It took some getting used to. There's also no way you can't feel like a space age rocket jockey knowing you are going that fast in a heavy car with fins on it. I felt like honking the horn. But when I pushed the horn button, I found out, what it really did was tilt the turbine up and immediately the car left the ground. Crazy with fear, I tried unhonking the horn, whatever that is. Something I did got me back down, and decided quickly I had had enough for the day.
I'm happy to say, the brakes were in great shape after all this time.
"Rivet, how am I going to get this thing out of here with no license plate and no trailer?"
"Now that you know about it, get that stuff together and come and get it."
"There's no way anyone will let this on the road!"
"Don't drive it on a road."
"Rivet, this technology - it could have completely powered civilization for the past 50 years!"
"There were already a lot of companies powering civilization for the last 50 years! They liked to talk about 'too cheap to meter,' but where's the profit in that?"
"Can't you just use it to run your house or something?"
"I've already got a little generator like this running the house. It has enough dust and shavings for 60 years or so."
"Maybe you can tell me how to convert it - I don't need to be driving a cruise missile down to the grocery store."
"I guess I could help with that. I'll draw up some plans for next time."
"That'd be great!"
I'm still waiting for those plans.
[repost: edited from sept 16 2012]
Licked
2012-07-29 16:17:47-0400
Is this the last stamp that I shall ever lick?
After all, it is a first day cover, and I am sending it under cover of darkness. I wrote the letter undercover under the covers. It is being sent to an old cove, a member of a coven, living in a house by a cove.
I posted the letter at the post office. I postulate that I will post about posting the letter. Post posting the post, it will be a past post.
After all, it is a first day cover, and I am sending it under cover of darkness. I wrote the letter undercover under the covers. It is being sent to an old cove, a member of a coven, living in a house by a cove.
I posted the letter at the post office. I postulate that I will post about posting the letter. Post posting the post, it will be a past post.
Debt to the Earth
2012-07-16 22:09:19-0400
Somehow, the most important motivation for activity in the world has become to service debt. It is not to build the infrastructure for a more efficient future, to repair and improve housing and transportation options, or otherwise create a basis for sustaining a productive balance between living things and the resources they consume.
Of all the laws to be broken - a state of war, say , is an example of sanctioned law breaking, defaulting on a financial debt is taken to be unquestionable.
But there are greater debts: they are the debts we owe the earth, the air, the water, and the living things of the earth, and these debts we pass on to our progeny more tangibly than the wholly statutory debts of the economic system.
With this in mind, we now are free to declare a war on financial debt, similar to the war on another abstraction, terrorism. Once it is defeated, we can go on to the more pressing business of securing a sustainable future. Indeed, securing that future would mean the end of financial debt, and go a long way toward paying back the more substantial physical debts previously mentioned.
Home Improvements
2012-04-13 10:26:18-0400
The way I'm building the new house is really interesting. First of all, the land was donated by the town because it's a brownfield in a flood plain. So the first thing I did was dig down to the bedrock, about 12 feet down, and soaked all that soil in a big heavy-metal-digesting algae tank. Since I work at C6, the carbon nanotech materials company, I had access to some experimental carbon fab equipment. There's this new device which takes a carbon source (the algae in this case) , purifies it (actually resulting in some little grains of those aforementioned heavy metals), and builds it into fibers that are about as strong as anything can be. The device makes a 1x1cm rod about 10 meters long. This rod is so light and stiff that it doesn't bend at all, ever. I modded the device, so that it build a cross bar bud every meter or so.
The base of the structure is a kind of mesh that actually bonds directly to the bedrock at the molecular level - no other adhesives are necessary. I'm also building a kind of swale/dike, anchored the same way, that will direct the water around the house and back to the river in case of a flood. It will actually create a wall of hydrodynamically stable water in that case. This is only possible because of the unimaginable strength of these materials.
I intend to build a super strong shell with integrated triple pane diamond windows in it. Inside the shell will be a shelter, which can be as fanciful and flimsy as I wish, since the shell completely protects it from the elements, a series of green house plots and water purification stations (boiled by black graphite heated by diamond fresnel lenses), and other sustainable amenities. Heat radiation is also directed at a large slab of exposed bedrock, which retains the heat overnight.
I'm going a little nuts with the fab machine, making a kind of diamond bubble substrate, on which I can spray some photocell material that self organizes into redundant micro electric cells. The cells squeeze all the sunlight that normally would be reflected off into the cavities of micro-bubbles, making them highly efficient and profoundly flat black colored. The electricity is channeled into a system of microwave laser transmitters and directly broadcast into my battery/inverter system.
This house will be a kind of showcase for C6, so it's being documented as I build it. Stay tuned!
I intend to build a super strong shell with integrated triple pane diamond windows in it. Inside the shell will be a shelter, which can be as fanciful and flimsy as I wish, since the shell completely protects it from the elements, a series of green house plots and water purification stations (boiled by black graphite heated by diamond fresnel lenses), and other sustainable amenities. Heat radiation is also directed at a large slab of exposed bedrock, which retains the heat overnight.
I'm going a little nuts with the fab machine, making a kind of diamond bubble substrate, on which I can spray some photocell material that self organizes into redundant micro electric cells. The cells squeeze all the sunlight that normally would be reflected off into the cavities of micro-bubbles, making them highly efficient and profoundly flat black colored. The electricity is channeled into a system of microwave laser transmitters and directly broadcast into my battery/inverter system.
This house will be a kind of showcase for C6, so it's being documented as I build it. Stay tuned!
Behind the Glasses
2012-02-16 21:40:37-0500
Every morning, it was a struggle for him to choose which glasses were the right glasses. Yes, the prescriptions had long expired for most of them, some were bent and cracked, some were tinted, or had ultra-violet protective coatings of some sort. So his choice of glasses was heavily influenced by environmental factors. For example: the sunglasses. Some were graded, some very dark, others, a light pink tint, others amber. Beyond the lenses, the frame styles presented another wide array of choices. Many were designed by designers, while others seemed to have been taken from the dollar store reading glasses display. There was not just the choice of glasses - there was as well the choice of lighting: incandescent, natural, fluorescent, LED? Which pair was exactly right for that day - to match the object of the male gaze with an ability to gaze in the first place?
Sacrificial Trees
2018-06-04 08:03:34-0400
It's that time of year when the Christmas trees go out. Buying, displaying, and disposing of Christmas trees is practically the only practice remaining of the religious ritual of sacrifice. Acres are given over to the growth of Christmas trees, nurtured for years until they are cut down, carted to parking lots, selected and bought, driven off, decorated for a few weeks, and then, usually without ceremony, stripped of finery and placed on the sidewalk.
In ancient times, the quality of the sacrificial goods was carefully evaluated to match the amount of godly appeasement with one's budget. It was a public ritual, and in many cases, a beneficent gesture from the gods in response to the sacrifice, say, a good growing season, benefitted the whole community. But American Christmas trees get no such ritual, and their sacrifice is not attended by requests for divine intervention. Yet here they sit, in rows in death as in life, out by the street: brittle, flammable, naked, and unsanctified. But what if we were to take these trees and collect them in a public square, and ignite them as in the old days, with praying, singing, and joy?
Community Chemistry
2011-11-28 22:58:51-0500
We spent the morning washing out the tannins. And tannins were everywhere. Buckwheat. Avocado pits. Hemlock bark. We washed it out and processed it, and placed it in little baby food jars. When we had a dozen of them, packed in an egg case, we put it in a cardboard box addressed to the Gilbert Chemical Company. That's how you'd get the bottle of tannic acid in your chemistry sets.
Our neighbor next door does all the sulfur bottles. The crossing guard makes the gum arabic. Mr. Berlin at the candy store works nights on the copper sulfate. Mrs. Fishbein grinds out the sodium bisulfate and her husband does the sodium bisulfite. And my friend Danny's mother's cub scout den makes the litmus paper.
In our town, Chemistry is a cottage industry. Being up in the mountains, surrounded by exploitable natural resources, it's been part of the town culture for years. There's a natural gas "spring" that we tap to run the town's bunsen burners and gaslights. The library stocks old lab reports and educational films. We even have an abandoned radon spa.
Around here, politicians don't mention superfund sites, nuclear waste dumps, Bhopal, or other chemical disasters. That's no way to get elected.
Our neighbor next door does all the sulfur bottles. The crossing guard makes the gum arabic. Mr. Berlin at the candy store works nights on the copper sulfate. Mrs. Fishbein grinds out the sodium bisulfate and her husband does the sodium bisulfite. And my friend Danny's mother's cub scout den makes the litmus paper.
In our town, Chemistry is a cottage industry. Being up in the mountains, surrounded by exploitable natural resources, it's been part of the town culture for years. There's a natural gas "spring" that we tap to run the town's bunsen burners and gaslights. The library stocks old lab reports and educational films. We even have an abandoned radon spa.
Around here, politicians don't mention superfund sites, nuclear waste dumps, Bhopal, or other chemical disasters. That's no way to get elected.
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