SRF Heavy Industries

Over the course of the last five hundred years or so an individual’s risk of death by murder — that’s all intentional untimely demises, amateur or professional, privatized or state-sponsored, individual or wholesale — has actually gone down. This is only true as an average, seeing as there are some locations (physical and/or in Hilbert space) that are much riskier than others, but it’s true nonetheless. So that’s good news.

Risk of death by negligence and neglect — this would be unintentional yet preventable untimely demises like those caused by curable diseases, starvation, exposure, unsafe housing, poisoned water/air/food supplies, etc. — also seems to be on the decline. On the whole. Averaged worldwide.

There are localized hot spots. In places where government is too weak to defend non-wealthy people from unprincipled wealthy people and/or where there is a dearth of compassionate wealthy people. But things are still better. In the long term. On the whole. On average.

So that’s good.

Right?

Look around you. You can tell there’s something a little kinky with this assessment. In the long term. On the whole. On average.

The problem is basically how averages work. In a situation like this, “average” is how you mathematically sweep the horror under the carpet of the doing-okay.

Say you have twenty people in a room, and all twenty of them together earn a million dollars per year. That’s $50,000 per head, so you might be inclined to think that everyone is basically okay. That will get you by if you budget, if you live in a reasonable neighborhood, if you don’t go nuts. Everything’s fine.

But consider. Maybe one of those people earns $600,000 all on his own. And another one earns $100k. That leaves $300k to be split among the remaining eighteen people, and by now maybe you’re suspecting that it possibly won’t be split into an even, meager $11,000 apiece.

That’s the root of the problem. It’s made quite a bit worse because we’ve created enormous machines out of paper that we’ve mistaken for people — machines that tie up an enormous proportion of resources because, for some reason, we allow them to own assets and money and real estate and, effectively, judges and councilmen and senators. Except we don’t count them as people when we do our math to calculate our precious averages. And we certainly don’t count them as people when it’s time to punish someone for the crimes of theft and bribery and murder. Somehow they simply turn invisible.

But you know, in the long term, on the whole, on average, everything is okay.

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I’m back at work after taking September off to mostly fail to sort through some personal business and to mostly move out of my house in Atlanta. Any projects I had going before this contract thing started in late May (with included interruptions) seems so long ago that I’ve lost all momentum and motivation. In fact, motivation for anything is at an all-time low.

Which, I guess, is understandable.

I need to get back into a daily writing routine, if that’s at all possible, and maybe put together some smaller projects first so I can get my endurance back up for something larger/longer. I don’t have a plan yet, but I’ll keep working at it.

If you’ve been waiting for something worthwhile to come out of the machine here, I ask for your patience. It might be a while longer.

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Every year, on this day, around this time of day, I go back and read this again, and all of the little comment threads, so I can remember what happened, how it felt … and how we all knew in advance how the events of the day were going to be used and misused for the next decade.

Some amazing things have happened for me over the past nine years, stuff I would never give back. But looking back over my own timeline, everything up to that date was pretty smooth running and more or less on some sensible track, and everything after that date was all shattered landscapes and tons of wasted effort trying to get back to familiar ground.

There is no familiar ground anymore. Any twinges I’ve been feeling for the American Dream have been phantom pains in an amputated limb.

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The Moving Finger writes, and having writ, Moves on; nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line.
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Fitzgerald translation

What we shall be is written, and we are so. Heedless of God or Evil, pen, write on!
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, same quatrain, Graves and Ali-Shah translation

Amazing difference, isn’t it?

Fitzgerald tried to preserve the poetry, whereas Graves and Ali-Shah went for literal and idiomatic accuracy. But the point here is that if you only ever saw one version, you’d think it was as accurate as an expert could make it. Seeing two versions in disagreement makes you wonder whether maybe they both missed something….

Pay attention to where your news and gossip comes from.

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1. Dealing with survival: If X is to survive, it is because X has mechanisms to provide for the necessities of survival: assembling and processing resources, waste disposal, defense from predation and parasitism, protection from environmental extremes, etc., commensurate to the dictates of the local ecology. Without these strategies, an entity its a flash in the pan.

2. Dealing with scarcity: If X is to compete with others for resources, then X must have strategies for removing resources from the grasp of others, either by violence, by deception, or by economic pressures. The last includes trading for resources with surpluses obtained elsewhere or created/refined by time and/or labor, or trading with labor or services.

3. Dealing with others: If X is to trade cooperatively, rather than as a hostile entity that must defend against theft and cheating, then X must adopt identity protocols that allow X to pass the territorial “friend/foe” test as “friend”. Identifying as “friend” also often allows one to participate in use of public goods and services for the duration of trading relationships.

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Instead of typing, I’m drawing little glyphs on the picture of a keyboard with the point of a finger. It’s still a fair bit slower than typing and stresses said finger a bit unnaturally. I could be faster with it. I can tell that. And more error-free. With practice.

Maybe I’ll eventually replace my bluetooth keyboard so I can get back up to speed. Or maybe I’ll slim down how I write so that it all works on a minimalist phone thingy.

It’s like drawing sketches with a pen. Editing is next to impossible and the temptation to revise vanishes when you can see only two or three sentences at a time.

Is the first pass really more honest?

Regardless of the little toy I have in my hand and what I have to do with it that passes for writing, the future is still not here. This is still not the future I’ve been pushing for for a decade.

Still slogging.

When I’m tempted to ask myself when everything ran off the rails, I have to remind myself that there never were any rails. I’ve been offroad since graduating high school. This isn’t a railroad. Or any kind of a road. This has been machete country the whole time.

I wrote this piece a year and a half ago, and that’s what it feels like. I’m slogging through machete country, been here forever, don’t know if I’ll get where I’m going (wherever that is) or get back home or even just survive, and I can’t get past the feeling that maybe I’m just a block or two away from the mall where I parked my car.

Hack, slog, hack, slog, hack, slog.

How’re YOU doing?

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If you think you can stomach it, go visit the Conservapedia’s “Counterexamples to Relativity” page and have yourself a good skim. I’d open it in another tab or window so you can flip back and forth as necessary.

Neither General nor Special Relativity are complete theories. They’ve never been presented as such by anyone who actually understands them — including the original author and the huge number of scientists who have tested and confirmed many of the implications. Many of the points they bring up on that page are worthy of consideration and, where possible, careful and considered rebuttal. But science should never be religiousized or politicized. And here’s why:

Scientists know that the current theories are almost certainly flawed and incomplete. Scientists look forward to replacing them with better theories as experimental data breaks old concepts and helps construct new ones. In fact, most time and energy and funds in the scientific world is spent on testing the previous theories to the point of destruction. When an old body of knowledge falls, there are huge parties and celebrations. I swear this is true.

On the other hand, religious ideology, and increasingly political ideology, which is itself increasingly religiousized these days, has a tendency to be certain it is correct — even though history shows both religion and politics need periodic overhauls. That certainty requires those overhauls to be accompanied by bloodbaths more often than not, and there is still blood being shed on every boundary between the ideological groups except where people are careful to include the possibility that they might be wrong, no matter how much they hope they’re correct.

We really don’t need a bloody revolution whenever it’s time to discard a leading theory and replace it with one that works better. Too much of our science drives technology and medicine and agriculture that is absolutely critical to supporting and improving the lives of billions and billions of people. We have no time and money and blood and lives to waste on getting sucked into someone else’s wars.

Which brings us to another thing: have a really really good look at the logo above.

The flag of the United States of America looks like no other flag on earth. It shows beyond any any attempt at equivocation that the Conservapedia, and any politicized factish datoids contained inside, are intended to have no application to any membership outside of ideologically Conservative America United States residents/citizens/affiliates, and, unlike science, has no need to even seem to be true everywhere, to everyone.

The horrific hypocrisy of pretending to have anything useful to say about universal truths while intentionally limiting the scope of what is being said to adherents of partisan politics is beyond ludicrous. The ideologues who compile the Conservapedia use that logo to shield themselves from scrutiny and debate in a national and global arena and taint what that flag means by alluding to it in such a fashion.

The United States of America was itself founded as a scientific experiment — a field-test of political theories developed by thinkers and philosophers in public debates that raged across continents, across political and geographical boundaries, in many different languages, in many different schools and universities. The flag represents that experiment — and its limited success. And its slew of absolutely necessary refinements and revisions. Using it as a shield against public discourse and democratic debate is proclaiming the failure of those principles, arguing against the inherent worth and equality of every voice that can be heard.

It’s truly pathetic that Conservatives feel so threatened that they have to attack science itself, and, by doing so, the foundations of the organization they claim to hold the most dear.

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Largely testing photo sharing to my bloggy thing. But also I thought this was a striking image.

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How long has it been since you struck a match?

Feel the rough, square-edged splinter of wood between the tips of your thumb-pad and your index and middle fingers. Close the box, hold it in your other hand, and press the sulfured tip of the match to the abrasive strip on the edge of the box. Put pressure on the stick of the match to the point just before it starts moving.

And just hold it there.

That’s what it feels like when everything is on track. When the tiniest gears mesh perfectly and the slightest amount of effort will be transmitted throughout the entire machine. Poised and charged.

Fingers to match. Match to strip. Match to flame.

Then flame to fuse.

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