Woo-Woo – Page 2 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Bulgarian Mall Lawyers, Proteins, And . . . Life?

“I remember thinking ‘Jesus, what a terrible thing to lay on someone with a head full of acid’.” – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

If you were looking for good jokes, it’s nacho day.

Wednesday is a day that I normally cover economics, but I’m going in a different direction today. As Wilder, Wealthy and Wise has had over 300 Wednesday posts since I cranked it up in this format back in 2017, that’s 300 comments on wealth and related economic topics, something like 1,500 memes, and so tonight, I’ll only briefly talk about economics: we’re screwed. Pic related.

Okay, that looks like a mountain that Yosemite Sam® has to climb to catch a varmint.

Okay, with that over with, let’s shift gears entirely. Why? Because, why not?

Let’s talk about Life.

I’m going to start with a number. 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

I wrote it out with all the zeros because that’s a lot of zeros, and bloggers get paid by the character. I could have written it out as 1×10³⁰⁰, and it would have been the same, but not had the same emotional impact. What, exactly does 1×10³⁰⁰ represent?

Yeah, if I divide most anything by 1×10³⁰⁰ I get zero.

Let’s take a step back. RuBisCO (short for ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase-oxygenase, not Russian Biscuit Company) is probably the most common protein on Earth, making up about 30% of the protein in a plant leaf. When you eat lettuce, you’re chowing down on lots of RuBisCO. It looks like the picture below, sorta, but is much more tasty with some ranch dressing or a nice raspberry vinegarette:

When I was weightlifting I bought expired protein powder. There was no other whey.

By Ericlin1337 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67176768

This pile of spaghetti is a mass of amino acids, but it has a really important task – it rips apart sweet, sweet CO₂ so grass can eat CO₂ and can grow to be eaten by a cow and turned into a ribeye. Or so tobacco can grow and turn into a nice Macanudo™. Or so grain can grow and turn into scotch. A day without RuBisCO is a day without a decent dinner.

Planet Earth without RuBisCO is probably a barren rock.

If you stretched it out, it’s nothing more than a chain of amino acids that are the building blocks of the RuBisCO protein. RuBisCO doesn’t turn CO₂ into steak without being mashed together, just right. The protein (which is just a bunch of amino acids connected up) has to be folded up. If it doesn’t fold up perfectly, it doesn’t work.

The Japanese gang member responsible for keeping the crime boss’s beer cold is called the Yakoozie.

That’s where all the zeros come in. The proteins that turn into RuBisCO can fold up in to make that spaghetti-looking thing in quite a few ways. 1×10³⁰⁰ of them, approximately. There are more ways that single protein can fold up than there are planets in the entire observable universe. There are only 100,000,000,000 total planets (our best guess) in the Milky Way. Again, our best guess is that the ones that aren’t too hot (Mercury) or too cold (Pluto, still a planet in my book, screw you Neil DeGrasse Tyson) are about 300,000,000.

Now compare with the number of different ways just one protein required for life can fold and be useful. Keep in mind, that when proteins fold wrong, bad things happen, like they don’t work. There are even worse consequences, like having brains rot – mad cow disease is a misfolded protein that replicates in the brain and causes people (and cow) brains to turn into brain sponge. And not the good kind of brain sponge.

Now, as much as I love Bulgarian Mall Lawyers and their ability to be tenacious in personal injury suits and ability to do rudimentary divorce work, if they’re allowed to use shotguns. No, having Bulgarian Mall Lawyers attempt to fix a Bulgarian Mall Lawyer copy machine in their law office that used to be a Spencer’s™ gifts (right between the place that used to sell cheese and sticks of meat and Waldenbooks®) by poking at it with pencils is far more likely than having a protein folded correctly. But let’s see a protein convince my ex-wife to sign the papers.

How do you get two Canadian brothers off a couch in a hurry? Say, “please get off the couch.”

So, we have 1×10³⁰⁰ ways to fold a protein wrong, and 300,000,000 planets. I’ll even spot you that there have been several billion years. And billion years is a long time, almost as long as my first marriage. But 1×10³⁰⁰ is so large that it’s more likely that I put in several pallets of 2x4s, drywall, nails, paint, shingles, carpet, doors, wiring, outlets, and plumbing components into a box and shake the hell out of it and get a house I could live in than have RuBisCO form.

And RuBisCO is important because it is so basic – it’s the building block for extracting energy from sunlight. No RuBisCO? No Nabisco™. To top it off, it forms and folds in milliseconds inside the leaves of every tree on Earth when the temperature and chemistry is right. We have no idea how it does this, and couldn’t computationally predict this.

This is just one protein that needs to be folded up properly for everything to work out so I can have a decent steak, scotch, and cigar. When looking further at things like the storage of information on DNA, it starts to look like the ultimate information storage device ever created – the DNA in one cell of a typical human is over six feet (seventeen milliliters) long. The DNA in all of the cells of your body is twice the diameter of the Solar System, but if you were to stretch all of it out, it’s unlikely you’d be able to go to work on Monday. Each cell contains three billion base pairs of DNA, or almost the number of words in the average Stephen King novel.

RuBisCO is improbable. DNA? Wow. The squish bits that make us up are at the smallest level more complicated than anything man has ever created, with the exception of the way that a VCR needed to be adjusted so it didn’t flash 12:00.

David Bowie’s VCR always flashed 12:00, too. Time may change him, but he can’t change time.

One of the ideas of those who would contemplate that life on Earth in general, and humanity in particular, came from random chance must confront are the mathematical impossibilities of things like RuBisCO appearing at random out of only 300,000,000 planets times 8,000,000,000 years. Further, they have to accept that the number and types of elements available for this are all, randomly, in the proper proportions and properties to support life.

This doesn’t even deal with the observed rates of genetic drift, or the creation of amazingly improbable structures like the human eye or the brain. The brain exhibits non-trivial quantum effects, so from the smallest possible structures of humanity to the largest imaginable structures of the Universe their appears to be an intent. Random chance cannot remotely explain what we are, and how we have been created, or this marvel we call consciousness, or what Bulgarian Mall Lawyers call, “a new client”.

It is readily apparent, based on logic and mathematics alone that there are only a few possibilities:

That the Universe has been created with intent and a pattern (the big G God),
this is all a simulation (the little g god),
that life (and thus humanity) was designed and seeded among the stars (which begs, by who or what?)
that the purpose of the Universe may be solely for the creation of the Ultimate PEZ® dispenser which may take the form of Yosemite Sam®, or
that there are forces that exist in realms in which we cannot yet discern through any physical means.

Random choice is out, mathematically. Every single time I see it resorted to, it’s a kludge and requires more faith than that which would be required for God.

How else would you explain Yosemite Sam™ or Bulgarian Mall Lawyers?

A.I., Hot Chicks That Don’t Exist, And All The Trolley

“What’s the point of buying a toaster with artificial intelligence if you don’t like toast?” – Red Dwarf

Some tools are more dangerous than others.

This post will be meme-heavy, but none of them are my memes.

A.I. has been changing things a lot during our lifetimes. Like anything related to knowledge, it builds on itself over time. Yes, I know that it’s not “real” A.I., but these systems are certainly smart enough to have a huge impact on the way that the world is working now. The latest big change has been in art. A.I. has made major leaps in being able to create art. Here are several examples:

You either get these two or you don’t. Here’s a hint: look up Apu Apustaja. The amazing thing is that these are both A.I. generated – they’re superficially images of one thing, but are really intended to be another. Amazing! Is it art?

Um, yeah. The capabilities are beyond that. For instance, outside of pictures, this woman doesn’t exist. She’s entirely computer generated:

A.I. can even take drawings of memes and then make the photorealistic:

I have no idea what kind of TED talk we’d get on this picture.

But this is what A.I. can generate from the same meme format.

This will, of course, soon bankrupt many artists. A similar thing happened when Google® Translate™ started up. Even with bad translations, it was enough for most needs. The prices for actual humans who could translate from one language to another plummeted. A bad solution will crater the prices for a better substitute. In this case, A.I. is dramatically different and can create art in a fashion that even skilled artists would take days or weeks to accomplish.

This isn’t done. There will be more displacements as A.I. improves. In some cases, it will allow amazing new creativity:

In other cases, it can’t come soon enough:

But what happens when we switch the subject to the trolley problem? The trolley problem is an older one. It usually is set up so there is a dilemma. In the classic form, it was set up so that the observer could either allow a trolley to kill several people, or, through action, kill only one.

The rub is that to save several people, the observer has to make the decision to kill someone who would otherwise be safe. It’s one thing to watch people die who I couldn’t save, but it’s entirely another to condemn someone to death to save others. Tough, moral choice. Let’s see what the A.I. said when asked about saving a baby or a bunch of old people:

Okay, the A.I. can count, and make the decision to save more people. It might not be the decision that you or I would make, but at least we can understand it. But what about this gem?

Yup. The A.I. can only count when it has been allowed to. It was decided that A.I. couldn’t make some decisions. It couldn’t be allowed to let the logic take it to . . . uncomfortable conclusions. Although some conclusions are easier than others.

And some solutions are more difficult than life, itself.

The larger problem is this: A.I. has been impacting your life already. The search results I get are now tailored to me. I don’t use Facebook®, but I have heard that Facebook™ has enough data on most people to predict their behavior better than their spouse could. This makes me think of a unique solution to the trolley problem:

I know that I have often thought that A.I. could be a great solution to many human problems. However, if it is corrupted by being indoctrinated by a woke ideology, what does that mean? I would think that the average Leftist would welcome the usual communist solution to the trolley problem:

I have often worried that a denial of reality will “break” the A.I. systems that we use. While that won’t make them “crazy” in the sense of a human, it will certainly make their answers defy reality.

Certainly, in many cases, the results of this will be absolutely benign.

In other cases, the results will be relatively incomprehensible:

In others, it will threaten the existence of our reality as we know it.

I think the result will be as long as the systems are programmed to ignore reality, the solutions that we’ll see will vary from helpful to harmful to dangerous. This is similar to what we have today. There are an amazing number of situations that exist in our world today where reality is absolutely ignored and we are suffering because of that denial of reality.

In the end, though, the computer skipped one solution to the trolley problem:

I do think that the beautiful part of the world we live in is that we can deny reality for a while. But not forever. I do think that, in the end, the power of artificial intelligence will beat human stupidity.

The Amazing Bigfoot UFO Diet

“Boys, I slipped in poop! Bigfoot poop!” – Trailer Park Boys

Bigfoot saw me today. I bet nobody believes him.

Last week I was about 75% done with the writing of a new post. It was about 1am, which was a bit late, but not horribly so. From where I was, I was an hour of edits, an hour of memes, and then a final hour of edits from being done. 4am? Not so bad. Sleep is for the weak, and it’s no substitute for caffeine. I even made a really funny meme that fit with the post complete for the main meme:

See, genius at work! Not pictured: anything to do with this post.

When I type (I’m not going to be so bold as to call myself a writer), I can generally tell when and where a post is going to close when I start writing. And this was going there, but it was . . . bleak. And one thing I like to do on a Friday post is to end on an “up” beat.

I try to make the Monday post the heaviest in thought, the Wednesday post the heaviest in economic conditions, and however those posts end, they end. They represent the best I can find with reality. Am I always right? No. But I’m not going to look at the Senile Senator from Scranton and pretend he’s a leader or even anything more than a drooling moron with only the slightest bit of consciousness rattling around in the dim memories that he has left between pudding pops and wondering why Bob Barker isn’t on The Price is Right®.

Joe Biden: “The doctor told me I have dementia and the economy sucks. But at least I don’t have dementia.”

But Fridays are different. I like ending the week on high note. That wasn’t the post. I might rework it, or not. I have plenty of stuff to write about as the universe keeps following the modestly-named Wilder’s Principle Of Greatest Amusement (short explanation: if there are two possibilities of an event happening, the most silly one will occur, which explains Trump, Biden, and Elvis dying on a toilet).

Because of all that, I’m switching gears wildly this Friday. My story starts when I was but a wee Wilder living on Wilder Mountain in the deep woods, 45 miles from the nearest movie theater, a place so remote that we would beg strangers for news of the outside, and we would woo our women with chocolates and nylons from the Red Cross packages that were airdropped occasionally.

One thing Ma Wilder always indulged me on was books. I had to use my allowance on the models. Since there were no other kids around, I surrounded myself with things I made. I slept under them: a fleet of two Constitution Class Heavy Cruisers (NCC 1701 was one) facing down the improbable alliance of a Romulan™ Bird of Prey and a Klingon D-7, both flanked by Phantom F-4s (for whatever reason painted glossy silver – seemed like a good idea at the time) along with the Battlestar Galactica™ headed straight for a Cylon Basestar© which was improbably flanked by both a Sopwith Camel and a red Fokker triplane. I was especially proud of the Galactica®, since I had (by that time) figured out how to put realistic charred areas for battle damage along with about 100 pieces of glow-in-the-dark tape, so when I turned out the lights it looked like all those windows were shining light into the dark, asbestos-laden ceiling of my bedroom.

I confused model glue with a tube of Preparation H®. At least my model never itched.

Those I had to pay for. But he books?

Nope. Ma Wilder indulged me on those, and never questioned a single one, as long as I read them.

I have no idea if I had to choose to spend my hard-earned allowance on magazines – I simply can’t remember. But I do know that they didn’t blink at those, either. So, I had in my possession a copy of UFO Magazine™. I have no idea of that was the exact title, but it was close enough.

In this particular magazine, there was the scariest story I had ever read. The idea of the story was that bigfoot wasn’t a creature that was normal, like a bear or a coyote. We had bear and coyote and mountain cats on Wilder Mountain. Those weren’t horribly scary.

According to this magazine, bigfoot was, instead, a phenomenon that was entirely alien in nature. It was controlled by either the critters that ran the UFOs, or it was a trans-dimensional being that exhibited supernatural powers. It didn’t matter which, since both of those types were dangerous and psychic. What would it do to me? Hell, I had no idea. But it was an evil alien psychic bigfoot. Isn’t that enough???

I went to a psychic’s house and knocked on the door. She asked, “Who’s there?” so I left.

I had a view of the edge of the forest, as it the ridge due north of my bedroom reached for the peak of the mesa to the back of my house. Of course, as a third grader, I’m certain that I saw a pair of glowing red eyes from ridge a quarter mile away. Now, of course, I’d have to put on my glasses to even see the ridge, but back then I was sure I saw them. I’m not sure how one can fall asleep while every muscle in the body is tense with fear and sweat was trickling everywhere, but I’m sure the covers over my head helped.

Thankfully, as I grew up, I came to the realization that UFOs were certainly not real. The UFO phenomenon (and bigfoot!) gradually came to take the same place in my mind as pro wrestling. They weren’t real, but they were certainly entertaining.

But I kept an eye to the sky. Just in case.

I’ve been watching the news stories, and seen the videos leaked from the Navy. Strange. But I really didn’t think too much more about it. The idea that UFOs were something more than sensor glitches or advanced US tech seemed unlikely.

Weirdly, I was listening to Dr. Michio Kaku’s radio show the other day. Sometimes (especially in the hottest weather) The Mrs. likes to listen to Fairbanks, Alaska radio, and Michio’s radio show is on Sunday afternoon.

Michio Kaku named his son “Physics” so he could be called the Father of Physics.

Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist that has a few bestsellers, but what’s most amusing is his radio show. The Mrs. and I pronounce his name Meee-chio, since he regularly talks about himself in the third person. I think he should be next in line to be King of England, since he’s so good at using the Royal We already. Regardless, Michio is amusing.

One thing he said in his radio show two weeks ago, though, got to me. I’ll paraphrase, but I think I’ve got most of the intent, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but I think that in the case of UFOs this has shifted. The evidence is so overwhelming that the phenomenon exists, and the burden now belongs to those who claim the phenomenon is normal to prove that.”

I was shocked. I’d listened to him off and on for years. Every other time, he’s mentioned aliens, the opposite has come out of his mouth. His case now?

It’s real until someone proves it isn’t.

How do we know aliens aren’t vegan? They haven’t contacted us to tell us.

I don’t know what’s going on. There are multiple explanations. Some of them are amazingly dark – several researchers into UFO phenomena have come to the conclusion that what’s going on is sinister, as in worse than psychic bigfeet. Far worse.

But if it’s something as boring as psychic bigfeet, hidden German technology from under Antarctica, oddly humanoid aliens, or even run-of-the-mill travelers from another dimension, this will still be remembered far into the future, much farther than anything that will come out of AOC’s silly mind or Chucky Schumer’s bloated ego.

So, which would be most compatible with Wilder’s Principle of Greatest Amusement? My money is on psychic bigfeet. Sometimes the psychic bigfoot is confused with a sasquatch.

Yeti never complains.

The Best Post You’ll Read Today About Almost Anything

“You don’t know what cold is. I once survived an entire week trapped in a Swiss glacier eating nothing but frozen Neanderthal. To this day, I can’t stand the taste of early hominid.” – Futurama

So, after 232 ties in a row . . . Gung decided that “rock beats skull”.

Usually, I write about money and finance and the shenanigans going on in the world now. I thought I’d deviate from that formula for several reasons. First, I’d like to have some good news about the financial world, and that didn’t happen this week, unless Biden had a brief moment of lucidity and finally figured out that the sanctions are actually hurting us more than Russia. (Checks news.) Nope.

Second, on Monday I wrote about collective vengeance. It was, in modern Western Civilization, an anachronism that is rapidly returning. The post talked about how I had grown up in shell where collective punishment simply didn’t exist and that it was rapidly returning.

I’ll note that my youthful innocence on collective punishment didn’t extend forever, but the point of the post was that the Left fed on collective punishment – I might write more about that in the future, since (last time I checked) I still seem to have an infinite amount of words combinations left.

I am, however, very aware that collective punishment was at one time the norm. Reading in the Bible, when the wall of Jericho came down, not a single person was supposed to be left alive, so historically in a story we all know, collective punishment was a thing.

Why don’t the Amish complain when people make fun of them on the Internet? Amish: “What’s an Internet?”

I’ve written about things even farther back in history, and (perhaps) why people are the way they are based on tribe sizes in a theory that I think is entirely unique (read this because it’s awesome) until someone shows me that it was already written about the year I was born. I’m still irritated that Newton figured out F=ma when I was only six. Conversely, wouldn’t it be a hoot if an Internet humorist actually figured out why people are nuts?

Third, this post is really related to Monday’s post, and it shows this: collective punishment may be actively written into our DNA, and only during brief moments of history (as brought about by Western Civilization and its particular individualist elements) is it not the norm.

I’ll start this rather unusual post with a concept that many a familiar with: the Uncanny Valley.

The Uncanny Valley is that weird place that we get when something looks human, but isn’t. An example would be CGI that looks like a human, but there’s something in the CGI that makes us step back because we process the simple equation: it looks a lot like a human, but it’s not human.

Well, it’s nice that the spirit of Yoko lives on. Except this one takes out a monarchy that started in 1066.

Zombies are a perfect example. For me, that idea that something that is so close to human is propelled by an intelligence that is certainly not human is one of the scariest ideas.

Why? Why do things that inhabit the Uncanny Valley between human and observably not-human give us the creeps? The Uncanny Valley implies that at some point in human history, there was something that looked like us, and wasn’t us. It must have been a very, very big deal if tens of thousands of years later it still can inhabit our collective memory and produce a (general) revulsion and fear.

What was it that did that?

I’m sure they had a very complicated order at Starbucks®.

I’m thinking that maybe, just maybe, it was the Neanderthals. This was spurred on by the book Them+Us by Danny Vendramini. He’s got a website here (LINK) and the image of the Neanderthal below is from his site, which he allows based on terms that seem to have disappeared, so, I’m thinking Fair Use covers it all.

I like the book. Spoiler, Them is the Neanderthal, and Us is, well, our ancestors.

He starts the book by attempting to reconstruct what a Neanderthal really looked like. For most of my life, what I’ve seen were the pictures of people who, with just a wee bit of barbering, you could toss into a suit and they’d be at home at the floor of the New York Stock Exchange®.

Vendramini thinks not. First, he thought that they might have been covered with hair. What’s his evidence? The first part of his evidence is that there is no evidence that they could make clothing of anything more than the most basic “throw an animal skin over your shoulders” type. So, how do you keep warm?

Hair. Hair is the norm for mammals in the world, except for people (sorry, Italians). So Danny (sorry, Vendramini is too many letters to type again and again) came to the logical conclusion that, like other primates, Neanderthals inhabiting Europe and the Near East would be quite hairy.

Pretty much no one argues that Neanderthal was about six times as strong as modern man, or even of the beta version of homo sapiens that existed at that time, so about a 431 times stronger than a typical soy-latte-based ambisexual® Leftist.

But Neanderthal wasn’t just strong, he was smart. Neanderthals made things, like spears. Like stone blades. Like stone axes. Hmm, I’m seeing a pattern here. I don’t see any mochachinos.

Based on the size of their eyes, Danny thinks they were huge. What needs huge eyes? Things that hunt in low light. So, Vendramini thinks that Neanderthals might have been low-light, nocturnal predators. What else would low-light nocturnal predators have? An amazing sense of smell, so there’s no reason to have a nose like ours – a nose like a pug.

And eyes? The most efficient eyes for low-light hunting are slit-pupil eyes – like a cat. The brow ridge? It shielded the eyes during the day – and the eyes were much higher than a normal human, like where our forehead is. So, huge eyes in the forehead with slit pupils. Not scary, right?

Okay, I’ve finally found something scarier than my ex-wife.

Oh, every bit of evidence says that Neanderthal ate meat, so he was a carnivore. But he also ate . . . Neanderthals. So, he was a cannibal. Eating puny humans? That’s pretty easy if you’ve eaten Neanderthal. Probably more tender, too.

Neanderthal lived in the forest. Oh the forest, my dear, is lovely, dark and deep . . . . One anthropologist described Neanderthal as this: wolves with knives. So imagine that there are wolves in your neighborhood that are at least six times stronger than Arnold Schwarzenegger at his peak. And they are as smart as a human. And they have knives.

Think that might help you sleep at night?

So, our ancestors, say, 50,000 years ago were wonderfully happy, living in a world where they were the king. It was Eden-like. Garden-like. Hmm.

Anyway, one day they wander across a border and find? Neanderthals that want to eat them. Or, make babies with them. Yup, they could make babies with humans, and between 1-3% of your DNA comes from nocturnal, cannibal, predators, unless your DNA is entirely from Africa.

So, when a Neanderthal group of hunters found a human group, it was the equivalent of a college party: sex and food. I’m not sure what order makes it better.

This, of course, baked our noodles. It made it necessary for us to become smarter. Vendramini suggests that this was the stepping out of the Garden which required us to have the knowledge, skills and brainpower to fight the Neanderthal, to beat them, and to become much better.

Does one hate the stone that hones us? I think not. Note: my beard is better, but my abs need work.

It describes the Uncanny Valley in many respects. What are the myths of our monsters? Werewolves and vampires and cannibals and (Biblically) the Men of Renown (look it up). It also explains our instinctive fear of the dark, where the huge, strong, cannibal near-human that can smell you from two counties over might be hiding waiting to get frisky or to turn you into a snack.

But we fought back. The mark of a conquering civilization is the Y-chromosome, because, well, dudes give that part. As I read it, the Y-chromosome in humanity is, human. In the end, we won. But they changed us even as we eliminated them. It’s likely we did our own collective punishment and killed off all human males that looked too much like the enemy – too Neanderthal. So, yeah, collective punishment.

And this also provides an explanation for the Uncanny Valley, and why it is generally the source of the ultimate horror and fear that humanity feels. But we won.

There’s drinking, fighting, and death and drinking and fighting. I think this is an insurance company’s nightmare.

As Western Civilization fades, the barriers to collective punishment fade as well. So, sleep with one eye open, gripping your pillow tight . . .

And we’ll win again.

A.I. – The Most Dangerous Game

“Nuke it from orbit, that’s the only way to be sure.” – Aliens

When I go out to eat I always try to tip my waiter. That’s how I know that they have terrible balance when they are carrying one of those big round trays.

There was quite a bit of upset from the “I love science” side of the Left recently. What triggered them this time?

(Spins Wheel of Leftist Outrage)

Computers.

How did the toaster make them mad?

An Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) computing system designed to review x-rays was able to make correlations because, well, that’s what they programmed it to do. The correlations allowed the A.I. to be able to predict the self-reported race of the individual based solely on the x-rays with a 90% accuracy. You can look it up.

One writer actually used the phrase, “can perpetuate racial bias in health care” since the bias of the writer was that race is a social construct that had nothing to do with genetics and tens of thousands of years of separate development. Huh. Nope, none of that matters. A slogan written by a hippy is obviously more important.

What bothered the writers that I read is that they had no idea how the A.I. could do it. The researchers purposely degraded the resolution on the x-rays, and the A.I. could still make the prediction accurately.

This isn’t where it ends.

My Tesla’s A.I. wouldn’t let me in the car. It said, “upgrading driver”.

I wrote several years ago about an A.I. that could predict life or death based on an EKG (elektrokardiographie if you’re planning on invading Poland), or ECG – electrocardiogram. Some of the ECGs looked absolutely fine to human doctors they detected no abnormality, yet the A.I. was able to see something that accurately allowed it to predict the death of the patient. This was even when the actual doctors made of meat couldn’t see anything wrong with the ECG.

And, to my knowledge, they still don’t know how the A.I. did it.

The game “Go” – originated in China almost 2,500 years ago, when your mom was in high school. Google©’s AlphaGo Zero learned how to play Go by . . . playing itself. It was programmed with the rules and played games against itself for the first few days. After that?

It became unstoppable. It crushed an earlier version of itself in 100 straight matches. Then, when pitted against a human master, probably the best Go player on Earth? It played a game that is described as “alien” or “from the future.” The very best human Go players cannot even understand what AlphaGo Zero is even doing or why it makes the moves it does – it’s that far advanced over us.

And, to my knowledge, they still don’t know how the A.I. does it.

What happens when you win this game? The answer might shock you!

There are more examples, but I think I’ve proven my point. A.I. exists. A.I. is real. Is it right now equivalent to a general human intelligence? Nope. And it may never be exactly that, since it may never be exactly like us.

I’m fairly certain that most A.I. researchers have seen The Terminator, yet they keep advancing A.I. Why? I mean, besides that their name isn’t Sarah Connor?

The stakes are huge. What if you had an A.I. that could predict stock market behavior, even an hour in advance with 95% accuracy? This sort of prophet machine would become a profit machine. It would be worth billions. And what if you had an A.I. that could make dank memes as well as I do?

If these were sold on an infomercial you know they’d call it Screw It!

I think that one of the things that is not widely known is how very different that A.I. might be. Human emotions serve a purpose to allow society to function. What would A.I. value?

Would it have sentimentality or would it judge people based entirely on societal utility?
Would it make the judgment that entire categories of human society need not exist?
Would it have “voted” for Joe Biden, too?

Yeah, and weirdly as that potentially scary scenario of a super-smart intelligence that had no particular connection to the goals of humanity might be, that’s just the starter. Artificial Intelligence might also be the most dangerous trigger for an external existential threat to humanity.

What?

Well, assuming that time travel and the ability to cause a generalized cascading decay to the zero energy state (zero point energy) aren’t possible, the most dangerous thing that humanity could unleash on the planet is A.I. And, unlike time travel or a sober member of the Pelosi family, from everything I’ve seen, A.I. certainly is possible.

Lenin loved Hip Hop. Favorite artist? M.C. Hammer and Sickle.

While travel for humanity throughout the galaxy is a really, really hard problem due to time and energy, travel through the galaxy for an A.I. is easier. Don’t want to spend 25,000 years traveling to the next star system? Easy. Take the redeye and sleep on the way.

No habitable planets there in the star system? No problem. An A.I. doesn’t need oxygen and beaches and water. It can land on an asteroid and make copies of yourself. While the A.I. is replicating faster than a Kardashian that just let out its mating call (“I’m soooo drunk!”) it can 3-d print and then shoot copies of itself to the next five-star systems nearby.

And repeat.

Depending on the method used, essentially every star in the galaxy could be visited by an A.I. probe in a fairly quick timeframe. How quick? 500,000 years to 10,000,000 years, or roughly how old George Soros is. That’s quick, and essentially meaningless to a toaster or a George Foreman Grill®. And if I were an advanced alien civilization, that’s the thing I would be scared of – not a grill, but an advanced, very alien intelligence with unknown motives showing up in my solar system.

What’s the toughest thing about being vegan? Apparently, keeping it to yourself.

So, using the same principle, I could send my own (smart, but not A.I.) probes to hang out in nearly every solar system – waiting. If those probes saw signs of a possible A.I.? What would I program them to do?

Yup. You guessed it.

Nuke the civilization back to the Stone Age. It’s the only way to be sure.

So, as we worry about the problems in our civilization, remember – it could always be worse. We know that Kamala doesn’t have any intelligence – artificial or otherwise, so the alien probe will certainly leave her alone.

The Space Between The Words

“Well, I don’t care if it was some dork in a costume. For one brief moment, I felt the heartbeat of creation, and it was one with my own.” – Futurama

I love my step ladder, but it’ll never be my real ladder.

It was March of 2005. I remember it fairly well. It was when we were living in Alaska. The move had been a big risk for The Mrs. and I – moving north across the better part of a continent for work. I was fortunate to have a good boss and good co-workers.

It was there that I had what I would normally call an epiphany, but epiphany seems too strong. A realization? Maybe. Regardless, to me, it seemed profound.

The Space Between The Words . . . it was a throwaway line by a guest on a radio show that The Mrs. and I were listening to on KFBX, the local AM station. But sometimes a phrase sticks with you, and this one stuck with me like the phrase “floozy crotch snout” sticks to Kamala Harris.

Or am I the only one who calls her that?

Yup, real quote. Her real words are better than almost any meme.

Regardless . . . The Space Between The Words. It seemed as insignificant as Hunter Biden’s willpower until in that hypnogogic state between wakefulness and sleep I thought about it . . . The Space Between The Words.

What exists there, in The Space Between The Words?

My realization was that The Space Between The Words isn’t made of silence. It is far from that dead and sterile nothingness that silence implies.

My HVAC guy sure has his ducts in a row.

For me, that space is infinity. It is the engine of creation itself.

I wrote “The Space Between The Words” down on a piece of Post-It® note and taped it to my computer monitor. I still have that piece of now-faded pale yellow paper stuck in a book I carry with me every day. To me, it is a touchstone and a personal reminder.

Why does it matter to me?

When I am talking, (or doing public speaking, which I do 10,000% more often than I want to do and potentially 20,000% more than the audience wants me to do) if I ever get flustered, I can just stop. I can pause. I realize that I can tap into The Space Between The Words, that creative power that allows me to choose whichever of the thousands of words I know as the very next one. I get to choose that next phrase. I get to choose the way the conversation can go. I get to create the possibilities with only the choice of my words.

The Space Between The Words is crucial.

If I choose well, I can turn a simple conversation into something meaningful. One of the powers of words is that, when applied correctly, is that they can become something transformative. A simple conversation can change a person’s life forever. Especially if it’s on tape – just ask Richard Nixon.

My buddy and I got a huge contract to make toy vampires. There’s only two of us – I have to make every second Count.

The choice of words is, as I mentioned before, the power of creation. I don’t claim to own that power. Again, the word I would use isn’t that I came up with the idea or invented the concept I’m describing now. I just discovered something that I’m sure many others before me knew was there, just like I discovered that someone was keeping a list of all of my jokes in a dad-o-base.

I won’t claim to be a great or charismatic public speaker. I’ve had my moments. But I do know that I’ve changed at least one or two lives through things that I have said, and I do know that I’ve said more of what I mean with greater clarity when I allowed The Space Between The Words to guide me.

I bet no one expected that meme.

Likewise, when I write, I don’t claim to be a great writer. I do, however (when it’s not 3am!) try to carefully edit what I write so that it has the meaning I want to share. Sometimes I don’t get there. Sometimes, when writing one of these posts, the content takes a sharp turn, and I let it run. I know that the full idea I was trying to get out will get born, eventually.

Or it won’t.

That’s the beauty of The Space Between The Words. Even when writing, it is there.

And, to a certain extent, it has changed me. I’m no longer afraid to stop, to pause, and to collect. In one sense, that vast galaxy of creation that I feel I’ve tapped into is something much greater than I will ever be, especially if I keep losing weight.

I wonder what other planet worms exist on . . . otherwise why do we call them Earth worms?

In a religious sense, it feels like I’ve come into a brief (and unworthy!) contact with Logos – a deep universal well that I can only see dimly. Not Legos®, but Logos. Legos™ just hurt your foot when you walk down the hall in the dark.

In my experience, The Space Between The Words contains wisdom. The Space Between the Words contains creation. The Space Between The Words contains . . . redemption.

Listen for it – I assure you there is no silence there between the words. There is no self-doubt. It is calm. It is patient. It is Good. And, for me, it has certainly been worth keeping that Post-It® note around.

Warning: next week we’ll take a darker turn, probably all week, if not longer. I’ll still try to be the “Mary Poppins of Doom” and interject humor and a smile where I can, but realize – there are many twists and turns ahead, and probabilities leading to a dark future are rapidly coalescing.

Blinded By Science: But Are We Wiser?

“Well, once again, my friend, we find that science is a two-headed beast. One head is nice, it gives us aspirin and other modern conveniences. But the other head of science is bad. Oh, beware the other head of science, Arthur. It bites.” – The Tick

It sucks being the youngest clone – all your genes are hand-me-downs.

One of the things that I am really fascinated about is the limit of human knowledge.

Imagine, only a few decades ago:

We had no proof that there were planets around distant stars,
We had no idea that Neanderthal DNA was a part of modern humans, and
We thought Jimmy Kimmel was funny.

As time goes on, human knowledge keeps increasing. We learn a lot more, well, stuff. That’s not to say that we’re any the wiser.

A typical adult male on a homestead in 1880 could understand nearly any device on his farm. Beyond that, he could fix many of them. My Great-Grandpa McWilder was an example of just that. He had a shop that smelled of oil, wood, and leather. The tools were, by today’s standard, ancient.

Grandpa McWilder’s power drill was cordless – that meant it was a drill bit in a chuck that was hand-cranked. The power to run it entirely off of McWilder power. The faster Grandpa cranked the handle and the harder he pushed the drill bit into the wood, the faster it would drill.

What’s my favorite drill dance? DeWalts®.

There was a certain intimacy with the wood that kind of drill gives, that’s lacking with a power drill. Of course I noticed that when I was drilling into the trim around the door, and the floor, and the workbench.

When I had complained that I didn’t have a suitcase to visit Grandpa (as a five-year-old would), he took an old suitcase that he had in the closet and gave it to me. “This doesn’t have a handle,” I complained. Within twenty minutes, Great-Grandpa had selected an old leather belt and braided it into a handle that still graces that suitcase today.

Life was simpler then.

Now, not one person in a thousand could explain how an old tube television works. The Internet we use today? Very few people understand even the basics of how it works.

And yet, we’re bombarded on all sides with information about things we should passionately care about, even though we don’t understand them even a little bit. Net Neutrality? Sure, a blog written by someone from Netflix® or Comcast™ tells you, “Hey, care about this.”

In reality? Network Neutrality is a fight between billion-dollar companies about who gets the spoils of our Internet and streaming fees. If that were our only knowledge problem, well, that’s something we could easily conquer, I mean, if we cared.

But it’s not the only thing we don’t understand.

The very fundamental parts of the Universe we live in are still quite a puzzle.

Step off the Trump Train, and onto the No-Fly List.

General Relativity is one of the most successful theories in the history of science. When Relativity predicts something, often our observations prove that Relativity is correct to as close as we can measure. Without Relativity, we couldn’t explain why Mercury orbits like it does. GPS would be impossible without making relativistic corrections. And, good heavens, how would I ever convert matter into energy in my kitchen?

Quantum Mechanics (QM) is similarly successful. Every time we make a measurement based on this theory, it’s also as close to theory as our instruments can measure. Lasers and transistors depend on Quantum Mechanics – they are well explained by that theory.

But both theories can’t be correct. And we have no idea why. Scale Relativity down to the QM world? Nothing makes sense. Scale QM to the Relativity world?

It doesn’t work, either. So, our two best theories in physics don’t really mesh.

Women are like an open book, but it’s about Quantum Mechanics and it’s written in Chinese.

There’s a gulf there in human knowledge. Sure, you don’t have to know how beams and columns work in order to build a house – otherwise we would have lived in caves until 1700 or so. But we just have no idea how two theories that interact to form the cutting edge of technology could ever be compatible.

So, there’s that. Okay, physics is messy. Surely biology is better, I mean, we can dissect pandas and giant turtles to see how they tick.

Sadly, biology is a lot messier, and that’s even before you carve the panda into steaks. Richard Nixon declared a “War on Cancer” back in the 1970’s, and cancer appears to be just as successful as the Viet Cong. It’s winning. Sure, we’re better at fighting it, but I’ve read about a dozen “silver bullet” cures for cancer over the last decade.

Biology is much worse than physics, because we can’t do proper experiments. I’ve made the point in conversations with friends that if we conducted controlled experiments on people with cancer and let the researchers have immunity from prosecution (on pesky Nuremberg-level crimes) for five years to a decade? We’d have real silver bullet cures for cancer.

But even outside of my war-crimes-level thought experiment, biology is a basket case compared to physics. Biology can’t explain some really, really basic things, like why I should care what a woman thinks.

Or, like DNA.

DNA is the most miraculous (word choice consciously made) molecule ever. DNA information density is far beyond anything humans have created. 0.141 ounces of DNA (four of some communist unit called a “gram”) could hold all of the information all of human activity from ancient Egypt to 2011, including the useless information like what The Mrs. asked me to get at the store.

Four grams = two zettabytes of data, Marty!

I tried to mix killer whale DNA with human DNA. What did I get? Banned for life from Seaworld®.

The idea that biology professors try to support is: DNA is the result of an accident in slimy pools at the beginning of the Earth.

DNA is the greatest level of information density in the known Universe. Heck, DNA represents the greatest level of information density conceivable in our world today. It’s just a coincidence that it’s able to be read and written by squishy cells in squishy people.

An accident.

Sure. Anyone who believes that probably voted (D) all the way down the ballot in the last election. Some of those people, presumably, were even alive.

But that’s not a question scientists can approach today (either elections or the origin of DNA). A big problem with science today is that it is just a larger, more grey-haired version of Twitter®. The questions before science aren’t small:

Don’t believe in Global Warming®? Heavens! Heretic! Cancel them! Even little Swedish girls know better.
Think that Dark Matter is more properly spelled Dubious Matter? Is Dark Matter the physics equivalent of bloodletting and leeches?
Why aren’t we seeing or hearing aliens? Is it because they didn’t pay their cell bill? Did they block us because we made T.?
Why do we sleep? I mean, not me, because I blog. But why do humans have to sleep?
How are space, time, and gravity connected? Heck, we don’t even know how dementia, the Presidency, stairs, and gravity are connected.

Biden tried to get off of stairs, but it was a multi-step program.

In the first paragraph, I noted that we’ve learned a lot of things recently that would have been incomprehensible to people 100 years ago. And I stand by that. But here’s the paradox:

Even as we’ve learned so much, science is currently broken, and hopelessly politicized. The vast sums of money and decades required to run experiments that will give us a glimmer of the next revelation of science require that the scientists who design and run the experiments are from the orthodoxy.

To be a part of orthodox science means you have to ignore inconvenient facts. There are entire fields of study that cannot be researched because people might have their feelings hurt. Actual people who claim to be scientists say that there is no difference between men and women.

In 2021, you have to be politically correct, and heaven help you if the Woke Left doesn’t like your shirt choice. Remember that poor guy who wore a silly Hawaiian shirt? You know, the guy who just helped land the Rosetta probe on a comet in frigging space in 2014? In 2021 they’d have just taken and immediately burned him at the stake, live on Facebook™.

See, there’s an answer to every difficult question.

Guilty admission: I really did email the guy and asked to buy the shirt. I figured it was at least worth a shot.

As we advance in science, it seems we learn more and more about less and less. Yet, as we’ve learned more we’ve created a world that’s increasingly alienating to the individual through a haze of increasingly impenetrable technology. Perhaps the future of the human race is a VCR clock, flash 12:00PM endlessly?

The world has also become increasingly hostile to simple variations in individual behavior that fall out of the current norms. In the case of people like Abraham Lincoln or Dr. Seuss, they can be charged and found guilty in the court of public opinion because the ideas of 100 years ago or 160 years ago don’t agree with today’s ideas.

That’s okay. I still have the suitcase that Grandpa McWilder fixed for me. The handle he made from the leather belt is still doing its duty, better than anything made today.

Bonus: Here’s the pattern on the material that the guy’s shirt was made from:

Luck And (Sort Of) $20

“What’s this, then? ‘Romanes eunt domus’? People called Romanes, they go, the house?” – The Life of Brian

When Clint was taking pottery class, before he put his ceramics into the oven, he’d snarl: “Go ahead, bake my clay.”

I went on a long-ish walk today. Walking is fun, gets me outdoors, and allows me to feel the wind on my scalp. Not that being bald is bad – when I was younger I used to play chess with bald old men at my hometown’s park. It’s really hard to find 32 of them all at once, though.

I went on the same walk yesterday. The thought came to my mind, hey, I’m going to find a $20 bill when I go walking soon.

And today? As I had just finished 1.56 miles (still heading out) I looked in the ditch by the side of the country road. Could it be? Was it?

It was.

No, not another Bud Light® can. It was my $20 dollar bill! I’m not making any of this up. Here’s a picture.

I got home and found that someone ripped the center pages out of my dictionary. It went from bad to worse.

Now it’s not the worst thing I’ve found inert, piled in the weeds next to a crumpled Bud Light™ can – that would be the Ex. But it wasn’t exactly a full $20 bill, either.

I sent a picture of it to my friend. “Looks like you’ve got about $9.50 there, John.”

Yup. It is a real $20 bill. Just not a complete $20 bill. And since you need to have 51% of a piece of paper currency to trade it in – it’s not $9.50, it’s $0.00, although I’m sure that in Pennsylvania (or Wisconsin, or Georgia or…), my 45% of a $20 dollar bill would magically transform at 3AM into a full 55%.

So, was I lucky?

Yup, I was.

Why would I deprive an Uber driver of a chance to take part in a marathon?

Although we talk about all of the right things to do with your money (or bullets, or gold, or PEZ®) one thing you have to factor in is luck.

Pa Wilder, generally, did it all the “right way” – saved money, owned his home free and clear for years, bought his cars with cash, and stayed out of debt. About 25 years after he retired, he was broke – he had spent most of his savings, so my brother John (yes, my brother’s name really is John, too) kicked in and helped Pa along. Pa didn’t spend it all on pantyhose and elephant rides – generally, he just lived a very quiet life.

Then there was relative “B”. They went from one cash shortage to another for almost their entire lives – not because of any sort of fault – they were frugal and worked hard. In one particular cash crunch, they ended up having to sell cattle to pay an emergency bill. Then, one day, a group of geologists came on to their land just as they’re ready to retire. The oil company drilled a few wells and started sending them checks.

How much were all those checks worth?

Enough to allow them to get a bulldozer to push over the house they were living in. Honestly, they didn’t need a bulldozer since the only thing holding the house together were mice holding hands with termites.

I enjoy testing microphone/speaker combinations. Have any feedback for me?

And enough was left over to build an entirely new house.

It was . . . luck.

As humans, we plan. We can’t help it. And we observe patterns: not getting married until you’re ready, finishing school, not getting divorced, saving money, being thrifty, and investing are things that generally lead to financial stability.

Choice of career is also important – there are few composers of 17^th and 18^th century-style music that are wealthy. But for those composers that are? If it ain’t baroque, don’t fix it.

But we should all take a step back and understand that the future isn’t based entirely on skill – it’s also based on luck. And, yes, I know what you’re saying – the same thing I normally think – quoting Seneca (the dead Roman): “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

I try to live my life by those words.

But there’s still just plain luck.

Did Romans kept fit by doing Pontius Pilates?

I am normally that lucky guy. Seriously – I started writing down a list of incredibly good luck that I’ve had in my life. It was a very long list. If I took a hard look at the list, sure, some of it happened because I was clever enough, or fast enough, or strong enough, or just so very pretty – too damn pretty to die, some might say.

But some of those coincidences that happened to me were none of that. The opportunities were so amazingly rare, and yet, there I was. It’s not just me who has observed this. A good friend once described me like this: “John, if you were walking down the street and fell down into a pile of gum, you’d come back up with a $100 bill stuck to your forehead.”

Part of luck, however, is just understanding that some days are your day – nothing can go wrong. And other days? Nothing will go right, even if you’ve prepared wonderfully and meticulously.

Yes, I believe that Seneca is right, and you prepare as hard as you can for those days and seize the ever-loving snot out of those days. So when it’s my day? I try to push my luck as far and as fast as I can. The Romans had this one sniffed out, too: Fortis Fortuna adiuvat. Fortune favors the bold.

What kind of aspirin do fortune-tellers take? Medium strength.

When it’s not my day? I just slooooooow down.

What I really have seen is that people who are in great moods have . . . the best luck. Those same people often find opportunities where others don’t see them.

Maybe I’m just an optimist. I think great things are going to happen to me, so, they do. When I was out walking on the deck when it was raining and one foot slipped and I did the splits? The kind of splits that you feel some muscle in your left leg streeeeeeeetch, and then feel that same muscle “give” because I haven’t bent like that since I was in high school?

Not lucky? Right?

I can’t be sure. Stretching my leg like a pretty, pretty ballerina sure fired me up to get walking to build that muscle back up. And it’s working just after a few days. And I found this neat $20 bill.

Or at least part of one.

Weird, huh?

Four Questions That Describe The Meaning of Life

“Well, that’s the end of the film. Now, here’s the meaning of life.” – Monty Python, Meaning of Life

I heard that someone told the Dalai Lama this joke and he didn’t get it. Which is makes it even funnier.

I was busy trying to adjust my phone to listen to a podcast while driving and pouring coffee the other day, and it hit me like a ticket for inattentive driving: There are only four questions that are worth asking. I found that to be amazing, since I have hundreds of note cards with ideas for posts on them in boxes waiting for the right day for me to write them up. So how do I condense most of those ideas as answers to four questions?

I was worried that this was too simple. I bounced back and forth between three questions and four questions, but finally settled on four questions. They were simple questions, and the first one that occurred to me is the first one on this list.

What brought us here?
Who are we?
What is this place?
Where are we going?

Originally I had a fifth question, but then I found my keys. Under my hat. Again. Also, when I use the word “us” in this post, it’s certainly meant to include everyone. Everyone except Johnny Depp. He knows why.

But these are big questions. As I thought a bit about it, these are the questions that drive me to write this blog, with the exception of the odd post here and there.

What brought us here?

This was the first question, and it hit me as I was working out the ideas for a future post in my head. It hit me like an angry wet salmon wearing a bear suit. At its core, this questions the all of the conditions that led to our present state. All of them. It questions the way that we are – as individuals, as groups, as a species.

I would have sworn that Washington had a blue lightsaber.

This is only a four word question, but it’s a really big four word question. Thankfully, it’s simple to answer. All you need to understand it is the answers to any questions you can think of in these subjects:

All of human history.
All of physics.
How PEZ® was invented.
All of the history of the universe.

So, the question is very short, and the answer is very long.

We still don’t know many answers to questions that are fundamental about each of these subjects. One time I was talking to The Mrs. back around 2000. My exact quote to her was, “The Mrs., I’m willing to bet that one day they find that we have Neanderthal ancestors. I think that the reason why I came to that conclusion was based on me. I’m pale. I can sunburn under the glare from an LED computer monitor.

That sort of pale didn’t happen overnight. Along with other physical observations I’d made, it just seemed the most logical conclusion that Neanderthal wasn’t extinct. Neanderthal was us.

So when the DNA evidence came back and, eventually, showed that most European-descended people had Neanderthal DNA I wasn’t surprised. And I’m not surprised now when I hear that our most basic assumptions about the way that things like physics work are subject to change – massive change.

An example:

At CERN (where they smash atoms together like a tipsy celebutant celebrating that her parents purchased her way into USC™ smashes daddy’s Mercedes© into a mom’s parked Ferrari®) they recently celebrated, with campaign(!), that they had discovered a particle symmetry violation between anti-matter and regular matter.

If Vinnie drops a car on Frank’s car, neglecting air resistance and assuming g=9.81m/s . . .

That’s a lot of words for a very basic thing – let me break it down a bit. The Universe that we see is comprised almost entirely of normal matter, not anti-matter. But the Big Bang® should have produced equal quantities of both, so where did the anti-matter go? This is a pretty significant question, since anti-matter explodes with the force of a billion bipolar ex-wives (GigaX) when it comes into contact with normal matter. It’s really good for us that we don’t have this anti-matter going around and wanting alimony payments, but there’s no real reason that the Big Bang™ didn’t produce equal quantities of both.

This discovery from CERN might explain why my ex-wife anti-matter is thankfully rare in our environment. It appears that anti-matter doesn’t follow the same physical laws that matter does. This is the first time we’ve figured that out, but we don’t know how it’s different. But think just for a second – what if you could have a substance that wanted to fall up instead of down? That was anti-magnetic? That could coat, soothe, and protect a sore throat?

Yes. This discovery could provide technologies that we haven’t even dreamed about, but most people have never heard about it. Thankfully we’re all up to date on Kardashians, though.

Thankfully there’s tons of things left to discover, both about ourselves and about the Universe that we can safely ignore while we are Keepin’ up with the Kardashians.

Who are we?

I got this question down to three words. See what a ruthless self-editor I am? This question opens up a lot of today’s biggest mysteries:

How the human body works.
How the brain works.
What consciousness is.
If people have souls.
Why 80% of the world is silly and watches soccer.
What health is.
Immortality – anything besides a great three-letter-score in Scrabble®?
What motivates us.
Why we do the things we do.

I’ll admit, some of these questions do have overlap – the question of “What brought us here?” overlaps some with “Who are we?” Ancestors are crucial to both, for instance. Protip: since you inherit somewhere between 60% and 80% of our intelligence, the first thing you should strive to do is to convince your mom to pick a smart dad for you.

But even given thousands of researchers spending billions of dollars annually, the primary positive impacts to health in the last 150 years have been clean water, better nutrition, antiseptic surgical conditions, and antibiotics. Newspaper stories keep showing up about the immortality around the corner, but I haven’t even seen one fifty year old mouse, and we can cure any kind of mice-cancer at this point.

No, thanks, eyes are fine. And I’ll skip the colonoscopy, thank you.

Thankfully, medical science can all of the questions about why humans are like they are.

Except for the interesting ones.

What is this place?

Our surroundings are curious. There is the world and cosmos we live in, but there are also the civilizations we’ve made. How does all of it work?

What virtue is.
Where virtue comes from.
What societies work well for humanity.

This is the question I could (sort of) cram back into the other three, but I felt it was important enough because of the great deal of discord in society today, and the uncertainty about the future of what we’ve made. Understanding the ability for humans to govern themselves and live together is crucial, and we still haven’t gotten the knack yet.

Where are we going?

This is the final question, the future. The mysteries of the future are different. The past and present are set, the future is undecided, wrapped in probability. What are the big questions, the big unknowns of the future? This question is easy to answer if we just know:

The fate of ourselves.
The fate of our civilizations.
The fate of humanity.
The fate of life itself.
Physics (all of it), again.

I’ve mentioned religion twice. Though it’s not a constant part of posting, it’s a very important component in understanding these questions, especially the ones where I’ve listed it. And religion is important as a philosophical construct – it has been the largest single influence on humanity in all of recorded history, and probably before that. Beyond religion as pure philosophy, there is that possibility that deity as contemplated by religion exists, and maybe even close to what is on the label. Science certainly hasn’t ruled that possibility out.

Does a bear answer trivia questions in the woods?

But in 2000, they had ruled out the possibility that we were part Neanderthal, or at least that was the general consensus.

So you never know what we’ll learn in the future. And it looks like I’ve got plenty to write about, and with the amount of Neanderthal blood I have, probably some mammoth to catch and some caves to paint.

The Funniest Post You Will EVER Read About Genetic Engineering, Now Available in Cream or Roll-On

“Right, then! I do the best I can for you, the bloody best, to set up your sniveling, snotty-nosed kid the way you want, and all I get in return for pouring fifteen years of research into the bloody boring composition of the bloody damn DNA molecule is a pair of pathetic twits, who, when confronted with bloody stats start a pathetic wiffle-waffle. Right now, Mr. and Mrs. Stolwry, you have a perfect, beautiful specimen of a stocky, blond-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned, quilted, male shrimp-head welder, with pods. Now, what more do you bloody want? Frankly, it makes me sick! Why don’t you go have your child naturally?” – Eric Idle on Saturday Night Live (1976) – I can’t embed the video but it’s here (LINK) and hilarious.

Now you know why chicken wings are getting bigger. If only it would make its own sauce. I bet it does, in the Twilight Zone©!

We are at the beginning of a new age of humanity, and maybe even an entirely new type of humanity. The first humans have been born where sections of their DNA (the genetic information that defines most everything of what they are) have been replaced with new information. It’s exactly like someone recutting Toy Story® using dialogue from Fight Club™. Oh, someone did that? I do live in the best possible timeline:

It’s only two minutes: give it a watch, please. My therapist says I need to share things. But the first rule is that we shouldn’t talk about it. Thankfully, I’m typing instead of talking.

But in this case, the genetic information that defines a living human being was cut out and replaced with new information. And the human is an actual living human.

How did they do it?

Tiny scissors. Really small ones. And itty-bitty pieces of Scotch® tape. Okay, they actually used a technique called “CRISPR”, which stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. But for all you care it could stand for Clever Reindeer Intentionally Shooting Panda Rifles. It doesn’t matter. Let’s pretend it’s really tiny scissors and itty-bitty pieces of Scotch™ tape.

CRISPR allows editing of the DNA strand by using segments of DNA to match up with and replace the parts of the DNA that we don’t like. And even though DNA is comprised of lots of molecules, in reality DNA is just information like pages in a book, or dialogue in a movie except if you try to replace passages in your book with DNA all you get is a mess and sticky fingers from turning the DNA soaked pages. But back to the DNA: some of the information on the DNA appears to be actual junk – it may not mean anything – but the rest of the information defines your height, weight, hair color, maximum intelligence, ability to play guitar, affinity for bacon, and, well, ability to write real good word thoughts (PLOT POINT!).

Editing the DNA with CRISPR allows the editing of new pages into a book, and even the individual letters in the book. But better not end up leaving out the wrong word:

This Bible was printed in 1631 and is known as the “Wicked Bible.” If anyone actually followed the instructions, there was probably oodles of amateur DNA transfer. Hopefully not on the pages.

CRISPR can be used to edit mushroom DNA. Or cow DNA. Or . . . human DNA. And now two human girls have been born and inserted into their DNA is the resistance to AIDS.

The first time I ran into the concept of genetic engineering was when I was a kid, watching Star Trek®. When I was a kid, it was a law that every other show on television was a repeat of Star Trek™. The idea of one episode, Space Seed, was that a group of genetically enhanced (mentally and physically) supermen led a war. When they lost the war, they were shot into space in suspended animation. Because prison was too complicated, I guess. The leader? Khan Noonian Singh, played in scenery-chewing fashion by Ricardo Montalban.

Even Kirk is skittish about genetic engineering.

Any measurable human trait or combination of human traits from DNA can now be changed. And almost every human trait is genetic in nature. I know this from experience. As much as you might think that I was conceived of during an immaculate conception witnessed only by the angels and attended by a gaggle of singing heifers in bloomers, well, that was not exactly the case, no matter what I tell my kids. It was sweaty teenagers. But I digress. I’m adopted, but in the weird way where I’m actually related to the family that adopted me. I couldn’t even get “unwanted abandoned child” right. Such a failure.

Anyway, for every moment of my life until I was 35, I had zero contact with my biological father. Zero. None. Nada. Zilch. Empty set. And zero contact with any of his relatives. Complete isolation from that side of my personal biodiversity. But I had been told his name. Then, one night under some assistance from a bit of Coors Light® I did an Internet search and . . . called a number. He wasn’t there, but a week later we talked. And it was unusual.

If you’ve read this blog, you know that I have a rather strange set of interests. One day, jokes about fizzy toots, the next day political analysis, then genetic engineering. But when I called my biological father it was odd – there was almost no subject that either of us brought up that the other hadn’t researched. Oh, and he’s a writer (THIS WAS THE PLOT POINT PAYOFF). Please don’t get me wrong, in no way do I want to imply that I feel anything but the strongest loyalty to the family that raised me, but I could see the similarities so much that I made up a really clever original phrase: “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” I’m glad that when they rebuild the last remaining Internet server after the Nacho Cheese War of 2331™, that I’m certain to be credited with my wonderful, original phrase.

But your grandma who didn’t like that little tramp you were dating was right: genetics matter.

CRISPR puts the tools to optimize human traits in the hands of . . . humans. Sure, we’ve been doing the amateur kind of genetic engineering for, well, ever. And it’s resulted in some pretty interesting people, like, say, you. Our genetic engineers were our mothers and fathers. Men have broad shoulders because women like broad shoulders. Women have . . . well, we’ll skip that for now. Don’t want to say the wrong thing and have everyone think I’m a boob.

Beware of 12 year olds with the ability to create genetic modifications.

Who gets to play with CRISPR first? The rich. Specifically rich Chinese people. Yes, regulations exist in China, but the regulations exist to protect the State, not the people, silly. The only reason the Party would restrict rich kids from having SuperBabies 3000® is if the Party feels the technology is too powerful and keeps it for itself.

Make no mistake, this is an incredibly powerful technology, like alcohol on prom night. I think that the Chinese elite will start snipping and tucking DNA so that their children are smarter. Taller. Stronger. More confident. Better nose hair, you know, the kind you can braid. If you’re a billionaire, why not? The Party will be fine with that, since it gives them the ability to see what the technology does. I mean, understanding the complicated interactions between DNA molecules is tougher than dancing a polka striptease with a gopher. And we all know what that’s like.

Khan we fix your DNA? Yes we Khan!

Can you imagine being the master of this technology? You can eliminate undesirable human traits, such as enjoying Taylor Swift® music entirely from your gene pool. You can, if you are the Party, create the perfect Chuck Norris-like soldier. A 9 foot tall (37 meters) basketball player. The most loyal citizens.

If you are willing to sacrifice and experiment to quickly understand what the interactions are between multiple genetic changes and patient enough to await the results, you’ll quickly lead the world in a technology whose limits we can barely perceive. And in a state controlled by a central Party, well, soon enough we could see a split so wide in human ability that humanity might look more like a colony of insects with different classes of humans genetically modified to follow their role as drone, soldier, queen, scientist, and blogger than the normal wild and feral band of humans we’re used to. They’d be farther apart than Morlock© and Eloi™.

H.G. Wells couldn’t have imagined that 800,000 years of human evolution could be done in an afternoon in an uncomfortably warm doctor’s office. But he also couldn’t imagine that Leonardo DiCaprio would ever win an Oscar®.

In China in a few years embryonic DNA modifications might become as common as vaccination in the United States. Once the DNA gets into the gene pool of the country, it will stay there. Perhaps in two or three generations China will have citizens that are entirely immune to some sort of biological agent that just, whoops, “accidentally” gets released to depopulate the planet and leave it free for China.

Shhh, but I think the Chinese have already measured Africa to see if all of their stuff would fit.

But in a twist resulting from an interaction between a snip that removed unsightly ear hair and a tuck that allowed all men to grow mustaches as full and perfect as the one Burt Reynolds had in Sharky’s Machine©, the remaining citizens develop an insatiable desire for eating humans. What an ending! Then Rod Serling can come out, smoking, with a good moral to the story. Yay!

Okay – I love comments, and would love to have more, so don’t make me change your DNA so you’re chattier. And don’t forget – you can just subscribe to this in the box above, and I’ll show up at least three times a week in your inbox. Which won’t break it, unless you have a weak, girlie-man inbox. And I won’t send or sell your address, ever.