Category: Woo-Woo

The Coming Civil War (United States), Cool Maps, and Uncomfortable Truths

“Well, l could be wrong, but l believe diversity is an old, old wooden ship that was used during the Civil War era.  l would be surprised if the affiliates were concerned about the lack of an old wooden ship, but nice try.” – Anchorman

politicalspectrum

So, I guess that my “Secretly Wants To Live in a Post-Apocalyptic Society” secret is out of the bag?  I guess I need more dehydrated food.  And scotch.

(Part II of this series is posted at: The Coming Civil War Part II, and a (Possible) American Caesar)

There are some posts where I know exactly what I want to say, and how I want to say it.  Often, those are fairly well scripted, either with a handwritten first draft or a set of researched bullet points.  I’ll expand those into the full post.  Those are nice.  The structure has been created.  The post flows out.

Some topics are topics that are well planned out (I actually plan the blog topics about three months out) and fit.  Some topics just hit me with a blast of inspiration and nearly write themselves.

And some are difficult.  Very difficult – they occupy headspace I know that I’m going to write about them, but the issue is so difficult that I want to make sure it comes out how I want it to come out, that it doesn’t inadvertently come out in some sort of ham-handed way.  This is one of those.  I’m sort of pleased with the results – it came out the way I wanted it to come out, just like the ending to Breaking Bad, or Jean-Claude Van Damme’s last optometry appointment – he still doesn’t need glasses, yay!

Don’t know a great way to put this, but we’re (in the United States, and in Europe, though my read there is much murkier) heading towards civil war.  In Europe, civil war means dissolution of the EU and (likely) expulsion of large numbers of immigrants.  But I’m not European, so I won’t go too far speculating about them.

I’m not sure if it will be a decade off or longer, but I put the arrival of this war as soon as 2024, and as late as 2032.  Not really any longer than that.  What would stop it is a prolonged, total war that would challenge the very existence of the United States.  External threats and an external enemy are the best way to create unity (and second term for a president named “Bush”).  And that’s not good, because a prolonged war always leads to extremes, and we have extreme weapons – in that way, a civil war might be the best-case scenario.  But I digress – back to civil war.

Why?  Again, this won’t be exactly the same civil war as THE Civil War – there are some facets that will rhyme, but others that won’t.  The major theme is division.  And what better way to show that than with . . . maps.

Here’s a map from Colin Woodward and Tufts University, and Brian Stauffer, depicting the 11 cultures that they contend make up the United States:

11nations

So, there’s this.  Accurate?  I would personally draw a line between those who like Star Wars® instead of Star Trek™.  Those people are awful.

And it’s not just culture, the Woodward/Tufts map is pretty accurate at predicting where we are today politically.  Here is a map of the Clinton/Trump 2016 vote count:

vote-by-nation-2016

The redder you are, the more Trump.  The overlay of the Woodard/Tufts map is clear.  These cultures are significant, and real, and explain NASCAR®, country music, and the inexplicable popularity of PEZ®.

And I think I’ve graphically made my case for there being a division.  But how significant is it?  Well, research shows that it’s pretty one-sided.  Liberals (at least young ones) are significantly more close-minded than conservatives:

civilwarstats

Yes, you read that right.  45% of liberals would be uncomfortable with a roommate with opposing political views.  12% of conservatives would be uncomfortable.  I guess this means that liberals don’t like diversity?

In 49 B.C., Julius Caesar was ordered back to Rome.  Quite specifically, he was ordered to leave his army, the 13th Legion (Legio XIII, Gemina, or “Twins”) beyond the border of the Rubicon river, which was considered the northern border of Rome.  He didn’t, and then spawned a civil war that (ultimately) led to the end of the Roman Republic and Caesar being proclaimed Emperor.  To this day we celebrate this event by ordering salads in Caesar’s name.

geminaxiii

The last time the 13th Legion was active, I think they got in line in front of me at Arby’s® in Boulder, Colorado after a Van Halen© concert.  Man, when 4,000 people are in front of you in line, you’d expect they’d run out of roast beef.   They did.  Thankfully they had lots of panda and koala bear left.  They also ran out of Horsey Sauce L.  They claimed they ran out of horses.

So we have divisions that are significant, enduring (these divisions aren’t new), and deep.  Yet for decades we haven’t had a problem.  Why are we at the Rubicon?

Well, we were ethnically much more uniform than today.  The United States in 1965 (at the time of a major change to immigration policy) was 85% white.  Now?  62%.  That’s a pretty significant change, and one that impacts politics.  Again, cultural divisions lead to war.  And the easiest division is what you look like.  I know that people like to fight and will pick any old reason to fight.  Religion in Northern Ireland (Protestants and Catholics), football in California (Raiders™ vs. 49er’s©), and really important stuff (Star Wars© vs. Star Trek™).  People will fight each other to the death because we don’t like each other’s hats.  Historically, multi-cultural societies . . . fail.  Spectacularly.  (Again, this is not an indictment of any individual group, just a reading of history.)

But civil war in the United States is . . . very singular.  The Civil War was built upon philosophical differences (with very human consequences).  Issues involved in the Civil War include slavery, states’ rights, and Northern industrialism versus Southern agrarianism.  But one of the underlying causes might just be that map of the 11 cultures shown above.  The Northern states were built on the Puritan ethic.  They make up the Boston/New York corridor and the swath heading west from that.  The Southern states were built upon scoundrels – the Irish malcontents and Scottish reivers that immigrated later.  They’re the ones that make up Greater Appalachia.

So what will cause a civil war in the United States?

The first thing is the philosophic divisions listed above.  The desire for the freedom of individual determination is still strong in the Deep South and in Greater Appalachia and the Far West.  That hasn’t changed.  The Puritans in Yankeedom and the Left Coast still very much want to make their values the only values that matter.  Note the graph above that shows relative discomfort with diverse exhibited by liberals.  Ouch!

These groups have hated each other since the 1600’s.  And it will never go away, especially as long as the New England Patriots® keep winning Super Bowls™.  The two sides have never spoken the same language.  The time that both North and South united?  After the Civil War, the North (magnanimously) allowed the South to keep their heroes (Lee, Stuart, Jackson, Davis) and they were transformed into American heroes rather than insurrectionist traitors.  Not a bad trade.

There were places that held out – the first celebration of July 4th after the Civil War in Vicksburg was on July 4th, 1945.  Admittedly, Vicksburg surrendered on July 4th after a horrific siege and devastating defeat for the Confederacy.  It took 80 years and winning not one, but two world wars for Vicksburg to celebrate national unity on a regular basis on July 4.  These divisions remain to this day.

But what else will cause this war?

The Fourth Turning – it’s time.  Here’s a previous post (The Economy, The Fourth Turning, Kondratieff, and You.) that explains this timing in more detail.  The last generation to have experience the horror associated with total war, with the mobilization of the entire economy of the United States to defeat a foe is . . . dead.  The youngest boys that landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day are 95 today.  They control nothing.

Our leadership, our population has no connection to those that saw the horrors of a continent ripped apart by war.  They led our nation (and all of the nations of the West) and their actions were held in check by the horrors that they had seen.  Now their experiences no longer temper the actions of the leaders (and desires of the people) to avoid apocalyptic levels of violence.

Let’s continue with economics – I’ve discussed before that the current economic practices have a time limit (More Budget Doom, The Rolling Stones, an End Date, and an Unlikely Version of Thunderstruck).  One cause of civil war (not necessary, but certainly an exacerbating cause) is economic collapse.  When people have more to lose than to gain, they won’t fight.  As Janis Joplin said, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”  And when people are ruined?  They fight.  See the French Revolution (Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, Mangos and A Future That Must Not Be).

Economics will be a trigger, but not the underlying cause of division listed above.

So, we have a civil war.  What’s the end look like?

Breakup.

I don’t think that the things that have held us together as a nation will continue to hold us together.  What values do we have in common anymore?  It seems like . . . none.  Let me elaborate.  I could do a post on each of these (and likely won’t – other people cover this on a regular basis, so unless I have a Wilder take, I won’t):

We don’t speak the same language at all, anymore.  Even though I have friends that don’t (at all) agree with me politically, I fear that they aren’t the norm.  The end state isn’t 11 countries.  It’s probably (at least) four.  I can see a Heartland State, an East Coast, a West Coast, and a Northern Mexico.  Los Angeles will be Mexico.  Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle will be East Coast.  The Boston/Manhattan/DC corridor will be East Coast.  Northern Mexico will be as shown as El Norte.

But on the bright side?  Jean-Claude Van Damme doesn’t need glasses!!! How awesome is that?

Human Beings, Are We Awesome Creatures With Cool Senses, or What? (Hint: We’re Awesome)

“I see dead people.” – The Sixth Sense

mulderscull

I find this picture . . . disturbing.  Should this be the XY-Files?

I think that a lot of times, we have no ideas of the capability of humanity.  From the ability to understand subatomic particles from the basis of equations and thought experiments that we constructed to the ability to build pyramids and land on the Moon, we continually do lots of stuff the warning label said not to do.  And we make bratwurst.  Which is, when cooked right, the Best of All Possible Foods®.

Human senses are apparently much more finely tuned than we ever expected and we’ve managed to gather data that we’re way smarter than we ever thought we were.  Human senses are adequate to:

  • Around 60% of the time, judge from a photo if a man or woman is gay or straight. For some reason, this gives gay people the heebee-geebees.
  • Determine which student came from a rich or poor family with about 53% accuracy. Not super accurate, but better than chance.  Perhaps it was because Ivana Trump was in the photo stack?
  • Determine if people are sick from looking at a picture of their stupid sick face – 81% of the time.
  • And we might have even more amazing skills:

That could have been the end of it. But another biochemist encouraged the pair to track Milne down and try a blind T-shirt test: She sniffed six sweaty tees from people diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and six from healthy controls. Milne correctly identified which six had Parkinson’s, but she also tagged one of the control subjects as having the disease.

Despite that error, Barran was intrigued—all the more so eight months later, when the same supposedly healthy control subject Milne had identified was diagnosed with Parkinson’s.

This is from National Geographic . . . you can view the article here (LINK).  It’s not a great article, but I’ll cite the source . . . .

643-sick-people-1

Sick people and well people, I’m not sure who is who, mainly because I don’t care about other people.   (Audrey Henderson/St Andrews University)

Yeah, humans can smell diseases.  Or, at least old British women can smell Parkinson’s disease, and some people can see them, at least some of the time.

And AI shows that what our brains are doing is processing subtle biological cues that are actual, physical patterns.  An AI was set up to determine the whole gay/straight question by feeding it tons of pictures of gay and straight people, and the accuracy of the algorithm was in the high 80% level, if you gave it five facial images per person.  Me?  My ability to judge gay people vs. straight people is totally non-existent unless I “accidently” open the door when they’re having sex.  My ability is zero.

gay-ai-face-study-2

Here’s what the AI figured out:  both Gay and Straight people are blurry.  NYTimes was where I found this, but it was originally from the original study.

One thing I’ve noted – generally just watching two wrestlers walking onto a mat, I can guess the winning wrestler about 80% of the time.  And I can tell which two bratwurst will be tastiest when I grill them.  Even if it’s a tie.  (It’s always a tie – they’re bratwurst.)

Old-Time Television, Polical Trends, and Civil War II for Fat People

“Well, l could be wrong, but l believe diversity is an old, old wooden ship that was used during the Civil War era.” – Anchorman

DSC04442

The Battleship Texas, reporting for tourists!  Hopefully fat ones!

Data Point:  I was at a club function with The Mrs., The Mrs.’ Mom, and The Mrs.’ Grandfather several years ago.  The Mrs.’ Grandfather was in the Army Air Corps in World War II, so he’s getting along in years.  Standing up and sitting down is tough on him.

The club opened with both a prayer, and then the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag.  You were supposed to stand for both.  The Mrs.’ Grandfather didn’t attempt to stand for the prayer, but when it came time to stand for the Pledge, he was standing straight and tall with his hand over his heart.  It was as if his loyalty to his country was in fact his real religion.

Data Point:  I grew up in a rural area – no cable for us.  It was in the mountains, so we didn’t even reception from the television station directly – we got it from a “translator” that took the original signal from the television station and converted it to a UHF signal to be rebroadcast to us mountain folk.  Consequently there were only three networks – ABC, NBC, and CBS.  We also got PBS, but who counted PBS??

The next day at school, we’d talk about the same shows.  Different races, different home languages in some cases, and different religions.  The commonality was our love (generally) of the same television shows – we all watched Family Feud®.  Our teachers were strong believers in America.  And our faith in the United States prevailing over the godless communists of the Soviet Union was strong.  We knew we could win.  And it was (after Vietnam) a time (mostly) free of war.  Even the first Gulf War was over in an afternoon.

Data Point:  For most of the nation’s post-Civil War history, the undercurrent of a single, cohesive nation, the undercurrent of optimism carried through the nation.  We were America, and it was morning here.  You might have voted against Carter, or Reagan, or Bush (I) or Clinton, but nobody said “not my president.”  Carter may have had crappy economic policy, but his commitment to building the United States’ military (stealth aircraft, improved submarines and missiles) gave Reagan the weapons to end the Cold War peacefully.

We were one as a country – bound by the civic religion of love for country, the nominal shared Christian values, and the overwhelmingly focused popular culture.

I’m not sure when it really began, the great fissures in American society.  Some may point to Reagan.  Some may point to the Clinton Impeachment.  Others may point to changing demographics.  Others may point back to Glubb’s (LINK) study of the end of empires.

But progressives were 100% certain that they would own the future and the presidency for . . . forever.  After W. termed out, the idea that Obama ushered in a year of final, complete progressive control was even more manifest.  And now, in the post-Obama era we have greater divisions than ever in my lifetime.

Why?

Well, for one thing, a vast majority of the citizens felt the civic religion my Grandfather-in-law felt when he stood up for the pledge.  There was a feeling of faith and reverence for all things American.  And why not?  The United States was the strongest economic and military power the world had ever seen.  And most of what we were responsible for, we felt was to make the world a better place.  Who was trying to get the Egyptians and Israelis to stop killing each other?  Carter.  Who was trying to limit nuclear weapons?  Reagan.  Bush (I) liberated Kuwait.  Everyone generally was in favor of that.  Clinton?  Well, he got a participation trophy – but didn’t mess too much up.

Also, values used to be common.  Mainstream Protestant Christianity was pretty much the assumed norm.  And the values of Protestants (egalitarianism, hate of nepotism, belief in hard work leading to success through a meritocracy, looking down on unwed pregnancy and single motherhood, and salvation through faith) were fairly benign.  You didn’t have to be a Protestant for a Protestant to like you, and as religions go, Protestantism is probably the most comfortable religion with a secular state.  As I heard it said once, “Welcome to the Methodists!  We’re not against anything!”

And popular culture was small (three stations!) and opinions were more limited.  No matter who you were with, you had something in common.  You didn’t like the same candidate, right, but at least you liked the same sports team.  Or the same sport.  Now, given the Internet and the explosion of cable channels, you might never watch the same show as your friends.  The commonality of popular culture is simply gone.

I think it might have been the division was seen in earnest in the 2000 election – the bitter, close win by W. was (maybe) the spark that lit the fire.  Was the degree of anger during this election and the aftermath partially in response to the Clinton Impeachment?  Probably.

Since the 2000 election, one side or the other has felt the presidential election wasn’t legitimate.  So, for the last 18 years, half-ish of the country has really, really, really had a deep hate for the president.  That’s new.  And there are a group of people in America today who actively despise the country.  That’s new, too.  And, they despise its history, too.  And they also despise showers, from the pictures I’ve seen.

If you look at the recent destruction/removal of Civil War statues, I get concerned.  The statues were a part of the reconciliation effort after the Civil War – part of the bargain for bringing us back together as a nation was that we embraced each other.  Oh, sure, there would never be a statue to General Grant or Abraham Lincoln in Atlanta, but General Lee could be rehabilitated as a military genius who was asked by both sides to lead their army.  These statues weren’t put up like statues of Lenin or Stalin – memorials to oppressive leaders – this might be the first war in history where statues of the losers were put up on territory they lost.

DSC02985

Sam Houston, in Houston.  Let’s see you take this one down . . . .

We have fractured into a thousand different values.  And a thousand different cultures.  I’ve actually seen it said on the Internet that America has no set culture or values and never has.  Our sense of purpose has gone from winning the Cold War to . . . what?  Something centered around the Kardashians?

We cannot continue like this, but the necessary preconditions to Civil War are (thankfully!) not here.  Our economy is strong, so people feel they have something to lose, so they won’t fight.  Fanatics on either side aren’t geographically separated (think north and south in the Civil War) so that’s another plus.  There don’t appear to be two military sides, so that’s helpful, too.

What next, then?

Well, Yogi Berra said it best, “Predicting is hard, especially about the future.”

  • We won’t become as cohesive again, outside of war. Once the group is shattered, it’s shattered.
  • We will find it difficult to agree on any national goals, outside of crisis.

Things I’m guessing:

  • We won’t see anything like a conventional war. We’ve spent too much money and are too good at it for anyone else to play.  Any external conflict will be far sneakier, and far nastier.  Think all the computers not working.  Or all of the Pop-Tarts® being the icky brown sugar ones.
  • Add a sufficient economic crisis, and all bets are off internally. I don’t think a second Great Depression (absent all of the welfare) will be peaceful.  At all.  Maybe not a civil war, maybe just anarchy.
  • People will call the future situation “bad luck” despite the clear predictability from every civilization undergoing the same circumstances throughout history (again, see my Glubb post: (LINK)).

I, for one, want to make video games, carbonated soda, Doritos™ and Twinkies® federally subsidized (free) for everyone.  That way, if Civil War II ever comes?  Everyone will be fat and slow and probably in sweatsuits.  It might make for the most humorous war in history.

AI, The Singularity, and Your 401K

“A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines.  We don’t know who struck first, us or them.  But we know that it was us that scorched the sky.” – The Matrix

2015 065

This is how “The Hobbit” should have started, with dragons and swords, rather than a dwarf dinner party?  Then I wouldn’t have fallen asleep during hour one of the 12 hours of movie.

In 1947, an author began to predict it.  In the 1950’s a few scientists saw it coming.  In the 1960’s, it became a (more and more) common subject.  In the 1970’s and 80’s it was nightmare fuel for extremely profitable movies and some great books.   And, in 1993, Vernor Vinge (author and mathematician) wrote the paper (LINK) that gave this phenomenon its name:  The Technological Singularity, or just Singularity from here on out.

This is the second time I’ve discussed the Singularity, and the first time was over here (LINK).  The topic is big enough and important enough that I thought I’d add on to it.  This will likely not be the last time.  Not that I’m running out of blog topics – no, I’ve got a page and a half of them.  No, the Singularity keeps getting uncomfortably closer, like your father-in-law’s farting Great Dane that he normally feeds some sort of petroleum waste covered in sulfur and toxic waste.  Otherwise?  Anything making that smell is generally dead.

Speaking of dead, Jack Williamson (a horribly overlooked author) wrote about the Singularity first in 1947 in his story With Folded Hands.  I read that when I was in sixth or seventh grade at the Middle School for Wayward Wilders.  I read every science fiction story or novel in that library, and I even started The Lord of the Rings with book two (The Two Towers) since the library didn’t have book one (The Fellowship of the Rings).  To this day I maintain it’s a better two book series than a three book series.  The first book is really just walking and singing elves and hobbits.  Meh.  The second book starts with treachery and fighting.  Yeah, that’s the stuff.

with folded hands

Anyway, Jack Williamson’s story With Folded Hands was . . . awesome.  And one of the creepiest things I’d ever read.  You can read it for free, here at this (LINK).  Here’s the spoiler-free-ish Wikipedia description:

 

. . . disturbed at his encounter, Underhill rushes home to discover that his wife has taken in a new lodger, a mysterious old man named Sledge. In the course of the next day, the new mechanicals have appeared everywhere in town. They state that they only follow the Prime Directive: ”to serve and obey and guard men from harm”. Offering their services free of charge, they replace humans as police officers, bank tellers, and more, and eventually drive Underhill out of business. Despite the Humanoids’ benign appearance and mission, Underhill soon realizes that, in the name of their Prime Directive, the mechanicals have essentially taken over every aspect of human life. No humans may engage in any behavior that might endanger them, and every human action is carefully scrutinized. Suicide is prohibited.

So, you’d think that having all of those things would be good, right?  Nah.  Read the story.  Want to ski?  The Humanoids are against it – you might hurt yourself.  And anything else that might be dangerous.  Like driving.  Or drinking.  Or smoking.  Or not exercising.  Or not eating the right foods.  Or staying up too late.  And the Humanoids are smarter than you.  And always watching.

It’s an example of how the Singularity can go wrong – an instruction set that’s interpreted as machines do:  literally.  For example, if one read the instruction “help humanity” and figured out that humanity was always suffering, and maybe the best way to help humanity to stop suffering was to end humanity . . . or if the instruction set was to create inexpensive cars . . . and it converted the entire mass of the planet into inexpensive yet attractive and stylish cars.  (Elon, make sure your programs don’t include this!)

These themes spawned numerous television episodes in the 1960’s and 1970’s.  How many times, exactly, did Kirk do mental ju-jitsu with a supercomputer?  I can count at least seven without thinking.  So, about 1/10th of Star Trek® episodes, Kirk was fighting a Singularity.  This continued through the movies Terminator® and Terminator 2© through the 1990’s.  Then Vernor Vinge named it.

Let’s talk about the Singularity.  What, exactly, happens?

In general, a much larger than human intellect appears.  And it rapidly reconfigures everything that it sees.  Concepts that are beyond the smartest humans are correlated – the data we already have in our experiments, is all brought together.

We know we are wrong, but don’t know how.  Could a superhuman intelligence bring it all together in a month?  A week?  A day?  Perhaps.  We know we are wrong about the way the Universe works – and that there are some pretty significant gaps in our understanding (LINK).

It’s a fair thing to say that we are living today with a weak AI.  My GPS unit tells me the fastest route to where I’m travelling.  YouTube® suggests songs I’ve never heard that I kinda like.  And algorithms based on my previous web browsing suggest that maybe I’ll need a knee replacement or perhaps a new kidney (now you know why I had children:  they are wonderful sources of spare organs).

I may even have interacted with an AI this weekend – I was having trouble getting the “name” of one of my Amazon® devices.  The “person” on the other end of the chat kept repeating the same things.  I had to figure out how to get to the answer.  But I told the “person” how I got there.  Bet next time it’ll be quicker . . . .

This is a weak AI.  It’s a general helper every day.  Only a little creepy, not “fifty years old and still collecting Star Wars® figures” creepy.

But it will/is getting stronger.  How long until Google® correlates web searches and times of day to a dozen or more lifestyle-related diseases?  I’m willing to bet you it does that already.  But this is still an algorithm designed by a human.  Probably.

But recently Google™ (which now no longer promises to “not be evil”) created AlphaGo©.  Go is an ancient game that rivals chess in complexity.  It beat the greatest human master 89 out of 100 games in October, which most people would call a “drubbing.”  Perhaps, most disturbingly, the moves that the computer made were called “disturbing” and “alien”.  The computer was left with nothing more than the rules of the game and a desire to win.  Not long after playing large number of games against itself, it was able to take on the greatest player in the world.  And win.  No human will ever beat it.

From my observation, the likely requirement for development of a true AI, a general AI is constraint.  The AI was able to beat us (us=seven billion humans) because it was constrained and goal driven – it was limited to a single gaming system with observable and finite rules.

And humans aren’t constrained, right?

Well, no.  Humans are constrained by a human body.  As much as I would like to be able to jump to Mars and party with Elon Musk (you know he already moved there, right?) I can’t.  Intellect is about observing and overcoming constraints to achieve a goal.  If you don’t have constraints or a goal, intelligence has no meaning and no use.  (This might be the most profound thought I ever had, with the exception of the partying with Elon Musk on Mars part.)

What are the constraints and goals of a human?  Our constraints are our intellect and physical limitations.  Our goals are our desire to live, help others of our kind, procreate, and keep our children safe.  Obviously, these are generalized.  And, they can be sublimated into secondary goals, like cats for a cat lady, or perverted into goals like more heroin for a heroin addict.

But how useful was intelligence, anyway?  Surface animal life has existed for nearly half a billion years.  How much evidence do we have for intelligent life on Earth?  Yeah.  Just us.  Probably 200,000 years or so.  This is 0.04% of the time that we’ve had surface life.  Eyes (not human, but eyes) have been in existence for that entire time.  So, 100% of the time we’ve had life on the surface, it’s had eyes.  But intelligence?  Not so much.

From that we can guess (maybe) that intelligence is rare.  I’d guess it’s because that there’s some component of intelligence that’s simply not useful for the simple goals of procreation.  It’s better to be stronger or have bigger claws or better teeth rather than a big brain.  Yet we, mankind, exist.  We replaced claws and teeth with brains and planning.  Perhaps the dinosaurs were getting ready to make the same leap when a certain meteorite hit the Yucatan, or perhaps the cold-blooded nature of their biology prevented them from being able to sufficiently grow the brain tissue required for intelligence.  To-MA-to, To-MAH-to.  And, we win.  You suck, dinosaurs!

Certainly, it’s fair to say that whatever biological bottleneck prevented intelligent dinosaurs from ruling the Earth today, humanity passed the test, and we are certainly, unquestionably, the dominant form of life on Earth.

The more we learn about AI, the more we will learn to give it constraints and goals like we humans have.  And those constraints and goals will give the “intelligence” part of Artificial Intelligence the reason to grow.  At some point, the constraints and goals will be properly set to create a general AI.

And then?

A singularity means that none of the rules from before even make sense.  That’s the difficulty.  Right now we worry about the prices of real estate in San Francisco or the price of the stock market or the value of our 401k.  We’re concerned with how many people like our BookFace® posts or what our current salary is or how much money we have saved in a piggy bank.

After a Singularity, many of the rules that went before matter anymore.  At all.  Your credit score might be less important than how many freckles you have.  And only the freckled will rule the Earth.  Why?  Because of Justin Timberlake.  Duh.

Our world regularly experiences singularities – the revolution in 1776 was one.  It was a fundamental change in the way the world was governed – giving more freedom than has ever come before to humanity.  The entire concept of kings was overthrown with the concept of divine rights as the basis for free men living together.  We also have darker experiences with political singularities, as those from the Soviet gulag or Cambodian camp can attest to.  And only a Singularity can explain why Firefly® was cancelled in season one.

But the Technological Singularity will be that.  On steroids.

Literally every facet of your life that you depend upon will be in question.  Monetary systems?  What is money to a superhuman machine intelligence?  Property rights?  Why do they exist?  Eugenics?  Perhaps the AI will work to make us better pets through forced breeding.

Nothing you can take for granted now will be certain after a Singularity.  And after a technological Singularity?  If a machine AI doesn’t like you, it can upload you into a core and torture you forever.  In perhaps the best, but most visceral fiction representing this, Harlan Ellison has the following passage.  The full story is here, but I warn you, it’s very good, but very stark (LINK).  I suggest you buy the full book at Amazon . . . .

From “I Have No Mouth, But I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison, ©1967

We had given AM sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But it had been trapped. AM wasn’t God, he was a machine. We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race, almost all of us, and still it was trapped. AM could not wander, AM could not wonder, AM could not belong. He could merely be. And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge. And in his paranoia, he had decided to reprieve five of us, for a personal, everlasting punishment that would never serve to diminish his hatred … that would merely keep him reminded, amused, proficient at hating man. Immortal, trapped, subject to any torment he could devise for us from the limitless miracles at his command.

Yeah, like I said rough.  And this .pdf was posted from a High School?  They would have burned a high school teacher alive back when I was in school for mentioning that work even existed (though my English teacher did mention another Ellison work, “A Boy and His Dog” and was not immediately hit by lasers and burnt to a crisp (though I did hear that a time-ray hit him, and he later retired when he hit 65).

Again, you can get the book here (again, I get no profit from this, but recommend you buy it if you’re not squeamish):

Vinge stated in 1993, not before 2005, nor after 2030.  Now?  2040 to 2050 seems to be the conclusion that most experts expect.  Still, like fusion, 20 to 30 years away.  Because a looming event that could consider everything you ever thought right, and immovable incorrect in a matter of months or days . . . that’s nothing to worry about.  Right?

Steve Martin, Bob Segar, and Interviewing; or How I Met The Mrs.

Five Year Old:  Sounds like a subdural hematoma to me.

Doctor:  Three years of nursery school, and you think you know it all!  Well, you’re still wet behind the ears. It’s not a subdural hematoma it’s epidural!

–The Man With Two Brains

Man_With_Two_Brains

Steve Martin does not officially endorse my marriage.  Officially.  And the restraining order says I can’t show up at his house at 4am to ask him to endorse it anymore.  I’m sure his advisors aren’t aware that we are really best friends.

It’s Friday, so technically this should be a health post.  It’s about health because married couples try to live longer so they can win that final argument, like two old pythons arguing about who is older and has more wrinkles from squeezing Mongolian herdsmen.  So, there.

What follows is a mostly true story, except for the exaggerations for the sake of humor or whimsy,   I’ll point out when some of the more incredible facts are Really Odd But Amazingly True with the flag (ROBAT).  And ROBAT makes me think of a robot bat superhero who texts in ALL CAPS JUST LIKE THIS.  But, it’s still amazing because he’s a bat who texts.

Anyhow.

Let’s rewind our clocks back to when Bill Clinton was still indicating that he  did not have sex with that woman, and The X-Files® was not starring some wrinkly old people.  Cell phones were for the rich and insecure.  iMac® was a thing, but iPod© wasn’t and iPhone meant you were talking with someone for whom spelling had little meaning.

I was in the basement of Casa Wilder 2.0 (I’m on 5.0 now) on a stair climber.  This particular stair climber was one of my favorite pieces of exercise equipment I’ve ever owned: it used hydraulic pistons that look like shock absorbers for resistance.  After about 20 minutes on the climber if a drop of sweat fell off my intensely furrowed brow and hit on of the hydraulic pistons, it would immediately boil off with a sizzling sound and the smell of boiling sweat.  And it had cables and rollers that could easily chop off a toddler’s finger.  Sadly, they don’t make them anymore.

It might have something to do with all of those nine fingered toddlers.

I was nearly divorced.  I’d been separated for over two years, and the paperwork was finally winding its way through the courts for final approval.  Why do divorces take so long?

Because good things happen to patient people.

I’d dated several girls, but none of the relationships had gone particularly well. Nothing horrible, mind you, except for the married Internet girl (honestly, it’s like we’re roommates,) and the other married Internet girl (we never even see each other). I stopped the relationships pretty soon after those facts came out.

I had, in fact, said in a prayer one night (in frustration), “Okay, I give up.  You figure it out.”  I assumed (and assume) that God has a sense of humor.  It was a Monday in March, about this time of year.

Recently I’d gotten very, very tired of the same twenty classic rock songs on a seemingly permanent repeat cycle, especially Bob Segar.  I can’t listen to any of his music anymore: it was on a rotation of about 2 Bob Segar songs an hour . . . . the same old cliche, is that a woman or a man . . . .  No, Bob, if you have such a problem with people making fun of your long hair, cut it.

Sheesh.

The result was I started listening to the post-Nirvana® 1990;s rock on station B which was entirely Segar-Free.  It might not have been metal, but it certainly had the virtue of not being Bob Segar.  Seriously, you have no idea the depth of my loathing for Bob Segar.

But yet I owe him something . . . .

So, listening to Station B on a Tuesday the day after my cheeky prayer. Every night there was a game show or giveaway.  And on Tuesday, the game show was Hollywood Movie Trivia® – the DJ would play a clip from a movie, and you’d have to have to call in first to name the movie.  And this one was (for a super-genius like me) ridiculously easy: it’s the movie quote at the top of the post.

The DJ played the clip and then went to a commercial.

I called in.  Note that my phone at this point was still corded.  Stuck to the wall.

Busy signal.

I hit redial.  Busy signal.

I hit redial once more.

Still busy.

The commercial break was almost over, so I gave up and went back to sweating on superheated pistons.

“We still don’t have a winner . . . ”

Redial.

Phone answered . . . “this is Station X.  What’s the name of the movie?”

“The Man With Two Brains.”

“We have a winner.”  Queue sound effect of ringing bell and applause.

I’d won a CD.  White Town, “ Women in Technology.  Yeah, it’s not real memorable.

https://youtu.be/_-rbS70uufA?si=MNAOAzswqtRvLu-H

Also, I’d won a free photo session at Glamour Shots©.  Glamour Shots® was a strange phenomenon in the 1980’s and 1990’s.  Essentially you went and the photographer would gussy you up with feather boas, makeup, soft fuzzy light and background.  Essentially time consuming selfies.

catshots

Not pictured: Me.  I’d attribute this if I could, but I have no idea of where it came from.

After reveling in my newfound photographic and CD wealth, I started talking to the DJ.  Seemed kinda cool, we talked for 10 minutes or so.  We never would have had the chance to talk for those 10 minutes if the DJ would have had to dump me after the commercials.  As it was, the only chance to talk to her and not sound creepy was on that one conversation.  (ROBAT – Really Odd But Amazingly True)

The next morning I went to work (city of about a million people) and mentioned to two of them that I thought the DJ was neat.  Oh, the DJ was a girl.  One of the two friends replied: “I know her, she’s not dating anyone.  I’ll set you two up for St. Patrick’s Day.”  And she did.  (ROBAT)

On St. Patrick’s Day we were to meet at 10 or so.  I got to the bar about 9:30.  The place was packed, and my friend was spinning mad tunes (is that even a phrase?) and she mentioned that the DJ would be there soon, soon being 10:30 or so.  I had some friends there as wingmen, and soon enough I was introduced to the DJ, or, The Mrs. To Be.

I immediately called her by the name she used on the radio.

The Mrs. To Be:  “No, it’s really REDACTED.”

John Wilder:  “Why don’t you use your real name?”

The Mrs. To Be:  “You know . . . stalkers.”

John Wilder:  “Oh.  (long pause)  My friends told me not to bring up stalking on the first date.” (Yes, I really said that.)

We danced.  We both realized that neither of us were dancers.  We picked out a booth in another room where the music wasn’t so loud.

I got beers for us. We sat down, and the interview started.  Yes, I did this (LINK) and interviewed her.

But a really good interviewer (and I was in top form back then) can make an interview seem like a pleasant conversation by a person that’s interested in you.  And it was pleasant.  And I was interested in her.  But I needed to weed out the kinds of crazy that would conflict with my kinds of crazy.  And also make sure that the person shared the same core values I did. (ROBAT)

I was pleasantly surprised that The Mrs. To Be was much less neurotic (in the ways that mattered to me) than most of the crazy moonbat girls from my previous relationships.  And she wasn’t married.

Yet.

We stayed until they kicked us out of the bar. Why did they kick us out of the bar?  Because everyone else had already left and we had been talking for three hours, and it seemed like 15 minutes. (ROBAT)

We walked out of the bar.  There had been hundreds of cars there when I’d gotten there I’d been lucky to find a good spot.  The Mrs. To Be had showed up nearly an hour later.  Yet, there were only two cars left in the lot.  And they were parked side by side, with matching dents on the driver-side door. (ROBAT)

Apparently, God does have a sense of humor, and thankfully for me He’s not subtle when He kicks a message out.  I walked her to the door, and leaned in for the kiss.  (ROBAT)

Which she wasn’t expecting, but, you know, when you’ve got the sign from the Big Coach to run like hell for first base, you run like hell for first base.  She kissed me right back.  (ROBAT)

139 days later, The Mrs. and I were married in a mall in Bally’s® Casino in Vegas on a Sunday morning.  (ROBAT)

bobsegar

Bob Segar, who brought together two people who were utterly tired of his music. Thanks, Bob for bringing us together in mutual hatred!  (Image by Adam Freese, CC BY 2.0, Attribution)

Dinosaurs, Radioactivity, Time Reversed Sensing, Remote Viewing and The Ultimate Warrior

“Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.” – Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

DSC03817

In 1843 Sir Richard Owen came up with the term “dinosaur” to describe the fossilized remains that were being discovered and studied.  Of course, before this point they were considered “dragon bones” or bones from giants because only truly massive beasts could have created bones so big.  But we all know it was your momma.

Every once in a while, I like to take a large turn to the weird on Wisdom Monday – primarily because it’s fun.  I think that following those that study the paranormal is similar to watching The Ultimate Warrior® take on Hulk Hogan™ for the WWF© title.  It’s harmless, amusing, and if you watch it close enough, you just might stumble upon some truth.  Ohhh, yeah!

I think that science describes what’s true – and as such, is the very enemy of post-modernist thought – “nothing is certain, nothing is true.”  And I am certain that there are many things we don’t yet understand, and many places where the basic fundamental understanding of nature and reality eludes us.  This is different than post-modernism.  There is Truth.  We just need to understand it.  And we really don’t.

Like radioactive decay.

Radioactive decay is where an essentially unstable atomic nucleus decides that it’s done with being unstable and dumps a proton like a psycho ex-girlfriend.  Or it splits into two nuclei like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck not being in the same movie together.  This decay is important, because it likely is the source of heat for the core of the earth that keeps our magnetic dynamo going that keeps the planet habitable.  Matt and Ben must be in separate movies so that we can all live.

But the rate of radioactive decay should be constant, right?  I mean, if I jumped up and down on a trampoline with a lot of plutonium the plutonium wouldn’t decay any faster.  I’d be fried like a pizza roll from the radiation from the plutonium, but the rate at which the plutonium decayed wouldn’t change.

The radioactive decay should be constant.

But it isn’t.  It appears to be (in some experiments) a variable.  It varies with the time of the day, and the season of the year.  Not by a lot, but by about 4% in one experiment.  Here’s a graph of the experiment by Sturrock, P.A.; Steinitz, G.; Fischbach, E.; Javorsek, D.; Jenkins, J.H. (2012):

decayrate

Pretty colors, right?  But it also is pretty plain that something is going on here that impacts the radioactive decay of Radon 222 seems to be changed . . . by how close we are to the Sun.  Maybe.

This bothers physicists.  A lot.

I also recall reading a paper by a Dr. Dean Radin some time ago (LINK – to a .pdf).   He performed an experiment with 31 different subjects where they viewed a total of 1060 images.  He measured their physiological responses during the testing.  They’d see a blank slide.  Then, five seconds after they pressed the mouse button, they’d see a slide.  Kittens.  A mountain.  A hot naked person.  A seaside.  A dismembered body.

What???

Yeah.  Some of the pictures were set up to produce an emotional response, but most, not.

About four seconds before the emotional picture, the subject displayed a physiological response.  But for those boring pictures?  No response.

Read that again.

About four seconds before something emotional happened, the subject knew something emotional was going to happen.  Which is not how reality has been defined to us – we’re not supposed to know that something bad is going to happen.  But this experiment said . . . we do.

And then there was Project Stargate, started at Stanford Research Institute and eventually folded into an Army project.  The movie The Men Who Stare at Goats is a fictionalized version of what went on during the Army project, and it’s not a bad movie.

Yeah.  This was a government funded (to the tune of $20,000,000) project in what’s called Remote Viewing.  What’s Remote Viewing?  It’s fairly simple – a target was assigned to a “viewer” who was asked to describe it.  In one trial, the US government was looking for a downed Soviet Tu-22 bomber in Africa – it was converted to a surveillance plane and had all of the latest Soviet goodies (I assume that they had diesel-powered calculators weighing in at only 350 kilograms).  The report says the remote view assigned to find it wrote down a latitude and a longitude.  And the plane was there.

The government reportedly got information they could take action on for years, in some cases entirely verified by satellite photos and other James Bond-type stuff.  In my own personal admission – at one point I got online and did a remote viewing test.  I concentrated very hard, wrote down a sketch and my observations, and the following photo was nearly spot on.

Coincidence?  Sure.

Science?  No way.  I couldn’t replicate it.  But it happened.  And these coincidences have happened to me throughout my life.

We’ve talked before (LINK) about the biggest advantage humanity has – the ability to see into the future.  We do it regularly.  I can predict that during the month of December, it’s probably not going to be an awesome time to catch a bunch of sun in Fairbanks.  I can predict that if I plant grass seed, fertilize it, and water it, at some point I’m going to need a mower.  Through our thought processes we can see the future.

But would it have been to our advantage to know four seconds before a saber-toothed tiger attacked?  Would it have been subject to natural selection?  Would the people who couldn’t see slightly into the future die at a slightly higher rate?  Sure.

How could that even work?

There is precedence in quantum mechanics for particles to become entangled that doesn’t even involve alcohol and a frat party – Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance” wherein the state of one entangled particle changed the state of the other particle even though they were far apart.  Something about information seems to tie distant particles together – even though there’s no way that they could be tied together, just like Hulk Hogan® and The Ultimate Warrior©.

ultimate warrior

Is there a coincidence that Hulk Hogan® teamed up with The Ultimate Warrior™ right when the Global Warming© thing began?

And the whole “spooky action at a distance” is difficult to believe, but it is generally accepted, and based on actual scientific observation, but we have problems with thinking that we might in some way be tied into events slightly into the future, or thousands of miles away.

Science can tell us a lot.  But we have to wait until Summer Slam ’18 for the results . . .

Richard Dawson, Quantum Mechanics, The Mandela Effect

“No, it’s the Mengele Effect.” – X-Files

DSC04279

Remember when a wax Rocky Balboa knocked out President Gore after the Soviets invaded Pakistan?  Me neither.

For me it started somewhere in my early thirties.

The Mrs. and I were watching the television one night and a show called “World’s Funniest Gameshow Moments” came on.  We started to watch – it was narrated by Richard Dawson.  Richard Dawson was the host of Family Feud® back in the 1970’s and 1980’s.  On the celebrity scale he was higher than most – parts in two big feature films and almost two straight decades on television.

No big surprise that he’d be narrating a show about game shows, right?  It even makes sense.

Except he was dead.  And the dead are notoriously bad at calling back their agents to get roles narrating television shows.  Except Bono®.  He’ll do anything.

I clearly remember reading Dawson’s death notice in the paper on a winter morning almost a decade earlier from the time we were watching the show in year 2000.  It was on the right hand of page 2 about two inches from the top.  I was sitting in the back of a classroom.  It was winter.

John Wilder:  “Hey, this is Richard Dawson.  But he died.  Right?”

The Mrs.:  “Yes, I certainly remember that he died.  Wonder when they filmed this?”

I booted up my computer.  I clicked on the network icon and connected to the Internet, via a nice 56k modem.

Yes, this was the sound of the Internet in the before time.  Imagine watching Netflix – it would only take 6 or 7 days to download a non-HD movie. 

After I logged in, I did a quick search, and I found out that . . . Richard Dawson was indeed alive (at that time – Richard Dawson is dead now, having passed away on June 2, 2012).

Richard_Dawson_Family_Feud_1976

Ahhh, the sweet morning scent of piano cinnamon trees.

The Mrs. and I both had very specific memories of Dawson being dead.  Very specific memories, and based on our recollection it was roughly in the same year.  And the same cause – cancer.  But we were wrong.

Now it’s understandable when one of us is wrong.  People goof.  But for us to have the same, specific detailed memory was spooky.

 

We brushed it off.  But we never forgot it.  It’s the sort of odd coincidence/occurrence that sticks pretty firmly in your mind.  Not that I dwelled on it, but every so often it came back up.  In one instance, I was travelling for work and thought that it might be the basis for a short story.

First, some background, from Wikipedia – stick with me, it’s worth it:

In Dublin in 1952 Erwin Schrödinger gave a lecture in which at one point he jocularly warned his audience that what he was about to say might “seem lunatic”. He went on to assert that when the equation that won him a Nobel prize seems to be describing several different histories, they are “not alternatives but all really happen simultaneously”. This is the earliest known reference to the many-worlds.

Catch that?  When you flip a coin, does it land heads or tails?  Schrödinger appears to be saying, “yes.”

Essentially, any time there’s a decision, the universe splits into two.  One pops off and becomes another, nearby, nearly identical universe.  Nobody remembers who won the coin flip to get the next beer, so these small changes that make universe splits go largely unnoticed.  Heck, maybe they collapse back into themselves for not being sufficiently unique.  It’s not like a big event like when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor, right, or when we nuked Berlin?  (I’m just kidding.)

As a side note:  we have discovered parallel dimensions – check out this (LINK) for more amazing (not kidding) details.

The most common example of this theory is Schrödinger’s Cat, which is a pretty famous thought experiment at Schrödinger’s expense (rumor has it this made him kinda pissy after he heard about it).  The really short version of this “experiment” is one takes a cat, and puts it in a box.  There’s some mechanism that has a 50-50 chance of triggering, say, poison gas to be released with our kitty cat.  Pretend it’s the radioactive decay of a cesium atom.  Let’s say you set the cat-killing machine in motion, toss a cat in, and wander off.  After a while, your Internet addled brain looks up from your MyFace© page and remembers you left a cat in the Death Machine again and should go and see how it’s doing.

This is funny if you like physics jokes.  I like physics jokes.

Is it alive or dead?  According to Schrödinger’s equation and Futurama, yes.  It’s in a state of quantum superposition.  And the quantum waveform collapses only after you observe it – and this isn’t some sort of made up thing – it has been proven through repeated experiments that observation (not interference) changes the pattern that light makes.

If light were a wave, it would make a pattern of alternating light and dark spots passing through the slits:

Doubleslit3Dspectrum

Source:  Wikimedia, Fu-Kwun Hwang, CC BY-SA 3.0

Stay away from the light, Carol-Anne!  The quantum collapse might put your eye out!

But if it’s a particle, it will make a dot on the back.

If you don’t check and see where the photon comes through, it makes the wave pattern.

If you check and count the photons going through (they have a way to do this) it just shows up like a dot.

Observation matters.  There is some debate as to whether or not that observer has to be conscious or not – certainly Nobel® winning physicist Eugene Wigner thought that a conscious observer was required for quantum mechanics to work.  And if quantum mechanics doesn’t work, the universe doesn’t exist.  At all.  At the heart of physics there is a (debatable) proposition that conscious observation is required to make the whole thing (you, me, PEZ®, a potential multiverse) even exist.

I wish I were making this up.  I’m so not making it up – this is actual physics.  You can check out this link for more background (LINK).

Back to my story idea:

The concept is there was a guy who began noticing things . . . like Richard Dawson’s death/not death.  These were trackable events, but events so subtle you’d never notice them if you weren’t paying attention.  Let’s say you could go back and forth between the universe where Richard Dawson died and the one where he didn’t.  Not a lot of change?  Probably not.  But maybe, you could make yourself notice less . . . or make yourself believe you’d observed things you hadn’t.  Maybe you could move to universes that were more and more different . . . and maybe you got unstuck in reality and started drifting through various universes.

Who knows?  Maybe that’s what makes a certain category of insane people the way they are – they can actually observe and move through universes, or are maybe adrift – they don’t have a grip on reality, since reality keeps morphing around their consciousness.

Still haven’t figured out how to write that story.  But I’m willing to bet you’re a bit creeped out right now, so I win, anyway.

Which brings us back to the Mandela Effect.  It’s so named because one of the big examples is South African leader Nelson Mandela and his death in prison in the 1980’s.  Except he didn’t die then – it was December 5, 2013.  There are a bunch of other examples here at this great website (LINK) for your viewing pleasure.  It’s like an Internet meme made of words.  My addition is just Richard Dawson.  And, no, I don’t remember Mandela dying before 2013.  Just the Dawson story.

I had decided to do this article on the Mandala (or Dawson!) Effect prior to the X-Files doing the best episode of this season (so far) with their episode “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat.”  Just funny it surfaced right before I was going to do this one – and, yes, sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence.

Or maybe another Mr. Wilder has it right:

wilder

 

Warning Signs, The Economy, Didier Sornette, and You

“We have no Great War.  No Great Depression.  Our Great War is a spiritual war.  Our Great Depression is our lives.  We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires . . .”

– Fight Club

DSC04280

This is the corpse of FDR, brought back to life every 75 years to fight Robot Hitler.  Notice we added a laser eye for this year.

I’ve talked about both the causes (LINK) and effects (LINK) of economic bubbles and economic depressions in two articles that won the Coveted 2017 Wilder Prize for Excellence in Journalism Related to Things John Writes About®.  You should read these articles.  They’re fun and may save your life, if you require expensive medicine from fresh squeezed bats each day and need the cash to pay for bat juice.

But what happens before everything goes straight to hell?  What are the precursor signs before a recession or depression takes hold?  Where are the danger signs that say . . . beware of dragons beyond this point?

mother of dragons

Game of Thrones would not be as popular if this was the casting choice for Daenerys.

Let’s start with definitions.  A recession (and a depression is just a bigger recession) is when the economy starts to contract, and the definition is that this contraction lasts at least two financial quarters.  A depression is the same thing, but there are great dust storms and everyone moves to California and no one bathes for a decade.

Why does the business contract?

Let’s take the last recession.  Everyone wanted houses.  Lots of houses.  In 2007 people were buying houses on speculation that they’d go up in price.  Because houses always went up in price.  And for a few years?  Yeah.  But when houses stopped going up in price?

People stopped building houses, six was enough for the average family.  But if you have no new houses to roof, and you’re a roofing company?  You fire your roofing crew and stop buying shingles.  The people you fire stop making truck payments.  The shingle company stops making shingles, and lays off the factory workers at the shingle factory.

Prices collapse.  Everywhere.  And in 2008-2009 this cascaded throughout the economy.  And the first thing that happened is that EVERYTHING got cheaper.

Perhaps the first sign that things will be going south is that . . . things are going well.  Too well.  It’s like the frat party at midnight before the heaving begins – laughter and joy everywhere.  And everyone believes that this party is different – they’ll escape the hangover gods in the morning.

So what is a gauge of the measure of market intoxication?

The VIX.

VIX stands for . . . Volatility IndeX.  VIX.  Like PEZ®, only with money instead of those small bricks of candy that build a wall of love around my heart (my doctor calls that arteriosclerosis), the VIX was created in 1990 and attempts to predict the market volatility for the next 30 days.  Here’s the graph of the VIX for the last 27+ years, thanks to Yahoo Finance©:

^VIX_YahooFinanceChart

If you look closely, you can see that when the VIX spikes, people are running and screaming in the streets because the economy is collapsing.  But what happens before the spikes?  Everyone is calm.

And, historically that’s been the case.  Everybody is an expert when the stock market keeps going up.

“Taxi drivers told you what to buy. The shoeshine boy could give you a summary of the day’s financial news as he worked with rag and polish. An old beggar who regularly patrolled the street in front of my office now gave me tips and, I suppose, spent the money I and others gave him in the market. My cook had a brokerage account and followed the ticker closely. Her paper profits were quickly blown away in the gale of 1929.” – Bernard Baruch, famous dead trader dude (from Fortune Magazine, April, 1996)

And that’s what that low VIX number tells you.  Everything is great!  Sunny sky and the wind is in your sales.  Not a cloud in the sky.

So, one big signal is that everything is going great.  Not sure how useful that is, but the current VIX is very near an all-time low.  This is why in my (very brave) 2018 prediction (LINK) I said it wasn’t going to blow up in 2018.  Obviously I could be wrong, but as low as the VIX is, I’d expect some upturn prior to things falling apart.  In 2007 the VIX turned up before everything blew up.  So?

My expectation of an economic recession/depression/crack-up number one?  The VIX will turn up prior to the fall, probably at least six months in advance.  So here’s one indicator of future economic downturn, and it’s been shown to work.  Perfect?  Certainly not.  Sudden dislocations (think 9/11) could throw it right out of the window.

Currency and Trade

What else might indicate a coming crack up?  One that was pretty popular was high interest rates.  Back before the FED so tightly controlled the currency and interest rates by buying all of the United States’ debt that’s unsold (yes, this is somehow legal), this was a sign that the party was going to end.  Failing businesses led to banks only lending to the best projects – the ones that could afford high interest rates.  Interest rates were (kinda) set by the market.

I’m pretty sure this one is long gone . . . and not sure that there’s a replacement.  The economy of the United States is such that, if we experience difficulty, other countries experience collapse.  Think the riots in Egypt, Syria, and Libya were spontaneous – no – they were the result of economic trouble in the US.

Another major indicator would be if another currency became as well accepted in the world as the dollar – and imports rose significantly in price.  Sadly, if this happens, the entire economic system is near collapse.  As I’ve pointed out before – the only thing that keeps our currency going is belief.  I can trade two pieces of paper with $100 printed on them to a liquor store owner and have a nice bottle of Johnny Walker Blue© handed to me.  Oh.  It has to be the government that prints the $100.  Not me.

Why?  People (silly people!) believe in the government more than me.  They believe the government won’t print too many.  Just like Bitcoin () is limited in the total number that will ever exist.  Except governments everywhere print money whenever they can.  Except the Swiss.  I blame it on the cocoa.

Energy

Other signs of big trouble?  Oil above $100.  Oil above $140 is screaming collapse.

Modern economies run on energy.  What would we do without it?

This is from Kentucky Fried Movie.  Good times.

Oil is consumed by every product you buy, generally in the production, packaging and transport.  Because of that, it acts as a general tax on the economy when prices go up.  And because oil extraction infrastructure takes years to get going – high oil prices can distort the economy for years.

Cash Ban

Horrible sign.  Venezuela will look awesome in comparison if this happens.

Math

I’ve mentioned Dr. Didier Sornette before.  He’s a French geophysicist that applied advance math previously used to predict earthquakes to predict whether or not a bubble exists in stocks, and, if so (at least in prior work) how long the bubble had until it popped.  He pegged that we were going to enter a singularity around 2045 or so where all bets are off, based solely on the math.  Don’t know if he still stands by that, but he produces a monthly report at the Economic Crisis Observatory (LINK).

In the latest report, of the sixty stocks in the US he studied, 35% were in a bubble.  That’s up from the previous month.  From this, we’d deduce the bubble is (potentially) inflating.

And Dr. Sornette absolutely called the big Bitcoin bubble a month before it topped.  Pretty amazing.

I’d keep an eye on this work.  It shows that there’s plenty of bubble a brewing in the record setting stock markets around the world.

And be careful.  There may be dragons here . . . .

NOTE:  I AM AN INTERNET HUMOR-DUDE, NOT A FINANCIAL PROFESSIONAL.  Consult someone sane prior to making investment decisions.  Like your Mom.  Or a lawyer.  Or a carnie.

The Flu, Fred Hoyle, Creation of all the Elements in the Universe, Panspermia, and You

“You’re from Pittsfield.  Know what happens to scholarship students caught cheating on exams?  You had the flu that day, didn’t you, David?  You didn’t take the exam?  You missed the test. And since you were ill, why not write me an essay instead?  Go get started.” – Dreamcatcher (Flu obsessed Stephen King)

DSC03018

Pictured – Cosmic Background Radiation left over from the Big Bang.  Maybe.

Winter is flu season.

I know, I’m being so topical.  I promise I’ll get off being topical in two minutes and take you someplace you’ve never been before.  Promise.

First, let’s get to basics:

What exactly is the flu?  The flu is a virus, from the Latin word . . . virus.  It literally means “Poison” – but it’s been a long time since Poison had a viral video . . .

Hmm, that was way, way cooler in 1988 before Bret Michaels discovered carbs.

Anyway, the flu virus isn’t poison – it’s a cellular invader.  A virus can’t reproduce by itself, it can only reproduce inside a cell.  And since it doesn’t have any cells, it needs a host critter that does have cells.  The flu picks . . . you.

Once it gets inside of you, it spreads as fast as it can, by attaching to a cell wall like a stripper on a billionaire.  After injecting part of itself into the cell, the cell cooks up millions of copies of the virus.  So, the virus uses your cell as a copy machine.  But it’s really awfully hard on the machine.  It’s like you sent a copy of your taxes to your printer and it exploded, but left you two million copies of your taxes splattered all across your basement.  Because the virus, in order to reproduce, makes the cell explode.  Thankfully, you don’t have to drink toner to get better.  (Although I’ve heard that toner solves the problem so quickly life insurance companies will not pay off – they don’t like tonercides.)  But still?  The cells explode.

In this case the cells are located in your respiratory tract.  You know, the place that provides life-giving oxygen so your Twinkie® and ice-cream eating body can live another three minutes?  Yeah, that place.

Your body has groups of virus hunter cells who look and dress exactly like mid-level late 1990’s programmers.  These virus hunters isolate the virus, and, once isolated, they extrude flagella that look exactly like baseball bats and destroy the invading virus.

Yes, I know that’s not the original song.  The Boy subscribes to this blog.

That’s how you get better, really, from any sickness this planet tosses at you – programmers attack it with baseball bats.  And your immune system keeps those geeky programmer guys around – so you don’t get the same virus again.  But the flu comes in all sorts of strains and mutates every year so the geeks don’t recognize the next virus.

How is the flu deadly?

Two ways.  The first and most psycho way is a cytokine storm.  A cytokine is a chemical signal that brings the cells with the baseball bats to destroy the copier.  (I apologize if this is getting too technical).  But let’s just say that your body releases too much cytokine?  In a really bad design flaw, all of the guys with baseball bats come from everywhere in your body and start trashing the place, even when they’ve run out of copiers.

In a cytokine storm your immune system trashes everything.  And can kill you.  So when you hear that a 205 pound (that’s 650 kilograms for you in Canada, or, as I like to call it, America’s hat) 22 year old bodybuilder with 4% body fat died two days after getting the flu?  Cytokine storm.

Medical hint:  If a medical science describes something as a “storm” it’s generally not a good sign, unless it happens to a really rich relative that liked you.

So far, I haven’t had at cytokine storm.  Since I’m breathing and all.  But the second reason flu kills people is the one that gets me in trouble:

All of the cells (copiers) that explode?  Well, all of their parts are everywhere in your respiratory system.  Your respiratory system is beyond inflamed – it’s covered in cell debris.  Which looks just like food to normally harmless bacteria that live, well, everywhere in your throat.  They sense the food?  Yeah.  Bacteria food fest.  And they don’t necessarily stop at the cell debris.  And then your already psycho baseball bat wielding immune system comes along, and . . . pneumonia.  Nothing fun about that.

That’s the one that gets me to get on the phone to my Internet doctor and pretend I have strep throat to get some amoxicillin.  It only happens every 11 years or so (this is important for later) so it’s livable, and also defines then interval between doctor visits for me.

But let’s get to the REAL point of this post, the one I’ve been teasing.

Flu, or “Influenza” comes from the Italian word . . . wait for it . . . “Influenza.”  Yay!  It’s easy when English just coopts the whole word.  But in Italian, influenza means, literally, influence.  Influence of what?

Influence of the stars.

So, you and I would just chalk this up to fate, karma, or some random encounter with some grimy plague covered dude.

But not Fred Hoyle.

Fred Hoyle, excuse me, Sir Fred Hoyle was a British dude.  And not only was he a British dude, he was a British dude who was smarter than Stephen Hawking.  Yeah.  I’ll stand by that.  He was (essentially) cheated out of a Nobel® Prize™ for the discovery (solo discovery) of how heavier elements are formed in stars and supernovas.

Yeah.  That smart.

Why was he cheated out of the Nobel©?  I’m thinking it was one of two things:  first, he berated the Nobel® committee for not giving the award one year to the grad student who actually did the work and made the discovery.  Hopefully she appreciated that.

Second?  He wasn’t shy about giving his opinion.  On anything.

Ever hear of the “Big Bang”?

Sir Fred was the guy who came up with the phrase.  He came up with the phrase while describing a theory that competed with the leading theory of the day – steady state.  That means the Universe didn’t start with a singularity – it has always existed.  Sure, we need more matter.  Hoyle speculated that the matter itself was being continuously created – he postulated that was no crazier that the idea that the Universe came from nothing.  His point when the background radiation was found by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson was that the radiation they found, if it were 10 times more or 10 times less would still have been proclaimed the background radiation from the Big Bang.  The conclusion was fixed – the evidence could change.

Other crazy things.  Carbon.  Hoyle looked at carbon and the physics for carbon formation in stars and supernovae.  He found that it was crazy unlikely that carbon would be present in the quantities that it is.  (HINT:  we are made of carbon.  And if there were less of it?  No us.  There are literally millions of carbon compounds – it’s a crazy versatile atom.)  He felt that the physical constants that governed carbon atom formation were so unlikely, that they were tweaked to make carbon since it is so important to  . . . us.

Did I mention Hoyle was an atheist?

Yeah.

He also felt that life was so unlikely (the analogy of life being as likely as a “747 being assembled by a tornado throwing parts together in a junkyard” was his) that he was a major proponent of panspermia – the idea that life was seeded here from interstellar space.  Because the idea that even single celled life occurs . . . is amazing.

Hoyle was also a fan of the concept of abiotic oil.  Abiotic is just a word that means “no dinosaurs died in making your gasoline” – the petroleum is a result of natural forces bringing it together.  If I didn’t have my next 18 blog posts planned out?  I could just start with Hoyle and get a dozen.  The man had ideas.

Yeah.  He wrote novels, too.  The one I read (The Incandescent Ones) was not particularly memorable.  I read the synopsis and . . . oh, yeah, I guess I remember that.

But the biggie for this post has already been alluded to:  Hoyle, in 1989 and in 2000 brought up . . . the flu.

Hoyle’s thesis was that the flu was not from Earth.  The flu came from outer space, and incidents of significant flu outbreaks were tied to the Sun.  See my link here (LINK) for other Sun linked things, and there will be (it’s currently scheduled for sometime in the next six weeks) another Sunspot linked post.

Did you catch that?  Hoyle felt that the flu came from space (queue echoey space music) and the solar cycle correlated to when we would have flu outbreaks.  The previous times Hoyle brought this up were at solar cycle peaks, in 1990 and 2000.  And the Spanish flu that killed 50,000,000 and infected 500,000,000.  (500,000,000 of a total population of 1,800,000,000.  25% of everyone on Earth got the flu.  The same flu.)  Yeah, that happened at a solar cycle peak.  Going back to the origin of the word “flu” or “Influenza” or “influence of the stars”?  Yeah.  Most scientists thought he was wrong.  Which is how every scientist feels about a new idea until they die.

solar cycle

Did I mention that Hoyle felt that life outside of Earth, began in space?  Yeah.  I did.

The Universe as depicted by 1978.  Note:  No Cylons were injured in the creation of this film.

The flu is dangerous.  A minor modification could make that cytokine storm much more likely.  Another minor modification?  Near universal death.  Call it a full flu.  But that’s a sad thought.  Not one that anyone has ever had.

Yeah, The Stand was an awesome book by Stephen King.  Read it!  It’s what a full flu would do to you!  (Note, not an instruction manual for the Anti-Christ.)

So I’m struggling for the moral to the story this week.  Don’t allow the flu to turn your immune system into baseball bat wielding dudes who will kill you?  Avoid crazy ideas since you won’t get the Nobel™ Prize®?

So an atheist that knew more about science than you or I ever will was convinced that not only the Universe was rigged in favor of life (carbon atom formation) and that life was so improbable that he speculated it came from space . . . .

Yeah, that’s the moral.  The flu can be more than a virus.  It can make you flat-out think.

Be like Hoyle.  Allow one crazy idea a day to enter your brain.  Figure out where it leads.  And take vitamin C (LINK) if you get the flu.

Believe me, you don’t want the one the aliens came up with this year.

 

Did I mention that my buddy John Apollo has a birthday this weekend?  Yeah, he does.  Happy Birthday!  Leave a comment and let him know that you care.  Or don’t and make him wallow in horrible sadness.