Puritan Heat Death

End of week in. No gym. Slept in till 0430. Must be Friday?

On which azimuth I ran across an article yesterday about the end of work. [Link] The idea is that robots/computers will take over so much of the work load that our current situation will be turned head over heels.

Right now we have about 0.1 unemployment, rough order of magnitude. It appears this is pretty well a magic number that has to exist for society (and civilization) to operate. But as is, it is a matter of great political and social hand wringing and garment tearing. Whether due to our Puritan work ethic or just New Deal propaganda, we have the idea that everyone should e employed. Every adult, that is. Except the retired. But not the infirm or mentally or physically unable. They;re just slackers and parasites.

Now let’s turn that upside down. How about 0.1 employed? That’s 9 of 10 without work responsibilities. The very idea brings Hobbesian shudders to the average Amerikan. They can’t imagine how society will function without honest labor. How can anyone live without earning money. Horrors!, everyone on welfare. Everyone white/black/… trash.

I have to admit I can’t imagine it very well either, but I can’t buy the idea we are all going to become gentlemen/lady philosophers/academics/crafters/……. Mostly because 0.9 of humanity are bogs and bogs don’t do those things very well. They especially don;t do intellectual things. So can we expect an increase in violence, gratuitous pursuits, and shortened lifespans?

Probably.

This is a good topic. Lots of room for cognition. Not clear it is good for the species.

humans, behavior, unemployemnt, disaster

Phone Religion

Mundane day again and week in. Happily back to gym although the podcast, an episode of the CBC’s “Best of Ideas” in their series on secularism was too PC, trying to press the idea that religion should be more than an individual matter. All they managed to do was further the argument that religionist organizations are all about control and only pretend to be about religion.

On which azimuth, I see [Link] that MegaHard is going to recant their stupidity – which demonstrates theirs is less than Canonical’s? – and reinstate the START button with their first major update of W8. Or could it be that they have discovered that they have a product without a market? Stats I have seen indicate box users are avoiding W8 like Vista while sales of slabs and smarts are well below the cut-and-run level.

What this does tell us is intriguing, especially in light of the whole ‘it’s the apps, not the OS’ theory. Evidently the OS does matter if it keeps you from running the apps. Gee, who would have guessed?

I noted yesterday in an eNewsLetter that sales of FaceBookFone are even worse than those of W8. Isn’t it wonderful that MegaHard now has something to brag about?

On which azimuth, I see [Link] that the Ubuntu phone is eminent. Wonder how big a thunk this one will make? But the really big question is whether Canonical will come to their senses and get back to being an OS and not a disaster?

I hate to say it, much as I dislike Gooey, but at least they are a secular organization to Apple’s religionist one.

computers, cellular telephones, OS, nonsense

Learning Episodes

I discovered yesterday that Friday morning at 0530 is a good time to go to the hospital emergency room. Not for me, but the maternal parental element who, it turned out, had to be admitted for further testing. And that in its Chinese Fire Drill entirety is why no blot yesterday.

Today is sorta another matter. The skies have opened, as the old saying goes, at the apparent behest of the weather beavers. Soggy. Very soggy.

And I noted [Link] that some U California wonks are going to gather a sufficient quantity of anti-matter to see if it has positive or negative gravitational mass.

This is the sort of thing that sounds exciting and Richard Ballenger Seaton to the mediaists. Sadly, it is rather hum drum terrorizing. All the theory indicates that antimatter has the same kind of gravitational mass as regular matter, it’s just an oleo of the anti-particles that not-anti-matter is made of. But it is an experiment that needs to be done, just for testability.

The nasty part of it is that such a large amount of anti-matter is needed that care must be taken not to BOOM!

Incidentally, that BOOM would be a REAL weapon of mass “destruction”, not what the Yankee government says one is.

humans, health, medicine, physics, anti-matter, gravity

Wednesday Huntsville Epiphany

When did speed limits go from being LUB to GLB?

humans, behavior, maths

Bog Amerika 1

Inversion layer this morning, and a bit of fog, just enough to bring out the lemming death rush in the Bogs of Marshall County. But the gym was sparse in population, especially educationalists, and while the podcast episodes were mediocre and unmemorable, it was a fair session.

On which azimuth, I noted this sundae that the Pew folks and the Smithsonian, the American national museum paid for by English monies, have done a test to assess the science knowledge of the Amerikan public. [Link] I will discuss the survey results in a later blot. For today I want to talk about my taking the test, not as a part of the sample population but as an insight seeking effort. And, as it turns out a rather disappointing journey. [Link]

The test consists of thirteen questions, either true-false (in the vernacular) or multiple-guess. The questions were not really science questions in that they didn’t have anything to do with the substance of science, but rather dealt with factoids like which gas is most common in the atmosphere of Tellus. But I suppose these are the things one would expect a bog to be exposed to and perhaps learn.

Even given that, the questions were all pretty innocuous and placid with one exception. That question asked whether an electron was larger/smaller than an atom. The problem with this question, to me at least, was that I had to assume what they meant by size.

As it turned out, my assumption must have not been too bad because I got a full score – thirteen out of thirteen – correct in their frame. I have to admit that the questions were not all that challenging other than having ill defined context. If bogs primarily learn their science for mediaists then this may be a fitting ill definition.

But what was depressing was the distribution of scores. The web site gave me this bar graph

Next: comments on the state of Amerikan knowledge as represented by this test.

humans, knowledge, America, science

Only Mixtures Are Stable?

New week, at least in the frame or measure that the week starts on Monday. I suppose that is a hold over from religionist times – the dark ages – into the industrial revolution and the generality of not working in the home. The podcast this morning, as is usual on mundane day, was an episode of the CBC’s “Best of Ideas”, dealing with the concept/actuality of secularism. It’s a series and the bits today were rather primarily concerned with trying to say that religionism and secularity are not orthogonal. Of course these are not scientists speaking and even if they were they would edit their vocabulary usage to accommodate bogs.

But while motoring back to Castellum SCP, I came to reflect that the reason they aren’t independent is because humans are rule breakers/avoiders/deniers. One of my pet peeves is people who pull up past the safety line at intersections. That’s a breaking of the rules expressed by law, hence somewhat arbitrary and self-serving of the organization at the expense of its members. This violation is widely recommended as a safety trade-off since it permits one abetter density of lines-of-sight. It also makes it difficult for anyone turning left at the intersection to avoid striking the motorcar pulled out.

This is the basic nature of humans, I fear. Breaking rules for their own benefit, rarely for anyone else’s. And the purpose of religion, in addition to “explaining” things people are too lazy to investigate rationally, is to limit this rule breaking for self’s sake. Sadly, the two aspects seem to get intermixed to the detriment of the good.

Simply put, it seems that humans are too self-interested, expect perhaps for that wee bit of biological programming that makes them sacrifice for offspring, a matter hated by almost all organized religions, to permit a rational social organization. Reason is not enough, emotion and endocrine secretions are necessary to bind society.

This all sounds like another monologue about bogs versus nerds, but this is coming from a different direction. Yes, it does lead to the distinction among the bogs and geeks and nerds, but it does not derive from that distinction. What it comes down to is that the large fraction of humans are going to be bogs and any society is going to have to be largely irrational. It’s somewhat of a third law of thermodynamics for humans – you can’t get out of the game. Or otherwise, society has to have all three types of folks to work.

So maybe we can eventually turn all this extrovertism around and get some rationality back?

humans, behavior, religion, rationality

Good Sex?

Yesterday was not the usual. And yes, I seem to have survived the medical procedures, at least thus far. Not sure my mental faculties are all that I should like them to be, but the aftereffects thus far are more the result of medications than procedure.

This leads me to contemplate an article [Link] I found about work from U Arizona. This work indicates that the success of modern homo sapiens is largely the result of miscegenation with other species of humans. And, yes, I know I have commented on this numerous times previously.

Anyway, what makes this cognitively attractive is not that it occurred, such is a matter of blatancy given recent efforts in genome mapping, but rather how it came about. The recorded history of humanity since around 500 BCE is replete with all sorts of proscription of miscegenation. In that paradigm, miscegenation is not reproductive activity between species, but between geographic and ethnic groups. When I was a bairn growing up in the old confederacy pink humans were not supposed to have reproductive relations with other shades of humans, or even with pink humans who were not denizens of the old confederacy.

That taboo is somewhat relaxed these days although not actually eradicated, hence the question of how did those ancient humans have the smarts to reproduce with different humans? Could it be that these attitudes towards miscegenation are an artifact of age and that it has only been since the invention of writing and civilization and such that enough people have lived long enough for these attitudes to emerge?

humans, behavior, anthropology, interreeding

Weighty Motor Question

While motoring in Nawth Alibam’s Shining City on the Hill yesterday I came to pose the question:

Are Rectal Sphincter Opening motorists [1] dragon’s teeth or elementary particles?

Because if one gets squashed two more pop up, indicating that like the children of the dragon, two emerge for every one destroyed. Of course, the could be elementary particles emerging from the fluctuations of the vacuum but if so they have to be their own antipartice, which seems rather too nice since a collision of two would annihilate.

Regardless, Huntsville is infested with them on all its motorways.

[1]  That’s SCP for “asshole”.

humans, behavior,

Humans Subtracted

Huzzah! Another week out survived and back to gym this morning. And happily absent of the usual density of educationalists, even the regulars who come when shule is desessioned. So the only mar in the effort was the presence of a single, vaguely threatening educationalist with hand weights straddling the indoor track. Still enough to evoke a bit of extra pulse so that it took me longer to reach the desired antecedent pace. But at least I could reach it. When the educationalist weight bouncers – the ones who are loud and criminal in the speed they drive their vehicles – are present that regression is often impossible so dense is the aura of harassment.

The podcast episode today was one of the CBC’s “Best of Ideas”, this one dealing with imagination. Overall it was a rather dragging piece since almost all of the creativity was idealized as coming from the “artistic”, mostly theater people. Since my taste for theater is more along the lines of Bullwinkle and Wile Coyote, modern theater almost always leaves me somewhere between underwhelmed and retching. One of the longest decades of my life was an evening a college girlfriend subjected me to an Ionesco play. All I can recall today is its resemblance to a sinus headache.

Not that I can say much of anything good about today’s television  or movies. John Carter was a travesty of the novel, for which I rationalize the movie’s failure, and the comedy Big Bang Theory that is a travesty of physics and physicists. Although it does have its good moments, but they are not as endurable in repetition as the humor of the Moose and Coyote. Also, I can rationalize that if they portrayed physics and physicists accurately there would be no audience – humor lies in exaggeration and insult, no matter what the social engineering liberals may bemoan.

On which note of human nature, I did find something useful in the discussion in the podcast. The tiny nuggets of pony, as it were. The point was made, with altogether too much attention paid that poetic whack Blake, that we all see reality differently, couched in the context of what we know and even if uneducated have years of sensory knowledge to shape us. Still, I was disappointed in their skirting of the individuality, and non-communicability. of knowledge. To the thinking nerd, individuality is the norm, collectivity is the strange.

But what struck me in this is another dimension of the difference between bog and nerd. The metaphor of this is imagining some process. The example given was a human planning the route to execute a task/chore list. I recognized this immediately since FD SCP and I have to discuss this every time we sally forth to run errands.

This is also an amazing complete characterization of the reality of bogs. Much of that reality is defined by what they do and have to do with being done to them entering only rarely and usually via other people. And that is their view of the structure of reality, somewhat akin to seeing the surfaces in the room around one without seeing what lies below and behind, at greater and lower levels.

It is not that nerds do not see this level, although they do usually see it less well or vividly than bogs, but that they see other levels as well. In a sense, it is akin to being color blind although that is a very strained metaphor. Bogs see their reality of human interactions almost exclusively while nerds also see some aspect of what is there when the humans are subtracted.

Selah. Enough pandering.

humans, behavior, nerds, reality, imagination

Natural Illiteracy

It is shaping up to be a perverse morning. The blog editors don’t want to work. And spring is apparently already over with summer already here. The only spring remnant is tornadoes.

One of my colleagues, Magnetic Inductance Force, sent me a couple of links on one of our topics of discussion: writing. No, not composing or composition but the physical act of putting symbols down on paper using pen and ink. In many instances the two cannot be decoupled but there are times.

I have been harassed and criticized by those who did not learn to key by putting code statement on 5081 cards. Despite my dire analyses, it seems that GEN Y has largely abandoned writing for note taking and has adopted keying or even recording instead. All my analysis indicates that the data rate of lectures is too much greater than the data rate of keying – for almost everyone – to make this practicable. The counter claim is that the lecturers distribute notes – infamous PowerPoint slides – and so the differential data rate is doable.

One of the links, to a Washington Post article [Link] is about the irrelevance of cursive writing and how it is being dropped from the public shule curriculum as irrelevant. Much gnashing of teeth, but an admission that for most of boggery this may actually make sense. Letters have been replaced by email which is being replaced by electronic texting which will be replaced by something else if the whole electronic thing doesn’t collapse when the electromagnetic spectrum gets saturated.

And thank you notes that my mother still writes are now impolite because they are a burden on bandwidth and attention span. It seems that in the transition from a mechanical to an electronic society we have forgotten the necessity of lubrication. If so, this brave new world will be rather Hobbesian.

The second article [Link] is about learning. It seems, based on some work by wonks at the other shule on the Charles, that students pay more attention to lectures if the presentation is hand written on the board rather than projected via PowerPoint slides. This is not surprising. Slides are not attention grabbers – that’s why there is so much stupidity with clip art – and can be easily deferred and delayed for later attention that never comes. It’s basic human nature.

So the revenge is that when one is lecturing and writing on board that is what one does: one writes in cursive. And future students who have not learned cursive will have a rather nasty awakening when they get to college and professor writes on board and they can’t read it. And if they squawk about their illiteracy they will be told that they are welcome to go to trade shule.

Stuff dreams are made of. In a liberal, pseudo-progressive social engineering environment, like college, it seems more likely that professors – the fuzzy ones at least – will discipline themselves not to write in cursive. And I suspect nothing will be lost in the denial because there was nothing there to begin with?

But over in the halls of STEM, this is not likely, simply because it is easier to write equations by hand than by slide. And more responsive. So the day seems likely that only STEMs – nerds and geeks – will learn cursive.

humans, behavior, education, writing, stupidity