Karen

I have known sin.  Hurt that we give each other seems a part of life, conflicting wants meeting constrained resources.  But hurting born of weakness, of the easy path, of avoiding conflict, that's unnecessary; that's sin.  Because I was short-sighted, because I couldn't see the future & couldn't plan for what might be, because I was callow & shallow, because I was weak, I sinned against Karen, against others also but especially against Karen.  And in the fullness of my time, those hurts have come back to haunt me.  The 1978 "Driver's Seat" by Sniff 'n' the Tears -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V88yyayq6AY, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SCzVEUlqqA, or the incomparable https://vimeo.com/13646998 (I love the red-rock majesty of the Desert SW, so thanks Mario Richard, & RIP) -- helps me look down a fifty-year-long tunnel:

...

Jenny was sweet

Show a smile for the people she needs

I'm trouble, let's drive

I don't know the way you came alive

News is blue (the news is blue)

Has its own way to get to you

What can I do (what can I do)

When I remember my time with you

...

Be Here Now -- where else can one be?  But I have to strive for this obvious wisdom (& have to make a conscious choice to be happy); my bias is to Be There Then, either dreaming about a future that inevitably depends upon the actions of chance or others (but never mine), or remembering the distant past, mourning on The Road Not Taken.  I'm interpreting my situation as self-PWND; my sense of duty has become much stronger than I would have anticipated decades ago, and prevents me....  I've lately become enamored with the recent works of author Blake Crouch; his novels Dark Matter and Recursion both deal with The Road Not Taken, respectively as quantum-mechanical (the many-worlds interpretation) and neurological.

I tell myself that if I could go back..., I would not make my mistakes of sin with Karen, but would certainly make different mistakes elsewhere.  I would have shaped a future that I chose, with a child and a planned career.  Perhaps I wouldn't have panicked, and acted bewildering mal-adaptively, when presented with a road into science, a challenge; perhaps I'd have been a scientist if I'd only been more mature.  And perhaps I'd have been with Karen for a time.  The Road Not Taken is for us the one Un-seen as well.

In The Bhagavad-Gita, Lord Krishna tells Arjuna:

sri-bhagavan uvaca

bahuni me vyatitani

janmani tava carjuna

tany aham veda sarvani

na tvam vettha parantapa

Ken Grimwood's Replay gives my favorite translation:

You and I, Arjuna, have lived many lives

I remember them all

You do not remember 

Presuming that we return again and again until we've achieved the enlightenment to Exit The Wheel, there seems little hope for me.  Not only do I not Remember, I'm hazy on what I had for breakfast yesterday.  But the long-term memory of the elderly comes back in strength; now that there's a lot more past behind than future ahead, half-a-century-old errors have come to frame my thoughts, to grace my life.

So what's the point of all this nostalgic wallowing?  You'll remember or see the subtitle of my blog, "You learn from experience, yours or someone else's. And since there's not enough time to make all of the mistakes yourself....".  Because I made these my mistakes, I expect you the reader to learn from them, to make different, perhaps "better" mistakes.  To err is definitely human, but so is to learn.

And that's the point.  This may (or may not) be the last entry to my blog -- that's why it's become important for me to address the "Karen" that haunts me -- I'm getting old, and planning on how to spend what time I have left (and In The Time of Plague, that time may be savagely truncated).  You reading this are getting old(er) too.  How are you going to spend the years you have remaining?  So plan ahead, and make good decisions.  If you do that, you'll have grown beyond me; my joy will be ineffable.

P.S.  What brought this monologue to life now..., was that I "saw" Karen in contemporary video, well, close enough (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsMQmmBRgAI 0m28s is not as good as the two listings below, but it's free...).  Perhaps I'll fly again one day, and thus watch air crash investigations with the high-minded philosophy that I'll learn from others' mistakes, and not make those same ones myself; VFR-into-IMC, getthereitis / mission mindset, confirmation bias, you can learn a lot from Youtube & DVR-on-cable-TV.  So I discovered that the Smithsonian Channel's "Air Disasters" S11E2 "Killer Attitude" (summarized in the central third of S14E2 "Fatal Friction") has a support actress for the NTSB investigation who looks exactly like Karen did around 1970.  Seeing a few frames awoke the pleasure of memory then the pain of loss, just like that.

ADDENDUM, (20200526 -->) 20230719T09-07:

I just finished reading "How It Unfolds (The Far Reaches collection)" by James S.A. Corey (the same authors Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck created "The Expanse" series of novels, but this isn't from that future), and continued thinking about Roy & Anjula.  That fictional couple created a marriage that fell apart, then they repeatedly met across untold time and space, thousands upon thousands of reconnections of different people who were themselves yet not.  And they all Moved On; I'm going to extract the key dialog at the end, that says it best for me, that speaks to my heart:

"I wasn't sure it'd play out.  I figured if        

you shot me down there, this way there'd  

be other chances.  A thousand new worlds,

and each one the chance to maybe get it       

right between us."

"We can

live a billion different ways from here, but

there's only one path behind us.  that was

never going to change."

"Well, we were good when we were good."

"And when we weren't anymore, we

stopped.  That's worth more than you give

it credit for.  It's possible to be faithful

to something that's in the past.  It's not

a betrayal to build something new when

something old is finished."

"Honor the past without living in it."

"I wanted to get

it right between us.  And I think this means  

that I did."

I'm coming to realize that I might "never" (a short-term thing, given my age) Move On, that my last thoughts will probably be of the Karen that was once mine.  And that's not a bad thing; some of our time together was indeed very good.  I can admit my mistakes, mis-direct their hurts past me, and finally remember the good that once was, the way we were in the youth of our lives.

The Bridge to Nowhere and Nowhen

I had occasion to write a friend concerning the Tarot and my uses thereof. Suddenly it clicked that this might be the more useful venue for my essay.

I like Sylvia's line from ST:TOS "Catspaw": "You like to think of yourselves as complex creatures, but you're flawed." but then I give it a twist. Emotions..., seem to date back to reptiles; it's not clear that their predecessor amphibians felt aggression (however, I don't know of any carnivorous frogs, that could have something to do with it...), but it's very clear for reptilian predators. And mammals definitely display the tender side, motherly love and so forth. My cats love me. Much of that is our mutual touching; they'll nuzzle me for affection, and I'll _pet_ them because I love them.

What I'm focusing on is that emotions predate humanity; they've been around for a very, very long time, have been, if you will, thoroughly "debugged" by evolution. They're the "truest" things that I know of in my mental landscape. I _trust_ my emotions. If I spot my beloved in an apparently compromising position, I may become depressed, angry, jealous, or another emotion or mix of them. I may have misinterpreted the situation, perhaps made an erroneous assessment. But I _can_ trust what I feel.

Let's contrast that. Calculus dates back about three hundred and thirty years. When I was in college it was easy, indeed the foundation for much more. But now, I can only see the action, remember the images, but not have a prayer of "turning the crank" on a problem. So how much do I "trust" my own calculus? And there's a similar but not so well dated argument for the much larger skill of logic itself (more than a thousand years back, but more than ten thousand? a hundred thousand? certainly it doesn't go back a million years). These are for the most part products of the conscious mind, relatively recent inventions. They're hard to grasp, hard to retain, and untrustworthy even in the most skilled of hands. It's easy to imagine another checking your logic, but just try to remember the last time a friend offered to "check" your emotions.

I see emotions as manifestations perhaps agents from the subconscious, the "ground state" that underlies each and every mind; they're totally trustworthy. Then that's overlaid by a superstructure of intellect, shaky logic with a shaky ego as captain. The rats have taken over the holds, the crew is mutinying below decks, the captain's taken to the bottle, but at least s/he still holds the wheel of the ship of state. :)

 I see the Tarot as bridge from subconscious to conscious. You start with a question, then you lay out the cards in a spread. The choice of spread, and the specific meanings to each position and each card, they're all arbitrary but chosen in advance to give a framework. And the _meaning_ is in the eye of the beholder.

Almost all of music is written to fit one or another template. J.S. Bach's music may be compared to mathematics, was written to a very strict template. Few want to listen to a kid hitting the piano with a hammer.

Free Will .AND. Predestination

I've been thinking since mid-2012, a BLOG hiatus if you will, just not posting about it. I hate to just say something when I don't have anything _interesting_. But this particular musing I'm posting today, I've had before; perhaps it's time to air it, to see if the posting spurs new points of view.

This will not be your usual, tired posting about a subject that goes back at least centuries (John Calvin), perhaps millenia (Saint Augustine?). This is a different slant, spurred into recollection by listening to Beethovan's 4th Symphony on WKAR this morning.

When Beethovan wrote the 4th, he was free to start it on any pitch, duration, chord, whatever, that he wanted. By the time he got to the end, he had almost no freedom at all; an arbitrary note would have been discordant. Similarly, when the author starts a fictional story, it's a "blank sheet of paper". S/he can start anywhere, and go anywhere else. The author's task is to tell a pack of lies, and make the reader like it; suspension of disbelief is accepted, but not internal contradictions. But as the story progresses, the degrees of freedom for the narrative narrow; there are more and more things to not contradict. By the end, there's very little literary (or musical) freedom left.

Life is like that, too. When I was young, my options seemed unlimited. As I made decisions (or didn't...), as I committed myself to a path, to my "life trajectory", other options were lost in the past. Now that I'm old, I seem to have very few ones left. Soon, there will be only one. I'm not there yet, but I can see this all too clearly.

One of the most amazing things about this Big Place where we live, is that it's comprehensible, that we mere humans can come to understand the cosmos. Our gestalt is by no means complete; we're constantly learning, ever expanding our species knowledge. But that we can at all.... And the best tool that I know for this is mathematics. Here are three easy steps:

• Algebra, the use of symbols with rules for manipulation, goes 'way back, is of Arabic origin, multiple fathers, and centuries before the Renaissance. Almost everything in mathematics is expressed with algebra; it's hard to overstate the importance of this "general solution".
• Calculus (roughly, the instantaneous slope of a function, and separately, the area underneath a curve, co-discovered by Newton & Leibnitz) depended upon analytical geometry (the equivalence of algebraic functions and graphical 2-D curves, Descartes); all three were invented during the Seventeenth Century. Suddenly change was comprehensible, and predictable. That last bit is the key I want to maintain here.
• Quantum mechanics is a Twentieth Century invention, but it's a mathematics quite unlike calculus. Its conclusions are useful mainly in The Land of the Very Small, are probabilistic rather than deterministic, and are supremely accurate. However, there's a crucial departure from the "model" presented by calculus, and that's..., the model. Both predict future behavior; however, calculus gives us a mental model, "explains" the universe. Quantum mechanics does no such thing; there's no model, no comprehension, no understanding, just prediction unsurpassed. Indeed, when pitted against Einstein's General Relativity, QM wins (at least this is my interpretation of Bell Theorem experiments). I suspect that we'll be generations getting around this failure-to-model, understanding "what's it all about".

So back to my initial point, that options narrow as the story / symphony / life progresses. I've never even seen this mentioned elsewhere, let alone analyzed. Is there a mathematics for this, perhaps the Mathematics of Converging Trajectories? Well, the best I can say is, "not yet". For the aging process, that's easy, that's entropy. But this..., I don't think so.

Three Hundred Years

Unlike those of the fictional Phil Conners, my years are advancing as fast as you might think (and yes, I still have to floss). At work I'm heading into "distinguished" territory, although I seem to be making about the same number of mistakes (yeah!), but many of those repeat ones (boo!). At home, I feel like I'm marking time, waiting for external triggers, paused (by my own character choices) but not blocked, and I just don't see that I have a lot of time to waste. None of us do....

Today's news brought not only the death of the infamous Roger Ailes (77), but also "Soundgarden" singer Chris Cornell (52); while the group's music does nothing for me (my current infatuation is the group "Ebanos de la Habana" -- Youtube for Laura Calderin's "Alborado y Son" and "Arsis"), dying at that early age, and as a suicide, seems tragedy. I've learned so much since I was a callow fifty-two.

That last brings me to this topic. Some periods of my life were exploration (of self & the world), some were pleasure (the women of my Twenties), some were mistakes repeated (marijuana long ago gave me temporary escape, but also dulled my ambition of those years), but the best were learning (like now). I'll never stop learning, although I may soon stop.

So what if I didn't just stop? I've imagined then wanted the kind of greatly extended lifespan that would allow me to witness events of great import on astronomical timescales, like the Red Giant phase of our own local star, the billion-year-long collision of the Andromeda Galaxy & our own, and the Era of Quantum Degeneracy. I would not be merely human on those time-frames, but would remember when I was.... But what about much shorter spans. What if I could live to be a more reasonable 300?

What I'm thinking about is the wisdom that I've gained so far. What kind of wisdom, perspective, and self-directed goals, would a human aged three hundred have? Never mind what society would have, I'm only focusing on myself. The best I can imagine is something akin to (what little I know of) Buddha, Jesus, and other Teachers both historical and fictional. Strive without ceasing, love one another, those aren't just platitudes, but deliberate choices to building a better world. Even in a post-scarcity time, especially then, lives would still have meaning; humans and their partners could still aim to better themselves and their worlds.

And if I, like so many others, can see a better future, can strive to build it even though I'll never see it, what of you reading this? What are your plans for your three-hundredth birthday? How will you in current time help to make a better world for future humanity? And why aren't you taking action?

Regret

is one of the most powerful emotions. Thanks to "Wrongologist" Kathryn Schulz for giving me the POV that what hurts so much..., is that I could have done better, I could have been better.

My Golden Age was in Connecticut in the early-to-mid 70's (perhaps some of you didn't realize that history went that far back :). I was in my Twenties, in good shape and chasing tail, except that I was beginning to realize there might be more. My then-immediately-former girlfriend and I had both thrown vitriol all over the relationship, thoroughly and painfully ended it (lesson to self there). The bitterness, the hatred, the warping of subsequent judgement will never heal.

So I started dating Sarah. We became lovers almost immediately, and that was a very positive thing. But what I remember across the decades was that for months, perhaps a year, we tried hard to make the relationship more. We would go places, and attempt to talk, attempt to share. It's as if the yearning for real intimacy was mutual, but we just didn't know what we were doing. We finally drifted apart, nothing traumatic, just a mutual parting of the ways.

And now it's the Decade of the Teens, and I'm doing considerably more than merely evaluating myself harshly. I'm remembering so hard that it hurts. The nights are worst, when I can play what-might-have-been cinema inside myself.

I feel like the unwitting and shallow-headed victim in a slasher movie, running fearfully from Death, down a long corridor that I do not want to be in, a life that I would have much, much otherwise. What I want is to be able to push the RESET button, to rewind and unwind and unbind myself back to 1975.

I don't want more life, just a different life. If I only knew then what I know now, I'd have committed there and then. Perhaps marriage to Sarah wouldn't have lasted; many marriages don't (my current one is 33 & counting). Related decisions would have sent me to a different graduate degree, I wouldn't be where I am now, I wouldn't be _who_ I am now.

When you're young you have little power, and so much freedom, so many decisions unmade, unhearlded. As you age and decide, luck may enhance position, but the decisions left to be made dwindle. All too soon you're out of them, you begin to understand Sally Jupiter (aging superhero from Alan Moore's "Watchmen"):


Oh, Laurie, you're still young.
You don't know.
Things change.
What happened happened 40 years ago.
I'm 67 years old.
Every day, the future
looks a little bit darker.
But the past...
...even the grimy parts of it...
...keep on getting brighter.


And irony of ironies, I seem to have a mental block, and cannot remember Sarah's last name (nor alas that of a one-night stand co-worker). Sarah is Lost in Time, as I suppose we all are. She exists beyond the Arch of Time, perhaps to be cherished only in memory.

I wrote a short story for her a few dark-nights-of-the-soul past, perhaps I'll publish this message-in-a-bottle for Kindle. I'll need some additional stories to make a collection, perhaps there's an opportunity here. Few seem to read my blog; that tells me I need another style as well as another venue.

But NOTHING can bring back the lost opportunity, the chance I squandered, that I might have done better. Regret..., indeed.

ADDENDUM: I've been thinking about this powerful post, and remembering the wisdom of The Beatles, specifically here as cast into the USA theme song to the brief TV series Providence ---

There are places I remember
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain

All these places had their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I've loved them all

When they were new, I sometimes wondered if the Beatles would have the staying power of Mozart, or Beethoven. In the fullness of my time, I know now.

The Potter

I recently posted this to a friend's blog, decided I wanted to more thoroughly own it, and so have reworked it here:

I’ve become a TED fan, see wonders sublime and profane (just kidding) there, intend serious consideration of a reduced-thing-set living (a word-play on RISC, reduced-instruction-set computing CPUs) based upon http://www.ted.com/talks/graham_hill_less_stuff_more_happiness.html. Howver, another two lectures that hit much closer to where I live, inside my skin, come from "Wrongologist" Kathryn Schulz:

• http://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong.html
• http://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_don_t_regret_regret.html

I see Variations on a Theme:

• Captain Kirk (Star Trek V The Final Frontier) proclaims that his memories make him who he is, that he _needs_ the pain.
• Dr. Katherine Pulaski (ST:TNG Elementary, Dear Data) advises that "Failure is the great teacher".
• (a real person, not just Star Trek philosophy) Kathryn Schulz advises on the value of being wrong, and of regretting.

These all seem to say the same thing to me, that we may make choices based upon imperfect information, but that then the results of those choices become our experiences; they shape us. We choose the potter (the nature of life is that we MUST choose), and then the potter shapes us the clay.

Straight south of Deneb Kaitos

(_aka_ Diphda) and almost into the trees was my first target of the night, NGC 253. In my Odyssey 8 it's a faint, diffuse, and slender cigar of light, nothing like professional photographs. I'd seen it decades ago in a 12_in "Clark" reflector at the University of California, Davis, but this view was better; "fast" rich-field Dobsonians are just better at brightening faint objects.

Later, SSE from Mirach I was able to locate M33 as a faint, diffuse, and fat oval. Both of these were "first views" outside of the UCD "peek", and I was quite pleased. I have a bigger 10_in scope that I purchased several years ago, but it's proven problematic, so the smaller 8_in, legacy of a now-departed friend from the 1980's, has been my workhorse, has shown me the wonders of the universe.

NGC 253, M33, (old familiar) M31, and others are all spiral galaxies, "island universes" (term that dates back to Immanuel Kant in 1755, long before any true conception of the cosmos), "fluids of stars" (Carl Sagan), but most importantly, places. That they're a long ways off doesn't diminish their basic nature, not as pretty pictures but as stages immense for plays numberless.

That got me to thinking of Robert Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy, a powerful indictment of slavery; only here I'm instead focusing on the title itself. We're all citizens of Earth, all members of humanity (all others please announce yourselves...), but perhaps those two characterizations need not always be equivalent. As I've said in previous blogs, we need to be out there among the stars, to indeed be Citizens of the Milky Way, if for no other reason than that Bad Things can happen to planets. Spreading ourselves around increases the chances that we'll be around for the Long Haul.

And can we ever be Citizens of the Local Group (of galaxies, includes M31 & M33)? That seems unlikely. Just spreading to the far edges of our own fluid of stars will take so long that it seems to me most unlikely that we'll still be "human". Science fiction is full of variations on this theme; I have my favorites, anyone who reads the genre will have theirs. Given a "colonization speed" of 1% of the speed of light means we might reach the far border of the Milky Way in only seven or so million years. By contrast, there were no humans seven million years ago. A mere seven hundred thousand years ago there were, and we can reasonably conjecture that they were just as smart as we are. But they were incredibly staid; progress was just not in their gestalt. What to us seem obvious improvements (why did pre-colonial residents of the Andes never develop the wheel???) took them tens of thousands of years.

By contrast, UCSD professor Vernor Vinge defined the term "Singularity" in 1993 to describe an asymptotic curve of progress for us (see HTML or text for the paper); and before him Alvin Toffler in 1970 wrote Future Shock. Think about that last one. We're now living in Toffler's future. Progress is insatiable. If you own it, it's obsolete. If it's software, there's undoubtedly an update for it right now. Tomorrow will bring new ideas. "News" is a twenty-four-hour thing, and not something that you wait for, something that's printed on dead trees.

All this tells me that progress as concept, as reality, will be with us for the foreseeable future. And how much can we progress in seven million years? Would we of today even recognize those who reach the far edge of the galaxy, and look hungrily onward?

OK, shrink back to the here & now. What does this mean for us? The term "manifest destiny" has meant the subjugation of native peoples, destruction of irreplaceable ecosystems, and other Bad Things. But when there are no natives, no ecosystems, what then? In the absence of Anybody Else, it seems blatantly obvious to me that we humans (well, so far anyway) should be taking the galaxy, that it's our manifest destiny, as a species and as an intelligence.

And what do the "we" of today need to do for this? Survive. Exercise prudent stewardship of our own planet so that we can survive long enough to spread elsewhere. We're doing a (insert expletive of your choice here) poor job so far, in the process of pushing the cultural reset button right now. Some humans will probably survive the next few centuries, but our global culture and technology just won't do well with a multi-degree rise in temperate. We're not doing a good job here, gang.

Think about it. We're bright, we're ambitious. We could go far. But the manifest destiny of galactic stewardship is by no means inevitable. Most terrestrial (the only kind we know of) species that ever lived are extinct. It could happen to us.

Addendum: I've struggled over just two words in my entire BLOG for years.  I can't seem to find a better pair for my belief that life, and in particular humanity & its descendents, will do its best to fill the unoccupied spaces, and that's a good thing.  But "manifest destiny", the phrase is so overloaded.  It's the language of the conqueror, of the subjugator, it's ugly.  It simultaneously expresses my expansionist beliefs, and offends my egalitarian ones.  { Sigh } As Mark Twain put it, "the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug", and this is definitely a small insect of a phrase.

Carbon Taxis (Tax is) The Way to Go

Taxis, as in the free movement of an organism toward or away from a stimulus. Or perhaps the not-quite-fitting pun....

This afternoon I played a recent PBS airing, Lester Brown's "Plan B: Mobilizing To Save Civilization.  Already I see Al Gore ("I am Al Gore, and I used to be the next president of the United States of America") & Thomas L Freedman (author of countless New York Times articles, and two books I own, _The World Is Flat_, in my job I see that every work-day, and _Hot, Flat, and Crowded_) as prophets crying in the wilderness, trying to warn us of the future that our global civilization is striding into, that we really, really aren't going to like. And now I'm going to add Lester Brown to this, a Triumverate of Doom.


Note that there are several points I want to draw:

• We the Living, aren't going to be living long enough to feel the full impact of our actions. The fruits of our stewardship of the planet will go to the unborn, who will never know our world except vicariously, perhaps longingly.
• And the Earth..., is in no danger. Our planet has suffered far worse than anything humanity can do. There have been a number of mass extinctions already (by any reasonable definition, we're in the midst of a mass extinction right now, only this one's "home-made", the fault of us humans). The planet, and sufficient life to totally restock, no issue there.
• What's at stake is our presence here, on this globe. And forget about emigration to another world. I already said "We already and only live on the best of all possible worlds." (previous post "Three hundred better men than himself").

Mars looks terraformable, but over millenia, not even centuries. Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars" trilogy posited enhancing the water supply by dumping Khyber Belt snowballs onto the Mars equator (an added benefit is control of angular momentum, easy to increase or decrease the length of the day). That may require a solar-system-wide technology, but certainly looks doable, in millenia.

Europa is cold. And it's a long ways away.

O'Neill-style space habitation may be the more immediate "life raft", but planets are a lot more reliable. Solar flares threaten our communications satelllites, but not our bodies; that's because we have core-generated magnetic fields, and a thick atmosphere. A "can in space" won't have either, will be highly vulnerable.

By the time we can terraform even one other planet, we may discover it's easier to rewrite ourselves to fit other environments. And that's certainly a goal of centuries for a technologically advanced civilization. So to move out into space, we need to last for those centuries and millenia, with a high-tech civilization, and that brings us back to Problem One, how to sustainably live right here.


So we've circled back to Macbeth & Banquo (you and me), their three witches, and the prophesy. What I especially liked about Brown's arguments was that his Plan B was simple, and glorious. But it wasn't easy. Here's my take, from memory:

• Cut carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2020.
• Constrain global population to eight billion.
• Eliminate poverty (I remember education as being the primary tool)
• Restore Earth's natural ecologies (possible only if we don't expand indefinitely, don't eat everything as if the Earth belonged to us, personally).

Everything there is possible if we break population growth. We could make a heaven of this earth, for all humans. How many would be ideal? Do we really need even eight billion minds at the same time? Perhaps one billion could live much, much better. Once we learn to control our population, then the collective wisdom of all, through individual actions, will lead to an optimal choice (no dictators, no "population councils" needed, this is democracy at its most basic level).


However, we may not have the time to stabilize population if we "choke up, heat up and smoke up this planet" first (Friedman's quotation). So the immediate goal is a drastic reduction in planetary greenhouse gas emissions. And primarily, for now, that's CO2. That's where my ambiguous title comes from.


The burning of carbon is a great draw for us all. The stored solar energy from hundreds of millions of years ago is in your tank, just step on the accelerator. But if it were possible to burn up all of the fossil fuels that we can lay our hands on, we'd boost the CO2 to the levels of hundreds of millions of years ago, and we'd have their climate too. "Hot and muggy" doesn't even come close. We'd be gone, headed for fossilization ourselves, archaeological puzzles for our distant successors to ponder.


So it's going to be the first of several great wrenchings of lifestyle to accommodate lowered CO2. Like many, I don't know how we are going to manage it. But I know how we'll try.


Those who think that mere carbon trading will suffice are fools. That's an arcane system that's easy to manipulate, easy for businesses to "back-door" their way into the chambers of government, and "get by". Don't we already see that happening in our govenment? Remember Mark Twain's "the best congress money can buy" (also attributed to Will Rogers).


That's why I see that a carbon tax is the infinitely better choice. "Fudging" that will be more open to public scrutiny (I hope, yes, I'm being optomistic here). But what will really make a difference, is the more radical solution I've seen proposed by others:

• Eliminate income tax. Completely. And eliminate the sales tax as well.
• Raise the money instead with a carbon tax.
• Make it big enough to cover the larger of the money formerly collected in tax, or the calculated value of the true cost of all that CO2 (think of the health costs to dirty air, or the lost water for Asian populations, drinking and crops, that no longer flows from tropical glaciers to the oceans, or any number of other "hits" to the economy).
• And do it now.

Think about how you'd reconsider your lifestyle if all of the money you currently pay in taxes were instead in your wallet, and fossil fuels and their derivatives (think "plastics", think "food", think of things that indirectly connect) all cost like blazes. You'd quickly reconsider how you live your life, accommodate new rules, and without doing anything except acting in your own self-interest, you'd bring down CO2.


Self-interest is very powerful, it just needs to be harnessed.


One final piece to this thread, then I'll move on. Several paragraphs back I referred to greenhouse gases, and said "for now, that's CO2". The phrase "tipping point" gets thrown around like so much verbal judo, has come to mean little because it means anything; perhaps there's soon be a local restaurant with that name. But there's a true tipping point that scares me, an unrecoverable state that we don't know how close we're to forcing.


Methane (CH4) is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, and there's literally tons of it in hydrates on the oceanic continental shelves, and in the (now potentially misnamed) permafrost. We heat these up enough with CO2, get a significant release of CH4, and what's released will heat up and release even more CH4, a positive feedback loop with truly ugly implications.


So can we a a global civilization turn around CO2, dramatically reduce its release by 2020? Brown's "Plan B" had a nice analogy to President Roosevelt's turning around of the USA economy at the start of WWII. There was no compromise. He didn't say "guns and some butter too". It was war machinery all, tanks, planes, whatever, and no other industry. It took a strong leader, and a direct threat to our (USA) way of life, and suddenly we were off in a new direction, no looking back.


In the summer of 1970 my Twin Cities Love, her sister, perhaps others I don't remember, and I were hiking Isle Royale. It's a long and narrow island in Lake Superior that has steep ridges with correspondingly plunging valleys; they all run parallel to the major axis, and we were traversing the middle, from SE to NW. So we were climbing to the heights and plunging to the depths, over and over. Further, the day was hot and muggy.

I had a significant lead over the others when I reached the highest ridge. I also had a significant bead of sweat, and that heavy pack on my back. Suddenly the world opened from dusty trail into a 180_degree panorama with a channel of Lake Superior in the foreground, and Canada to the horizon. And there was a wind ahead of me. So I hurried to the edge in order to fully take in this heavenly state.

Late in this excursion I discovered that I was on the edge of a ledge, a deadly drop right before me. Worse, it wasn't a right-angle edge I was on, but a curving surface going from horizontal to vertical in a very few feet (certainly not as much as a meter, we're talking _close_). And much worse, this was crumbly rock, I could hear sand-grain-sized stuff under my boots.

I couldn't just *STOP*, that would have pitched me forward, The Big Goodbye. I'm not sure that I've ever thought as fast as I did there, not in words but in momentum calculations, in muscle control, bringing myself to tip-toe verticality with zero margin left. And I backed away from death.

My fellow climbers joined me on the ledge, and no one even knew, only I was the infinitely wiser.

That...,  is what I mean by suddenly taking a dramatic new direction, Roosevelt's example and mine. One day you're driving out to the beach for fun, the next day you understand the true cost of gasoline because you're paying it all at the pump, and you are finding a new way of life, new ways to have "fun".

Me? Much of my fun is in my friends. Many are virtual, text on screen or noises coming out of my phones. But the love, that's real. It's a whole lot "real-er" than having a big car, or jetting to Europe on vacation. You don't have to have a big carbon footprint in order to have fun.

And the planet, it will be just fine regardless, it's in no danger. Perhaps our descendants will still be here also, and not extinct, not headed for fossildom; perhaps they'll remember us as a "Greatest Generation" like we think of the WWII cohort, and for similar reasons. We can make a difference. And isn't that what counts, what all of us want?

The Inner Light

I've been watching Japan's multiple-horrorshow unfolding itself with agonizing slowness, have had much time to reflect.

Where I live, the north-western coast of the USA, is due for something similar (Google for [ cascadia seismic fault ]), except that we have no nuclear plants on the Washington State coast (the only two such that cable TV advises me of are instead in southern California). When (not "if") the fault "unzips" the entire coastline from northern California into British Columbia will be devastated; those two reactors will not be in the direct line-of-fire, but will surely receive some tsunami action.

And where I live, the house, is a tsunami-proof hundred vertical meters up-slope from salt water. Further, it's very strongly constructed, an accident of choice of wall paneling and cheapness of plywood at that stage of construction in 2008. There are many seismic faults running everywhere underneath the Olympics and the Puget Sound, some discovered only this year; indeed, there's one directly core-ward from me. So this over-constructed house would most likely slide off its foundations but should remain in one piece, uncrushed, for most foreseeable events, something not true of much of the surroundings.

My spouse, beloved cats, and I should survive the initial event, be among the millions of refugees.

All these morbid thoughts have a positive side; they help me reassess what's really important. Not the latest gadgetry, not the status or money of a good job, but instead family, friends, loves, pets, life, they're really important, right now. As I once saw on a friendly bank's billboard, "The most important things in life aren't really things at all".

You reading this, this is your time; you have your circles of love - enjoy them while you may. Or as my second-favorite Star Trek put it, "Live now; make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again."...

We definitely live in interesting times.

{ the sounds of wind in the trees }

Recently I said bitter truth to the other of so long ago; it wasn't even small recompense for injuries done her decades old, but was terrible ashes in my mouth (talk about your Garden of Forking Paths). Perhaps I'll hear back one day; for now, I seek wisdom in silence.

So I'm always going, but now I'm taking a new direction. It's a Three-of-Wands sail-setting journey that we all need occasionally. Change is life, stagnation ain't. That this wind in my rigging comes from shame, from guilt, from regret over my twin mistakes so long ago, is yet good.

If that sounds strange, life change driven by such terrible negativity, reread the paragraph containing "I know where the stress fractures lie" in my last blog. My bitter pill is like Earthpower. Power comes from below, from being grounded.

• A grounded opponent is harder to throw.
• In Forbidden Planet the Monster came from the Id.

Three hundred better men than himself

Paedaretus, not being admitted into the list of the three hundred, returned home with a joyful face, well pleased to find that there were in Sparta three hundred better men than himself.

I was walking around town, listening to Plutarch describing Lycurgus on MP3, and heard this wonderful quote, not merely in its own right but also in the pathways it stirred my mind down. It's what I hope for the youth of today, that they'll be better than I. And that led me to thought of the future, of a better world, of better worlds.

That's what we all want for our children, for the future, right? That's not just a gadget-rich environment, and not just one where people are no longer hungry, right? So what would be a better world? Hopefully not the dead dystopia inside Joss Whedon's wonderful "Serenity", that was cinema, entertainment. But what qualities would be desirable?

I suspect that there are as many answers as humans. Just as we're different, and have different desires, we would see different futures. How boring would life be if everyone though as I do. :) Here are my three suggestions, my three wishes:

• Education not merely universal but also much, much more profound. I find that I'm only now learning how to live, learning what it's all about. Wisdom was hardfought, I'll never stop learning, but soon I'll stop. "Smarts" was a long time a'comin'; suppose I'd better understood life and myself twenty years ago? Or forty?

What I mean by "profound" is something akin to what Greg Bear leaves hazily defined in his Queen of Angels when he refers to the therapied. I understand such to have undergone a process that breaks down some of the barriers between the conscious ego and the vastly more powerful wellspring of the subconscious. Such people will have the same desires, the same weaknesses and strengths as the rest of us, but they will not act out of control, they will know what they want, and will act with a sense of purpose.

I know myself better now than I ever had. I'm not absent from flaws, from weaknesses; I know where the stress fractures lie. But these days I'm more likely to bend those weaknesses to my own purposes than to be used by them. But I'm only an amateur at self-learning. There are undoubtedly three hundred better than myself, and that's a good thing.

• I'd also like to see the definition of humanity considerably enlarged. What troubles have we had for thousands of years over the pitiful differences between ourselves? I speak of such evils as discrimination over race, religion, & sex (both biological and that of partner preference).

Will we have those kinds of difficulties with the other when we meet someone really different? I tend to borrow Gene Roddenberry's IDIC philosophy, and think that we will be enriched when we meet others. Some will be dangerous, no doubt, but some will be our friends. And all will be different. And where might these come from? I suggest:

1. We meet them "out there".
2. We discover them right here.
3. We invent them.
4. We become them.

The first is the traditional "aliens", from hundreds of movies and tens of thousands of books. But of course, all of these are (so far) fictional, they merely reflect the thoughts of the writers. The reality will doubtless be quite different.

And are there any others out there? That seems one of the most ludicrous questions I know. Looking upward at night shows these points of light; stories can be played out in their patterns, but there's little hint of the real grandeur. Get a small telescope, and suddenly there's no end to the lights in the sky, they're beyond description, beyond complexity, strange and hopefully wonderful, but you need some of the knowledge that others have spent lifetimes on, in order to know what you then see.

Luckily, we have access to really big telescopes these days, and can see much more of what's up there. Can anyone really look at the approximately ten thousand galaxies of the Hubble UDF and say that we're the only intelligent life in the universe? We strut and fret our hour upon a stage of size incomprehensible. It's inconceivable that we're the only players.

The second, well think, how do you know that we're the only intelligent species here? Whales have brains bigger than we do, sing symphonies we cannot understand. Crows and octopi both use tools. Gray parrots and great apes can, I believe, run computers. Perhaps we'll engage in an Uplift one day, as David Brin imagines over several books, and we'll raise one of our fellow species up to obvious equality.

The third, is perhaps the most problematic, on several levels. The thinking machine has been a staple of sci-fi for generations, but is it possible? I tend to hope so. But controversy abounds. Perhaps anything that can be constrained by logic, by rules that humans can comprehend, perhaps the constraint itself denies intelligence, denies ego, denies self. And let us hypothesize that we do succeed in inventing the other one day. There will be ethical questions. Is it murder to reboot it? Is keeping it "captive" a slavery? At what point will it be an equal citizen?

And that last point comes from the wondrous space-opera Orphans trilogy of Sean Williams and Shane Dix, and is at the heart of my "definition of humanity". "Engrams", personality copies of originals long since died, go to the stars in tiny spacecraft as processes running on computers; there's no inside to the craft but for devices, no biology there. To the crew members inside, it's a totally real and very malleable experience. You want the bridge of NCC-1701D? Piece of cake, it merely becomes part of the shared illusion that the virtual crew experience.

But sci-fi aside, the point of "Echoes" for me is that, contrary to what you've heard, humans don't come in all sizes and shapes. None of us are suitable to go to the stars in a few cubic meters of technology, and none of us can be yet cast into unfamiliar biological packages in order to better live immersively on other planets close to home. We don't even come in green & blue (I'd like to be teal, myself :).

• And I want us out there, out among the stars, so that we're not subject to a "single-point failure". We already and only live on the best of all possible worlds. But Konstantin Tsiolkovsky said it first, "Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever."

This is a nice planet, but we don't want to be resident only here, we need to spread out among the stars. Suppose a really big rock falls on us, or some other natural phenomenon sterilizes the surface of the earth (there's suspicion that the mass extinction of 439_Myr ago was caused by a very, very high-energy pulse that cooked off the ozone layer, then let the sun's UV sterilize everything on land and in the upper layers of the ocean). Or suppose we just foul our own planetary nest.

I like humanity (some important names for me: Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, Claude-Achille Debussy, Dan Simmons, Gautam Siddhartha, Gene Roddenberry, Greg Bear, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Jesus, John Varley, Joseph Michael Straczynski, Linda Nagata, Ludwig van Beethoven, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Patrick O'Hearn, Philip Glass, Roger Zelazny, Tony Hillerman, William Shakespeare, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart). We're a good species in many ways. I believe we can accomplish great things in the trillions of years left in the Stellar Era. But we need to survive, to not go extinct. We need to be out there, and when we go, we won't all look like we do now. When will we dump stupid prejudices based upon mere appearance? When will we learn to rejoice in the other?

The Train of Thought has Definitely Left the Station

The idle mind can fugue wonderfully, chain together disparate memories, create skeins to marvel at. I'll inaccurately and incompletely reconstruct over my cup ("tea, Earl Grey, hot") what I've been thinking over the past few days.

A few days back was the first anniversary of the death of New Mexico friend Bruce Watson. I had thought death by misadventure (probably despondent, playing with firearms), but Memory Alpha now says suicide.

That got me further investigating the deaths of favorite characters, where I cross-connected to Babylon 5 characters I've enjoyed. I'm pleased that the excellent Walter Koenig, the frequently miscast (IMHO) Gary Cole, the stunning Clayton Rohner (from just the one episode, Too Short a Season), and the very talented and sexy Patricia Tallman are still with us. But I was saddened to discover that Ward Costello and Andreas Katsulas (and others I might re-find) are gone.

Costello died last year of stroke-related complications, at age 89. That's completely understandable; evolution has no further use for us once we're beyond prime child-bearing years (men get a "break", extended time to procreate, but paradoxically it would seem that women actually have better construction, last somewhat longer). I hope he lived a full life, left satisfied.

Andreas Katsulas is however another story  Katsulas, a heavy smoker, was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer in early 2005. He lost his battle with the disease on February 13, 2006, at the age of 59. No more G'Kar, no more Commander Tomalak, only a life cut short....

That reminded me that my foster brother the doctor. After my parents had passed, I reached out to him, tried to establish bonds. But he was never close to me, he wasn't even warm toward his own children. I used to say that he had received the wire mother, but only a few minutes of web research convinces me that the cloth ones weren't in the end actually any better.

Whatever, he was like Katsulas a heavy smoker. He knew better, but perhaps was unable to break the habit. Googling for nicotine and heroin addiction suggests what I was taught long, long ago, that it's harder to break a nicotine addiction than a heroin one [for one thing, you can't buy a pack of heroin at the grocery store, for another, individual (USA) states don't have a pecuniary warping of morality over the collection of huge taxes from the sale of heroin]. He died three years ago at age 79, at a hospice and in great pain from lung cancer.

And then there's a lover of decades ago, one of my Big Mistakes. I wish her well in Minneapolis, hope she's happy, and desperately wish that she might give up smoking. The last time I saw her was years ago in California, and the premature aging, the lines showed in her face. I've seen that kind of face before, in my Aunt Thelma who was also a heavy smoker; she passed quietly, but not before having years of wracking pain caused by constriction of peripheral blood vessels, and subsequent amputation of (I believe all of) her toes.

All this, above, intersected in my mind with the poor showing that BP is making in the Gulf, the slow-motion tragedy that will affect us all for decades. Tony Hayward does not bear ultimate and solo responsibility for that; such a dubious honor belongs to the Board of Directors of British Petroleum.

These two trains of thought collided (no survivors), and I began thinking about tobacco as poison, a legal poison produced by great (I mean "large" and not "laudable") corporations run by boards of directors. Perhaps fifty years ago such powerful men and women could have precariously thought themselves to have clean hands. But there can be absolutely no doubt any more; tobacco causes cancer, and brings about early death.

I don't understand how such things can have a good night's sleep, knowing that they are directly responsible for the killing of millions of their fellow humans.

Let me be clear about this. Rare is the product that doesn't have some side-effect, some danger.  Two quick examples are economical food that will probably involve "easy" (read "cheap") pest management, easy production, and easy distribution; along with the food you may get herbicides, pesticides, and other "added ingredients" that don't necessarily add health to the consumer.

And the international travel that's part of knitting us together into one humanity involves jet airliners; they're rapid and very safe travel, but the environmental cost of the fuel is relatively high (this is a huge topic, it's very difficult to compare plane, train, car, whatever, so this is definitely IMHO), and very occasionally things can go horribly wrong.

However, we can choose to buy prepackaged food, and choose to fly in aircraft.  There are benefits and risks, and most of all, there's choice. Tobacco does not work this way. The only consumer "benefit" is the temporary surcease of addiction cravings, the cost is an ugly and early death, and once you're hooked there's little choice.

But perhaps there's a chance for wisdom here. Corporations can learn, can change, just as individuals can. There's no reason why R J Reynolds, Philip Morris, Lorillard, and a host of others can't begin to turn away from this evil. It will take their recognition of the direct link (perhaps a private recognition, but whatever), then abandoning the seeking of "replacements" (no more advertising, no more "freebies", no more expansion into the Third World), then movement of corporate goals toward other products (easy to imagine, just switch to making products that are good for people), then finally the abandonment of tobacco (presumably because all those addicted have died off).

The only sure way to end nicotine addiction is to have all those who are addicted die, and no more take up the habit.

This could be done, perhaps When Pigs Fly, but perhaps sooner.

The final thread that makes up this skein is an article I ran into over the weekend, wherein Warren Buffett gives My philanthropic pledge. A very, very rich man who thinks of the rest of humanity is a rara avis indeed, someone to admire and emulate. I already try to share of myself, but alas my gifts are considerably smaller, giving of myself to friends, helping the bum on the street, giving blood frequently (that never-met strangers might live), that sort of thing.

So perhaps there's hope after all, that the scourge of tobacco will one day be merely a footnote in history. And Andreas Katsulas et al. will have suitable memorials, that no more will pass as they did.

How Time Flies (stop my mind from wandering, where it will go)

Casting my thoughts into eternity is more difficult than it looks; I wonder who you are, reader. In a way, this must be what authors face. They get no respect, or other feedback, from their readers when they're deep in the dark night of the soul.

I've been seeing a lot of bad news (almost always, that's the only kind of news...) lately.

• BP is facing disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
• Greece is in upheaval over European conditions on debt assistance.
• We continue to "have the best congress money can buy" (satirist Mark Twain said that) that's obsessed with re-election at all costs, "all other considerations secondary" (Science Officer Ash, from the 1979 movie Alien); I see no candidates anywhere for an updated Profiles in Courage.
• A Lacrosse relationship went horribly wrong.
• And then there's that "nut" who tried to non-bomb Times Square.

When I see all that, I tend to turn inward. I cannot solve the world's problems, nor even my elderly neighbor's, but perhaps I can make a difference with my own.

I faced a local rejection, but as it was a polite one I tried to respond in kind. I argued my case, then carefully reiterated the rationale behind the other's rejection, accepted some of it, and decided to go to work on the latter for my own purposes. Anyone who believes they're infallable, probably isn't.

So I'm going to the gym more often than before. Weight loss..., seems elusive so far, but I'm converting something to muscle, and that's a good thing. Long life seems dependent upon many factors, but two of them are a strong immune system, and a strong body in the more traditional ways. As attributed to Groucho Marx, Joseph Heller, and probably many others, I plan to live forever, or die trying.

And I continue to reevaluate the rejection. Perhaps I don't want to belong to that club, if that's how they treat newcomers. The rejector clearly is not of my kind.

I'm a big anti-fan of Digital Rights Management, where content owners have all the power and I have none. So I have only a first-generation e-book (the manufacturer for "Rocket eBook" devices is now defunct) mostly loaded with public domain books. And I've been buying books lately ("When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes" - Erasmus), some paperback, some hardcover to "upgrade" my library. Not only do they actually belong to me, but there's still a brisk trade in used books, indeed I can give away my books to friends & strangers. That's another thing that DRM has taken away from us.

Lately I've been re-reading my favorite story on the Rocket eBook, Lovecraft's "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" (you may enjoy this directly on your computer, at dagonbytes). Randolph Carter dreams of the Golden City three nights running, but is not allowed to approach it. He petitions the local gods of Unknown Kadath, and that really shuts the dreams down. So in desperation he resolves to journey to Unknown Kadath, the more direct approach if you will, a quest.

So last night I saw The Jane Austen Book Club and liked it; I may explore Jane Austen next (her books have been out for a while, no DRM here).

And I seem to frequently dwell on people I've known, friends & lovers gone over the Event Horizon. I feel a deep debt to some, but there's no going back, neither alternate fork in the road nor thanks (for a few, anger instead) to give. So I try for the wonderful philosophy from Pay It Forward; I try to do good to others in their honor. What goes around might not ever come around; it's not a circle, you can't go home again. But perhaps it's a never-ending spiral.

Eight miles high and falling fast

It's that quiet time between Christmas & New Year's, a time for reflection, for looking back on the year accomplished (deeds done and gone for better or worse), and the one to come (resolutions & plans). Janus is the symbol, a reminder that I still can make myself better, write my own script that I'll be proud of.

However, I intend here sharing a personal history already written, a plan that didn't pan out, but that nonetheless I feel pride over. And that's a good thing, to make something, in this case to extend oneself wildly, and know that the risk was worth it (I got only one response on this, no one was willing to take any personal plunges). Did I learn something from my "failure"? You bet! :) Based upon the reference to the CDs, I estimate this to have been written in the autumn of 1999, well before any social networking that I was aware of.

And the solo omission, has to do with how much computers know about us, and how little they actually know, all facts no comprehension (and wisdom, that will be a long time coming). A single terabyte hard drive in anyone's computer has enough storage to hold a short story for every American, or the name of every living human. But only people can evaluate, so far. The important information I share has to do with myself, with my values, and is for you the reader (and not robots). But perhaps personal information could be linked disparate databases, then used against me, identity theft. So only my friends will know my mother's name....

Tribe

Subject: Greetings and Felicitations

That's what The Squire of Gothos said anyway; I have loftier ambitions.  Of course, one man's Renaissance qualities may be another's diletantism, but that'll have to be your call, I'm too busy.  Thanks to Christine, I've slowly, for a computing industry professional, come to the realization that I can belong to, that perhaps we can have an extended family, a -tribe-, a subset of the Global Village.

So I introduce myself in four threads (a sinister not dexter thanks to http://www.scifi.com/wildpalms/index.html).  I do so to relatives I've known since the fifties, and those who are only names on email lists.  Yes, the world is a dangerous place, but you whom I've never met, someone I trust has vouched for you.

Those who know me have no need of my name.  An introspective tautology from Stephen Donaldson that I like.  For the rest, {SNIP}.  The moon was 28 days old, so it would have been invisible, but just before the sun rising in the east.  I've wanted to live there, the moon that is, for decades, but my society, my race, doesn't seem to be getting its act together, no colonies, cities, or homesteader cabins for us.

EVERYTHING MUST GO - sadly true, but maybe it's the mortality that makes this moment precious.  My mother has seen all her age cohorts die, friends, relatives, loved ones, and now may even be aware that her mind is passing out of ken.  I spoke with her on my birthday a while ago, thanked her for making all this possible, and she mumbled words to me, the attendant told me I'd made her day :).  That's why the lesson for today, is to focus, to be Here and Now, and to reach out, to share this moment with others.

Myself, I plan..., well, I -plan-, to live forever.  How else can I see all there is to see?  I think I have a reasonable change at it if I can make it to 150, and that may not be so pie-in-the-sky as it sounds.  I'm not talking your petty centuries, the march of time, mind you.  The earth, left to its natural destiny, will most likely be swallowed when our sun swells to a Red Giant in five billion years.  We're pretty sure the universe is open, so a time immeasurably far beyond that all of the free hydrogen that can be will have been bound in stars, and burned up, and the stars will eventually go out.  It will then be the era referred to as Quantum Degeneracy, of black holes and massless particles, and it will last so long that the Stellar Age that came before will be as a flash in the infinite night, compared only by a number that is a decimal point, and page after page, nay book after book, of zeros before we get to that trailing one.  It will end when the black holes have all unergone Hawking evaporation.  Space will be a thin soup of ever expanding photons and other massless particles, mass-energy density asymptotically approaching the ground state (which may or may not be zero, there's some interesting speculation floating around about that which we'll completely bypass in the interest of brevity).  Time will be difficult to measure because nothing will EVER change; I figure it'll be gettin' real interestin' about then.  That's what I'm shooting for.

RISING SONS - Some of us are in ascendence, some in decline.  The wheel turns.  I was a hotshot after I got out of my draftee time in the Army.  I was young, virile, single, had enough money, and I was alone in Hartford, well, almost alone, as I had a girlfriend lover of several years; we'd even lived together in Germany where  I was stationed, "on the economy" off-base.  We didn't handle Hartford well, too many ~distractions, and finally were history when I moved back to Michigan for a Masters degree two years later.  I was poor, but happy, hard at work in realms abstract and academic, having fun as a volunteer telephone crisis counselor, where I learned an amazing amount of stuff about myself.  Then I was hot again in Virginia, alone and lonely, then Boeing Company called, and I was cooler, but lucky to meet someone of character, a mutual chance encounter, and I was married.  I was down in that, we moved to California, I was further down, lucky to drive over an hour to a low-class job as computer operator, and then I was a campus janitor, part-time no less.  That purgatory of self-image as well as finances ended when I took a database programming job in L.A., two months there and I was let go, but the white-hot reference made up for it, and I was still in ascendence, another year computing support for three medical researchers, and I had a co-authorship in a very small paper in a medical journal; pity I don't have a URL for it....  Chance, that's all, let someone see my resume among so many in a newsgroup, and then I was a contractor at Hewlett Packard.  Two more years, and I had the coveted permanent position, and a year and a half later I'm co-lead in my group, several newhires to mentor, important support / admin roles up the kazoo, my boss really likes me, and I already have the freedom to live most anywhere in the country I please, and telecommute in.  My spouse and I are thinking about small towns in the Rockies, Colorado probably, possibly Montana.  Money presumably goes farther in some of those places, I keep my wonderful position, and maybe even can resume my love of amateur astronomy, seeing the faintest smudge of light reflected off atoms of aluminum at the bottom of a Newtonian / Dobsonian reflector, and knowing that the galaxy I dimly perceive contains planets, life, intelligence, maybe even a wisdom that we haven't got around to discovering, inventing, whatever.

The morale?  It's the wheel turning, stupid.  I no longer feel superior when I'm up, inferior when I'm down.  I can't let my self-worth be defined by others, by my job, my possessions.  Further, it's not just a question of self-esteem, of mental stability, but of morals.  If that human is my relation, then s/he cannot be less because s/he cleans toilets, or more because of that unsavory CEO position.  If there's anything that's important, it might be what I once read, in the sheet metal facade around a fireplace in the Mark Twain house in Hartford.  The words are hazy now, I'll have to revisit for the exact quote; it referred to the worth of a house being in the friends who frequent it.

HUNGRY GHOSTS - well, yes, they're around me, they talk to me.  Not really, of course, but then again, yes, really.  My parents moved me from heaven between third and fourth grades, a tiny dusty town in the Willamette Valley between Salem and Portland, you could even see Mt. Hood in the distance, to a Portland suburb, then three years later to Michigan.  I had them, and Grandma lived with us too, but other than the Davis Clan, Linford J. Davis, MD, and family, I had no one, no friends, didn't like the place; I was miserable.  From this side of the terrible gulf of time, I don't thoroughly understand just why I was miserable, in ways it was more like _Tom Sawyer_ come to life than many childhoods I've heard about, but we'll let that be.  I discovered the Hart Public Library, vowed for some reason to read the entire Science Fiction collection, and I was off.  If the stories were mostly shallow, with Buck Rogers technology and plastic people, there were also authors behind the pages, teaching me ethics, goals, friendship, nay, being my friends.

I've grown up, read about the names, those ones just after the word "by" on the title page, and discovered some were Great Men ("Great White Captains", in the parlance of "The Way to Eden"), some were shallow as dinner plates, and a few were genuinely good people, a little of which might just have leaked through when their characters met a challenge or two.  I am most sorry that I never sent a fan letter to Roger Zelazny.  He worked for The Social Security Administration, and he wrote.  Late in his career his friends persuaded him to "give up his day job", and risk it.  He moved to New Mexico, wrote more, and quite possibly died because his colon cancer was diagnosed too late (that's my theory, anyway, no Medical Plan for even successful writers).  I expect to treasure the creation of his mind referred to as the Amber series for a long, long time.  If you're curious, the first of the ten slim novels is titled _Nine Princes in Amber_, and please ignore any lurid swordsman covers; that's -not- where it's at.

Those hungry ghosts?  Newton once said that if we see farther than those who came before, it is because we stand on their shoulders.  You'll see many references to the thoughts, the words of others, in my writing, those who came before me.

I remember my dad, and what he had to say, what asperations he had, and somehow they've become part of me, I live for him; I'm sure he would be pleased with me, too bad I was that janitor when last he saw me.  It's not so direct a connection, but Zelazny lives through me also, I try to be a person proud of myself, feet of clay but head looking at the stars, as he was, and through his Corwin of Amber tried to show.  You there, look around, I'll bet you see hungry ghosts too, someone living through you.

HELLO, I MUST BE GOING - Time grows short, I've been riskier here than I'm used to, maybe even more boring than I had a right to be in front of relatives, let alone strangers :).

One final thing that some of you might be interested in.  Six months ago, give or take a few, I got a letter from out of the blue, than someone named Sara Robertson.  She'd gotten my address through Joan Davis, and was (is) interested in genealogy, specifically what I could tell her about my family, and all those old photos I harvested when I cleaned out Mom's belongings, twice, a move to Ludington and a private but closely watched apartment, then to a much more closely supervised but other wise wonderful existence in a ranchers house with others in her age cohort.  It took months for me to get the equipment together, but finally on a borrowed scanner I saved the best 152 photos to ~1.3_GB, then burned a triple of CDs, the most common format, readable by virtually any computer with decent RAM.  I've only burned two sets, sent one off to Sara, and am awaiting feedback on some that I couldn't identify, UNKNWN03, TINTYP04, that sort of thing.  Yes, there were some tintypes, just under a dozen; some of the collection date themselves to the late Nineteenth Century, the tintypes may approach The Civil War (ahem, The War Between The States for y'all).  Any who are interested, drop me a line, and by and by I'll burn a few sets.

Y'all are welcome in my life; please use only the "Primary Personal" email (unless you're looking for a job :).  What I'm hoping for, as I said at the beginning, is an extended family, a tribe.

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

These would seem to be my two favorite sayings these days, courtesy of Katherine Pulaski (a fictional doctor speaking the words of screen writer Brian Alan Lane), and of a former president of Harvard, Derek Bok. Both speak to the cost and the value of learning.

Here begins a great adventure, a learning experience (I'll certainly learn). This is so true of writers; some have told me that I'm a good writer (although several of my immediate managers seem to have preferred the term "wordy" :). We'll see....

I've thought of blogs as narcissistic, but instead intend this to be didactic without however being boring. One of my favorite roles has been mentor. I've frequently advised that you learn from experience, yours or another, and there probably won't be enough time to make all of the mistakes yourself (besides, some mistakes are fatal...), so better to learn from those of others. And because you'll never get to chat with all of those alive, let alone all humans, it's better to read what others have written. That opens up the centuries to your education. That's why reading is so vital. So perhaps I can cast my thoughts into that other Undiscovered Country, "pay it forward", that future readers might find enlightenment, or at least amusement.

But I'd like to devote my first blog to an entirely different and timely subject. Today is Thanksgiving 2009, and I want to be thankful, I want to honor those who have taught me. Some I honor are long gone, but not forgotten, some will probably never read these words anyway, and a very few will know.

• My parents are long gone. To them I owe both my excellent genes and my (IMHO) good values. I haven't shared the former, no children, but have tried to share the latter, enriching the lives of friends and family. To them I give (and gave, past times) the lyrics of a song Mary Travers sung:

I am your child
Wherever you go
You take me too
Whatever I know
I learned from you
Whatever I do
You taught me to do
I am your child
And I am your chance
Whatever will come
Will come from me
Tomorrow is won
By winning me
Whatever I am
You taught me to be
I am your hope
I am your chance
I am your child
Whatever I am
You taught me to be
I am your hope
I am your chance
I am your child 

• My spouse has taught me a great deal, been the second most important influence on my character. And some of our feline children have been most vocal, in their own way, in my instruction.
  
• Various friends & lovers have taught me of the delicate intertwinings of friendship, love, & sex (you were expecting something else???). Some lessons I'll never recover from; East Lansing, Hartford, Cottonwood/Clarkdale/Sedona have all warped my judgements. But there were many good times too, many growings together, even a few whose lasting gifts will be with me to the end. We're neither herd animals nor solitary ones; we need each other. And there's only the one game in town; if you don't play, you won't get hurt, but you also won't learn.
• A legion of science fiction writers have helped shape me. I was in small-town Michigan with no friends, happened upon the library, and arbitrarily picked the Sci-Fi shelf to read. Some of the characters in the books were shallow as dinner plates, but some taught me values, ones reflected from society as well as the more idiosyncratic choices. Of course, it wasn't the characters who were there for me, but the authors. And not only did I learn values from them, I retained the love of the field as well, and over the years branched out into other genres.
• There were some from teaching professions who also taught me. Alas, almost all of their names are gone, it would seem that I remember only their lessons. I've forgotten the beautiful equations of graduate school, but still remember my n-space visualizations of them....

There's another aspect to memory, one that James Tiberius Kirk might have helped me with if I could have only found his "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" quote about pain and memory. Memories that encapsulate our behaviors, our thoughts, things we're proud of and things we're ashamed of, what exactly is there more to "self" than that? If I could reach back, and take away some truly poor choices that I made, then the learning would never have happened, in some sense I wouldn't be "me". So, just like the Captain, I need my mistakes, my pain, my sorrows and shames; they define me.

I can be thankful that I'm alive, that I'm enmeshed in webs of friendship, caring, & love, that there's another sunrise to witness, another starry firmament to wonder at, another smile to share, and another hill to climb (I wonder what's on the other side). But the debts, the obligations, the credits, the rememberings go to others for helping shape me into what I am.

And yes, those managers were probably right.... :)