Cobb

Some Thoughts about Space Colonization

Some perspective I have been missing in all of the fabulousity leading up to the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing tossed me for a loop last week. In all of the things I have been ingesting on rocketry it had only been buried in the back of my mind that the space race was not merely ideological and patriotic but in fact funded by the research behind ICBMs. In other words, putting a man on the moon wasn't really much more than another way to scale up the capabilities of the military industrial complex. Whoosh!.

What is easy to forget in the hype is that we didn't merely put a man on the moon, we took 24 men to the moon and back. My favorite, Michael Collins, drove around it while Armstrong and Aldrin left footsteps, planted a flag and took pictures. But there were many others who sat on top of the most powerful machine every built, the Saturn 5. And each of those rockets had five monstrous F1 engines. While those didn't power any of our ballistic missiles, Aerojet, Rocketdyne and Aerospace Corp learned a lot from the lessons.

So when I hear people quoting Elon Musk, whose SpaceX has done some very impressive rocketry say we should go to Mars, I'm a bit more hesitant. Like millions of Mikes born in the 60s when that was the most popular American boy's name, I wanted to be an astronaut. I read science fiction and Starman Jones was probably the most influential book of my pre-teen life. But it is clear now that nothing about the manned space program was intended to scale to the dimensions of colonization. Considering the ribbing astronauts got from military pilots there's more than a little truth that they were just handsome window dressing distracting from a MAD economy. The oratory from President Kennedy takes on a sheen of irony and slight of hand now in retrospect. I didn't become an astronaut nor an astrogator. I don't think Earthlings will get the opportunity to flee this planet.

For all of the interest on global warming or climate change or the de-humanization of forests, you would think that before we start talking about space habs, we might try much of that here. It seems to me that even given the pretense of mass colonization, Earthers are going to have to learn to live indoors in the dead cold or boiling heat for a long time. Longer than the Biodome. Longer meaning for life. So why not try and build a city somewhere in the Namib or the Arctic circle. What mix of people would not drive each other mad? How do you make water in the Sahara for 75 people in a habitat. What is the appropriate sexual balance? How many children, handicapped and seniors are necessary for human sanity and compassion to survive in desolate isolation?

These are not things most people think about as the millionaires put down their payments for space tourist reservations. Maybe we ought to. Everything cannot be saved by rockets. It certainly was not why they came about.

Ecosystem Engineering

So if you can CRISPR an infertile mosquito and half of the worlds mosquitoes literally screw themselves into extinction you will have eliminated a lot of malaria. You will also have eliminated a lot of bird food. How many humans will live? How many birds will die? If you knew the answer to that question and network searched all of the ecospherically related questions, you might end up with something that ends up counting all sorts of animals of particular interest. The trick of course is to simulate an entire ecosystem, and having done so with a complex enough model, reduce the number of unintended consequences, or at least recognize some of them in realtime for the next iteration of the model.

The biggest problem with this will be scaling moments. What happens with the death of 20 billion mosquitoes may be a completely different phenomenon than what happens with the death of a mere 2 million. This is a field of endeavor that I imagine. Look how primitive putting a wristband on the leg of a condor is compared to this.

I cannot see that the ethics of this are any more significant than the ethics of farming. Farming is certainly exactly that same thing - ecosystem engineering, in which the DNA and destiny of any number of organic species is manipulated and subordinated in a controlled manner to yield benefits specifically for the dietary requirements of humans. You control the territory. Map off a piece of the earth and subject it to human science, technology and other fiddling.

I recall some research done a long time about about wolf populations somewhere in the colder bits of Canada. At the time people could not believe that these arctic wolves could survive without eating livestock, and so farmers were shooting them. Only one researcher was brave enough to hang out at those latitudes away from supermarkets for months to study these wolves. As he came close to starving, he found himself regularly dining on roasted rats, and suddenly it became clear that large mammals could survive indefinitely on such a diet - which nobody believed before his documentation. Since then this has always been a part of my thinking and threw a great number of monster movies under the relentless logical bus in my mind. How can anything so huge survive to be strong enough to knock down buildings if all they are going to eat is a tiny human or two?

These are the matters of caloric thermodynamics to be considered. It takes energy, and these paths of energy are what should be measurable to enable such tracking of ecosystem dynamics. I don't know what shortcuts are taken in the supercomputing simulation of nuclear detonations, but there is a clue in there somewhere.

The Fact Chain

Imagine that you were an actual smart college professor who cared about the state of human knowledge. You cared so much that in your spare time, you would collaborate with other such professors to determine the truth value of what every comment section said about your specialty.

You could use a blockchain tech to sign facts in collaboration with others in your field, and those facts would be made accessible to everyone else on the planet for free.

By the way, Quora is a good feedstock for exactly this problem, but Quora is centralized and under the control of Quora.

At some point in the future, the best answers at Quora could be annotated and curated by such professors who will do public peer review, and thereby insure the integrity of the distributed ‘factchain’.In other words, instead of Google telling you what is popular, the factchain will tell you what is right.

AmCoEx

(from the archives - June 1998 )

The AmCoEx Index of Used Computer Prices (long version of index)
The following average prices are for the most actively traded
models for June 22, 1998.

Average Average
Buyer's Seller's
Machine Bid Ask Close Change($)

IBM PS/1 486/66 420MB $100 $250 $125 0
IBM ThinkPad 350C 300 500 400 -50
IBM ThinkPad 500 250 475 325 0
IBM ThinkPad 755CX 350 650 500 -25
AST 486DX/66 420MB 125 275 125 0
Fujitsu Lifebook P133 800 1150 875 -25
Dell 486DX/33 270MB 100 250 125 0
Dell Dimension P166 2.1GB 300 650 625 25
Gateway 486/100 540MB 150 375 225 0
Gateway 486/75 Notebook 320MB 350 600 525 -25
Clone 486/66 420MB 150 250 175 0
Clone 586/133 500MB 200 400 250 -25
Clone P100 1.2GB 275 450 375 0
Clone P200 2.1GB 400 650 600 -25
Clone P166 1.2GB 350 575 475 25
Compaq Contura 4/25 120MB 200 475 500 -25
Compaq Prosignia 486/33 500 MB 175 375 175 0
Compaq Presario P200 2.5GB 400 600 525 -25
HP Pavillion P166MMX 2.1GB 400 600 500 0
Mac Quadra 700 230MB 200 350 300 -25
Mac Quadra 840AV 500MB 300 600 350 -25
Mac Performa 6116 700MB 300 500 475 0
PowerBook 160 160MB 250 500 300 25
PowerBook 180 160MB 350 600 375 -25
PowerBook 520c 250MB 400 750 600 0
PowerBook 540c 320MB 600 1000 750 -50
PowerBook 5300 500MB 500 750 550 0
PowerBook 5300cs 500MB 650 950 825 -25
PowerMac 7100/80 700MB 300 675 525 50
PowerMac 7200/75 500MB 400 675 650 0
PowerMac 7500/100 1GB 800 1400 875 -25
PowerMac 8500/150 1.2GB 800 1500 1150 0
PowerMac 9500/120 1.2GB 900 1600 1175 -25
Mac 8100/80AV 1GB 500 900 550 0
NEC Versa 486 200MB 450 625 525 -50
Toshiba 486/75 500MB 400 650 575 -25
Toshiba P75 Notebook 500 850 800 -50
Toshiba 4800CT Notebook 550 825 800 -25
HP LaserJet IVL 200 400 250 0

Since 1988, the American Computer Exchange has matched
buyers and sellers of used microcomputer equipment. The index is a
sample of the most actively traded models in the used market. Many
other models are actively traded each day. For more information
contact the American Computer Exchange at (800) 786-0717 or download
the AmCoEx Used Computer Pricing software at http://www.amcoex.com.

When They Reminisce Over You, For Real

I only know the title of this piece sampled from some De La and I can't tell you what the joint was.That's odd for me who generally knows the OG, but not this time. So I listened and it comes sweetly in line with a friendly shout from Mark Anthony Neal, a man I knew back in the days of the blogosphere, the blackosphere and all places yonder, now more than a decade gone. There were others of course from back when I remember, first in line Jimi Izrael who got me on NPR with Michel Martin. There were my cadres from the black right, The Conservative Brotherhood, including the most effervescent and flavorful Avery Tooley and the stalwart crew including Baldilocks and the black conservative woman who set the world on fire, Miss LaShawn Barber. Long before there was Candace Owens, Shay Riley at Booker Rising ran down the facts. Prior to that I came with it on the Talented Tenth Progressive flavor at Vision Circle with the celebrated Good Doctor Lester Spence, my old boys Ed Brown, Craig Nulan and others I haven't spoken to or heard from in quite some time. Pshaw. Not long before that, I was all over various places in the pre-blog world including being the FAQ keeper at SCAA in the wild days of Usenet. That's where I met some of the men I call my existential partners - whose footsteps I could be or they could be me depending on how the wind tossed the butterfly. One of them has recently stepped up to legendary status, running the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. It's good to know good people. It reminds me to try to be good.

But I'm impatient, and I don't even suffer my own foolishness very well. As I have for the last 30 years at least, I've tried to live by the code that no concept you hold is valid unless it can be integrated without contradiction into the sum of your experience. Or as Cornel West would put it, your praxis has to have integrity. The code of your life has to compile with no errors, and you should not disregard the many warnings. You stand the risk of running in infinite circles. Somewhere around the end of 2007 when I was trying to help put Microsoft on the EPM map and a toxic green goo of mortgages started eating a hole in the floor of the American economy, I underwent a series of tough revisions that continued through the election of Barack Obama. I came to the slow realization that identity had tipped the scales away from reason, and I had to quit investing any effort in politics. Around the same time, continuing in my mad scramble for the dosh point, aka 'fuck you money' I assumed a bit too much about that realm called 'upper management' as well as that called the 'upper middle class'. I reset and went Stoic. I was fortunate to get a heads down job that I could work at home and enjoyed the blessings of focused technical work, let my face grow shaggy and began my martial education. I became friends with the local first responders, the local gunsmiths, the local FBI agents, the local dojo masters, the local gyms and the art of making brilliant salads. I had high and low points, and one notably on the same day having completed at the age of 57 a grueling ruck. It might be said that this was all part of becoming a military dad, but it was about my own health and getting away from political thrash and trash.

Nowadays, my Stoic journey is mostly complete but I've learned that an attitude of mockery can only get you so far in politics. I can't say that I am entirely done with writing. Even though there's nothing I want to tell and explain to the world, I still need to be a good example. So I think it is time to walk as a man in full, well in the moment, beholden to my own ethics, remaining anti-bullshit, but as open and social as possible. I don't have much more to do to protect my family, and I still have some great stories and good ideas in me. I've made some pretty excellent friends too.

So when I look at that black life, I'm left with very little but the sweet BBQ crust on the grill of my life. There's a flavor that will never disappear, but these days it's more than just pork ribs I'm grilling. It's bulgogi. It's not only Kingsford for the fire, I'm doing it just fine with propane and propane accessories. It's an odd feeling not to want to do anything particularly blackified, but I'm used to it. What I'm not used to is looking like an old black man and I hardly know what to expect of outward expectations. Still, I think like with every other experience down that disciplined road of non-contradictory integration, what I will continue to do is tell the straight story. They say that the human body replaces all but its brain cells every 7 years. It's curious looking back at what I was into 15 years ago. Well, I wrote what I needed to write.

These days, over in Quora where I spend most of my time online, I answer a good percentage of the questions they throw me. It gets me about 200k hits a month, which is better than I ever got on the blog. That's the preferred format for the moment, because I don't have to put stuff out there from my own imagination. People ask me. I like that, and it's a long format. I was surprised to get 6k karma points over a weekend just posting a picture of my parents wedding at Reddit. I mean we are pretty good looking but it's difficult swallowing that one post being the most popular thing I ever did in 20 years online. I continue to write my mostly serious and expository stuff here at Cobb, if only to keep track of where I'm thinking outside of work. And Facebook is for anyone who wants to be a lightweight friend. I have an odd mix of twitter followers @mdcbowen, and I really do hope to increase that and do some more vlogging on YouTube. I'll try to get some kind of hookup with the IDW which is for me right now the most righteous thing on the interwebz.

I'm a traveler, and some might even call me a pioneer. What I know for sure is that if I have a real curiosity, or something to prove, I'm not afraid to go there. I took the test and I'm very high on openness to experience. I did a tally and I have been to 96 of the 150 largest cities in the US. Sounds like me. Speaking of which, it's about time to hit the road. I'll let you know when I get my Porsche.

Service Aussie Style

So I was in Sydney and found my perfect pub, the Dove & Olive. I was a bit surprised to learn that it was an insult to tip the waitstaff. So I learned how it worked.

You go up to the bar and order what you want. You pay ahead of time. You find your own table. They give you a number. They send somebody over to your table with your food. If you want more food or drink, you go and repeat the process. If you want bbq sauce or mustard, it's sitting on a side table somewhere in the joint. Get it yourself. When you're done, they bus your table and that's it. Here in the states, the closest thing to it is how Carl's Jr works. I like it.  

The most important thing about a sit down restaurant is that you get to sit down. So we have some difficulty because we have a lot of restaurants like Denny's and Tony Romas where the food isn't all that great and the service isn't all that great, but we're stuck in the formal restaurant rut in terms of the service style. There's nothing about these kinds of joints that is the elegant thing where the waitstaff ought to make a difference. They're watering holes. 

I got in the habit of tipping because I was on business and expensing my meals. But even the business meal joints have become rather run of the mill to me. Basically, if you don't have live music, but you do have some music, it's not a fancy tipping kind of joint. So I would say there is a class of overpriced chain restaurants like PF Chang's, Houstons, Mortons and McCormick & Schmick that are in my sights. I'm going to tip there out of force of habit, but I really don't want to. I can get food that good at an Aussie style joint, but right now the Frequent Flyer, Happy Birthday and First Date crowd are keeping these places alive. Those people tip. 

Leadership: The Hybrid Model

I am becoming more convinced that what is miraculous about AI should not seem miraculous to us any more than the miracle of the Triceratops. AI is a creation of the evolution of human thought pursuant to particular ends. If it reaches those ends, that doesn't make it generally useful or sustainable. As soon as people get bored with AI and the margins for AI development decreases, the industry and its products will suffer like flat screen TV repair. 

I read an excellent introduction to a new product called LF this morning and it has got my mind spinning and connecting a large number of dots. I will archive that original post here. In summary, it offers an interesting insight into sustainability by making the convincing observation that system developers fall in love with elegant models and tend to shy away from hybrids. I mean you teach theory, right? You cannot teach leadership. Leadership that works (as you see I'm skipping ahead to the lede) does so because it is agile. It keeps the goal in mind and it uses a variety of delivery methods for carrots and sticks contingent on its ability to see and sense. The operant phrase is in the quote:.

"Decentralize until it hurts, then centralize until it works."  

The next thing that happened was that I watch videos of Ronald Reagan and noticed how he stumbled over his answer about what leadership is. That's ok. A dictionary definition would not suffice. Reagan became clear when he reflected on his own values and his own stories. That's a very good way for a certain type of leader to operate - on the confidence with the methods that have personally worked before, yet with an understanding that whatever you do know or don't know, responsibility ends with you. If you are decided to not let theoretical impurity discourage you, ie if you are not afraid to be heretical for the purposes of a specific solution, then along with sharing the credit for success, there is nothing you can't accomplish. 

I like the idea of abandoning a slavish dedication to systemic elegance. Sometimes you have to get your hands dirty.

The Misery Gap, Kantian Good Intent and Non-Zero Sum Activism

Consider the misery gap.

Imagine that you are an American who feels out of touch with harsh reality. You can go watch superhero movies because they are violent and exciting but just really fantasy violence. You're safe. You're comfortable. You watch TV shows where young stupid awkward people are cute and have nice apartments and don't get into car wrecks that jacks up their insurance premiums. You're young and healthy enough to get totally wasted whenever you feel like partying and you don't even think about health consequences. I mean you'd eat cheeseburgers every day if you could live with the gut and hip consequences. I mean meat is more dangerous than alcohol, right? OK let's not get to serious here.

The bottom line is that you're a happy American and you've got it pretty good. You are, dare we say it, privileged. I mean not compared to your friends and co-workers but compared to all kinds of other miserable people. You think to yourself, I'm happy to talk about all kinds of ways that people could be less miserable. And I'm all for being supportive of that. I'm a good person and I will speak up, because that just makes sense to me. You think, I wouldn't want to live in a harsh reality like so many other people, and I want people to live like I do. More friends for everybody, right? In your world, there is practically limitless freedom. The only limits on freedom are the zero-sum kind. When I take advantage of you, directly that's wrong. Otherwise I can swing my fist anywhere, so long as it doesn't hit anybody's nose.  

OK That's the setup. 

What then is the zero-sum nature of activism? When you talk about all kinds of ways that people could be less miserable, is there a cost? Is positivity not always only positive? When everybody is working to make the world a better place so long as our intentions are good, then we are all good right?

Cobb doesn't think so. This is the theoretical context that occurred to me as I was thinking about a 'misery gap' in the following scenario. If Trump makes you miserable, if the very fact of Trump is making America miserable again, then why do people risk death to come here? Most certainly they know that they will face violence and dangers of the action movie type where commandos with black camo and automatic weapons will shout at them. Certainly they must know that they won't be able to get car insurance.

---

Anyway. That train of thought had a hard time climbing a hill to see the promised land. Meanwhile Fareed Z sees some facts and makes some speculations. The facts are the most interesting part.

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN: Given President Trump's mean spirited and often bigoted attitudes on immigration, it pains me to say this, but he is right, that the United States faces a crisis with its asylum system. Democrats might hope that the out-of-control situation at the southern border undermines Trump's image among his base as a tough guy who can tackle immigration. But they should be careful. It could actually work to the president's advantage.

Since 2014, the flow of asylum seekers into the United States has skyrocketed. Last year, immigration courts received 162,000 asylum claims. A 240 percent increase from 2014. The result is a staggering backlog with more than 300,000 asylum cases pending and the average immigration case has been pending for more than 700 days. It's also clear that the rules surrounding asylum are vague, lax and being gamed.

The initial step for many asylum seekers is to convince officers that they have a credible fear of persecution in their home countries. And about 75 percent meet that criteria. Some applicants for asylum have suspiciously similar stories using identical phrases. Many simply use the system to enter the U.S. and then melt into the shadows or gain a work permit while their application is pending.

Asylum is meant to be granted to a very small number of people in extreme circumstances. Not as a substitute for the process of immigration itself. Yet, the two have gotten mixed up. As the Atlantic's David Frum has pointed out, the idea of a right to asylum is a relatively recent one dating to the early years of the Cold War. Guilt ridden over the rejection of many Jewish refugees during World War II the U.N. created a right of asylum to protect those who are fleeing regimes where they would be killed our imprisoned because of their identity or beliefs. This standard has gotten broader and broader over the years.

And now includes threats of gang warfare and domestic violence. These looser criteria coupled with the reality that this is a safe way to enter the U.S. have made the asylum system easy to abuse. Applications from Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans have surged even though the murder rate in their countries has been cut in half.

More broadly, hundreds of millions of people around the world who live in poor, unstable regions where threats of violence abound could easily apply for asylum. Do they all have the legal right to enter the U.S. through a backdoor, bypassing the normal immigration process? The Trump administration's approach has been mostly to toughen up the criteria. Hire more judges, push Mexico to keep applicants from entering the U.S.

But a much larger fix is needed. The criteria for asylum need to be rewritten and substantially tightened. The number of courts and officials dealing with asylum must be massively expanded. People should not be able to use asylum claims as a way to work in America. There needs to be a much greater cooperation with the home countries of these applicants rather than insults, threats and aid freezes.

No one fix will do it, but we need the kind of sensible bipartisan legislation that has resolved past immigration crises. Democrats have spent most of their efforts on this topic, assailing the Trump administration for its heartlessness. Fine. But that does not address the roots of this genuine crisis. If things continue to spiral downward and America's southern border seems out of control, Trump's tough rhetoric and hard line stance will become increasingly attractive to the public.

Keep in mind, that the rise of populism in the Western world is almost everywhere tied to fears of growing out of control immigration.

(published now without further comment)

 

 

Richard Kadrey and the Morality of Dark Degenerates

I have been enjoying the Sandman Slim series of novels by Richard Kadrey for years. This week I just finished his latest novel, The Grand Dark. It is a revelation. I will place it, in my ultimate library right next to Gene Wolfe's 'The Land Across'. The new book, The Grand Dark, takes place in what could be described as an alternate Mitteleurope postwar near future. It's at once both futuristic and retro, a brilliant creation in which serves as a kind of gothic background for a tale of youth and innocence lost, repression, rebellion and decadence. In describing it thus, having read it, I find myself getting excited about something I'm sure I wouldn't have been excited about had I read an overview. It's Kadrey, a writer of wondrously dark imagination. There's not much of any other way to describe him now as the caretaker of the morality of dark degenerates. 

So start with the phrase 'entartete kunst', and imagine an American 1980s romantic punk sensibility in a Reagan era where the CIA was not turned against Soviet Russia, but against Americans whose common folks had turned to a minimally employed louche cokeheads and heroin addicts. Imagine thin wastelings like the Pet Shop Boys, East end punks in tattered jackets looking after scores with West End girls, dragging on Shermans all black lipsticked in sheer gauzy blouses. Imagine a precisely speaking man in small hornrimmed glasses dressed formally with a preternatural intelligence lording over a bicycle delivery service with a ratpack of couriers looking just out of the workhouses of Oliver Twist. Imagine a grimy industrial city barely hanging on to civility patrolled by automatons, robot taxi drivers, spiderlike police bots. Imagine disfigured war veterans who wear steel masks covering their deformities grumbling to themselves on public transit everywhere you go. 

The Grand Dark is the pseudonym of the theatre of the absurd in which the most crumbly of human dramas are shot through with sexual drama and political innuendo that caters to the most ribald and degenerate sensibilities of a bounding youth and a slumming aristocracy - where poets and students and grand dames & dukes meet at opioid cocktail parties signifying about the potential of transgressive creativity, each production aiming to rise the level of shock and awe to that of civilizational neutron bombs. And around every corner are the brutal police and the even more vicious secret police. 

The novel is the story of a naif and his lover, an actress, two against the whole demonic world. Like Forrest Gump stranded in Milan Kundera's Prague, Kadrey's protagonist Largo struggles against the news of the world as he manages to escape its crushing jaws by inches every day. He is animated by his passionate love for Remy whose love and life are romantically reckless in the way only an energetic and beautiful youth animates to the stunned jealousies of the jaded who surround her at work. Their love is true and it surpasses all until things with gravity and grit get their grubby ways. Remy disappears. Largo struggles to find Remy. Has she abandoned him? Is she lost? Kidnapped? Dying of the miasmic vapors of this cruel industrial wasteland?

In all ways subtle and clever, Kadrey's world pulls you into its twisted orbit, drowning you in gothic mystery and the horror of war, the heat and hate of the beat down humans and the intrigues of revolution and counter-revolution. It is a world of creeping cold claustrophobia, like Terry Gilliam's Brazil set in Eastern Europe. Kadrey's writing simply and occasionally brings you directly into the head-pounding despair of a sweet young man fighting for his very survival in a world intent on destroying all that gives him hope. 

In all this, Kadrey has brought me face to face with something I would not have known how to approach - which is how one who is weak and powerless with no cause to hope and no ethos beyond survival lives at the mercy of sophisticates who see in him only a means to crafty ends. Largo's degeneracy is genuine. He is a son of the underbelly of society, and no he doesn't know how to tie a tie. He doesn't jog for his health, he grabs on to the parcel of peace that can be purchase by a couple of drops of opioid under the tongue, by the hot breath of his lady love, by the thrill of outrunning the gangsters out to bash his brains. And so we are left breathless trailing a youth with none of the degraded common sense of a degraded time, yet whose honesty is the only sort that can reflect the humanity of those who struggle on the daily. He is dirty and unsubtle. He is weak and frightened. He is used by inches in ways he cannot comprehend and all he can do is try to stand up straight and stand up for his friends. He who suspected no one finds himself pinioned, as was my heart. 

Penultimate Histories

This morning as I was sleeping through a conference call, I found some reason to check the stats on this blog. It turns out that some Chinese bot was keying on the word 'yellow' according to Google. Since the phrase I saw contained the phrase '500 tons of yellow' I quickly discerned that we were talking about the Valery Plame scandal and the matter of yellowcake in the evidentiary buckets of Iraqi causus belli. 

Just last week I asked over at Quora to some intelligency guys what they considered to be the amount and quality of disinformation assaulting our senses in the miasma of the interwebz. I got some fair answers, but nothing definitive. I'll go back later and ask another way. What I suspect is that the qualified experts on these matters pay attention to the qualified experts. The problem is than unless you are somehow hooked into their writing, it's hard to find out their syllabi. For me, on matters like Plame and Yellowcake, I would depend on Bellingcat. This reminds me that I am awaiting some factual resolution of the recent outrage over mined ships in the Persian Gulf, keywords 'limpet mines above the waterline'. 

What I would like to start now, is a new category called Penultimate Histories. It is the longitudinal stuff missing from the MSM that gives the appropriate context to the study of complex issues that are spun our way through various craptastic means. This is very much like the curated quality of a BoxTagged XRepublic except that I'm the sole dude. I have to start somewhere, and I can't get this crap out of my head. 

Recursion

Blake Crouch is the most emotional sci-fi writer I read. In that regard, what he writes may be a great deal more accurate for his characters and NPCs. Danger, confusion, loss and suffering are more vividly illustrated in this book than in others, but quite resonant with his prior 'Dark Matter'. Oddly, I preferred Dark Matter's protagonist who was a bit more bumbly and challenged. 

However the scale of Recursion is a great deal broader. The entire planet is entangled in a quantum dilemma. At its best, this book gets us close to Michael Crichton level drama. Its take on 'time travel' is a very clever working on the order of Primer and Inception. 

There is a kind of blind naivete driving the ambition of the characters here that didn't ruin the book for me, but annoyed me for a time. And since this is a book about people's lives rather than the situational drama created by technological disruption I think it's something Crichton would have handled much better. The way the ordinary Joe protagonists in this cinematic drama handle their dilemma puts a locus on character that requires me to suspend disbelief more than I should. In other words, if you give somebody the talent, financial and technical wherewithal to change the world, and their ambition is actually to change the world, how do they end up so squeamish when they actually do change the world and people die? That said, I find the protagonists' reactions to the tragedies that ensue quite realistic in an oddly informative way.

What Recursion reveals, emotionally and psychologically is the extent to which people whose lives spin out of control tend to seek comfort and solace from an ever-shrinking circle of intimates. In Crouch's world, the keys to all survival are the hugs and kisses that only one person in the world can give and losing that person drains all meaning from life. Recursion is the illustration of what could happen when that person is erased or altered by memory. The world comes apart.

Stop Crying

So about a year ago I witnessed something that stuck with me. Over in Sunnyglen Park where I did my morning runs, I saw parents out with their young kids. One of the kids was riding on a scooter. He must have been about 3 1/2 or 4. I can't remember if he was wearing a helmet but he did an Arte Johnson. Fall down go boom. As he recognized that he was in pain, he started yelping and the parents rushed over. Of course they were young parents and so they didn't know how to deal with the situation, not as well as I do of course. They were reacting to the pain he was feeling, not the wreck. And when you're crying and people are reacting to your cries, you cry until they guess right or promise you ice cream. 

The proper thing to do when your kid is bawling his eyes out is to get him to start talking about what happened. You want to encourage him to talk and then he'll realize this and then he'll have to pipe down to explain the situation. So the first logical question is What happened? (sob sob, I fell down), Where? (sob. over there) Over here? (no) Show me where. (right here). OK. Where does it hurt? (sob. on my arm) Let me see. (see?) Oh. Yeah I see. 

If you are more perceptive than a 4 year old, then you'll see how the misdirection gets him to focus on the series of events that lead to the boom. Not the present pain. By the time you get through this exercise, the kid will have put together some cause and effect stuff in his head. You can even elaborate with some forensics. OH. Look at this bump. I bet you hit that bump and it made your scooter fall. (yeah. stupid bump!) Well you know to watch out for that bump. Now the kid is oriented to be smarter about his scooter riding and the consequences of bumps, rather than the quickness with which he can procure ice cream by crying loudly at all the mommies and daddies in Sunnyglen Park. 

Thus endeth today's non-fableized fable.