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"He hauled in a half-parsec of immaterial relatedness and began ineptly to experiment."
-James Tiptree Jr.
January 2, 2022. The turnover of the year is a nice motivational tool to make changes, and there are different kinds of changes. When people talk about New Year's resolutions, they're usually talking about changing habits, or default behaviors. The main thing I want to work on this year is being more physically present in every moment. I'm making it a game, where I break my actions down to small things: open dishwasher, put spoon in, close dishwasher; and I count how many things I can do in a row before I mess up and have to do something twice. This includes typing without having to hit backspace all the time.
Another kind of change you can make is in your priorities for living. The last couple years I've been thinking more about death, which generally feels like a relief. But the closer I get to understanding it, the more I see that I really don't want to die -- I want to continue living with no responsibilities. So that's my number one priority from here on: to minimize the number of things I have to do. Part of this is that I'll probably be blogging less, especially on hot-button subjects. Or, as I wrote last month in this thread: I used to want to be Gandalf, the famous wizard who saves the world. Now I want to be Radagast, the obscure wizard who hangs out with trees.
One thing I did in 2021 was get better at playing piano. I just follow whatever is fun to do with the keys, and I've ended up putting at least 50 hours into polyrhythms, before putting one hour into chord changes. My usual style is to park my fingers on the same keys for an entire piece and improvise. I have my favorite chords that I come back to, and over time I develop melodies and patterns that I come back to.
Over the holidays, I had a brief housesit at a house with a real piano. It's a bit out of tune, some of the keys are half-dead, and my recording system is super lo-fi, but it still sounds better than MIDI on my digital keyboard. So I recorded some stuff and ended up with three decent tracks. I call them Faewater, Jam in F, and Sunburst.
December 29. Unrelated links. "Autism is a Spectrum" Doesn't Mean What You Think. People think it's a gradient where you're more or less of one particular thing, when really it's more like the visual spectrum: farther along the spectrum from green isn't deeper green -- it's blue.
The article divides autism into seven things, where any given person might be high in one and low in another. Personally, whenever I take a test, I come out barely neurotypical, but probably where I'm the most autistic is neuromotor stuff. It takes an unreasonable amount of mental energy for me to keep track of where every part of my body is so I don't bump into stuff. It's also difficult for me to give anything a medium amount of attention -- I tend toward obsession or indifference.
The Mysterious Bronze Objects That Have Baffled Archaeologists for Centuries. Some people think they're calendars, or range-finders, but there's never any writing on them. Another guess is they're something metalworkers made to prove their skill. Update: Tim sends this video about using the device to knit glove fingers.
One of my big projects this year was transcribing the key chapter of an important out-of-print philosophy book, The Psychic Grid by Beatrice Bruteau. The chapter is called What is Real?
Also added to my readings and mirrors page, a fascinating doom speculation by mathematician Steven Strogatz, from 2013: Too Much Coupling
And some music. Surely my favorite song of 2021 will turn out to be something I haven't heard yet, but so far it's this live track from Big Blood's Quarantunes performance: 1000 Times.
December 27. I don't plan to have any new ideas until next year. Today, three minor science links.
Watching A Lecture Twice At Double Speed Can Benefit Learning Better Than Watching It Once At Normal Speed
Water drinking acutely improves orthostatic tolerance in healthy subjects. Translation: if you stand up and get a head rush, you're probably dehydrated.
If this is true, it's the best news ever: Bugs are evolving to eat plastic. But this Hacker News thread casts doubt on whether it's true, and there's also some speculation about plastic being eaten when we're still using it.
December 24. For the holiday, I want to write about Christianity. I was raised Catholic, and it occurs to me, I'm still more Catholic than I am Christian. It's not a coincidence that my favorite singer-songwriter, Colleen Kinsella, and my favorite sci-fi author, Roger Zelazny, are both ex-Catholics. Catholicism, more than any other spiritual tradition, knows how to make the woo-woo luminous.
Growing up, I always understood the idea of God, but the idea of Jesus never clicked for me. Now I identify as an esoteric monotheist, where "God" is the incomprehensible universal consciousness. But it doesn't make sense for that kind of God to have a son -- that would be more like Zeus.
If "the son of God" is pagan, then "died for our sins" is Dadaist. What do dying and sins even have to do with each other? A sin is a mistake, and the thing to do for a mistake is to be in the same situation and behave correctly. I know there's an ancient tradition of human sacrifice, where a person is killed to make things better, but that doesn't make it any less nonsensical. And yet, like unboxing videos, "The son of God died for our sins" resonates on a deep level with people of many cultures.
After I wrote some of the above in a Reddit comment, I had a dream, in which the actual message of Jesus was both difficult to understand and difficult to put into practice. So the early leaders of Christianity, seeking to grow their movement, changed it to an easier message. Of course dreams are not a reliable historical source, but probably that's what really happened, because that's what happens with everything famous.
My best guess is, Jesus was a guy with high spiritual intelligence who did a lot of mushrooms and had some great insights. "Judge not, that you be not judged" is probably the most useful advice ever given, and I love the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. For me, the crucifixion and resurrection are a metaphor, for how each one of us can transcend suffering by fully facing the pain before us.
Here's a Christmas song I haven't posted before, from 1965, The Sonics - Santa Claus. And the one I post every year, Steve Mauldin's Abominable O Holy Night.
December 20. A few notes on Las Vegas. The best food we had was the Korean-Mexican fusion at Best Friend. But the best restaurant overall was Superfrico, which had great food, interesting cocktails, and a really cool environment including a live DJ and performers who played saxophone and juggled right above our table. All for less than half the price of seeing Donny Osmond.
The best immersive environment was easily Omega Mart. It's like if a supermarket were designed by an AI, or by aliens. The whole place is packed with creativity, and I want to avoid spoilers, but behind the scenes it's even better. Impressionism was only invented 150 years ago, and already we have trippy art that you can go inside of.
What I found most interesting about Las Vegas in general was its advanced artificiality. Even where it's done without creativity, it's mind-boggling how many dollars and hours have been poured into shaping coarse matter into eye candy. This is something humans have been doing since ancient times, and we've never been this good at it.
You could make the argument that we will never again be this good at it, given that we've done it with nonrenewable resources and a social order that's losing its grip on human motivation. But I like to imagine that we've barely scratched the surface of our potential as world-builders.
I probably don't do as much LSD as I should, but when I do, I always get this insight: that compared to the beauty and complexity of nature, the human-made world is clunky and ugly, like toddlers playing with blocks.
At one store in The Venetian, I saw a six foot H.R. Giger-style alien sculpture, all made out of stainless steel machine parts. But if it were to actually work, the parts and their arrangement made no sense. I saw cool steampunk costume goggles, too fragile to be used as real goggles. The Conservatory at the Bellagio tried to make something beautiful out of living plants, and it was inferior to an actual forest, and also to many of the completely artificial environments nearby.
My point is, we have a lot of room to integrate the aesthetic with the functional. Deep in Omega Mart is a musical instrument whose strings are lasers, each making a different sound as you block it with your finger. Someday, when we've solved the paradox of labor-increasing technology, and we all have lots of time for creative projects, that kind of thing might be common.
And we have even more room to integrate the human-made and the non-human-made. Instead of an artificial tree with glowing leaves, we could have a real tree where the lights feed its photosynthesis. We could do sewage treatment by running the waste through dense arrangements of water-cleaning plants. And those are technologies that we already know about. What might we do in a thousand years, when we have morphic field generators, and silicon dendrites, and fractal-iterating fabricators?
Related, from 2012: Any Sufficiently Advanced Civilization is Indistinguishable from Nature
December 18. Just got back last night, and while I work on my next post, some happy links.
They say writers should write what they want to read, and mostly I do, but some of my favorite works of fiction have a certain vibe that I could never achieve, including John Crowley's Engine Summer, Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar, and most of all Hitoshi Ashinano's manga Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. Thanks Alex for sending this fan page with download links, YKK Project.
Wolves make roadways safer, generating large economic returns to predator conservation. Related, from a Reddit comment in a thread about quicksand:
Wolves. Never a threat. Often encountered them doing field research in the Canadian wilderness. We could walk right through the middle of a pack. They'd trot over to our camp, lay down and just stare with a mild curiosity. Sometimes they'd have a bit of blood on their faces where it had been deep in a carcass but zero aggression towards us. Their cubs would play with anything dangling. After a while the pack would get up and just trot off as if 'nothing interesting here.'
And some music. Some people find this unbearable, but I find it soothing: a loop of the Mr. Sandman intro.December 11. Next week I don't expect to post because I'll be on vacation in Las Vegas. We're going for the immersive experiences including Omega Mart. I don't plan to do any gambling, and here's a good page of gambling simulators where you can test out a bunch of strategies and see that you'll still lose.
December 9. Smart article on decline (thanks Greg), America Is Running on Fumes. (That link is a paywall workaround. If it doesn't work, try this one.)
There's lots of stuff about the decrease in new ideas, why it's happening, and how to fix it. But my favorite part is about all the changes at the end of the 19th century:
Imagine going to sleep in 1875 in New York City and waking up 25 years later. As you shut your eyes, there is no electric lighting. There are no cars on the road. Telephones are rare. There is no such thing as Coca-Cola, or sneakers, or basketball, or aspirin. The tallest building in Manhattan is a church.
...
A quarter-century hibernation today would mean dozing off in 1996 and waking up in 2021... Compare "cars have replaced horses as the best way to get across town" with "apps have replaced phones as the best way to order takeout."
I think this is unfair, but it's also a really powerful idea, to look for 25 year periods where one kind of thing changed a lot. If you're lgbtq, you'd probably rather have the cultural changes from 1990-2015 than the technological changes from 1875-1900.
Or consider all the cultural inventions and openings from 1960-1985. If I could time travel to 1875, I'd rather have that upgrade, than the upgrade that actually happened. A world with punk rock and horses sounds pretty cool.
Of course, the tech changes were necessary for the cultural changes. The music of the 1960's required fully distributed phonographs and radios. And yet, phonographs and radios were around for decades before they drove a renaissance. So I'm wondering, what things have already been invented, that are still waiting for their golden age?
My bet is on psychedelics and transcranial brain-hacking. Future archaeologists, looking at physical artifacts, will surely see our century as one of decline. But if you can stay out of the worst places, it might be a good time to be alive.
December 6. Lately I'm feeling burned out on blogging. Sometimes people caring what I think is not worth people caring what I think, and that's becoming true for more subjects. But this is a cool subject (thanks Jed), Reality shifting: psychological features of an emergent online daydreaming culture.
RS, described as the experience of being able to transcend one's physical confines and visit alternate, mostly fictional, universes, is discussed by many on Internet platforms.... The experience of shifting is reportedly facilitated by specific induction methods involving relaxation, concentration of attention, and autosuggestion. Some practitioners report a strong sense of presence in their desired realities, reified by some who believe in the concrete reality of the alternate world they shift to.
Obviously these worlds aren't real, but it's interesting that there is a cultural trend of more intensive imagination. It's anyone's guess if this is a dead end, or if it's leading somewhere.
Related: a smart blog post from 2017, Reality has a surprising amount of detail. The same thing struck me after playing on the Oculus and then taking the garbage out. In VR, there's a limit to how deep you can zoom before you get to one pixel. In reality -- and you could even use this as a definition of reality -- no matter how deep you zoom, there's always more. That's why physicists will never find a final particle or a grand unifying theory.
December 2. Stray tech links. Here's Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand. This article is loaded with examples of how increasing technological complexity creates more problems than it solves.
On the same subject: Ask Hacker News: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005-Google? Because the internet is much bigger now and more complex. But the thread does have some examples of good small search engines, including Gigablast. There are a few more examples on this altsearch page (thanks
Alex).
Firefox is the Only Alternative "to a complete Chrome hegemony."
Why a toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today
And two surprisingly unpopular YouTube channels, Ris and Revrart, both makers of fractal zooms into trippy illustrations. I recommend muting the sound and playing music of your choice while watching.
November 30. Continuing from last week: why is modern society so busy? I said it's "built into our culture on a deeper level than technology," but now I'm not so sure. This could be another paradox, like Braess's paradox, in which adding more roads slows down traffic, or Jevons paradox, in which using a resource more efficiently leads to using more of it. Through mechanisms we don't fully understand, our labor-saving devices could be increasing labor.
Matt comments:
The problem could be completely cultural. That is, it's possible that technology only accelerates work in cultures that idealize work. If work is seen as virtuous, rather than "some activity necessary for survival and maintaining infrastructure," then people will use technology to leverage themselves into greater virtuosity.
We know from anthropology that when some foraging societies are, say, given access to trucks then they don't spend more time foraging. Rather, they get the week's work out of the way more quickly and spend the rest of the week in leisure.
What's exciting about The Dawn of Everything is how it emphasizes conscious choice in culture. There's plenty of reason to believe that some Indigenous cultures, when Europeans encountered them, were in a mode of consciously rejecting large-scale agriculture, hierarchies, cities, and so on.
Could this happen in the future? I think it could happen in the near future, if we get an unconditional basic income. Of course, this would be in a context of general economic decline. Desperate governments will prevent mass unrest by throwing money at their citizens. Then the worst jobs, and the benefits that depend on them, will mostly disappear.
But the last thing I'm worried about is everyone taking their UBI and staring at the clouds all day. Farmers will continue to work because they're already working for basically nothing. And the worst things humans have done have been done by the over-motivated. I fear the rapid growth of authoritarian movements, gobbling up UBI's as tithes, and using efficiency of scale to put large regions under old-time social dominance culture.
At the same time, there will be lots of other social experiments, and with luck a few of them will find ways to keep going, at a high level of slack, as the old systems fall.
November 26. Weird links for the weekend, starting with a review of a fringe science book from 1896, The Human Soul, featuring lots of trippy primitive photographs.
Bill sends this piece about Colin Wilson and The Robot, in which the "robot" is the human brain's ability to make conscious behaviors unconscious. This allows us to do routine physical tasks with much more efficiency, but then the robot goes too far, numbs our perceptions, and makes us feel less alive. I'm not convinced that we're talking about only one thing here, because when I'm really high, which supposedly shuts the robot down, I can still type.
Transcranial brain stimulation can reduce disgust and moral rigidity. Transcranial means it's done with electromagnetism through the skull, without breaking the skin. I think this kind of thing is going to be huge in the coming decades.
Pretty good Reddit thread, Police, security guards, paramedics etc - Have you ever been called out only to realise it was a seemingly paranormal incident?
And from today, a funny Reddit thread: Have you ever written down a 'genius idea' while drunk/tired/otherwise confused, then gone back to it later to find it was complete nonsense? What was your genius idea?
November 24. Depressing Reddit thread, What is an overly-romanticized job? The key comment:
Reading this thread, I'm starting to think work in general is overly romanticized in our culture. To the point where people sacrifice their relationships, their time, and their happiness in pursuit of a misrepresentation of a career they chose. I think a lot of people feel so committed to their choices and pressured by society that once they realize that their job isn't what they expected, they just white knuckle it to retirement.
And yet it strikes me, a lot of these terrible jobs would be pretty good at a slower pace and for fewer hours. The fact that we're still in such a hurry, with so many labor saving devices and so much material wealth, suggests that the hurrying is built into our culture on a deeper level than technology and economics.