Boundary Conditions

Happy Spring! Google celebrates today with a doodle showing smiling rocks watching a cherry tree blossom. The little one accidentally sneezes, and blows the beauty. I suspect either Google has no sense of irony, or that some one subversive got the conceit past the censors. Just like Disney used to, they storyboard lots of challenging adult plots before cleaning them up for mass appeal. I suppose Google still likes to live at the edge.

Mark Zuckerberg meets with the central party boss in China who is in charge of "propaganda." Here we call that advertizing. It's an apt meeting. The Party would love what Zuck has, so long as they could rate the netizens according to some political calculus according to what those netizens like and don't. The algorithms are identical.

Apple doesn't want in to that business, staying clean with hardware and software that gets things done for people according to what they want, and in China they all want iPhones. But our Ashcroft clone Eagle scout FBI boss, apparently utterly clueless about technology, cares only about our safety and security, and so Apple is in the crosshairs. Imagine what China would do with that back door were it to be loose in the field.

Meanwhile in China, they keep track of who's on first regarding the great go contest between AlphaGo and some human go-master whose name will soon be forgotten. Workers at Google still effuse about the coming singularity when machine prowess will be wedded to human intelligence to make a whole brave new world which will look a lot like those depicted in our digital fantasies for the future as framed on screens of all sizes everywhere.

Of course there are the MadMax naysayers, who depict dystopia without any plotline at all - just a straight trajectory into the end times, which is however, very very Grand Theft Auto cool, one has to suppose. Surprise sweep at the Oscars, perhaps for its celebration of diversity.

I am still stuck in the middle of the quite literally interminable - boundless - Three Body Problem, which were it not on my Kindle would extend to some 1200 pages in Chinese by the time I finish volume three. This guy, Liu Cixin, explores every conceivable narrative eventuality following on his simple originating conceit; A hive-like civilization some 4 plus light-years away in one of the galaxies closest to earth has managed to survive the extreme and random vagaries of their three-sun system. They have accomplished a kind of autonomous hibernation, likened to those anti-freeze body-fluid little "bears" discovered in Antarctica. These apparently so-called in English "Trisolarians" have learned to self-dessicate on demand.

Their problem is that their last but one remaining planet has flamed out across the random Trisolarian eons, and they need a new place to live. Earthlings despondent over mankind's treatment of our home planet and our politics - well China's politics, to be specific - misguidedly send out a distress call, which is picked up by these even more exceedingly desperate Trisolarians, who set out to occupy a planet which very much resembles our Eden to them. It's all relative, right?

They are very clever, these Trisolarians, and so they play a trick on earthlings, whom they know can and will develop our scientific and technological prowess much faster than the periodically hibernating hive collective culture can ever do. Temporarily in advance of Earth in their deployments of quantum physics, they place a kind of mask in front of any further development in the arena of basic research. All they need to accomplish is to stop us across the 400+ year journey to our planet which they almost immediately launched.

I am just at the part in the series where the computer scientists have been frustrated by the blockage of any advances in their understanding of quantum theory as those might apply to computing, energy generation and so forth. They have, however, managed to concoct a real-time and functional schematic of the human brain by piecing together a gajillion core silicon replica of our our neural mappings, inside a holographic projection of which they can wander around and study.

So far, the main outcome of this exercise is to have discovered that intense irrational phobias can be implanted in the living human brain; the example is a fear of water, perhaps adaptive to Trisolarians and certainly to electronic machinery which still depends on early twenty-first century iterations.

Here the author turns to investigations of faith and belief. It's interesting, if terminally inconclusive,.

Now as I read the Chinese are laughing up their sleeves at the utter insanity of the electioneering of Donald Trump. I imagine that even down to the lowliest Tiananmen survivors there are plenty who feel relief that they never did follow us down this road.

But really, we've carefully paved the way here, in part by bargains with the devil made by the Republican Party starting way back with Uncle Ronnie. In part by our use or misuse of social media, which we once did think could liberate all peoples of the earth in the model of the Google Twitter Arab Spring. Not so much anymore.

Crazies come out of this stuff. True believing outright lunatics, and they are legion.

There are really only three technological epochs in the history of mankind. Agriculture got us started as something recognizable as the human race. That was not much longer ago than the great ice age which carved out all these lakes I love to live among.

Writing was the big one - a genuine emergent phenomenon, perhaps in the manner of our very brain itself, not programmed by evolution which formed our basic biological components. These emergent phenomena are the epiphenomena which ride on top of pattern recognition, face recognition, articulate utterance and physical grasp.

Writing allowed humans together to cobble or craft a kind of soul, if you will. We imagined or created some highly individualized narrative behind each familiar face, even while we tempered that epic power by the supposition that behind unfamiliar faces and women's faces there was nothing at all worth individually caring for. To this day, as a species, we seem to desport on the femininzied other for our animalistic pleasure.

And then we discovered mechanical motive power, accelerated by the cosmic gift of fossil fuels, remains of our evolutionary forebears. We broke free of water power - of geographic limits - and made it all the way to the moon without the help of very much more than a cellphone's worth of silicon. Embodied logic.

Perhaps the technologies of agriculture and writing and industrialising motive power all simply accelerated what was already latent at life's beginning. We imagine something very human-like at the end of this random chain, almost as though there were intelligence at its beginning.

And so the information technologies in this so-called information age are supposed further to accelerate this fundamental trend, even as we irrationally cling to those remains of the previous day; the trains the planes the automobiles. The ships at sea, the networks of postal stops, the imagination of something exotic and interesting at the other end.

Among the boundary conditions we investigate in this age of consummation - when gravity waves and massless bosons are finally "detected" - are those of the literal singularity; the Black Hole across whose edgy boundaries it is still unknown whether even information can transgress. These may yet reveal secrets from the Big Bang Beginning.

Or so goes the News of the Day. We here in these United States remain afraid of actual bodies transgressing our boundaries, while in China they remain much more afraid of the kind of information we Americans so willingly trust to our friendly almost childlike captains of digital industry. Snowden is so childlike too, pointing out the Empire's bare behind.

What really are we so very afraid of?

It could be that our technological accelerations are revealing and propelling forward all that is the very least human about us. There is such a growing chasm now between those on the New Age conveyor belt and those who are its servants. C-level executives flow like water among enterprises which range from soda-pop to war machinery to even education as though the organizational principles were all the very same. Credit score or citizen score vetted entry level workers who may aspire to win the mansion in the sky. Meanwhile you might feel lucky if the local constabulary allows you to pitch a tent in some vacant field.

Google pitched a rock to welcome this very strange spring. No snow here in the northeast where I turned in my skis a week ago. A week before that it was below zero Fahrenheit. The lake never did freeze over the way that it did last year.

A rock is as fully determined as any moving machine, certainly including the digital which still can't create a truly random number without dipping into the real world. Our technological advances seem maniacally bent on separating our minds from any body at all, as though we might prefer to live in some perfected world of abstraction where anything imaginable can be real. As though we will no longer care for touch as mediated by the boundary of our skin.

And so we continue to concoct this grand spectacular emergency as though it were the only imperative remaining once we learned to overpopulate our ground. Surely there must be some thoughtless thought-free way to put humpty dumpty back together again so what we may each and every one of us live in the comfort we see projected by our betters.

The conceit of the Three Body Problem is being carried out in reality. There really is no more basic physics to be accomplished. We really are facing the end of all that we know, only the enemy is not storming in from some other galactic system. Pogo style, the enemy is us.

Those Trisolarians have transgressed even speech. Their thoughts are transparent and so they have no guile. They have no analog to human language, and so we clever humans have determined to lodge our secret plans inside the private heads of four carefully chosen schemers. And now we've built a computer analog of the insides of those very heads. The suspense is just killing me.

But the reason I keep turning the pages is that I really want to know where the author lands. I can't tell from my clumsy Internet searching if he is so fluent in English that he has mastered that much of our history and literature as he packs into his novel. Surely there is not a soul here in America who knows that much about China from translation.

I want to know if in the end Liu Cixin - apparently an engineering operator of a power station, likely a nuclear power station in China - I want to know if in the end he realizes that there is an end to science actually. I struggle so with the novel into which he seems to need to pack the entire vocabulary of written Chinese, that I haven't found the time to research the man, literary taboo though that might be. It is by his work that you shall know him.

Should.

Know.

Him.

I dodge the same question he does in the book, with some very clever nearly untranslatable rhetoric. Belief in the end can't be instilled by or by means of machine. Faith is irrational. Random may not be so.

The suspense is killing me, even while it keeps me from more important pursuits; the ones the paylords would have me accomplish post-haste on the deck while I spy the iceberg ahead and imagine someone in charge must have seen it first.

I would steel the helm myself before I let the Donald grab it. But who the hell knows how to do that, and in any case another one would arise from the crowd terrorist cell-style, a clone put forward by the crowd which needs the appearance of leadership if not its substance.

This is the wages of disinvestment in education, of channeling women into STEM so that they can feel still more powerless and inadequate. Be like us but keep your lovely bodies available and free. Who hasn't cringed while watching House of Cards that this might be the Clintons? The evil now required for the C-level has grown palpable. The clueless disregard for what you don't already favor. The heedless promotion of Ivy Leaguers as your proxy, as though these might inspire confidence and not expose the lottery wheel of admissions for its historic fraud.

There are digital numbers on the heads of each and every one of us. Our narratives don't matter any more. We might as well stay silent and hope for the best.

I am going to take a ride by car into this beautiful sunny first day of spring. What else can I do? I am pissed that I had to spend this much time blathering into the ether.

But I do think that language and the skin are beautiful and necessary boundaries. You will never know me by my works, as I will never trust you that much though I have made that leap of faith a few times. I have yet to meet a person who is not far more interesting upon the knowing that was the case on supposition. The dance to get that far is becoming more and more tricky though, even as the social markers for recognition of parity are becoming ever more stark.

Donald is transparent. That must be his attraction. He gives voice to what many apparently wish they could say out loud and not be thought ignorant for it. I think that they are right in that. We ought to listen more carefully. Those of us who are in charge of the collective narrative. I mean the educators.

Ignorance is as ignorance does. We seem to be doing it faster.

As the next technological revolutionary breakthrough I propose love. That will require allowing the exposure of actual narratives and not the sanitized Disney-style ones either. If we are to prove that humanity or something like us really is at the end of the timeline, then we really should begin by behaving human. We should begin by learning to read, and leave the ciphering for later. We should learn to listen and to touch.

These information technologies were invented and envisioned by a bunch of spiritually dreamy anarchists, right alongside their military and C-level aspirants. We need to take back the space. It belongs to humanity and not to the money-driven Beast.

These are not the end-times. This is the very dawn of humanity if we would but awaken to it.

NOTD

I'm very acronym challenged today. Back in the day, I thought I remembered NOTD meant News of the Day; something the sysadmin might configure so that all users were on the same page, so to speak. Now it might mean Night of the Dead, or god knows what all.

On this day, Google's driverless car program suffered its first machine-caused accident. I hope their insurance goes way way up, right? Google's go-playing program beat the world champion go player.

This is all old news, since IBM's Watson has long since beaten Jeopardy and let's not even talk about chess.

But at the same time, our political system seems to be melting down.

WTF, right? I'm going out on a limb here to claim that these are all the same event. Approximately conterminous with detecting gravity waves, the Higgs boson, the largest structure in the cosmos, a cure for cancer. Sorry, just joking about that last one, and didn't mean to hurt anyone's hope.

Machine-mind, which is generally associated with masculine mind, has reached its limit. Intuition of any sort has never been on the table, but let's stay short of that and make the outrageous claim that the machine mind has no clue about how to read social science. It's too hard, and the rewards are too dim.

I have this on first hand highest authority.

The thing is, masculine machine mind has the right to toss aside social science as all sorts of convoluted rhetorically challenging gobbledegook, while at the same time claiming a kind of privileged access to that arcane mathematical and algorithmic language rewarded best on intelligence tests (which even Google doesn't use anymore to get its best employees) that the rest of us sheepishly claim ignorance about.

See it doesn't matter who wins in the contest between man and machine, since the man in the contest is already a machine. There are plenty of really cheap and easy ways to reduce automotive mayhem, and driverless cars are by far the most complex. Way more complex than a system of globe-circling airlines, or a trip to the moon and back which still had a man at the tiller.

In a mild sense this imperiousness about the locus for solutions to mankind's problems constitutes a kind of collective rape. Of the Earth, of the female of the species, of our children. One could measure this by differentials in wages, in representation, in education male to female, but that would be a bit too much math again. Shoved down peoples' throats. Get on the STEM bandwagon, women, or you'll be left behind. It's not that black lives don't matter, it's that black thinking doesn't count.

Fact is we men have a hard time taking responsibility, and would rather foist that off onto the future in the form of perfected knowledge, as though all accident might eventually be shoved off the table and our women about whom we doth protest far too much our love might live in peace and harmony.

Clearly, that's not about to happen. There is no limit to what we will expend on war materials of science to develop autonomous cures for life. Even while we allow that person almost right next to us to drown because we won't tarnish our new shoes, as lots of very nice social thinkers might observe. Turst me on this, nothing here is original with me.

I wish I could join the elder march - nothing more to lose - on Washington this April, but I'll be in China where such silliness would never be suffered to happen. I guess it should be said that they don't let amateurs get so close to power as we do either.

Is Bernie an amateur? I hardly think so. He's spent his life solving very real social problems. Is Hillary an amateur? I don't think anyone on earth would say so. Trump? Nope - he's just some kind of crazy narcissistic reflection of the gut feelings of the least informed among us. Get rid of him, and those gut feelings still remain. He's the sort of narcissist who gets rich, but not the sort who makes anything worth having. Gut check that!

Would we have a future, we had really better start taking responsibility and stop thinking only about ourselves and our little local fame and fortunes which allow us to persist in our comfortable moving or stationary wombs with a view.

Yes yes, it's all very exciting to imagine driverless cars all packet switching their way to zero accidents and minimized stop and go. But the real point is to keep us separate from one another so that we don't have to interact.

With the political will and a tiny itsy bitsy smidge of social science knowledge we could almost tomorrow ban all cars to the cities' edge and provide house-to-garage timespans to retrieve them from the Big Garage at the frontier should we want to drive out of town which is the only fun to be had in a car anymore anyhow. A simple network of smart buses and no new infrastructure could get us around the city in less time than it now takes to walk. That would buy us the time to reconfigure for a future in which we sit on our front porches again because we actually know our smelly neighbors.

Talk about a pipe dream! Well, I do live in Burlington, home to Bernie, 100% sustainable electricity grid. Still walking across town takes about the same amount of time as driving and parking. Now there's a metric to chew on.

What Does LIGO Mean to Me?

Every once in awhile there is a person who will afford me the courtesy to critique my writing. There is no mistaking the issue; I need to get the "I" out. But really that's all it's ever about for any of us, so fuck you too since I'm not exactly trying to get published here.

I had the great honor to meet Dr. Joshua Smith when I was at Cal State Fullerton. Shamelessly, I used the calling card of a visiting delegation from China to make my introduction, and he did grace me with a highly literate tour of his work and I knew the inevitability of this day coming, when gravity waves would be proven beyond any reasonable doubt.

My nephew is on the team for CERN now, over at Fermi lab, and I know the same inevitability. My uncle was finally recognized by a Franklin medal for his groundbreaking work in radar. Over at Syracuse University they are proud to boost his legitimate claim to have written the most cited paper in physics. They all work signal against noise. I'm on the noise side of family and friends.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt I am zero here, though I might have entered that arena. I might have entered lots of arenas but I didn't. I'm annoyed now by this announcement, ushering in the Year of the Monkey in preparation for which I was at the top of a nearby ski mountain watching sun setting over the Adirondacks, while the first full moon after the one which graced us on Christmas was rising from the backside of the mountain. I was really really happy, because lots of times I nearly die at Christmas time, and this time I was a month out already and still here.

I was placed perfectly and so naturally I thought that this event was placed for me alone, although I would have missed it entirely if it weren't for the fellow I rode up with on the lift. He seemed about twenty-something with his sprung seat bolted onto a single battered old ski, but he was rather more toward my age and therefore full of lore and wisdom. He apologized for slowing the lift down since those were the rules for people without sliders on their feet.

I watched him go to climb the tower he'd told me about so that he could witness the moon rise behind the sunset and I left that for him alone to enjoy, not needing more than I was already granted, right? Fact is, I was done and it would hurt too much to walk uphill in ski-boots. I had a nice ride!

I'm annoyed because I'm right at another good part in the novel I'm reading, struggling hard against my fading mnemonic powers against the convoluted colloquial information-age Chinese in The Three Body Problem.

I will get no further into Chinese than I did in physics and I'm down the slide on the way out, fuck all it was a nice sunset. And I sure do wish they'd had the sense not to "simplify" Chinese writing since I'm having to start all over again, having been trained in the classical forms. Assholes.The guy who perpetrated that crime is rightly celebrated and still alive according to my electronic Chinese sources. Hat's off, but not today in Vermont where it's too damned cold and welcome!

Up early because I don't sleep as per usual, less secure than I've ever felt in my income stream, annoyed that I will have to go to work and annoyed by the prick to my conscience that I must write about this before I forget it and mostly annoyed because I will have to leave that lovely book behind for yet another day.

See, in that SciFi fantasy novel, the earth is doomed in approximately 450 years because some apparently far superior civilization has lost their living space to nature's whim. In our desperation to announce ourselves, we sent out signals, and they got them and now they're headed our way because we live in relative paradise and don't even know it, and they're not about to go quietly into that dark night, those competing sentient beings. The last of their several suns is about to blink out, not sunset, but for the very last time, as in forever, and it seems that like those little microbears in Antarctica, they've been somatically evolved to survive cosmically long winters in suspended animation, but they can't survive this last one since it will last approximately forever.

So you know, like all good science fiction, this book is about the here and now and the politics of how we can organize ourselves against the inevitable but now in this book it has a name this inevitable and is giving us a signal back and it is ominous. The End.

Among other things, the Earth in her wisdom as mediated by the United Nations has, among other things, designated four people to stand in for the rest of us, up against the wall, with unquestioned authority to imagine a resolution which isn't terminal for mankind.

This is because the Trisolarians (what an awkward term, which I would never have known except that I ran into a fellow who's reading the translated novel and I didn't know what he was talking about, which is worse than simplified Chinese characters if you ask me) think transparently and don't need anything so awkward as language. They are a kind of hive-civilization whose semblance of one-time China is purely accidental and unintentional according to the author here.

So we clever earthlings have decided that we will leave the ultimate solution to the opaque and sneaky minds of these four wall-facer humans who know how to hide their thoughts. Three of them are your usual suspects; Some combination of politician and scientist and warrior to come up with the cleverest plan. But the fourth - a clear stand in for the author, duh - is a romantic fabulist.

He occupies the world's Bill Gatesiest retreat now, stocked with finest books and wines by a mountain lake surrounded by snow capped mountains at room temperature. This is literal Eden, or at least quasi-literary wannabe Eden for sure.

So having unquestioned power to do so, and claiming his sybaritic existence as "part of the plan" which has become shorthand for crazy notions just like in English, this fellow whose name is "Logic" duh, invites his buddy "Old Strongman" super-sleuth to take over his security detail, because plenty of terroristic earthlings want him dead, assuming that these extra-terrestrial invaders represent a better life-force than the one that we embody, and welcome home, better people!

His task for the sleuth, Logic's is, is to find his fantasy girl, whom he imagines must exist somewhere on this earth, and at this particular moment in my reading the sleuth is game for crazy Logic. They were about to render her likeness from police software, but he just wanted to know what she is like, the sleuth did. And so Logic starts to describe her, a pure white flower sprouted from the pile of rubbish and with that fine metaphor for life the universe and everything I had to come over here to keyboard and start writing which just pisses me off terminally. I want to know what happens next!

Well, OK, so I'm right smack dab in the middle of this incredibly verbose trilogy and at the rate I'm reading it will be many more moons before I finish, so I suppose I can afford to take a little time off to celebrate the virtual certainty of gravitational waves (I still want the graviton-boson, though, and so, apparently do lots of others, unless I missed that between the lines, so to speak).

I've been looking for experimental proof to my point and I realized this morning that Joshua Smith had already given it to me though I didn't know what to do with it until just now. Yes, I have a point!

His part of the massive project was to design the detectors for the far more clever folks brand-named CalTech. I think I've got this right, but it could easily be vice versa and make no nevermind, but to get ever more precise readings for position he fuzzed up the readings for momentum which accords with quantum theory from which Einstein's gravity remains oddly disconnected.

So the reason that this is so interesting is that it pretty much answers that old philosophical saw about if the tree falls in the forest and nobody's there to hear it did it make a noise. Which is a version of the Schroedinger cat story, which is generally answered somewhat sophomorically and certainly dogmatically according to laws of post-mortem and sound-wave impacts that a fact is still a fact ma'am. That cat was already dead before you opened the box, and we have the tools now to determine to some arbitrary degree of certainty just when it happened. Or not.

There's chaos all around us, you know, and it doesn't take a tree falling to change the world, only butterly wings, which takes me back to finding the most fantastical girl in the world.

We're a funny people, we Americans. Let's say you buy a lottery ticket and you win. You would be really really outraged if someone else took your money and you'd maybe even have them thrown in jail, bad enough that the government wants its taste on behalf of the rest of us.

But scientifically we assign precisely no meaning to random. This is a fact provable six ways to Sunday and you can't make it happen no matter how much you pray or contrive or consult the Book of Changes, there is no meaning to a toss of honest dice.

But then we let it change our entire universe, putting us, the "I" at its very center as the perfect lover of lady luck and proceed to live it up. You don't find that weird? I sure do. I mean that wealth no more belongs to me than does the pile of gold behind the walls of James Bond's Fort Knox.

But and so we must suppose that our very existence on this little planet Earth which we so eagerly despoil and no more so now than in China (I come by my verbosity naturally), is but an accident without intention. Which of course it is and nothing wrong with that, since you might not like girls anyhow, and no offense. I just want a taste before I die, right? My personal Eden and fuck you too.

But in his experiment, Joshua made a choice about detection, thus implicating mind - let's call it his mind for the sake of his honor - in reality. This is not something that would have happened in the forest without him. (Look, I don't know if this was his idea, I just happen to have met him and so I'm buffing up myself, OK?)

So what's been discovered here, along with the near-virtual-certainty of the existence of gravitational waves and the probable eventual following of those diminutive to the point nearly and virtually of nullity little bosons, gravitons, points of literary nothingness, is the implication of mind already in the world about us that science means so very desperately to discover without our implication.

Almost as though the very Earth were meant to be, and the beauty of those sunsets or sunrises as my friendly Chinese engineer-author (he runs power plants of all things!) would have them, is pretty much built into the DNA of life itself, no accident but wanted, really, as the object of universal love and affection.

It's a cliff hanger and no mistake. Do we even give a shit?

So anyhow, intention starts with desire, and desire, as I've been saying ad-nauseum since about forever, defines time's arrow, as has been a part of universal being since precisely forever as defined however you wish. This is not an emergent quality of humans and humans alone. This is what brought us into being. And there is no Name to that which had the desire. I can read at least that much Chinese.

Thanks Josh, and also for that lovely talk about Hopi reality to which you, at least, are hardly opposed. I am really really happy for you and wish you perpetual happiness in the Eden of significant discovery, you stud you!! No, I mean really, if I were a woman . . . .

Post Haste

No, I don't really do this much anymore. I've lost the sense of anything to say.

This morning, having fallen behind on my email sweep, catching back up to my Netflix queue to be sure that I don't miss the chance to be entertained properly, noticing along the way that Stephen Hawking - very old news this - predicts some kind of perfect storm apocalypse thing, and not really caring to take the time to see if that's because of some artificial intelligence explosion, which I semi-gather he's against, or if it's just his joining in to the general malaise about our future. Wait! Did I lose my thread there?

It's just hard to believe that my email capacity for free storage will not catch up with itself sometime, and then I'll lose all the good stuff; those emails traded with actual friends which I sometimes re-read after a failed e-mail search and find myself sometimes refreshed, sometimes embarrassed. It's only a little more likely than to dig into that shoebox of old letters from girlfriends, but still, it's hard to just throw them out, you know?

It would have to be a law of nature that the quantity of SPAM, so called, collectively will overwhelm the free capacity so that I can be discouraged from deletion so that the AI monitors can see what are my marketable characteristics for the targeting of, well, more SPAM.

I know that there are AI algorithms which can and likely do reduce the actual storage space required for SPAM which goes out to the entire cosmos of inboxes to just one single e-mail note as if to one single inbox alone. Trivial! Even when it's personalized with my name on it, that's almost nothing.

But really I only spend a scant bit more time to keep up with this matter of personal responsibility than I do to check up on the snowstorm I missed because my smartphone reduces me to my local footprint of care, and I no longer watch TV. A friend was supposed to visit for a ski outing, and  I had no clue that he would be socked in down in NYC. What rock do I love (sick typo) under!?

Well, I mean, I don't really give a damn about the weather, mostly looking to be sure that there hasn't been another trade-center collapse equivalence, or nuclear lobbing or do I mean lobbying, but in any case there was at least a near miss, and I pass that one by on my way to my actual goal which is to spend some time reading an actual book. Sometimes it's just really hard to keep ones focus! And I still haven't gotten there, because I just care so much for you, dear reader in my dreams.

But since the book I'm reading - The Three Body Problem - is really hard in its original Chinese, I sometimes have to take a break from that to read a different book in English, which is pretty much like a glide down the bunny slope, and so of all things I did a quick read from a pdf even though I could have bought it on iTunes for $10, but I'd rather spend my $10 for a feature film to treat myself once in a while; I did a quick read of Bucky Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, which really everyone should read at least a few times in their (politically corrected) life.

This time around it was a bit disappointing, since he seemed to be pointing in the direction of what those Lord of the Flies evil kidlets at Google seem to want, adopting as their elder guru a crazy man, Ray Kurzweil, who's hardly scared of any stinkin' AI apocalypse, saying essentially "bring it on" because I'm going to live forever and so can you. Maybe. If you have the price for admission, right? I'm just still wary that Google may go out of business, delete delete so I can archive locally, delete. I can't keep up, and I still don't trust the AI, quite, delete.

But sure by that time storage will be totally, like, infinite, man, and totally free (does that mean ad-free too?). But they've been saying that since about forever regarding time, as in technological progress will erase scarcity and nobody will have to work anymore and our time will be our own, just like I can write endless emails without any postage except that if I write more than a screenfull not even my very best friends or even lovers (which I hardly bother with any more if you want to know the truth) can be bothered to read them. (So, I'm forced to bother you here!) It's the rhetoric which has changed, right along with the medium. Dear Mom . . . . I used to write. I can't be bothered even to call, and she can't write back anymore anyhow. Messaging is all we've got in the new media. Content. Empty.

Anyhow that was Bucky's point. That our "metaphysical" prowess will ultimately learn to leverage free solar energy and negate the necessity to despoil the planet by dirty extraction of our egg-white stored-up get-baby-started cache, which is fossil fuel. That's his metaphor, that mankind via the technology of the written word has only this very second cracked open our shell, but also that we have nearly exhausted the free ride our egg gave us while we learn to feed ourselves, except where's Mommy??

I was disillusioned to learn that Bucky himself probably invented the story of his near-suicide (this was some quick side-reading on Wikipedia) and how he calculated that in the broad infinite universe his wisdom was but tinier than a mite and how could he be so bold as to pronounce himself dead, so why not throw himself to the fates, which he did to great effect and so I must forgive him his narrative invention, apparently, of a voice from the blue. Yeah, I know, like why was it a male voice, right? Daddy never suckled us! Daddy taught us how to hunt eventually, but that was after we grew up already, and according to this particular story - Bucky's - we have yet to grow up, and so we have no business hunting! We can't be trusted with the Big Tool, by which he meant the bomb I think.

I don't know which part disillusioned me more, but in any case Bucky was pretty clear about how the pirates have occupied the board rooms, the controller cockpits of our spaceship earth, and I don't want to bore you about what he means by pirates since you really should read it for yourself. But in any case, those on the Bridge - as Star Trek used to call it - who are not the government officials who are beholden actually to them, these pirates; Bucky is clear that what they mostly do is figure out how to create more want, the illusion of scarcity in the midst of actual plenty.

Once you create more want, the rest is trivial which means calibrating the cost to stay out of the cold as just a smidge this side of terroristic, and certainly the cost to eat above the obesity diabetes level as blatantly terroristic, but with the price of oil incredibly dropping because keeping you on the move is the most critical piece. You have to be able to get to where you want to be, and it has to be not here! And you have to feel yourself too stupid actually, to be worth more than Wal-Mart, or was it Wall-E wages.

It's 7 degrees outside, alright? and I'm pretty happy just now to stay right here, and not so sure I would have wanted to ski anyhow, it's being quite this cold, although I did buy a nice new red ski parka which promises true warmth, hi tech warmth. I can't wear it though because once when I was a little boy and Mommy bought me a new red hat, I stuck my head out the car window just for the thrill of it and to copy my older brother who stuck his green one out, but mine flew off my head and down over the fence of the terrifying Skyway Bridge and gone forever and really I never did feel comfortable on that bridge, a kind of vertigo in my dreams.

I'm keeping it for inside use because it just costs too much to heat this place - OK, no I'm lying. My heat is included in the rent, yipeee, free ride, whooeeeeeeeeee! Calibrated 30% of income, and I'm on the high end of the denizens of this place.

Right.

Anyhow, the problem is apparently not how "metaphysically" clever we might be or might become because it's clear we've already figured out these technological tricks - these tools as extensions of our highly generalized capacity to leverage and solve problems in the physical world - way beyond even Bucky's imaginings, although he was pretty spot-on. He imagined the technology, but he also imagined that our use of it would be still that much more advanced into the realm of giving an actual damn.

The problem is how to get the pirates out of the boardroom. (Hint: Donald Trump is the embodiment of the pirate. You're forgiven if you cheer him on. We've been taught that way according to a highly elaborated curriculum.)

Part of the problem is that we've been tricked into believing that specialisation - divide and conquer basically - is the only way to get things done, when actually the most human thing about us is that we are generalists who can - by means of tool extensions to our interface with the world around and about us - specialize as need be and as circumstance requires it, but that our evolutionary survival as the fittest has been a generalists' proposition. The written word is restricted from no-one except as schooling makes it so, right? (Sorry, brief editorial comment)

(It's sunny now, I might lose interest and go skiing, sorry. Or perhaps you cheer me on?)

Anyhow, those boardroom pirates are just having a grand old time acting as though they could live forever in the sense that there is no house - nor number of houses - big enough, nor plane extravagant enough nor yacht gilded enough, nor fear of actual death and demise sublimated enough to keep them from their want of power.

I know, I know, that they must feel that they are protecting us from our benighted selfish and stupid selves, since they have proven to have so much more capacity to fulfil want, to amass wealth, to take the controls, Scotty, which god knows I haven't any clue about how to do.

Feel the Bern, feel the Bern, feel the Bern (advertising insert)

You see this endless snowball avalanche effect, right? Want building on want and it all goes back to Mommy's nipples, right? You still can't find them on TV, and the only really dirty word is cunt now, which yes it really should be, but, what, really? I mean really!

Nobody really thinks that war-machines are beautiful. Well, OK, I guess I do, in the abstract Star Wars sense of them. But in the particular, it seems an abomination and an atrocity of the first order that we build so many of them and still further that we sell them to the highest bidder, pirates as buyers and sellers both. Bucky talks a lot about that, and about how it's only at war that we ever have apparently infinite resources, but how we must scrimp and save and cut corners for education (schooling is in fine shape as a share of GDP), or at least keep it scarce by siphoning off the good stuff to those who wish to specialize to some artificial degree of separation from the rest of us though ironically we brand them as generally "excellent" or having special needs, generally speaking, and so the perfect becomes yet again the enemy of the good.

War as a concentrator of wealth. Technology as a concentrator of wealth. This is not what Bucky meant by the metaphysical trumping the real, for goodness sake. This is piracy!

But war does breed - and in this Bucky is at his best - the actual progress in technological development which can hold the keys to our survival. Well, except that he didn't quite anticipate perpetual war and its attendant terror which is meant to keep us all indoors, glued to the screen, glad we're not black or over there. Hmmmmmmm.

No, really the key is to get the pirates out of the control room. . .

As a kid, I already thought that the metaphor of  "spaceship earth" was wrong. It's the metaphor of the control room that's wrong. It doesn't matter who's in the control room, because Mother Earth is driving this thing, right? I want to stop saying Bucky, but I can't, sorry, but anyhow, Bucky was writing at about the same time as Rachel Carson (who manages to show up in just about every single piece of Chinese science fiction, although she's disappeared from our radar - it's funny how far afield you sometimes have to go to be reminded of your own roots. I don't think Buckminster Fuller is even on the Chinese radar at all, so far as I can tell. Too cranky? OK, wrong again, I just checked Chinese Wikipedia, he's there), and being a man maybe he was just a little bit over-impressed with his own engineering prowess.

See the egg thing was just a metaphor. Earth is not the egg. Or maybe Earth is the egg and the mother is "out there." But the point is that life as in the Star Wars Life Force (what a retro bore that new one was, a blatant, though really really good, marketing machine . . . ), but not really because that was still all about warships, in any case as in life is more powerful than these pirates. Well, sure they're going to die, the individual blackguards, but I mean the piracy movement. Life is more powerful than that too.

Which is pretty much why I've had to auto-delete all the political SPAM (you thought I'd already forgotten where I started with all this, right?), and I'm certainly not about to give my marginal living costs away as though I could make any difference to the political process (Sorry Bernie, and screw you Hillary, no wait, I love you Hillary, no wait, um, I just wish you were a little more maternal is all, but I didn't mean it. Honest!).

Want and fear, want and fear, and that's what I want to get away from. I want I want I want.

The sun is still rising. Fahrenheit exaggerated negativity approaches Celsius moderation or what's a meta for? Meme. Whatever.

I find extravagant hope in absence. The only thing absent is a loving "other," and I don't mean that space filled-in by that abomination of language, "God." The name that can be named is not the eternal name, say those clever and exam-and-rule-gaming Chinese. They do this by peculiar ambiguity of language. "The Dao that can be Daoed is not the eternal Dao" or the Way that can be Followed, or maybe "eternal" could mean "popular" or even "common," except that would be to exchange modern for archaic, which sometimes seems like a not-bad notion.

"God the Father" is so clearly the pirates' work, the patriarchy, the warriors, the control freaks, the wanters after nipples. God the Mother makes a bad trade-off.

Alright, look, I really don't want to go skiing because it just hurts. I'm old, I lack muscle tone, I don't feel like paying stupid amounts of money for goggles or a face-mask and it just hurts, OK? I'm going because I feel like I ought to go, like eating broccoli if it weren't produced by slave labor, more like eating from the life-sustaining golden harvest organic locally sourced foodie store, except I honestly can't afford to go there, and I'm not even poor or black.

I can talk all I want about the gas I'll burn to get there, but I know I need the exercise, I know, but truth be told I'd really rather just eat and drink and die however I feel like it, OK? I want someone else to take care of the externalities for me, OK, like maybe we could all just take a bus, OK, and sit by the fire and not be crowded out by too much noise, OK?

I know I know, it's because all I would want to do is eat and drink and maybe be a little bit merry that I have to be regulated and controlled and kept on a leash of salary and benefits, and a ski pass, OK, I know. I like to work, I do, but sometimes I do resent the compulsion to it. I want to want to ski, you know, but then I want to be young again too and know what to do about it, OK?

Where was I?

Mother dearest, She who is just there or you would not be here, and then you must push her away and she will be just fine with that. Not the Earth, certainly, who is kicking up quite a ruckus really, as in pushing us away for the stink of rotten egg, not some civilization from some other planet since the universal laws militate against our incremental chances to be in touch within Einsteinian limits not that nobodaddy's out there, I mean He most certainly is, according to the laws of probability, but he would need a mother too.

Let's call it Cosmos then, Mother Cosmos, She of the extravagant preparing of this field for implantation, accidental birth, gift of oil for the taking gathered up from sunlight by virtue of simply living. She who now speaks to me through accidental clusterings of language, of things that I happen to find as though they were planted there for me and me alone, for whatever else could it be, since I am not in control of so very much before its fact. Most of that which has meant much to me has come before me quite by accident, to be perfectly honest about it, although I work to claim it as my own.

Cosmic tellings take no time at all in their transmission. They are the impulse which precedes choice, the emotional basis for that which we rationalize after the fact as belonging to me and me alone, the choice was already made before we could take ownership of it, twinkle in your father's eye, seduced really, and willingly as though forever and evermore could be had in an instant.

Now I shall ski, dammit!

And another thing . . . .  oh crap, my nose is bleeding again, although I've gone off the coumadin in preparation for the colonoscopy, balancing risk against calamity for bankruptcy protection, it's probably just the intensity of the indoor heating. What a pain in the ass, sorry.

Thank goodness I don't need rubber gloves against my own blood, although I've had to use them to wash dishes to prevent cracks in the skin on my fingers. Yesterday I did ski, up against the setting sun, rosy perfection really, over Lake Champlain, just as the full moon, first since Christmas, was rising from the opposite direction. I've been there also while sailing on Lake Erie and it makes a conspiracy of love; yin/yang splendor over some reflective surfacing.

It hardly matters that these true or reflected lights were from some distant past, one - the lunacy - less so. It also hardly matters that you, gentle reader, are distant from me by coy refusal perhaps or general repulsion not wishing to accept the taste of me though you would if I were only prettier.

You are informed by constellations as they actually are in your life, and they are arranged also for you and you alone, since you are that distant from your smelly neighbor or even the lover who is temporally so sweet, by laws of physics which actually do prevent your occupying the same universe which makes a pretty good guarantee against eternity. Since it cannot be all one, although I am alone. I cannot occupy your space.

Your mother is just one big accident waiting to happen, conjecturally, since who can be so sure? Not me, that's for sure.

It's the accident of your birth that proves her being.

Aw to hell with all these engendered man-made artificially intelligent gods. Nature, by very definition has no beginning and so nature has no end. It's only Man who mismeasures things that way. Skinned against eternity for hold on just a minute now.

Crazy Chinese Testing Regime Which Will Wipe Out ETS

Yes, we  all know that the Chinese educational system is hidebound and bogged down by dronish memorization toward an utterly determinative college-entrance exam which is composed of yes/no questions or essays whose "right" answer depends on understanding the party line. So no wonder China can only copy and not create, right?

Well, not exactly, but I won't get into that here. I just took a three minute test to get my standardized Chinese score, perhaps a kind of TOEFL score for Chinese, called HSK. I have some confidence in the score, mostly because I "get" the way the test is run. Simple really  - it flashes in front of you progressively more difficult words, starting with written characters plus the pinyin pronunciation, and gradually letting go of the pronunciation and giving you the written words alone.

Based on your response for each challenge, the next card will raise the stakes or lower them until you have statistically reached your max. If you take too long you're going to hobble your score, so no time for a dictionary.

It reminds me of the test I take every year to make sure my incipient glaucoma isn't messing up my peripheral vision, called a visual fields test. Little lights are flashed at odd intervals around the periphery of your vision, up to its limits including control lights toward the center, all of greater of lesser brightness while you stare at a dot in the middle. I don't enjoy the test, and apparently no-one does, but it only takes about three minutes, and it has a high degree of reliability.

You'd think people would like the visual fields test, since it's really a straightforward computer shoot-em-up. Hmmmmm, maybe educators make the same mistake when they think that kids want to play instead of learn.

I don't know, but I don't see why the same principle couldn't easily replace many of the droning torturous exams we put our kids through in the name of accountability. None of these help the teacher to know where to target teaching. It's all just part of the surveillance state, designed to keep people regimented and scared. Kind of like the way we think of China.

I know that this sort of algorithmic process is often used in computer-based learning, but I'd say we should implement it wholesale in the process of both formative and summative examination. It should work just fine for those subject areas where it might be appropriate - most certainly all the much-vaunted STEM fields - and relieve our kids of the terrorism of testing. And while we're at it, stop testing for willingness to be subjected to such testing and to be exposed as deficient for that. Right?

Maybe I was just pleased that I eked out the top level by scoring just above 5000. Who needs a do-over with that! Or maybe I'll wait until I finish The Three Body Problem in its original Chinese. Take that Zuck!

The Burial Post

Typically, I have to rush out with something distracting just to hide the most recent thing I had the nerve actually to post. Mostly, I don't have the nerve anymore, which also means that I mostly don't even start. But hey, it's New Years Day, no official work, and I see that I have something here to bury.

I've had fathers on my mind for a variety of reasons, and it comes up in relation to Star Wars, obviously, and my own father dead almost a year now, and priestly fathers for all sorts of reasons relating to patriarchy, and this binge-watch I just documented with Hitler's son in the Skywalker role and the Republic/Resistance duped by Empire (The Man in the High Castle).

So into my field of view comes notice that George Lucas likened his sale of the Star Wars franchise to the selling of his children to "white slavers." Now I'm not disposed to like Lucas particularly, maybe figuring that he represents movie moguldom more than he does the art of movie-making, and well he has that born-again hair style and just doesn't look cool.

But the interview with Charlie Rose, of whom I'm more recently aware because he seems to have sold out to the networks, or at least I've seen him there on one of the BIG ORIGINAL THREE, and assumed he had sold out; anyhow, Charlie Rose is interviewing George Lucas, and like for the zillionth time in my long life I have to remind myself never to prejudge. I mean, Lucas comes off like a decent highly intelligent and very real, if somewhat uncool - which is in his favor! - guy!

And so now I have this thing to puzzle out in semi-public (because to do it in private gets me precisely nowhere), which is regarding where in the world technology should go next. I think we all assume it will be or maybe even should be immersive virtual reality, enhanced by CGI and maybe even a little bit of robotic drone takes to get to those real places which even in our imagination we can't reproduce, just because reality does remain that much more wonderful than what we might imagine.

This would be to crawl into that 3D screen, which up to now we still need special glasses for, but also to cut us off from anyone else in the audience for our own private immersive better-than-real reality, if for no other reason than that the drone takes will take us places in the realm of the real where only superheros get to go on the screen.

Maybe, all Disney now, the seats would shake us around and smells and fluids would make it all really real.

Lucas was convincing that all art is technology and that all technology follows the needs of the artist and not the other way around. Incrementally, each step of the way, the artist can imagine something he wants to render - to design, I suppose - which was unimaginable before and he brings technology to bear on the realization, and the technology moves ahead in the process. Lucas used the example of a cathedral, an architect, but he slid back and forth to even the technology of books for story telling.

But when we talk technology now, we have in mind something which leaves books out, don't we? I'm not sure that Lucas' claim is not problematical. It would seem that an equally solid case could be made that the technology leads the artist and not the other way around, but in any case, the scenario of immersive engineered better-than-real reality does seem to beg some sort of question.

Technology of various sorts has enabled mankind to come together. Certainly books create a kind of collective mind in the form of culture, and trains, planes, and automobiles surely allow us to experience different kinds of peoples, even as it allows families to spread out and sometimes one people to obliterate another. Soft and hard power can be equally deadly where civilizations are concerned.

Lucas reiterates the old saw that all technologies can be used for good or evil, and thus we all suppose it is and always shall be. But as my Dad used to say, you don't have to catch syphilis to know you don't want it, which I have extrapolated to mean something more like you don't have to take Heroin to know that it's a bad idea.

At some point differences in volume or velocity or any sort of quality become differences in kind, and we might all just prefer the virtual to the real, making emotional connection only with ourselves. I don't know that Lucas said this outright, but he sure did seem sympathetic to the notion that this kind of reduction would be precisely what the powers that be truly want of each of us. I learned he made an early movie on the theme: THX-1138. (Of course it's not so available from my usual outlets, darn!)

It's not that heroin doesn't make you feel good, it's just that it pretty much ruins your life. Unless you never had one to speak of in the first place, in which case there might be no comparison. Book learning is hard, but we seem not to value it any more, having replaced it with something called STEM. Book learning brings you closer to other people, and might even inform your emotional intelligence to the point that you can make good connections in the real. STEM is all about agency - authorship in and of the world at large - and if it doesn't provide the means to wipe us all out as it seems to have been doing so far, should be the only means at our disposal to prevent same.

Even Jar Jar Binks, criticized as I remember the caricature to be of black folk, should remind us that there are aliens here on earth that we still don't care to know about. Like maybe the shared experience of watching that "space opera" about fathers, sons, religion and the state might even bring peoples together right here at home.

Sure sure, back to the start here, and remind myself not to be so sure. Immersive onanistic virtual reality might give us our only chance to experience the world the way that some other does, and as a shared or at least sharable experience might bring us closer to each other in the end.

The trick will be to prevent that great marketing machine from killing off the art in the name of profit. Lucas talked about that a lot too, although there must be other people who took note that where he started by allowing Charlie Rose to contrast him for his embrace of popular media with his familiar "Francis" (I wasn't sure who that meant, and Charlie was uncharacteristically mum) who seemed to be making movies only for himself. By the end of the interview, Lucas was orchestrating himself into the same lonely posture.

I am going to return now to my struggle with the Chinese novel, The Three Body Problem, which seems endlessly promising. An old story perhaps; we meet ourselves by delving into outer space. We send signals outward in desperation that we might be that alone, or because we don't trust our promises to ourselves, or because Mammon is taking over once and forevermore.

In the end, we answer ourselves, don't we, since whatever complexity there is in the cosmos that we don't quite understand, we won't likely make contact with it by worshipping only ourselves as we are right here and now.

So whether it's the story which really counts, as George Lucas seemed to say, or whether it is touching the universal in each of us which the story allows, and which might also be done by other means, there is plenty of cause for optimism in this new year.

There are plenty of gaps in reality and in understanding which are bound to be crossed and filled in and made real. The good stories will all be strange and familiar both, with family in the role of enemy as often as of friend. The challenge will be to keep the heart true and the connections real. And make sure that STEM is not some means to keep us uninformed and dronelike, programming for the man.

Happy New Year redux.

Happy New Year (Star Wars Redux)!

Hello World! That's me, algorhythmically speaking, pushing some button to simulate life.

I did make it into 2016, though I had some difficulty crossing boundaries, and have nearly not made it more times than I care to remember across my so-called life. I do seem to like the word "redux." I decided to drive home across the first and probably only snowfall of this season. Horrowshow.

I didn't go in with great expectations, already knowing from having heard it said over and over again, that the latest Star Wars would be a masterwork of marketing, which it surely is.

But how disappointing that there could be no further inspiration which made the first one (and then the second and third which was about the end of it) such a thrill. Our world felt changed, and we were looking forward to a better more composed world, where there was some actual reconnection to a life-force, call it what you will. Joseph Campbell wrote about it, or do I have that backwards too.

I suppose it must be beneath mention that the marketing machine which the film now embodies is rather more like the death-star - I guess it's now a death-planet - than even the Man in the High Castle which I binge-watched to greater satisfaction than the Force Returns could ever provide.

Same story of fathers and sons, and the evil Wizard of onetime Oz being the goad for all the efforts of any Resistance. A better story though, except that it too can only imagine the world that we have in the place of any dream of a better one. A misty past where people seemed to give a damn.

The only innovation of the new stars wars, to my jaded eyes, was the 3D which made it seem as though my screen was almost a portal to a compacted reality. I watched the High Castle series on a series of very little screens to better special effect.

We have crossed some boundary to where we have no further dreams than to live as sated consumers, pandered to and promised release from fatty sugared overcharging. What more could we possibly want then?

The dream would be of post-scarcity where grinchy acquisitive hearts could grow a few sizes bigger, but I don't suppose we can picture that, really. Our adrenaline pumps when we are ourselves the first-person-shooter, and make the shot in some sick parody of Zen in the Art of Archery. May the force be with you too, evermore.

In the new Serial, Bowe Bergdahl confesses to wanting to live out Jason Bourne, and for that we must kill him, now musn't we, or at least hate him very very much. He is not allowed to be our uber self, that self reserved for screen alone, though if he did live the calculated cost to rescue him across the episodes would be still more than was expended on the very idea of Bergdahl left in the field to rot. They are doling it to me, and so I can't binge unless I wait, which pretty much wrecks the whole concept of high now doesn't it.

Questioning our chain of command is the only sin, and the church was already exposed as a patriarchal franchise grab of a meek and mild though worldly Jesus. The chain of command goes all the way up to Hitler or Rumsfeld or Darth Vader's son's adopted son, distantly related on the distaff side, who killed his actual Father, Harrison Ford, as reality mixes well in 3D with fiction to our sugared pleasure. Nice touch, that, I mean he's probably about to die anyhow, and might deserve it for misleading our loyalties, of which he has, famously, none. How much script should you really give an old man?

Our trouble is to imagine a better world that we would like to inhabit even supposing we are the Lucky Man who gets to live in the Castle on High. What is good enough to pry our cold homing wishing grip from that promise?

Could it not be to release a bit, to suckle, even to lose the promise of ubiquity, perpetual agency, design thinking unto death do us our part? Our drones will now catalog their obstacles and bring us back 3D images of a reality too far and high for us to visit personally says Qualcomm. We can 3D print whatever thing we can design. We can stop reading altogether and revert to form as beasts, perhaps, motivated only to consume or be consumed. Emoticons in place of faces shrouded in virtual reality goggles.

Well, Happy New Year in reality. I still hope for a world where the losers are the winners, since at least they didn't have to kill to get ahead. But we must work to imprison them all first before they spill our beans. Put guns in their hands if necessary, to cover your complicity!

I have grown so old and lazy that I won't even link my thinking for you, well you can look it up easily enough except that you won't care to any more than I care to do it for you. New episode on offer. I will grab my little screen and turn off the vision and turn inward to imagine. Or shall I drive? Decisions decisions and not a bit of design to any of it.