The Happy Pig Who Ate The Universe

There once was a land, not long long ago, in which physicists and janitors sat in lunchrooms together, eating unhappy pigs. The mother pigs tried to warn their little pigs about that world, however, since even the most intelligent pigs are dullards, it was hopeless to communicate anything more complicated than "shit tastes good" to their little ones.

There were times that the janitors could make small talk with the physicists, or if nothing else, might stare upon their blackboards late at night -- chalky expanses filled with endless equations -- while blinking and comprehending little more than the little pigs. But both janitor and physicist enjoyed munching their cooked delights, oblivious to the vast gulf of epistemology that separated them.

Prior even to then, in an even more simple time, before chalkboards could possibly hold such illustrious expressions of calculation, there were also people known as physicians. These people worked in a manner that touched upon the physical world, rather than merely the spiritual, looking for facts from which their knowledge could be increased. They also had people about them known merely as servants or scrub women, since the word janitor was not then in common use. But it was very rare that a servant would share lunch with a physician. However, they still ate little pigs whenever it suited their income.

Yet, neither scrub women nor physician understood the reality that all animals, whether little pigs or living kings or anything else between, were all composed of vast forests and jungles of microbes, each battling, and eating, and dissolving, and evolving and depending on each of the others for its existence. There were ideas, of course, passed down from the ancients, that such components called "atoms" might comprise the world of physical things. But scrub women might not have known much more than there were particles of dust and grime everywhere, her constant grief, and the source of her employment.

But the education of physicians increased, beyond the old science towers such as Galileo and Newton. Beyond the early dabblers and alchemists. Beyond even physics itself, to a time of Einstein and Bohr and Fermi and Feynman and so many others. The term physicist made one a different kind of person than a physician, and scrub women (though still existing) became known as "cleaning people" and "janitors", or in a greater dignity as "maintenance engineers."

But whatever you called anything, it was becoming more more complex and subdivided, to the point where physicists might be subdivided in groups who provided theories regarding strings as little bits of essence, or theories regarding boson fields responsible for sorting particles into their various masses, or theories which attempted to merge all such theories into grander theories, all the while munching little pigs.

It might have one day appeared to a physicist that his knowledge of the world was losing grip. He could look across the lunchroom and view the janitor, a man who might be paid somewhat less but who provided a far more observable service to the world. Where the physicist was busy bashing protons or nuclei together, making such a mess of things, the janitor was busy keeping the place clean and in working order. One could remove a physicist from the building with much less effect than by removing janitors.

One day in the land of not long long ago, there became an ever heated argument amongst the physicists (although not amongst janitors). The arguing became so heated that the very air itself became stripped of molecular oxygen and was replaced with very warm carbon dioxide. They argued over things that seemed silly to janitors -- whether sparticles were required to explain 10 dimensional strings in a 5 dimensional brane. Are black holes merely giant capacitors, absorbing matter and energy, packing it into containers known as singularities, and awaiting the "long, long from now" period in which they will emit all those containers into the coldly expanded space about them, to disappear themselves?

But, as little pigs scurried about the lunchroom in a confused manner reminiscent of Brownian motion, the physicists threw their pencils and chalk and laptops at one another. The number of theories of everything had grown to large, and might soon approach infinity, which is against the rules. Science demands that things be elegant and neat, not strewn with a mishmash of badly named entities that one day are the favorite toys in the playroom and the next are thrown to the janitors to dispose of.

Janitors, knowing not whether tensor waves might require a massage or a pill, just ignored most of the squabbling, keeping an eye out for splintered pencils, broken chalk or an occasional mistreated laptop, and simply ate their little pigs in silence.

The physicists themselves grew tired of such outbursts -- they were not physical men, despite their titles. They longed for simpler days when one could get the Nobel Prize for discovering X rays, something that had an effect, but was so mysterious it had no name, so that X would have to do. They longed for simpler math, such as that of Newton, where the calculus of movement was linear and only developed limps when attempting to resolve 3 bodies at once.

It was never to happen, though, since time is seated in linerar causality, where death always proceeds from birth, not the reverse. The world would never be simpler, but due to entropy would only become warmer, or at least more uniformly colder, depending on your point of view.

And there would come a time in which there were no more little pigs for the janitors and physicists to eat. Instead, there grew a giant pig, a very big, happy pig, who ate everything about, including janitors and physicists and even little unhappy pigs. It grew larger and larger until it could no longer eat anything more, whereupon it fell asleep, happily engorged with the entire universe. And it stayed happy and full forever, since there was no one else around to make the pig unhappy.

The physicists of that time long long before, in which squabbling filled the land, had actually predicted such a large, happy, pig. And they were right about one thing. That since the pig grew so big and so full, it had run out of other possible things to eat until it was forced to eat itself, happily forever after.

The Big Whoosh

Image via Wikipedia

There is little to do but wait, now. The universe is expanding. We are all getting stretched, perhaps imperceptibly now, but ever increasingly as time goes on. Yet, there are problems that one wonders won't interfere with that dooming process.

For instance, right now we might be expanding at, say, 100,000 mph. (I don't really know for sure, but that's a good starting point. But the rate of acceleration might be like gravity on the earth, but instead of 32 feet per second per second, maybe it is only 1 inch per second per second.   

Yet, there would an expansion rate of millions of miles per hour after only a few hours. So, unless we really are expanding rapidly to apocalypse, it probably isn't that rapid. Perhaps it is only 1 nano-meter per second per second. That would slow the expansion quite a bit, and give us some breathing room. Yet, no matter how slowly the acceleration is pegged, it is still accelerating, and all the stuff will be pulled apart like a giant blob of taffy by two elephants. Eventually the fabric of space would be torn, atoms would be unable to remain stable, and all life and physics as we now it know would be gone.

But maybe there is no such thing. Maybe the stretching is only local, so that galaxies that seem to be receding away from each other will simply be pushed together at some distant place that we are unable to view from this vantage point in space and time. Perhaps they will die from crushing gravitation instead of uncontrolled expansion. Yet, whatever it is, however it happens, I'm not too worried that it will happen anytime soon.
 
Let's say that we began to expand all the way to a speed of c, the speed of light. At that point time would stop for us (as well as other problems plaguing our existence, like having been reduced to cinders by the sandblasting effects of hydrogen atoms in space.) But the expansion, no matter how it advanced after that point, would cease to effect us. Yet that is no great win, for nothing else would effect us either. 

I can't be sure of this, of course. No one can be sure of  such things so far in the future, and so far into the outer bands of physics. We don't even know what all the dark matter and energy really is or does. We barely know that stuff even exists. We barely understand that we exist, and certainly cannot understand why.

Space Travel Forever

There are many times I wonder if humans will really ever visit space. By space I mean outside the Sun's atmosphere, which reaches out beyond the Earth. We travel in the tiniest amounts relative to the vastness of interstellar space. And we have never been even close to there.

We have unmanned probes -- Voyagers 1 and 2 which may someday reach beyond the bow shock of our solar system. And they have been traveling for decades. It is unlikely that any humans would be patient enough to travel that far with nothing to do but wait and wait and wait -- for nothing whatsoever. They would die before they got out beyond the Oort Cloud, or at least be immensely feeble and riddled with cosmic radiation.

But, lets pretend that we actually make some kind of device that can shield humans from any radiation, travel at sub-light-speed but still at relativistic speeds. Then what? We could travel for many more decades, raising a family aboard some tiny microcosm of our home, only to float endlessly toward unknown emptiness, perhaps passing by some star many generations later, and finding nobody home.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, aliens have decided to come out of the closet. They admit they've been visiting us for thousands of our years. And worst of all, they do not come from another planet in spaceships traveling across the galaxy like the Pinta, Nina and Santa Maria. They merely cross the dimensional planes that separate us, by use of some kind of gravity warping machine or whatever.

We then must bid our brave generations of Space Travelers out beyond the Oort Cloud a final electronic goodbye, or perhaps a message that implores them to turn about, to return home. Please come back, to the only home there will ever be, forever.

In our science fiction books there have been marvelous machines imagined, designed and specified to quite extensive detail. But similar to the beautifully crafted Victorian Time Machine of H.G. Wells, none of them can really work that way. Perhaps I am wrong, which my imagination wishes to be so. Perhaps the physics of multidimensional travel  is nearly equivalent. To travel beyond our own 4D environment to some other plane would be no less grand and no less distant than traveling through empty space forever.

But, if aliens came to greet us from such planes of existence, they could at least guide us toward a worthwhile goal, and not just let us grope in the dark. Yet that must be exactly what the aliens did, for who knows how long, before hitting just the right combination to locate our living planet. To them, or at least to the first ones who accomplished such a feat, it must have been far grander than winning the lottery.

Sun Down

I have been a software guy for about 40 years. I also know the hardware side of things, and have invented many things (of which I now own nothing.)

Sun was a computer vendor that I admired during the days of very, very bad IBM PC's and toy Apples. They had very nice workstations, very nice software, and many intelligent employees. They developed so many things it is hard to remember them all.

But I would have to say that Java is the one thing that strikes me as a very big loss now that Oracle has consumed Sun and all of its IP. Although, technically, Sun owned Java, it had never charged for it as a programming language. There may be products made from Java that were for-pay, but even those are frequently free of charge.

I actually don't like Java, except for a few aspects of its abilities. I know it, I write programs with it, but there are a lot of things about it that prohibit me from using it for serious work.

Number one, it is always interpreted, or compiled into an intermediate byte code, for whichever machine it runs on. There are ways to optimize Java, sort of, but its very nature as a "hidden object" system makes it work very hard on the inside so that the programmers on the outside don't have to explicitly allocate and free memory, or worry about what happens after a function is disposed of, etc.

C is extremely the opposite of Java (except for most of its syntax). Everything is right out front. Getting all tangled in your own rope and hanging yourself with C is quite common. It is exceptionally close to machine language, so it is more easily optimized for whichever platform it runs on. But it must be compiled, in advance, before it can execute.

C++ is sort of a cross between C and Java. It allows you to hang yourself and shoot all virtual copies of yourself in their virtual feet, as well as pretend that you know all the big words which are used to describe the components and object mechanisms like overloading multiple inherited protected methods. But C++ also has the hidden object problem, only made worse when some system like .NET tries to mix C++ and C# and Visual Basic and J# ad infinitum into the same bag of worms.

But, as much as I like the bulls-eye, sniper rifle effect of C, and as much as I put up with the haughty, but effective maze of highly optimized C++ objects -- I will still miss Sun's Java. It isn't that I won't use it anymore, or that it will disappear altogether as a language. It isn't so simple as that.

When Sun owned Java and the world trusted Sun, it was like a bright and shiny day. But now that Oracle has bought Animal Farm, you know that the dogs, chickens and horses are not going to be treated as equal as the pigs. And now the very word Java is like the word Dark. The Sun has set, and I hope that the night is not a dreary darkness, ruled by Larry, Prince of Darkness.

Oh, Bother

There are many things that bother us in life -- insects, diseases, money problems, love problems, other people in general and a host of other bothersome things.

I doubt that there will ever be a time when there is nothing to bother us, Perhaps after death, in a peace beyond peaceful, there will be no bother. But then there will be no awareness of it, so it is not helpful. If there is "life after death" then there will always be something to bother us, or torment us, as the case may be. I would imagine that even Heaven would have something bothersome, such as eternal light, or too much singing, whatever.

In this time of our lives, we who have been blessed or cursed with life during these times must endure the effects of overpopulation, of over-reliance on chemical pesticides in our food, of pests that can't be eliminated at all. There are politicians who lie more vehemently than ever, with propaganda more insidious than ever, with more pleas for violence and destruction.

We must endure the financial collapse, the loss of our life savings to perpetual thieves who run the stock markets and banks. We will become slaves for those who love to enslave. We will starve while the thieves gorge themselves. We will die while the thieves restrict all medical services for themselves.

Although this is what is happening, it was once thought that we were the luckiest generations. We live in a world of technological profundity which has never been known before. No emperor or king ever had access to the comforts of life that even the most modest homes provide, with plentiful clean water, communications devices to reach to all points of the globe, cleaning devices that can keep our homes spotless and bugless. Sure, the kings might have had 100 wives or whatever, but that is little different than having 100 girlfriends to wine and dine with our V8 powered golden chariots and splendid silk-like clothing bought for a few dollars in Walmart.

But all that is disappearing -- reserved now for the very rich and powerful. The rest of us will seemingly be disposed of -- the not-so-pretty girls, the not-so-useful old, the not-so-lucky of us all. Our luck has run out, and the seas will become oilier, and deadlier, to the point where, someday, the rich will have to eat food made by machines from bacteria and fungus -- the most resilient lifeforms of the Earth.

Of course that future is not certain. It may be that when the majority of us die that the minority can once again live in the splendor of overabundance. When the value of human life has increased from 1-in-a-billion to 1-in-a-few-thousand, perhaps we will treat each other better. When I say "we" I don't really mean "me" -- I'm certain to be not long for this world. I only mean the survivors -- those of us, and those of the animals and plants, that survive the great dying.

There have been many exterminations of life on this planet. Perhaps only a modest percentage of the total will survive, with some events worse than others. A huge asteroid being worse than a few volcanoes; a sudden heat wave perhaps worse than a sudden cold snap. And life under the sea has less direct exposure to the events that kill most everything on the surface.

Even an event that completely kills everything, and evaporates away all the water, might leave behind spores that could live again should enough water return, even if only under miles of nothing but rock.

It would be unfortunate if such a thing happened because of nature, from the effects of stars and planetary alignments. Eventually the Sun will vaporize all life on this world anyway. But it is very sad that a small congregation of greedy thieves would subject an entire planet to destruction and starvation.

But that is what is happening now. It seems that our duty as citizens and mothers and grandfathers is to do everything and anything to prevent such acts of criminality from ever occurring. If the population must be reduced, so be it -- have less babies. If the food supply must be protected, so be it -- pollute the world less. If the way we power our cars and factories is killing the world, then stop it. Replace those old technologies with new ones -- which are sane and sustainable.

Yet, the criminals always seem to win. Then nuts in Iran, the nuts in our own government, the nuts in North Korea, the nuts that own all the oil, all the coal and all the chemicals. They always seem to win while the rest of us can only make them richer or nuttier.

The Ideas Of Dogs.

There are a million ideas that spew from the imaginations of people, and even of dogs and cows, to a certain degree. Humans are more able to convey those ideas than are other animals, but the ideas persist nonetheless.

I might have an idea in my business, "Would a robot that has art deco integrated into its metal parts have a market?"

Whereas a dog may have an idea "What would happen if I ate grandma's couch?" A cow doesn't look very thoughtful, as slow and cumbersome a beast they be, but surely there must be such ideas that "If only I could jump this fence, that luscious alfalfa over there would be mine!"

I'm not sure I can ever find out about these ideas, being so difficult to live the life of a cow or a dog, but I can imagine being much more incredibly ignorant than I am now and having only the barest consciousness of the world around me. Something like a fish. Although whales look fish-like in most ways, they are not, and are probably very likely to having ideas of their own, although with no hands it is very unlikely that they will ever implement any of them.

Dogs are certainly not high on the list of intellects, yet on a tall pole from microbe to man, their intelligence would be very high. Just not as high as chimpanzees, dolphins or a few other top minds on the Earth.

But put dogs in a pack and they seem to pool their limited minds into a super mind that can do just about anything short of design rocket ships or build houses (they still don't have the skills needed to manipulate finely detailed machinery). But 10 dogs has exactly 1/100th the fear of 1 dog. And all that yapping and barking that goes on in the pack -- "Let's eat Alice the cat!" -- "Let's go steal Farmer John's boots and chew them to shreds!" -- "Let's go near the School and sniff each other's rear quarters -- it seems to embarrass all those elementary school teachers!"

Yes, I know these are more like just my own lonely ideas -- not those of animals. But I can't imagine having such active and inquisitive personalities like dogs or weasels or squirrels and not having the slightest idea about anything.

Fire burn Og! Ouchie.

We are cavemen burning stuff. As humans, in certain parts of the world, we burned every tree, every bush, every blade of grass -- for who knows what petty reasons. On Easter Island it was involved in building a large number of giant stone heads.

England once was covered in forests and now must protect the last few that remain as though they are museum pieces.

In America, also once covered in forests, we are almost in the same shape, although now, instead of burning wood, we burn oil and coal. It is obvious what happens when that happens. And now in the Gulf of Mexico we can see what else happens, as if the Exxon Valdez was not enough.

If we can make it to space and beyond the planets with scientifically designed machines, we can get beyond this incredibly medieval destruction of our own home planet. Armageddon be damned. There is no excuse for this.

A Smooth Ball of Melted Glass

There is a point beyond which my patience wears thin. Ever since the early days of hijacking airplanes to Cuba there has been terrorism in America. Worldwide is even worse, with so many nations held hostage by various terrorists over the years that I could never do the topic justice. But this is not to narrate the history of terrorism. This is to describe my anger at the problem.

All my life I've lived with the threat of nuclear annihilation, weapons grade anthrax, super volcanoes, ice ages, global warming -- or something. The US and USSR could have reduced the world to a large pool of glowing melted glass devoid of land based life beyond ants, scorpions and microbes. A meteor strike might do something like that someday -- naturally.

But I think the first "terrorists" to really get my attention was "Sirhan Sirhan" who murdered Bobby Kennedy, and the murderers of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich back in the 70s. What made it seem terrible was that when I read various "opinion" articles about such events, there was a sense that "Oh, well -- they're just Jews. Oh,well - he was just a Democrat."

Obviously, there are hate mongers out there that share a love of terrorism -- so long as the target is one of their hatred symbols. Of course the Arabs (or Palestinians if so called) continued on, hi-jacking planes, killing innocent bystanders or even purposely killing as many civilians as possible in their mindless quest for "justice".

Having been born completely ignorant, as everyone is, I did not grow up predetermined to hate this or that group of people or symbols or religions or whatever. However, there was a great deal of brainwashing that I'd gone through via my schooling -- the Red Scare, the White Racists, the Malcolm X phenomena, etc.

Being American, I did not share the Arab hatred of the Jews, nor was it actually promoted in the schooling -- only hints of it made it to my ears. My first actual thoughts about Jews stemmed from my first having read about Auschwitz and the Death Camps in Nazi Germany. I was aghast at such brutality and prejudice.

When terrorism is mentioned, it must also include the utter terror of the Stalinists, the Maoists, the Nazis, the Police States, the KKK, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Mafia -- and so forth. It is not merely the current group of "iNuts" -- Islamic nut cases -- that have promoted terrorism, nor will that group be the last to employ their methods.

Death by suicide bombs, airplane crashes, beheadings, toxins and whatever else can be made lethal or gruesome and kill as many people as possible -- this is their tactic. It creates fear, which makes people do irrational things, making it easier yet to create more fear and more irrationality. It feeds on itself like a fire burning through steel tanks of gasoline, each explosion destroying more and more tanks of gasoline -- until it has burned out completely. It only takes one little grenade to set off a very large firestorm.

What will burn out terrorism? Do the iNuts truly believe that they can murder their way into some kind of Islamic Kingdom on Earth? If this is what they think, and it may very well be, then the world is in for yet another holocaust. No one, no country, is going to sit around patiently awaiting their death by squads of suicide bombers. Every country that has any means of fighting them will do so. And the means of fighting them will escalate as the tactics of terrorism escalate.

The Nazis rounded up all the Jews in Germany and from whatever countries they invaded, and used them as scapegoats, as slave labor, and even just as meager suppliers of stolen wealth. But this was only possible when a passive, peaceful people could be cynically deceived by the Nazis, following various Judas goats to their slaughters. The Nazis were a centralized enemy, however. If you could kill the head you could kill the Nazis completely. But even with the target firmly stuck to the map of the world -- it took massive firepower and millions of deaths to kill that Nazi head, which would actually commit suicide rather than face its victims in defeat.

The Islamist Nut Case Parties -- the iNuts -- are not stuck to a world map. You cannot just bomb some city into submission or sink all their submarines or whatever. They are hidden amongst us, in caves, behind women and children, walking amongst gasoline trucks or water supplies. You cannot kill the head to kill all the iNuts. They are like an army of ants with many queens. You must kill all the queens and kill all the ants.

How does one go about not only killing, but exterminating ants (or termites, or wasps?) If you can locate an entrance to their nest you can, with some difficulty, bait the area with slow acting toxins that they are not equipped to detect. They will carry the stuff deep into their nests, feed the eggs, feed the queen and eventually feed the toxin to all of their millions and become either dead or highly reduced in numbers.

Naturally, whenever a queen can survive such toxins, there are probabilities that more ants can evolve which are not effected by that toxin. But if there is a large enough number of such effective toxins to choose from, it may work to exterminate the entire area's ants. It is much like using antibiotics -- all or nothing. Anything less will only result in evolution.

Ants may be pests in our homes or farms, but they are actually the Earth's garbage collectors, so it isn't really so good to kill them all. Control them, perhaps, but not truly exterminate them. That would obviously backfire on us.

But what would happen if we (or a majority of nations) decided to exterminate the terrorist iNuts? Would we just kill a few hundred al Qaeda here and there? That doesn't seem to have worked before. Would we need to include the Taliban by the thousands? That didn't work, either. Or would this deadly, ghoulish operation have to actually kill their entire breeding stock indiscriminately? I would hope not, but as can be seen in the current wars with Iraq, (less overtly Iran) and other Islamic hotbeds of terrorists -- you cannot leave a single one in place or another hive of al Qaeda (or al Kabob or some other iNut group) pops up -- just as determined as ever.

We will have to drastically increase operational anti-terrorism success or we will have to scrap international air travel. I have traveled the world on Navy ships and I can attest to how slow and unbearable that would be compared to a relatively quick airplane ride. Yet, although slow, it would be much harder to detonate a suicide vest or "underpants bomb" that would blow a hole through several inches of steel on the side of a ship. Plus, passengers can be screened in a more staged process, requiring groups to be separated into less deadly sizes -- if some bomb goes off in one area it will not necessarily effect another.

With large, slow, travel ships the passengers can be sorted accordingly with detection machines built-in to the ships. The length of travel can be made up for in comfort, so that not all is lost. Sometimes a walk through the park is more pleasant than a tumultuous ride of Mr. Toad at 600 mph. For higher speed travel, passengers can agree to more invasive screening, or obtain licenses that require more expense and insurance. A corporation can hire its own jets. A travel club could charter its own jets. The question is about certainty and trust. It is not necessary to completely eliminate ALL air travel to be safe.

Yet, all these defensive techniques will only provoke them on to use ever larger weapons against us. If suicide vests don't work, then crashing fuel tankers or using nuclear devices will work. They can plant automatic bombs by hanging them underwater along the lines used for travel ships, just like the old days of mining the sea lanes. When a ship goes over it could trigger a nuclear explosion that destroys everything within several kilometers and poisons the water and air as well. Although I doubt in the early days they would waste nuclear devices in this manner, there are so many scenarios it would be difficult to predict just what they might try.

The same kind of mining can be done with balloons which hide in the clouds and can be triggered by directional radar reflections off passing planes and then detonate their nuclear or radiation spewing bombs. Even just electromagnetic pulse (EMP) devices can bring down planes and destroy electronics in cities. The technology for that is difficult, but not impossible. If they are able to obtain nuclear devices they can obtain EMP devices even more cheaply. Metal enclosed airplanes can be somewhat immune to such devices, cities filled with wooden or stucco houses cannot protect their computers and so forth whatsoever.

So there is an urgency to our attempts to counter the effects of terrorism. I cannot imagine that the tactic will ever be erased from the quivers of future warriors. And our own response to that tactic will be an even greater terrorism in itself. But is there a point to where terrorism ceases to work?

Nihilism is a kind of brinkmanship belief system, common amongst the iNuts. It just devolves to a point where "if I die we all die" kind of mutual assured destruction like was used between the US and USSR for so many decades. This is what I really meant so far as wondering if the iNuts truly believed they could "take over the world." Surely they know that their world would reduce (or be martyred) to melted glass over wide horizons should their ultimatums ever be realized.

The US is a schizophrenic society, which on the one hand wishes "can't we all just get along -- there's money to be made here", and on the other hand wishes to "utterly destroy all its enemies using particle beam weapons from space -- just to see how cool it looks." We have the technology.

The USSR does not exist anymore, but Russia, China, India, Europe (as Nato), and even Pakistan and Israel have joined the N-club. N. Korea and Iran are like angry children -- banging on the doors to get in, but having only empty threats and scorpions to fling at the world. Nevertheless, it is Iran that bothers me the most.

I do not consider any culture on Earth to be literally "stupid", and certainly not the iNuts. I do think there is a kind of blindness within their cultures, or a self-limiting reliance on mere repetition of Islamic verses, etc. Yet they will have to also use their intelligence to learn that, regardless of anything, either the US (or more likely Israel) or one of the other N-club members will not stand for some fairy story which places some iNut as the "King of the Mountain".

(This also applies to the other kingdoms and to the US, too. Each could be eliminated just as rapidly as anyone else by someone in the N-club should they become too haughty and destructive.)

But this scenario, where we use our most powerful weapons against goat herders with suicide vests, is insane. Even China has become an "ally" in the sphere of terrorism. They don't like it, we don't like it, and we share the pain and the determination to confront it. The N-club members can destroy each other, but we don't wish to. There is no money in it. There is no Jackpot to claim. Only going down in a "blaze of glory" can be won by behaving like thugs with Uzis.

How could the world come to this? How can the human race survive beyond this MAD cycle? Perhaps, technologically, some winner could emerge and the human race will continue on. But it could very well be that the winner is not one of the N-club, nor any of the iNuts, nor anyone else who pounds the Earth with wanton destruction.

Whichever humans behave the most like ants -- probably they will survive.

Terror or Terriers

Small dogs can be trained to detect things like drugs, chemicals and explosives and then to bark and yap mercilessly at the perpetrators until they give up in desperation.

Of course, this is just sarcasm, however it is probably true with the first part -- the detection of things. Already there are beagles and bloodhounds and various other dogs used for detective work, airport sniffing, etc., and dogs are also used as soldiers or police. They are much braver than humans since they don't know all the things that can hurt them so acutely as humans.

Image via Wikipedia

There are other things that dogs can do, such as mark suspects with substances that can be tracked by machines or by other dogs so that the perpetrators can be followed, hopefully to their lair. This can also be done by machines, especially when the risk to a dogs life is in the balance. A dog's life may not be worth a human's life but most people would prefer that neither humans or dogs had to be sacrificed for military or police actions.

Anyway, even if small dogs are not accurate they can still be useful. If only one in three people carrying bad chemicals in airports or other crowded locations is detected, that is all the better. So it seems that such use should be made -- there are plenty of small dogs waiting to be put to sleep. They can be put to use instead.

Indigo Out We Go.

There are so many problems nowadays. I hate to even think about them anymore. I can understand why some people are just escapists, and drink themselves into a stupor or something, just to not think about all this.

It seems obvious now, always in hindsight, that we would crash and burn. I have always written of the issues with the environment, with social ills, greed and so on. But no matter how pessimistic I was, it was Pollyannish instead. To be an optimist, I would say that at least the animals won't miss us. The planet will someday return to a quiescent state, with the normal carnivores and herbivores living their sometimes dismal lives, but with less humans to destroy the place.

No one likes to imagine that their family will be the ones who are sacrificed for the good of the planet. No one looks at their children and thinks, "they will someday starve to death," unless they are already living in a state of starvation. Around the next corner there will be a big chunk of meat to roast. Just beyond the horizon will be a crystal clear lake full of clean water. Next week there will be a scientific discovery that eliminates all disadvantages of technological progress. All the pollution will be solved somehow, and energy will be free.

Somehow, I don't think so. As I look around, in my vantage point upon a hill, I see a world that is drilling deeper and scraping the bottom. It takes more and more money to get a barrel of oil, and the average person makes less and less money. That can't last too long. So, unless there really is some magic solutions in the near future, our long term future seems pretty grim.

I don't want to look at my grandchildren and think of that. I don't want them to be slaves in some dark world like the world my grandfather had to exist in. But it is a real possibility that it could even be worse. For, even in the days of World War 1 (they didn't call it that, then) and the flu pandemic that killed off so many that it made the war seem insignificant, there was a great future ahead. Many discoveries were being made even then, in science and physics and energy production, that would someday pay off -- at least for a few decades.

But, like coyotes surrounded by rabbits and birds galore, we gorged ourselves without regard for the future. And only when the rabbits and birds became scarce, we the coyotes turned to eating lizards and bugs. And only when the lizards and bugs ran out, we the coyotes could only eat other coyotes, until there was nothing but ourselves to eat. Then all us coyotes would be dead.

Then, a few birds from far away might land in the world with no coyotes, and find themselves surrounded by seeds. And more and more birds would grow, and have even more baby birds who would have even more, until all the seeds were gone. And then all the birds would die, simply because there were no coyotes to keep the birds from eating every seed.

Of course, in nature, this is a sine wave of negative feedback, and the coyotes and birds and rabbits and seeds all keep the world in some kind of equilibrium, and the complete extermination of any one species is usually avoided. Usually, but not always.

Humans, as vastly intelligent as we are, compared to the rest of life on Earth, are about to become one of those species that either completely exterminates itself, or a very large proportion of the other species on the planet.

Conspiracy of Doom

I have often written about the environment, so as to make it seem as though I am one of those "tree hugging owl fetishists" or something along that order. Well, I certainly care about the environment, since I have many grandchildren and nieces and nephews who will need it for their lives -- even if I did not care at all for my own health and welfare.

I usually don't hug trees, unless I am climbing in one and nearly fall out or something. I care about owls as much as the next guy I guess -- anything that eats rodents is probably a good thing to have around. Rodents spread diseases pretty quickly when left uncontrolled.

But all that means nothing. I think the lumber and paper industries, the energy industries and other "heavy users" of the environment are far more concerned about those things than I am -- they often make big ha ha about the dimwitted tree huggers and joke about how people are far more important than owls. Whatever. I am not so impressed by either side. Trees will die no matter what happens from now on. Owls will die. People will die. I don't see all that much to laugh about. And all those things have always died, in more or less numbers that now. There is not much to cry about, either, except for being a bit sorry for destroying the place as bad as we have.

Yet, I feel a certain sorrow that the entire propaganda system employed by industries that destroy so much of the world and profit so much by doing so, can be so successful in destroying the efforts of those who try to protect the futures of our descendants. It isn't about owls, it is about your grandchildren.

We don't need paper as much as the paper industry needs us. There are many substitutes for paper made from trees. Any kind of fibrous material can be used for various grades of paper. Paper money is not made from trees, but from linen and other plants. There are huge amounts of hemp plants -- useless for smoking but great for making rope, paper, clothing and millions of other uses. Hemp and marijuana are variations of the same plant, similar to how corn comes in many variations -- from Indian corn to cattle feed to popcorn. But relatively few varieties of hemp are useful for getting intoxicated, whereas ALL hemp is useful for its fiber.

People can argue over the relative strengths of this or that fiber, but there is really no true need for trees when making paper. Yet, the use of trees for paper is probably not that big of an issue. The trees in question can be the most useless kinds of trees for any other purpose, and be great for making paper.

You cannot build houses from hemp. This is a use of wood that needs real trees. And the better the quality of wood, the better the houses. Yet even houses do not really need to be made from so much wood. If only furniture and the inside finishing of houses used wood, rather than the entire frame, roof and so forth, then a great deal fewer trees would be needed. Wood is very handy, easy to cut, and all that, true. But there are alternatives to wood for building the structural parts of houses. Bricks, metals, plastics, and even fibers in the form of rope or cording can be used instead.

For centuries, because of the endurance of ceramics, the favored building material was stone and brick. It did not suffer termites or wet rot. It was less prone to fire, and offered protection against arrows, spears and other projectiles. Only the lessor of the piglets, who built their houses from straw or wood, were eaten by the wolf. Yet, there is a great cost and effort to building from stone, not to mention a formidable problem with earthquakes or ground movements. Brick can be more convenient, since bricks can be manufactured from fiber and mud or cement, and more easily hefted to a lofty position for assembly in pieces than stones.

Yet, here in the 21st century, we still need to kill vast forests of trees just to build houses that will rarely survive longer than the occupants. Forests do regrow, certainly, so long as they are not merely destroyed wholesale, so for controlled populations, wood can be a perfectly adequate material for housing. But, it is doubtful that wood can supply the houses of 10 billion people in the manner of American house construction.

If we were to live on the Moon, in a place completely devoid of trees, we could probably do well simply stacking rocks and melting them into an airtight seal, or compacting the powdered surface into bricks, melted in solar ovens and then solidified in the frigid shadows. The entire Moon is one giant quarry. We wouldn't need to kill a single tree. I'm sure we would kill them if they grew on the Moon, but since they don't we wouldn't. At least there would be no tree huggers on the Moon, for those who find them disagreeable.

We could do the very same thing on Earth, even using solar lenses to melt sand into bricks, and never kill another tree. The trees can be left in place for shade, oxygen, habitat for animals, etc. And certainly a few of them could be used for making furniture and so forth. Or for hugging, just to piss off the people who can't stand that.

Pictures of the Girls

A few pictures of the girls together. They get along well with their little brother. He doesn't know what to think of them, though.

More Pictures

This first one is the newest of the bunch. Blond and blue eyed. Already joined the Marines.

Pictures

These pictures are a test for making a personal photo blog. They are some from years past when Adryana was 1 or 2 years old. I will collect some more from Haley's collection when I can get to them.

Alien Power

There is hardly a Republican in our country that doesn't expound upon how things like drilling for more oil or building more nuke plants is the "answer" to our very crushing energy expenses.

This is ludicrous, not the rapper but the condition. All that Republican mantra o f "oil and nukes" results in is more expense, with most of the nation's money still pouring into the pockets of a very small number of corporations, out of the pockets of hundreds of millions of Americans.

I don't imagine that oil can be replaced any time soon. Nearly every car, train, ship, truck, bus and airplane exclusively depends on oil or its derivatives. Almost zero depend on something else, such as the old sailing ships that exclusively depended on currents of water and wind. There are a few subways and other short-haul train systems that use electricity rather than oil, and there are a growing, but small percentage of hybrid gas/electric cars and trucks.

There are also Naval vessels which are nuclear powered, but very few compared to the total number of ships crowding the oceans.

Even if ALL cars were magically converted to hybrids or all-electrics there would be a large number of barrels of oil still dedicated to the transportation industry -- either directly or via electrical power generation. Perhaps a shift from oil to coal would reduce the oil barrels, yet increase pollution far beyond our current terrible amounts.

I could go down a list of technologies, comparing costs vs pollutions vs convenience or sustainability, and so on, but this would merely drone on about things that have already been droned upon. Death by boredom.

What would aliens use for power?

This is, of course, an unanswerable question given that aliens don't offer themselves open to study. The fact of their very existence is questioned. But as a thought experiment, I will just assume that there are some aliens somewhere which have transcended archaic systems such as carbon/hydrogen/oxygen chemistry for power.

The average UFO (as reported to various researchers), floating and accelerating effortlessly and silently, must be powered by something -- and it is unlikely to be diesel fuel, coal or even plutonium. In this thought experiment, as unlikely as some find the very idea of alien spacecraft, it is only necessary to define what UFOs do NOT do as they zip around the Earth and wherever else they go.

They do NOT leave behind a trail of smoke, CO2, H2SO4, or any detectable gases, except a few reports of contrails, although simply passing through high altitude humid air at high speed could cause contrail effects.

They do NOT burn holes or strips of scorched soil into the Earth which propulsive particle beams might cause. Nor are people or objects vaporized by such beams, which would need to be extremely powerful to produce enough thrust.

They do NOT attract pots and pans and other steel objects which might be expected of a powerful magnetic object, in which the magnetic field is opposed to the Earth's natural field for propulsion.

Of course, if they were simply figments of our imagination, then they would not be expected to leave any physical traces. In comparison, the objects that do fly around in our skys less mysteriously are airplanes, jets, helicopters, ballistic artilliary and rockets. Each is either directly noisy, and most expel large amounts of polluting gases, smoke and chemicals.

We imagine ourselves in the far future in a similar situation as the magical aliens who pilot the UFOs. We will hopefully develop some kind of clean, powerful, magically safe and quiet propulsion system. We might ride in anti-gravity machines or time-machines or whatever, in a kind of "Jetsons" future -- picnicking on Mars and arriving back home on Earth in time for an music concert with speakers situated in geosynchronous orbit (I know... a vacuum would not carry any sounds).

But we don't live in the future, nor do aliens give us their secrets. We must create our own future from the tools we have right now -- and those tools do not need to depend on ancient molecules of pretroleum or coal. Sunlight is power, rain is power, wind is power, tides are power -- and all are free. They require machines, of course, and machines require maintenance, of course, so they are not truly cost free, but they are not owned by greedy men and subject to obscure commodities trading peaks and valleys.

I'm certain that a great deal of reluctance on the part of industries to use these free energies is the fact that no one can own them, nor meter them, nor turn the spigots on or off to promote some act of war or revenge. War is usually the mother of invention, and wars are destructive -- if both sides of a war cannot destroy the machines of the other side without destroying their own machines, then there is no advantage. If solar energy was the only source, then neither side of a war can snuff it out.

Yet we are snuffing ourselves out by refusing to use these free sources. Certainly I cannot step on the "gas" in my sports car and hear that roar from the gasoline engine if it is powered by some silent inertial cycling system. How could we melt steel and make locomotives without some huge pile of coal? Never mind that the sun can be focused by simple mirrors and create temperatures that can melt not only steel but virtually every material mankind is able to fabricate.

Traditions must be discarded, however, since there cannot be 100 billion people on this planet all driving 500 horsepower engines that run on gasoline or diesel. I doubt that many people could live even in the sparse lifestyle of Homo Erectus, or in the harsh, starvation edge of Ethiopians.

Linux Rocks -- But Sometimes PooPoos

I've been using Unix flavors for much of my software life, so Linux is just yet another of those flavors. Also I've used Microsoft (except for Windows 1.0 and 2.0 which were useless...) during all that same period of time, Although I realize all the reasons Unix is not Linux, nor was HP Unix (Hpux) the same as IBM Unix (Aix), there are actually much more versions of Linux than there were of Unix, although for obvious reasons -- Linux was developed to run explicitly on PCs which had been build specifically to run Microsoft stuff. Plus the source code was able to be altered by anybody with the curiosity or courage to try it.

Over the years, of course, Linux has also been redesigned for use as a replacement for Unix on many architectures, not just x86 machines, and unlike Unix it has also been able to penetrate the micro miniature world of cell phones and other tiny devices. Google's Android system is based on Linux, but so is a competing system.

Another popular system, the Apple Mac OS X family, is another system that is Unix-like, but is not really Unix. This started out during the NeXT days, a machine that was cute but for some reason did not make it very big. Maybe it was too expensive. It also used a flavor of Unix inside. I suppose BSD Unix is very close to the Apple's stuff.

Yet, with Linux there is not just one big monolithic LINUX 5.1 SuperDuperWindows or anything like that. There are probably hundreds of versions of Linux, especially if you count the bare bones kernels that run in tiny computers to the full scale multiprocessing servers and the many different desktops (this machine is openSUSE 10.3 currently -- thus the icon at the beginning paragraph). Many Linux purists (like virgins except hairier...) dislike openSUSE for making a pact with the devil (Microsoft). I was not happy about that either. It just so happened that my newest Dell laptop would only work correctly with this particular release of Linux, unless I did some serious driver repair by myself.

Microsoft is starting to subdivide into many pieces now, with various Windows CEs, servers, Vista (5 different ones!), and all the old MsDOS versions, Windows for Workgroups 3.1, etc. Microsoft has many systems named for the year they came out, almost like cars -- except with cars there is some long embedded habit of coming out with a brand new model every single year.

One of my laptop's was retrieved from the trash -- a Thinkpad 600e with W98. Boy was that a clunker. I replaced it with NT after a lot of effort (which improved performance quite a bit over W98 -- it was not able to run XP at all.) If I had been smart at the time I would have put Redhat Linux on it, but my jobs at that time required working only with Microsoft, so I tried to just use it for that purpose.

The other day I tried Ubuntu on the old Thunker -- it ran great. I might just completely replace the NT system with that, once I've made sure there are no remaining needs for the compiler or anything else from the old NT world. It took a lot of effort to revive old Thunker from death and I'm a little hesitant to just willy nilly start from scratch.

Yet, I have other laptops, other desktops. I don't need Thunker. But I think I will always need Linux. I can no longer stand Microsoft jerking me around. I have tried all the .NET crap. Maybe I am just old fashioned, but I really can't stomach the modern "spank your hands" programming tools. It is like being a soldier with a toy plastic gun. I've written programs in almost every level of language (but certainly not in every language there is...). I do make blunders, but I will repair my own blunders, thus learning more than if the machine did everything for me (and very slowly at that.)

Linux is not perfect. I think it is very dangerous in the hands of sloppy users. If you don't make sure it is wearing diapers, it will happily take a dump on you. The various desktops (mostly Gnome and KDE) try to help, but once you start really doing something besides play the games and use the Internet it takes a bit of intellectual effort. This is also true with Unix, or even more so -- there were very few GUI tools for Unix systems management, and there are only a few more GUI tools for Linux. Mostly there is a need to just type stuff in the shell in an exceptionally cryptic manner.

The good thing about Linux, at least today's versions -- I can still write in C as well as in all the object oriented languages and stuff runs just fine, thank you. I have Ruby programs, PHP, Perl, Python and other such scripting programs. I think they are fun, and for many things they are adequate. Until machines begin to communicate on Internet with Terabits rather than Megabits, I doubt that the overhead of Ruby or PHP would matter too much.

Plus, I don't have to buy anything. All the languages I could ever want are free to install, although I've only installed a few that I really use. There are also IDEs, editors, databases, email, browsers, etc, etc, up the yin yang. In fact, Linux suffers from too many choices rather than too little. I would think that the European Union would be far more afraid of Linux than Microsoft when it comes to market share problems. At least Microsoft costs some amount of money to use -- Linux and everything it can run is totally free. (The exceptions are the various copyrighted image or music formats... although reverse engineered versions of those abound anyway.)

Now, I will close this long winded blog entry. I just wanted to rant and rave for a while.

Yet Another Linux

I got another laptop, a medium speed Core Duo guy but with 2gig memory and 300gig disk. It came with Vista. That did not last long. After about 20 minutes of Vista (after a much longer question answer session before it finally booted completely) I noticed that certain things were being installed which I did not have the opportunity to say YES or NO.

To me, that is called SPAM/Malware/Spyware/Marketing, and it really soured my first true experience with Vista. It was only Vista Home Basic -- not much of an experience at best, anyway.

I immediately grabbed a CD with openSUSE Linux, which so happened to support all the hardware on this laptop (Dell Inspiron 1520). I wiped out the entire 300gig disk and replaced it with Linux. Now I have a screaming system that computes the hell out of data and has every damn software thingy I could imagine.

I DO NOT RECOMMEND DOING THIS!!! Although I have a great machine as a result, it took my many years of experience with computers, networks, Unix, Linux, XP and all the various wires and vast differences between them. I think that is the real reason Linux will never be a household word. It is just too hard for Mom and Pop to grok.

There are companies that will sell you completely installed versions of Linux for a slight fee over the cost of the machine itself. But I have no time for that. I just do it myself in a few hours. All the frustrations are good for my heart -- pacing around between machines. Good exercise.

Ubuntu Linux Rocks

I have invested about one whole day to installing Ubuntu Linux 7.10 on my wife's Toshiba Satellite Pro 6100 laptop. We had it repaired from a burned out fan and disk so there was nothing to salvage from prior systems. I did, however, install XP Pro first, since she would need that no matter what else happened, as do I on my own computers.

The installations went OK until I tried to get a flaky Ethernet connection to work. I finally had to go into my office, right next to the router, and directly plug it in with a short cable, and that gave me straight Internet -- wonderful. But, Linux nor XP could use the Wireless Card. It must be faulty. I have a Wireless game connector (Wireless G via Ethernet) which I am using at the moment-- that worked because Ethernet worked and Linux or XP neither had to think about a different device.

I like Ubuntu Linux. So far it has been easy to install, has a lot of nice features, games, tools, every sort of doohickey that a programmer like me needs.

I install g++ and was able to make some hello world type programs. I have OpenOffice for all that stuff and Evolution email, Image editors, movie/music players, some kind of Skype like thing, and so forth-- everything I could ever want to buy -- all for free.

Since I am an old Unix hacker, Linux seems like a modernized dream version. But to my wife, this is a nightmarish Non-PC that requires too much re-learning. I understand. I didn't necessarily like re-learning programming on PC's after Unix, either. It was a definite step down. Microsoft has some adequate tools, and billions of add-ons and helper programs made by them and 3rd parties. But mostly MS is about paying through the nose for everything -- especially if you are a business.

The dual boot works, however I'm not sure how to make XP the default instead of Linux-- it is my wife's machine, after all.

I'll figure it out. Must be a way to edit that Grub file or whatever it is.

Give a Hoot

Having used the Internet since its inception (and having also used other ancient networks using SDLC, DECNET, NETWARE, et al) I considered how different traversals of the nodes or pages of the web were basically indeterminate. Humans just go through the pages on whims, and sometimes just shoot arrows in the dark.

Reading books, which I still read the old fashioned way, is not so random, in that the writer purposely put a set of words in their unique order. It is still possible, of course, to just thumb your way randomly through any given book, or interrupt reading the current book and read some other book indicated in the footnotes or references. Yet that is not so easy as clicking your way wildly through web.

Some books, text books for instance, are so complex that one needs to join a group study in order to explore them. I do not usually enjoy memorizing infinite dates in history, memorizing the rigid taxonomies in myriad fields of science, or being persuaded by every persuasively written passion in a pile of essays.

Instead, when reading the web (I hate the term surfing - when traversing a labyrinth it is far deeper than skipping along some single wavy surface), I just follow the maze paths on whatever whim of interest I might have at the moment. Maybe its about computers, science etc. during one day, then just digging up the blogs about the political oligarchy on another day, and then watching some incredibly self-destructive teenager getting whacked in the nuts with a cricket bat to demonstate his "manly courage."

The links to those are perhaps too many to list here without some consolidation. Besides, they are linked from myriad other web pages or nodes already and I dislike redundancy. This system of following links is not necessarily like the neat chapters in a book, although some authors have attempted to organize their web sites quite neatly. Instead there are sometimes reliable links, and sometimes not, to related or vital information at each node.

Sometimes I am annoyed by he incessant commercialism on the Web. I am not immune, even though I am quite cynical and don't sucker for things often. But I do sometimes look for certain products and it is easy to get stuck in an ad cyclone if I am not careful. Each ad visited produces a dozen new ad sites - all attempting to save some information about me for them to profit from, even if only by selling my info to some other business.

This is not only a problem on the web. It is scary, really, to think that we willing hand over our money to machines that link our information into a web like that, even if it is a "secure connection" to our own banks or savings institutions. All our transactions, numbers, codes, etc., all neatly tucked away for some creepy totalitarians to control us with. They will be able to decide whether that transaction can take place. People are already are doing this, it is not just a fear of future possibilities.

Nevertheless I continue through the network. I read the bizarre oddities that occasion by, like pictures of an alligator swallowing a woman like a snake swallowing a rat - head first. I read of the CO2 levels of this planet's air trapping heat which then releases methane that then traps more heat. It is one of those bad situations that you don't want to know, really, because it effects the lives of billions of people in the future, including my own young grandchildren.

Spam is still around, of course, some very sophisticated, some corny as a chicken dance. It bothers me, of course. But the real issue is the random propaganda that I am hit with so incessantly. If I write an opinion on my blog, say, that republicans are more propagandist than democrats, then I am writing propaganda. All opinions are thus propaganda, pure and simple. Some propaganda is less harmful than others, but it is all harmful.

But then there are the videos of incredible bouncing balls thunked into a shotglass or some way to quickly and surely pick locks, or ways to increase your car's horsepower with ice, etc. Home jet engines are always fun. Even just the pictures of giant tomatoes and the largest earth drilling machine, or "scenic pictures" of giant mountains of worn out tires, just waiting for some idle teenager to start them on fire.

It's all just a hoot, really.

Images and Baby

It's been a while since I've written anything for the blog, which has very few readers and probably good reason. But I've been busy, working way too hard on way too many things. Such is the nature of computer science.

My youngest granddaughter is getting near 3 months old (has it been so long?) and she is smiling at me and trying to talk (or make gah gah gooog sounds) to her own reflection in the mirror. She also likes to push buttons on a music toy, although she mostly just randomly strikes the thing, lucky to press something that works. But when she does make something play music she lights up and almost jumps out of whosever arms in which she happens to be held.

Work has its ups and downs, but mostly things are working well -- a DLL that automatically scales or crops or shrinks images so that they look optimally when played back on a digital picture frame. Those may seem like toys, but it takes the full science of digital image processing to make them truely useful. These images are samples of what I'm talking about.

This picture is the original image, scaled to fit within a certain width, e.g. 800 pixels. Click images to see larger version.

This picture is the processed image, scaled to fit the same width, but with some attempt to retain larger detail. Notice, however, that the sky seems to have distinct sections of slightly different color. That is an artifact of the process, which cannot "see" sky or objects the way we see them.