Dante Daffodil in Daffodiliac

Click to enlarge Interior

This is a picture of the house in Second Life which I made from manipulating objects with 3D menus and texture files that I either made myself or downloaded from somewhere else. It is just an exercise in letting my mind expand into a machine's body. I am the little guy in the House that Dante built. It is in the very upper left corner of Adscita, in case you are familiar with SL.


Click to enlarge Exterior

This is the outside of the House as seen from a bird's eye flying by a cliff. The house is literally as wide as I could make it within the 256 meter area of land, although I could have made a many story skyscraper if I used less complicated components. (56 maximum per 256 meter lot.) Sometimes I wish I could really sit in there and complicate things from that alien landscape.

I also feel that I've put quite a bit of effort into this and can only tinker with things in other ways unless I decide to expand my holdings in SL. I have real life work to do, anyway, and fantasy worlds will not even support themselves in cyberspace -- certainly not pay the real world bills.

Saddam Is Dead

The end has come to Saddam Hussein, or rather Saddam hung from the end of a rope. What can I say? I wasn't glad that we went to war, nor that we captured Saddam before we captured Usama Bin Laden. But there is so much blood on everyone's hands, it is difficult to write this blog entry without getting blood on my own hands.


Now, if only the death of Saddam would end the killing -- but I'll bet it goes on for a long, long time. There is so much blood in the sand of Iraq and the cold crags of Afghanistan to write the history of the world many times over.

Forever Ready Batteries

I use to write science fiction stories long ago, until I had to spend more and more time to write science nonfiction. I didn't notice the change so quickly, really. Just one day I thought the whole exercise of making stuff up was vastly less important than making sure things were accurate. It is like the difference between painting watercolors and manufacturing automobiles -- very completely different.

I must do science still, but I have to admit that has become very tiresome. I long for the freedom to just make stuff up -- to let my mind wander. I don't want to make sure atoms are aligned and the sequences assembled with correctness. I just want to paint colors that don't necessarily exist. I want to pretend that traveling through time is possible for everyone.

I only get paid to solve problems, not to dream anymore. Dreaming, however, is still a part of science, such as to dream up an idea to solve the unsolved. But there are limits to dreams, and almost no limit to the paperwork. No limit to the meetings and lines of computer programs to test the ideas, and then to write more paper work.

Science fiction is possibly a mixture of art and science. Like a watercolor artist, the science fiction writer can broadly splash a background of pastels and and infinity of sky and sea. Within those limitless landscapes the writer can stud the place with aliens and magical machines or beautiful girls with aquamarine eyes and ultra-mental control of their lovers. Science is like a Microsoft OS, mostly inhumane, coldly calculated, and fraught with inherent, ugly complexity. Art can be smooth and incalculable, only the result of a mind and its biochemical neurotransmitters.

But science also has a beautiful side, if only that mathematics might be carried out in a certain elegance . I think it sometimes limits those who can view such "artwork" to those who labor with all that math, perhaps completely lost on many whose lives never required those skills.

When I see the sky I see infinity -- no matter if there really is an edge or not. If I was to walk at a snails pace until the end of my days I would never get any less further toward the edge than if I were to fly through space at the speed of the fastest rockets, or traveled to other stars with ion drives. It is infinite for all practical purposes because I will surely die before getting any significant distance toward even the observable end.

Yet in mathematics one must deal with multiple infinities, as if one weren't enough, and never mind if there can be no true single infinity or not. In mathematics merely the potential for something to be real makes it become real, for instance counting from 1 to infinity and, between each counted number, stepping an infinite number of steps. No one can actually do such a thing, but just because it is thinkable, it is therefore a non-zero probability and must have some formal treatment.

Similarly, just the possibility of something existing out there beyond the edge of reality makes it necessary to think about. Mostly, the only good will be to dispel some incorrect notion about physics, or to tidy up the details of a formal theory. I can't pretend for a moment that more than 1 infinity is even remotely actual, yet if I were to divide 4 infinities by 1 infinity I should expect the result to be 4, not "an incalculable quantity". This is merely because of the rules of division, and canceling out the sides of equations however, and the variable X is allowed to contain infinity just as much as X might contain 23. How silly is it to even have to deal with such folly?

I have just as much problem with other logic problems, or even rules involving time. Time is difficult to define without using a term which is somehow interchangeable with the word time itself. The same is true of space. For in either case, at zero time, or zero space, existence itself seems in peril. How can time NOT exist, or for space to NOT exist, even for the merest instant, somehow seems absurd. Yet, by the accounting of some unknown substance S, space might be zero because of the relationship of S to time, or some substance T might interact with space in zero time. Gravity is kind of like that, where it is really a kind of Inertial Ratio that is affected by mass and effects mass itself, yet has no mass.

Quantum physics gets so convoluted with paradoxical logic that some scientists just throw up their hands in surrender. The theoreticians might always find them a source of alchemical mystery, that perhaps they might "solve the great mystery" if they keep at it. But to a rocket scientist only results count, and rocket full of fuel is not a bucket full of symbols. For them, a machine must actually function accurately in order to land on the Moon or Mars. Theorists might cry foul, though, for someone to demand utilitarian materialism. Surely the "magic" is still in scientific theory, even if it is gone from the clockworks of planetary systems. The edge of the Universe is much closer, for in theory at least, a black hole is the end of time and space for anything the enters its gravity well. Since no one knows the what-happens-next of that problem it is very fun to theorize about.

Yet black holes are not truly theories, they are real physical things, and somehow the do emit teeny amounts of "radiation" which means that the can evaporate. I wonder if we might sometimes see the results of such events, or if it such a very long time, near eternity for a mere human, not a single black hole would ever truly evaporate. And if it did, I wonder if there would be a sudden explosion of light that was no longer bound by the massive gravitation, and it would appear almost like the supernova which might have given birth to the black hole originally. Time itself, as well, like pent up light and heat, may spring forth again from a black hole in that far, far distant time, and liven up a long black eternity once again.

Black holes may well then be the storage batteries of reality. Do not open until quadrillions of years after Christmas.

A Second Life

There is now a new member of my Internet experience -- Second Life. It is a strange place in cyberspace where 3D objects and computer generated people wander around in a place much more bizarre than real life, although real life can be very bizarre in itself. My name in there is "Dante Daffodil", which might sound a bit "gayish" now that I think of it, but I chose the name because it seemed somewhat humorous and easy to pronounce.

I have bought some land there, only 256 sq meters, which is approximately 2300 sq feet. That is a small lot in American terms, but perhaps a giant lot in other countries, such as in Tokyo. But it is enough for a little home in the land of Odd.

At any rate I am now designing a house -- my first house was sort of a disaster, there are some rather clumsy 3D controls that I haven't completely mastered, and the primitives (pieces of 3D objects) can add up pretty quickly. I'll have to learn to save my creation more safely when it has reached a plateau of usefulness.

Second Life can be an all consuming endeavor if you let it. I try to balance my real life work, which is also all consuming, my home life, and all the other lives that I lead, such as writing in this blog under a pseudonym.

Anyway, as I progress in Second Life I shall update with some pics and coordinates for anyone who wishes to visit me there. (You will have to join -- free, at least for now, for limited users. I had to pay a small amount extra in order to own property, about a hundred dollars for a year's right to own property, and the property itself combined.)

If I wanted to buy an island or something it could cost a great deal more than I am ready to spend right now. But businesses can be set up in there, like casinos, furniture stores, clothing and fashion designers, etc. I am a computer scientist, so maybe there are some areas where I could make money, I don't know right now. I just find it an interesting thing to do between compiling and testing real world software.

I have met some interesting characters in there, some from other countries, and share my findings and have discussions with them. It is a strange social life, but it doesn't require so many airplane tickets and baggage. It may be good for me -- I'm usually such a loner outside my own immediate family.

Arctic Ice Melting a Bit Faster

"So what?" you may ask. That is, if you don't care what kind of world your children live in. This means more than just a tough adaptation process for polar bears and walruses. It means that almost every habitat on Earth will be different, and some of it will be uninhabitable.

Serreze and others said at the conference. Greenland could begin to rapidly calve off glaciers in the North Atlantic. Ocean water levels around the world could rise 13 to 19 feet during the next several centuries. As the ice disappears and the Arctic Ocean warms, more of the microscopic plant life stays on the surface. Thus, bottom-feeders like crab and shellfish die off. Pollock and salmon, however, would do better. Sea lanes would open up above Russia and Canada.

Serreze joked that Russian colleagues tell him that global warming is good for them. "But on the balance, there are more losers than winners," he said.

There are already dead zones, and in the future there will be more dead zones. Perhaps many species will adapt, or just be happenstance contain just the right genetics for a hotter planet with much different biological characteristics. Some of it will be fun, some will be ghastly, but if past extinctions are anything to compare our situation with, most of it will be death to any species that is living in a narrow adaptation range, such as coral that expects a nice 71 F for most of the time, or humans that have difficulties with 117 degrees in the shade, every day , except when it rains 42 inches in 2 hours and washes everything away.

Hall Monitors

Here is the story of the Hall Monitors.

One was a boy who, aside from this single badge of authority, had only excess acne to show for his life. But should you step into the hall from a classroom, he would instantly arise from his official, tiny desk with its single pencil and clipboard.

I was new and relatively unknown in this school. He immediately asked, "What is your name?"

I replied, "Di'angelo Nostromos"., remembering some dude from some book that was being discussed in my history class. He asked me to spell it, which I did, "Di'angelo Nostromos".

What was the teacher's name?

"Mr. Richter." I said. To this I noted a different body language.

"Richter, -- History -- Medieval to Renaissance?"

"That's right." I replied.

"OK, here." He then gave me a Hall Pass. Some piece of paper that endowed me with permissions to and from the Boy's Restroom.

"Thanks, I said." I then walked on toward the restroom, inwardly wondering if I should have given him such phony answers. Instead, the very next day that I had to use the restroom, from a different teacher's room, I met a girl monitor instead.

She asked curtly, "You're that Dante -- from North Fork?"

"Yes... uh, of Mrs. Sweenie's class."

"No.1 or No.2?" she asked with thick glasses making her ponderous presence seem all the more serious.

"I said, "I'm not sure, yet."

She was a little annoyed. "Well, make up your mind."

"OK, then, No. 1." I huffed, now getting in a hurry.

Then she hurriedly scrawled something on her clipboard. As she scribbled her portly body jiggled. She then ripped off a small slip of paper and gave it too me. "It's good for 2 minutes."

I decided to go No. 2. About 15 minutes later, in the way back to class I was immediately accosted by the chubby hall monitor girl again.

"Time expired! Time expired." she repeated like a broken parrot.

"Well," I said, handing her my little slip of paper, "When you gotta go, you just gotta go."

She looked at me narrowly, "That sounds like a bunch of bull. I'm reporting you."

Google Document Editor Test

GoogleWrite 1.

This is a new document made using Google's competitor to Windoze Office product. It probably does everything I would want for most things I do. It might also be easier to share with other people on Internet.

Lets see some colors and things like that. Maybe it takes a lot of network bandwidth, maybe it is not very private. I'm not sure I would trust Google or any other corporation with my intellectual property. What if I write politically "incorrect" blithering that someday becomes "not so private" because of network bore worms.

Think about greasy grimy gopher guts galore.

Propaganda Bananas

If all I did was write blogs, or if at least I was immersed in it the same way that I am in my day job, it would be much better writing than this. That doesn't mean, however, that it would be read by more than just one person -- only that it would be better written.

From the viewpoint of the Media -- that insectoid world of blabbermouths, tattletales and slickly persuasive one-sided debaters that dominate the sensory apparatus of modern humans -- we are merely "data consumers" out here in TV, Radio, Newspaper and Internet land. We are starved for actual truth, always perched on chair's edge for every word that issues forth from the ponderous authority of punditry and anchor personage.

Like animals starved of food, we will eat almost anything that comes along -- so long as it tastes something like truth we will believe it. Truth is only what you think you believe, so long as it can never be proven false. Gods are like that. And there will always be WMDs in Iraq because "we didn't look good enough" or they might have been "hidden temporarily in Syria" or something. I suspect there use to be WMDs in Iraq, and for all I know there still may be WMDs over there somewhere. But no one knows for sure and that's all the Media needs to keep the concept alive.

In my real work I have to actually do something before it can be called "work". I can't just write about it, or explain away the failures in blithering narratives in hopes that my boss will be snowed. If I was guilty of some debacle like Iraq I would be fired in an instant. But, in the Media, the truth is of little importance. Message is important -- get out The Message! Pound home those Facts, however vapid they sound, never mind how obviously nonfactual they are, over and over.

It is almost seems as if the Media believes that pounding a nail hard enough and long enough will cause it to grow into a flower.

I am -- somewhat -- happy that this last election flushed a lot of elephants down the toilet. Sure, that clogs up a lot of pipes (especially those Internet "tubes"), but the darn things were trampling the USA into the ground -- something had to be done. Of course, if you are an elephant then you see things differently. Trampling is called "hiking." Stampedes are called "festivals." However, I am not so sure the jackasses will run the country much more competently. Certainly they could not do so badly as The Chimpanzee King.

I read a lot about global ecology and climate change ("tree hugging", to the elephants). I am clearly on the side of the environment, myself, because I understand the science adequately, but there are plenty of naysayers. There are very loud skeptics of any and all climate theories that don't advocate the Book of Exxon.

If the theory of gravity was as adverse to Exxon's Obscene Profits as climate change theory they would loudly proclaim that we are really only floating randomly about and that G-forces are illusions. Pretty much the same theory that, if defied, severed the heads of the unlucky critics of The Church. And, wherever the nay saying is the loudest, you will probably find that all the amplifiers are owned by the industry, Exxon and friends.

If an oil company isn't just the arm of some dictatorial government, like Russia and most OPEC countries, then they use derisive propaganda tactics invented long ago by junior high school bullies and Machiavelli, combined with the verbose hocus pocus of scientific charlatans -- exactly the same as witch doctors, tobacco, alcohol and pharmaceutical companies. Divide, obfuscate and conquer.

The problem with the Environmental vision of reality is: any harm that might befalls mankind as a consequence of our pollution and energy gluttony is "way off in the future." (This may not even be true, and it could be much sooner than even the pessimists think.) A lot of people have a cavalier, devil-may-care attitude about the world, taking most things for granted. And in many parts of the world there is still: Slash and Burn -- the Tradition.Who cares what anybody in the future else thinks? That is their problem.

It is very easy to fool idiots. It is a little harder to fool imbeciles and morons, and a little bit harder for normal people. But you can at least keep them all confused for a while. If the sum of all those confused people outnumbers the people who disagree strongly with Exxon -- then Exxon wins. It also helps if you can bribe government officials and own the Media, not a problem with $ billions to burn.

What would be the Grand Subversive Goal of Environmentalists, (whom the polluters label "hyperbolically hysterical tree huggers"), to seriously study the problem; to reduce mankind's wasteful habits; to reduce the pollution; avoid the use of toxic metals; and do whatever else it takes to leave an inhabitable world for our children and their children? Who could possibly be harmed by these conservative actions?

Even if there was no real possibility of climate harm by openly polluting, which is absurd, it would not harm us to be cleaner -- and the naysayers could call all the environmentalists "loonies", "moon bats" or whatever they wish if the pessimistic predictions fail. Oh, well. A few bruised egos.

On the other hand, the small number of very rich men of puzzlingly optimistic climate theory (and legions of corporate talking-point lackeys) have $ billions to lose if the world reduces its addiction to their dangerous products. What if the polluters were somehow held to account for all the disease and decimated habitats their products have wrought throughout the world? Their great wealth would disappear, vast liabilities would cripple their corporate bottom lines and stock evaluations, and drain them of all future capital.

It would be exactly like suing a doctor who butchered a patient or an airline with drunk pilots and hundreds dead and unrecognizable. Yet a world with climate gone crazy would be terrible on a far grander scale, almost beyond imagination, and truly be a catastrophe to millions or even billions of people, and even more animals and plants.

Naturally, to avoid responsibility for such calamitous ruin, they want insurance policies. In the case of the oil companies the premiums are paid -- not to insurance companies -- but to media propagandists. Rush Big Buttocks, for instance. For enough money you can buy the entire world's silence. And the price of silence is death to huge numbers of living things on our planet, and a feast for fungus and bacteria, and wars for resources amongst hordes of the surviving desperadoes.

We are like a monkey and a jar full of beans that's chained to a stone wall. We got our hand stuck in the jar because the fist is full of beans that we don't want to let go. The tiger is coming, but somehow we can't force our hand to drop the beans. We are trapped. The tiger will get us. And all the tiger had to do was pay off the Media with a few bananas to keep us distracted, so we never, ever drop the beans.

Paranoia Petunia

Paranoia is a funny business. You have an easy mark, the public -- always afraid of their own shadows. You have terrorists who yell "Allah hu Akbar!" while chopping off heads. You have cops that shoot people full of bullets, regardless of whether they have guns. You have Right-Wing Nuts who are so bigoted about everything that they have a hard time concentrating on any one thing that they hate the most -- and hate everything and everybody. You got fast-food joints that can't keep the e-coli out of their fresh foods.

I am like Otis Redding -- I got 10 people trying to tell me to do 10 different things, so I guess I'll just remain the same.

My friends, some younger than me, with serious, life-threatening illnesses -- heart ailments, schizo-brain problems, eating disorders, rheumatoid arthritis. Some are too fat and also too weak hearted to risk the exercise they need. Congestive heart failure is a slow, disabling descent toward death, with bunches of pills and advice, but nothing seems to help. Some are healthy looking, but they eat too much junk food, not enough veggies, too much alcohol.

America, the Paranoid. I will plant petunias. Watch them grow. Think about living things instead of dying things. I have my own blood pressure, heart arrhythmias and dietary problems, too. I know I'll die soon enough. But, until then, I will try to grow more Petunias.