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.

Humans popping out all over

The newest baby girl is getting a little more recognizable as a human, at nearly a month old -- not so compressed looking. They are like butterflies that unfold their wings for a while until they take shape. The cramped conditions inside mama are gone, and the baby expands into the world. To see and feel and taste and smell and hear the ruckus all around.

The other girl is 3 years old. Once "the baby" herself, she is now more of a little person. At least she knows how to communicate most of the things she needs and wants. She lost her position as "the baby", but she gained the position of "big sister" with all the power that implies.

What will these children grow up to eat? Will there be a world fit for them to live in when I am gone? Will we have used up all the fuel and salted all the fields? With methane venting from the melting tundra -- it seems very bad for them in the days beyond my life.

"Why worry?" one might say-- "just grow your children right." Yes, I'll try. But I certainly can't grow corn in the Sahara.

Yes, I know the dinosaurs had to die out and mankind will have to die out eventually. But the dinosaurs were too stupid to know they shouldn't shit in their own water supplies. We are smarter than that.

The Tell Tale Heart of Internet

It is final. Our household revolves around Internet. It is not that we are all websurfers or computer professionals, although my wife and I both are computer geeks. But a couple days ago the cable modem smoked a fish and so much for Internet. No bits per second. Zero.

But our phones, our banking, our connections to most people in the world is through that cable connection to broadband Internet. Without it our phones ceased working, our email stopped working, Skype and Vonage stopped working. Everthing stopped working. My job depends on Internet.

So for the 2.5 days without Internet (or almost without -- there was still a spotty connection of rogue, unsecured wireless routers out there for an emergency email to my work, or two) -- life was more like the old days -- watching TV for the news, using my cell phone for almost everything else. It was like returning to the year 2001, when Internet for me was ISDN slow mode, NT still ran on most of my computers, and there was no "War by Bush, for Bush" and I used AOL disks and CDROMs for coffee coasters.

Now, after a cable service call, it is back to normal - back to the Internet for news, for phones, for work, for everything again.

The Anti-Language: Visual Studio CLI

The last few months have been very busy for me. Usually I keep myself busy anyway -- I have this blog, another blog and even another blog, but those are only for my amusement and not for money or fame.

I am working too hard now to maintain these blogs as frequently as I'd like. What at first seemed like a 2-3 month contract has now entered the 5th month, and as far as I can tell, it may extend indefinitely (not infinitely, mind you) into the future. I am not complaining about the job at all, I welcome that aspect of things.

Being a C programmer by preference, and a sometimes C++ programmer by employment, I am not put off by immensely complex projects. Every non-trivial system I design takes mind numbing quantities of complex steps to complete, sometimes reaching into years. I would rather complete things in far less time, even in days -- if possible -- but complexity takes time.

Microsoft's .NET programming environment is my least favorite toolkit however, and it has taught me much about the power of a monopolistic corporation to bastardize an otherwise fine programming language like C++. I would much rather code in C, with all its warts and pitfalls -- but that is not the goal of .NET that I can determine.

C is like machine language with libraries of functions that many, many fine programmers have already written. All I do is write my mess in there and -- whooosh! A new system. C allows one to shoot themselves in the foot, of course, but any cowboy that shoots themselves in the foot is not a very competent cowboy.

Visual Studio (2005 in this case) seems to bend everything around the idea of "Common Language", as though C++, Java and Visual Basic can be simultaneously enveloped by a "Studio" of glorious multilingual software agents, all dancing in harmony and providing a "rich user experience". To me that is just Marketing Propaganda disguised as a programming language.

I just see it as unnecessarily complex, composed of far too many layers, and replete with thousands of "objects within objects" which almost-but-not-quite do what I need to do. I wind up writing all kinds of dumb wrappers or "un-wrappers" to fix things that shouldn't need fixing.

If all I did was write business programs in a relational database environment, I guess I could see the point of all that .NET crap. But trying to write scientific programs, it is just mountains of goop that crowd out the entire point of the system -- to solve problems.

I can write 2 programs -- 1 in C (with a GUI of sorts) and 1 in C++.NET (with an immensely complex GUI). The C version will run in about 1 megabyte of RAM. The C++.NET version will run in about 90-100 megabytes of RAM. The programs will perform the same task, although from a different philosophy, however the C version, being about a million kilograms lighter, will outrun the C++.NET version hands down.

Indefinity

Infinity may be mentioned more often, but indefinity is more closely that which can be achieved. It does not claim something as grandiose as infinity, yet it can still be immense beyond anyone's imagination.

And it is not to claim that indefinity can ever replace infinity in mathematics, since that is clearly false -- try to divide any number by 0. The answer is not indefinite, it is infinity. But indefinity is more of a description of physical reality, where a quantum entity is not a continuum, nor is space a continuum of zero sized points so much as a set of locations that are occupied by something that can be measured.

So, in the physical world, unless there are truly an infinite number of objects all exactly crammed into an exactly boundless space that is infinitely large, then there is only an indefinity.

Mentally, one can construct sentences that logically conjugate all the permutations of concepts, even resulting in infinite infinities, and so forth. Yet not a single infinity can be demonstrated in a physical way. There is in a sense a real, kinetic and participatory indefinity. There is only a potential abstraction with which to demonstrate infinity.

I would think of indefinity as being a worker class and infinity as being upper class. The upper class has loftier speech, but the worker class provides for the leisure to speak it -- indefinity is the coal which is burned to light the artwork. I would think that Mark Twain might have had a mite more respect for the lesser of the classes.

After all, what is infinity but an immensely large bag packed with an uncountably immense number of zeros?

Workaholism

It is a terrible problem, workaholism. I'm not sure it is a purely American problem, but certainly many Americans suffer from it.

The reasons Americans are prone to workaholism are economic and social, of course, but also endemic to industrial, highly competitive structured environments. It is just as easy to be workaholic on the farm, as well, where 24 hours might not be enough to get everything done. Americans tend to honor caffeinated beverages and individual achievement -- we try to race the Devil and expect to win.

It hurts your body and probably your mind to repeat anything over and over ad infinitum. This is the death of humanity but the realm of machinery. Humans are less likely to integrate huge amounts of information of such repetitious nature without huge amounts of error and negligence -- wearing out attention, assured of mistakes. It seems fair to allow for machines this realm of capability.

So, "one day", it is often said, we will all live in leisure and give over our minds to purely esoteric and profound knowledge -- no further need to get our hands dirty. The machines will do all the wretched work.

But there are no days like that. Even with huge amounts of actual repetitious actions done by machinery, there remains immense amounts of wretched work left for humans, if not even more than before machines were employed "to simplify" our lives. So I toil away, climbing to the peaks of the next horizon, hoping to find the sea of leisure, where I can say "I am finished."

Yet, the reward is more in line with the pellet for the rat in a plastic box. The lever is pressed and pressed until a pellet comes out. So long as the pellet is given at intervals that are at least sooner than the spontaneous recovery time, the rat will press the lever with undiminished vigor until it dies from exhaustion.

The Other Hand

I was born right handed. However, due to the rigors of repetitive stress injury over the years, I've become left handed.

My right brain controls my left hand, so it gets kind of mean sometimes. It is not happy about being the "main hand". I still eat right handed, throw balls right handed, all that stuff. But I must use a keyboard and mouse in a left handed way. After a while it rebels, and makes stupid mistakes -- which usually means my right hand must now hit dozens of backspaces.

Such an asshole, my left hand. I've come to distrust everyone's left hands.

Energy For Beer

No of course not - you cannot get energy from beer, beyond the psychological effects of drinking it. You can throw a lit match into it and just pfffts the flame out. You can put wires in it an it just sits there. If you pass a current through it, not exactly recommended, it just bubbles a little bit. It acts more like a resistor than anything that adds energy.

No, the energy is FOR the beer, not the other way around. Beer is not easily replaced by any other stuff. Wine is just not the same. Whiskey is definitely too much. You can't just chug mugs of tequila like you can chug mugs of beer. The Egyptians knew the importance of beer.

(Hmmm. I don't really like beer, or any alcoholic beverage.) But there are definite beer enthusiasts out there, entire football stadiums full. There are sports bars and pizza bars and barbecues and backyard cookouts, all with their favorite brews and some with their own breweries. But to make beer, you gotta have energy.

Certainly everyone knows about 60 cycle hum. This is the familiar hum of everyday house electricity in America. Light bulbs are all blinking 60 times per second. There are coils of wire that are being reversed in magnetic field polarity 60 times per second. One only need to produce very small balls that vibrate 60 times per second to produce energy. The balls will become slightly warmer. One can make many tiny pendulums that tick their 60 cycle ticks and produce a machine that perpetually runs, so long as the 60 cycle hum exists.

I shall name the resulting brew "HUMS Beer" -- from the land of 60 hertz.

Sliding Into Oblivion

One thing that really bothers me is that the bees are dying. I've read several articles about it, watched a BBC TV news bit about it, and I've read some of the scientific magazines blurbs about it.

Since writing this I have learned that a kind of parasitic bacteria is responsible for the plight of bees. Also, the likelihood that they will survive as a species is at least as high as ever.

It also bothers me that although large percentages of the bees are dying in large areas of the Earth, that nobody has a good theory why.

Although I am as likely to blame global warming (or climate change, if you prefer), but I don't think that is the sole reason, but may be something that worsens an already existing problem.

Diseases have been tested for, and only small numbers of the bee deaths can be linked to any specific disease. Likewise with mites, which are a problem, but not so much to account for all the deaths.

There is a clue -- that bees go out of the hive to forage for food and do their pollen thing, but don't come back. Slowly the hive is less and less populated until it is unable to provide for the next generation. Perhaps the hive limps along but it is not productive, and the fields are left unpollinated.

Could it be that simultaneously, all over the world, that there is a bee assassin growing in the weeds? Some kinds of poisonous spiders or an increase in bee eating lizards. But usually things like that are limited to a specific region, and would be obvious for their effects on other animals than just bees.

Are ants dying also? Are there other insects that have similar habits as bees that suffer the same fate? I wish I knew. It is an interesting problem, but I am not equipped to go out in the fields and solve it. Besides, there are highly competant beekeepers and scientists already trying to figure it out.

Trees of Forests

Trees of trees. Worlds of worlds. Infinite flatland, into which our little minds dig little holes, and discover that nothing is truly flat, and that mostly things consist of the holes.

Reaching into the holes are long tunnels, each of which branches into many more tunnels, and each of those has tunnels, until the branches are lost to our senses.

Silly, perhaps, but this is the fate of all analysis. One looks at a hair, to discover that it has little hairs of its own, and each part has more parts until we reach a level where only conjecture has tread. Languages for computers also develop such branches and divergences.

Almost all of the attempts to create sensible and simple procedural statements which have no shades of gray, only things which are either true or not true. If one wants to test the value of gray things, then the statement still demands that the gray be some value that is both greater than 0 and less than perhaps 255. Yet a human may not be able to directly measure the grayness of something of such little difference, unless the gray values are large but adjacent regions, where the eye creates a visible boundary between their otherwise ambiguous gray values.

The simple languages turn out to grow very large complexities despite themselves. But computer languages do not generally write themselves. Humans, over many centuries and generations, have taught themselves language, each particular one starting out rather simple, but accretion after accretion of "ifs ands and buts" eventually makes the language so complicated that few people can ever learn it completely.

English has over 500,000 "normal" words, and far more than that counting all the specialized jargon of various disciplines. There are millions of animals, plants and other organisms that we have named. We say they are Latin or Greek based, as in Lepidapteraor Telescopic as well as completely artificial words like P54 or Pentium.

In addition to those kinds of words there are others that only mean something to a system, such as account numbers, license plate numbers, part numbers, device identifiers, chemical names. These are infinite words, which have no enumeration in a dictionary, but are integral to some database method or filing system in a business or government.

But imagine that for every group of 100 words that I create a title for it. From then on, whenever I want to convey that set of 100 words, I merely invoke its title. In a similar way, each group of program instructions to a computer will be give some little title. DIR means "directory display" to a certain class of computer. We don't tell the computer some tedious string of binary numbers, which each program consists of, in sometimes utterly complicated and difficult forms. It is much more sane to assign a symbol to each range of identical program strings, just as having a title for a book.

But each group of programs that comprises a system will have a name as well, as in XP or Linux, and this group of electronic components that interconnect processing units with memory subsystems, graphical displays and I/O devices is called either a Desktop or a Laptop, sometimes with only a slight difference, usually in weight and size.

The alphabet that this computer uses has a name called Ascii, and more generally there can be Unicode which contains a root core of Ascii. Symbols with yet more groupings are symbolized yet again and become members of other groups.

If mankind exists for another thousand years, how much of this complexity will have grown? Or will it all just be forgotten, like the fish passing each nameless other fish in the ocean, or each indistinguishable atom in every indistinguishable molecule of intergalactic gas.

Trauma Central

It's been many years now, this Iraq thing. It is no secret that I am disappointed in my country, more specifically our NeoCon Republicans. I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat, although I probably lean away from Republicans the most.

I'm not against war, per se. If some country was to attack ours, or if terrorists are attacking us, I see no problem in fighting back with everything we got. But that is not what has happened. We started a preemptive war with Iraq, based on sheer greed and typical boorish dystopia, partially from revenge by the idiot son of a prior one term president.

Wikipedia - A dystopia (from the Greek δυσ- and τόπος, alternatively, cacotopia,[1] kakotopia or anti-utopia) is a fictional society that is the antithesis of utopia. It is usually characterized by an oppressive social control, such as an authoritarian or totalitarian government.

I am getting on in years, so when I see this is as one of our most grievous mistakes, I am taking in consideration many wars and battles in our history. Vietnam is probably worse in sheer numbers of deaths, so far, but Iraq is worse for trying to extricate ourselves. We depend too much on the oil in that region, and to just drop Iraq and gather our broken marbles in a hasty retreat is not possible. As much as I would hate to spend another day there, or kill another young person over it, we have ourselves in a monkey trap.

I have very little hope in a friendly relationship with most of the factions in Iraq and most of southern Asia. Only a kind of economic balance with India and China has any hope of success. One cannot reason with religious fanatics or revenge-seeking barbarians, and that includes the ones in our own country.

My granddaughter may grow up with these problems still festering, just like the horrid slaughter that has gone on in Israel and Palestine for the last 60 years. And as technical measures and countermeasures continue to escalate, the festering becomes ever more destructive. I don't think any place on Earth will be safe, except where the most draconian security measures are in place -- and living in such a way is pretty much the dystopia I already mentioned.

Iran is probably next. If there is money at stake, if the World economy is at stake, then no other mechanism of politics will be able to prevent a war with Iran. Not unless the people in Iran come to their senses, or the big capital countries decide to abandon the oil and isolate that region in some other way. Islam may or may not be the only issue in some of their thinking, but power definitely is one issue.

For some people, the bean in the monkey trap is more important than anything, more than their children's lives, more than the lives of all creatures on the Earth. They will sacrifice anything and everything to keep the bean. The bean is power.

Jackpot - Natural Royal Flush

I just got tired after a day of programming. So I went into Secondlife, found a casino, bet a few hundred L$ (about 4-5 real $) and hit the jackpot for L$150,000. That is worth about 570 real $. Nice.

I even took a snapshot.

Train of Fools

A man wearing a long dark coat hefted a heavy suitcase as the train pulled into the station. A few people got off and soon the conductors signaled all aboard. As other people hurried into the train, the man hefted his suitcase up the step in the doorway, turned right and walked down the crowded aisle, patiently waiting as women stowed their shopping bags and gathered their children. He then sat in a seat next to another older man who seemed engrossed in a book, shoving the heavy suitcase beneath the seat.

The train soon huffed and shuddered into action, followed soon after by the conductors gathering tickets, "tickeTS!" and punching holes in them. The conductor paused when he reached the man with the heavy suitcase. "Bartonvillia? Not many get off there anymore," he said as he punched the ticket.

The man in the dark coat said nothing, but nodded. The conductor moved on to the next seats. "tickeTS!"

There isn't much to look at on the way past Silvertown, especially in the evening, just a few lights in the farms that float by the train windows. So everyone seemed to just stare at the others, sometimes looking at their watches, sometimes looking in their pockets for things. The man in the dark coat sat motionless, staring at nothing.

There were two children in the seats a couple rows ahead that looked back over their seats. They were perhaps 7, at most 9, and they had impish looks in their eyes as they scanned the people behind them. They both seemed to freeze as their eyes met those of the man with the dark coat. He looked back at them as though they were rats. He then looked away, staring at the exit sign over the door at the end of the car.

There were several towns yet to go, but the man felt somewhat relieved that the woman and her children left at the next stop, in Candlewood. No one else got on the train to replace them. The man with the dark coat closed his eyes and leaned back to rest his head against the small padding. It was not long until the train had chugged and shuddered up to speed again.

There were mostly small farms and trailer parks out this far, at least until the high walls and turrets of Bartonvillia Monastery. No one ever went there except on a few certain days, like the upcoming Day of The Bones.

As the people got off the train in ones and twos on these stations in the sticks, there eventually was only the old man who read his book and the man with the dark coat and heavy suitcase, sitting on the same row.

However when Roselander stop came along, the second to last stop, the old man closed his book, mummbled "Excusa, Excusa...", arose and hobbled past the man with the dark coat and his suitcase. He walked as though he had no pain free joints, with a cane, and slowly lowered himself to the step and then to the landing. The last sounds of him were the clop clop of his cane on the wooden platform.

Then there was merely the dark coated man and the conductor to hear the huffing and clanking of the train as it labored to its last passenger stop. Not many stopped there, but their was one who would. Even so close to his stop, the man with the dark suit was almost nodding off, only to be awoken with "Next Stopppp! Bartonvillia!

As the train huffed to a stop, the man hefted his suitcase and as soon as the door hissed opened, stepped down to the cobblestones and looked over to the dimly illuminated street leading toward the caretaker's house, and sighed. There was no one near the train stop, no one on the street. He shifted his heavy suitcase to his better arm and walked the noisy cobblestone path to the street. Behind him the train shuddered a few moments, then began to backup the opposite direction it had just traveled.

(continues...)

Fly Kite for Papa

Here is another entry, another day, another essentially mundane description of life from the point of view of someone who, if nothing else, is not you.

From my office I can open a door to the patio which overlooks a lagoon, mostly ocean water from the Pacific. Beyond the lagoon I can see the far shore and the roads that lead to various shopping centers, car dealerships, and the freeway. Beyond that is the ocean itself to the infinite horizon.

I thank the stars that I live here. If I watch the news I see the lives of desperate people who live in squalor, in countries scourged by war and death, in places where the weather is a constant enemy, in places where misery is normal.

I remember the places I've lived, some just as bad, with tornado wreckage in Texas, with frozen wasteland in Nebraska, in the deep snow and icy winds of Minnesota, the thin cold air of Denver. Yet, except for occasional murderers, they were not ravaged by war.

I have seen many movies about wars. I was in the Navy during Vietnam, and by sheer luck never had to face a firefight or a minefield. I don't envy those who had to fight in the hot, sticky jungles, or in the dust storms of the deserts, or who died just practicing for war -- in an accident, some mistake that cost more than a good grade in their record.

Afterward, after the war is over, no one really wanted to talk of it, to brag about this or lament about that. They wanted to just not think about it anymore. They didn't want to see the faces of those whom they killed, or of their good buddies whom were killed instead -- to wonder why they instead were spared.

So, like me, they became workers in the American machine. I chose computers, others chose businesses or factories or farms. We raised our families until the next war came along. The next war came, and it wants to use our children as killers for reasons that don't make obvious sense, perhaps for patriotism, or for revenge, or for the Administration, or for nothing.

I had only a girl, and she did not choose to become a soldier, but instead became a mother. She also had a girl, and is about to have another girl. This means, just by statistics, that it is unlikely they will be soldiers.

And I wonder, in the future when I am gone, will this still be happening? Will there be wars forever? Will more mothers lose their sons and daughters in some foreign land? Will my descendants be killed by terrorists, by some kind of virus, or by a suicide bomber in a kindergarten?

Will this house be overgrown by cacti and scrub brush -- the normal vegetation? Will this view of the lagoon be lost to time, lost to the ravages of heat waves and super storms, never to be inherited, but to be uninhabited forever after, when our country has ceased to maintain this landscape and the desert returns?

I shouldn't worry about it, I guess. I lived this long, and I survived many close calls. My children are responsible for their own lives. I can only help them for a little while. They must fly the kite by themselves in the end. If the kite doesn't fly, it is not my fault.

Dust in Gods Eye

Romans and Egyptions are often equated to their gigantic creations, some of which still stand today, if not for another thousand years. If we do not purposely remove each stone from the pyramids, they might still last another 10,000 years or more. Also, during in a similar period of time, some relatively few sessions of cataclysmic weathering might do away with them altogether.

In space, especially, there are much tinier things that can be many billions of years old, unchanging in the coldest shadows of comets or stones. These little tiny specks of matter have always been there -- in one form or another -- before any thing else. And the tinier a thing is the more of them there can exist. Only a single universe the size of the universe can exist, but octillions of things can exist if they are smaller than .5 octillionths of the universe.

This is the "bottom up" approach. This states that all these little bits of matter and energy pre-existed (or were created by some mysterious process) and that they have recombined and recombined into much more complex and powerful structures. It is often said that something is insignificantly small -- so that it does not matter. This is clearly not possible. It is very important that something be in each and every state before it can be called "something".

A piece of dust is an imprecise phrase. Dust can be infintesimally small or can be the size of large grains of sand. But very small dust is actually atomic or subatomic phenomena and very large dust might actually be gravel or pebbles. But the general idea remains that whatever these bits of existence are called, it is by successively larger constructions or supercombinations that they eventually become livers and feet and brains, or even just the condensed and crystallized lava we call rocks.

How many levels of combination are there? It may be that combinations of any finite number of elements is finite as well. Yet if there were 100 different things, there would be 100 factorial ways to rearrange those 100 things. For an octillion factorial, things get really hard to name. It is not true infinity but practical infinity. The universe may perish as a whole before every combination could ever be achieved and there may be some mutually exclusive combinations so that they could not be simultaneously achieved.

A human being, with its trillions of cells and intricate intercombinations, represents an astounding number of simultaneous states. A mouse is only a tiny bit less complicated when this method of abstraction is applied. And a single celled organism is only a slight bit less complicated still, since it is still consisting of trillions of atoms and must survive in an even greater complexity in its environment.

To a single cell, every rogue molecule that bobs by is a potential destroyer. It might be catalytic like chlorine or platinum. It might be a solvent or corrosive or able to plug up chemical pathways. And there may be huge numbers of rogue molecules in the soup, such as in our own blood, and the cells are under constant threat of disintegration. We don't consciously care of such battles -- at our level of abstraction we are more afraid of tigers or sharks or other people with various weapons. Yet the battles all wage simultaneously.

The idea of God having purposely created us from the Top Down contains within it the problem of having to also create all of the tiny atoms and subatomic apparatus that makes us function. And all of those top down designs -- elephants, trees, fish, stones, water, stars -- all must also be made of immutably identical bits of bottom up designs.

Therefore, God would not have just created a man, willy nilly, but must have created the entire system of bits and pieces from which everything else is created. In this way it matters little whether God creates a pig or a chicken, the little atomic bits are no different, only the combinations of them ever distinguish the higher order things.

Pigs are kind of like shuffling the cards one way, and chickens are shuffled in another way. Humans are yet another shuffle.

Likewise are words, with letters like a,b,c and sometime symbols like ! and ?, there are little bits that combine into higher order abstractions. Words, phrases, sentences, concepts, articles, books, bookshelves, book rooms, ad infinitum, all made from the dust of letters, and letters formed in the dust of human minds.

History is also made from bits. As time goes on the bits roll up into a giant dust bunny, they form into lumps and landscapes of history, and time keeps on leaving a trail of dust behind.

2 Jobs

There was a time when I had a very good, high paying job and was in the prime of my life. Things were pretty good, and I knew I couldn't complain about it.

Still, I complained about it. It wasn't that the money wasn't good. I wasn't that the job was boring, or not challenging. It was very high tech, recognizing objects with computer vision, searching through mountains of text for patterns of concepts, ,etc.

It wasn't that -- it was the damn marketing people. I don't know what they teach those guys in college but it doesn't have anything to do with science or logic. It has to do with lying and believing your own lies, and trying to force other people to believe them. They are a lot like terrorists in that way.

Anyhow, it was my undoing. I couldn't make their lies come true, I told them so, and refused to play any further such marketing or management games. They could reorganize themselves into oblivion for all I cared.

Now, about a decade later, I'm much older and less fired up about things. I don't make so much money, and I have to work on whatever jobs come my way, and sometimes when it rains it pours.

So things are good again, at least for a while. The only problem is that I have to work on too many things for my onset of frail hands and misfiring heart. But, I'm not going to argue with marketing people anymore. They can believe what they want. If I have to, I'll just pretend that I believe it too.

Obesity In Software Development

I have written some pretty large, piggy programs in my day, but never until now did I write a program that does virtually nothing, and consumes 50 megabytes doing it. As soon as I press a button that makes the program do something, it jumps the size up to 60 megabytes.

This marvel of consuming memory is the output of Visual Studio 2005 WinForms. Usually I write programs that might use 2 or 3 megabytes until creating a huge number of image arrays or whatever that then jump the size up to maybe 30-40 megabytes. But the purpose of the program is to search through huge amounts of data, using the images in memory repeatedly in the algorithms.

I have a feeling that the Visual Studio 2005 "Common Language" stuff makes for very inefficient programming. This makes memory and disk makers happy, of course. But it somehow just seems plain old piggish to me.

I think of Microsoft products as the gigantosauruses of modern times.

The Brain of The World -- Coffee or Not?

I have recently been discussing such topics as artificial life and artificial intelligence with a fellow who has collected quite a range of discussions, videos and interesting pictures related to these subjects. Naturally, these are an afront to the "creationists" of the world.

To many people, especially from my boyhood home in Nebraska, these are just "not to be discussed." Narrow minds abound in some parts of the USA, every bit as narrow as the Islamic Taliban or the Protestant Puritans that crawled ashore in early American colonizations.

Phooey. These subjects are mostly profoundly affecting our lives as we speak. The very techniques that a computer scientist can use to demonstrate artificial life can be used by nature to mutate bacteria from a friendly form into a virulent deadly infection. The belief is a choice made by humans, but the forces of nature do not care who believes them. If someone wants to substitute "God" for "force of nature", that is their prerogative. It does not change the equation, however -- God does not seem to care who believes what, either.

AL, the forms of life that can be simulated in a computer, or made from machinery of various types, currently are nothing to fear, and are more comical than onerous. There is no malevolent artificial mind that can coldly decide to eliminate humans, nor even a computerized Minivan that can decide to cruise around, looking for victims.

However, there are also no iron-clad restrictions on such behavior should it ever arise -- an extremely unlikely event. If a Minivan "suddenly evolved" such a brain from its pile of wires and actuators and sensors, humans could simply refuse to sell it gasoline or whatever fuel it requires, and it would have a very short spree.

But such fears are the food of science fiction, not current science fact. Yes, there are very powerful computers and networks that form a gigantic network covering the entire world. Yet, even these vast "potential minds" of electronic form simply lie dormant, awaiting humans to pound the keys. Humans must provide the "desire" -- that is not inherent in the design of a network.

The most that a network, without human intervention, could ever "want" is for all of its nodes to behave like good little nodes, shoveling packets of data from one place to another. If there are no packets to shovel around -- Oh, well. The network does not become agitated and begin to synthesize packets other than occasional "r u there" kinds of inquiries to test the veracity of the network.

If too many errors occur on too many nodes, then there is some agitation, but usually resulting in a reconfiguration using nodes that function normally, and ousting the nodes that misbehave, thereby re-routing packet flow around the bad ones. This is normal, desired behavior -- designed that way on purpose by humans, and not just some arbitrary decision made by an emergent machine intelligence.

So, at this level of operation, the huge, world wide web is like a network of nerve cells in the arms and legs of the world. Sensations pass up the "pipes" to the spinal chord (the so-called backbone of the Internet) and responses to those sensations (i.e. search results, email packets, whatever) come back down the "pipes". There is no centralized brain as such, where all decisions are arbitrated by reason or conditioned reflex. So far, the only true brains in the world wide web are human.

Servers, although somewhat centralized, are still distributed widely about the world, so that no single set of servers can be the "central brain" of the whole Internet. The closest analog to that might be the "Name Server" which translates things like "www.humptydumpty.org" to 162.3.41.211 or some such numeric address so that computers can successfully send and receive packets using those addresses with routing functions.

But even those servers are distributed around, only occasionally refreshing their database of names with the central repository. This acts only as a kind of bottleneck which forces all computers in the world to somehow obtain updated information from the central database, yet there is no control flowing back to those computers, only tranlation tables. The very place where centralized control can take place is not programmed, by either the center nor the outlying nodes, to do anything beyond name translation.

So if the "Name Server" became agitated and began ordering other computers about, they would all pull up their skirts and run away -- at worse unable to translate names, but otherwise unaffected by the petulant, newly "conscious and beligerent" Name Server.

Intelligence agencies, mom and pop, girls, boys, spies, criminals, companies all mix their packets together all over the network in a gigantic hodge podge of data, which even companies like MS and GGL struggle to monitor for indexing purposes. Even if you try to get your data to show up in various databases, it might never make it, or take many days or weeks before it shows up.

I think the Internet may have the total intelligence of a starfish at this moment. A starfish does have some abilities to make decisions, and so does the Internet -- but not reasoned decisions. Like if you cut off a starfish's leg, it might grow a new one. Same with Internet. If you provide food for the starfish it will consume it, and if you provide food (computers and modems) for the Internet, it will consume them.

But the Internet will not assume control of the world like the huge computer in Colossus, or the HAL9000 in 2001. It simply has no desire to do so and there are plenty of humans out there actively attempting to prevent such controls by other humans (who ARE problems -- THE problems of the Internet that so much energy is expended attempting to quell.)

It is far more likely that some hacker named something like "8MyDog" or "33tm3" will steal from you, or send you a virus, etc. It will not be a conscious Internet, only a conscious crook which uses the Internet.

Therefore, even though the current form of Internet is neutral, the future is still dangerous, and AL could be installed on the Internet by malevolent humans, whose evil desires would be dutifully carried out by the obedient nodes of the Internet -- no less efficiently than if they were to pull the trigger of a gun.

Anyway, it will be quite a while before artificial beings are a true threat to humans. But, for all my explanations that it would be difficult or silly to expect such things, it is not completely impossible.

There is always an outside chance that somehow, someday, the Internet will WAKE UP and smell the coffee. Just make sure that your modem does not attempt to drink the coffee. Coffee may be good for business, good for talks with friends-- but is not good for your computer. Do not let the computer, modem, nor any component of your Internet connection drink coffee under any condition.

Knocking at Limbo's Door

There are several things happening in my life (real life -- as opposed to and in addition to my "SL" online second life) that are pulling me in a lot of opposing directions.

I don't feel at all secure about any employment, even though I have many irons in the fire, and several real opportunities right now. The way this country is headed, toward a kind of corporate feudalism or reactionary socialism, either way, could make life much harder for people like me. The dwindling energy resources will put an additional strain on all countries, economically and politically. Cruelty, I think, is the most probable next stage -- when it is not easy to be generous.

No corporation wants to hire people over 50. They sometimes have to because of laws, or they have to because there isn't a younger person that can do exactly whatever it is they want done. But there is always a sword hanging by a hair over your head at that age. Always many go-getters ready to go and get your job before you do.

In the meantime I must work many part-time gigs. I don't mind that so much when I'm working, it's just that it is over with eventually and there is the insecurity of finding a new one. I am not able to retire -- and I wonder if I ever will be able to -- so I'll probably work until death. Or I will be discarded and live in poverty in a socialistic nightmare with no money to support it -- much like the Soviet Union became.

Death is necessary for us older people -- we have to get out of the way of our own grandchildren. I just hope it isn't some warehouse for the feeble that I'm stuffed into -- waiting for life's final breath. I would rather just work until I drop dead. Work is all there really is left for me now. I live to work.

Update To The Situation

[Image was removed ...Picture of large ice chunk melting into the ocean...]

I have been very busy in the last month and have neglected my blog. I have even experimented with another blog program (offered to Opera Web Browser users, of which I am one -- sometimes).

Anyway, the main problems that I feel are worth writing about keep on happening, and I must put in my two tenths of a cent.

The Situation: Politics, Science, Time, Energy, Space.

Politics is the art of lying, naming it diplomacy, and pretending it is noble.

Science is the opposite of Politics, the art of telling the truth in the driest manner that steps on the most toes and yet -- pretending it is noble.

Time goes by, draining our lives into the blackness of future death, only sooner or later depending on how well we use the time left.

Energy is consumed. The only thing that stops energy from being consumed is the fact that energy runs out. The last drop of gasoline is burned, the last coal is shoveled into the boiler, the last log is thrown into the hearth.

Space is plentiful, although habitable space decreases rapidly as the number of inhabitants increases.

Politics needs space, time and energy to diplomatically lie about what problems they promised to address when elected. They quickly use up all of it, and solve no problems.

Science is very good at pinpointing the exact problems, the exact amount of time needed and the exact amount of energy needed, as well as the exact amount of space required for implementation. Rarely is there enough of any one item, and usually there is a lack of all elements. Science is not magic and cannot conjure up elements from thin air.

Time ticks by, closer to that last feeble beat of the heart before it ceases.

Energy, which in animals depends on food, air, water, a beating heart and functioning brain, can never be enough for the simple fact of entropy-- the reduction of orderly stuff into disorderly stuff is relentless.

Gore has already went out on a loop to tell his environmental chaos stories. Anti-alarmists are out anti-alarming people in droves. They have decided that all scientists are evil (except Republican scientists) and everyone else who points out such uneasy facts to the King Without Clothing is thereafter doomed to a sneering disregard.

Global Climate problems are not best asked of humans -- ask the animals. Ask the plants. Which animals migrate where? Which ones are unable to survive. Just count the dead ones. And watch where the cockroaches go. If cockroaches can't live someplace, it ain't going to be a good place for humans to live.

2560 square meters

That is how many meters of virtual land I now own in Second Life's virtual worlds (the portions of this cartoon schematic that is Rocky.) It allows for about 400 or less "prims", which are the basic primitive objects with which to build houses, walls, pictures, TVs, couches, beds, and whatever else one might create in that world.

A Famous Presidential Candidate has a little space in Second Life, too..."

It is also possible to create an almost unlimited number of "prims" which are not actually invoked within the world, but are stored in the "Inventory", a database of things like objects, clothing, alternative avatars, skins, guns, cars, boxes of stuff that other people gave away, or things you might have bought but haven't found a place to put it.

You can put huge amounts of prims inside a "box" (1 prim) in the form of its "List of Contents". In order to use anything in the box, it must be copied back out of the box and then "rezzed" into the world. This clumsy step makes the "storage box" method not quite as handy as just leaving it all in inventory. Yet, in order to clean up the huge lists so you can find stuff, putting things in boxes is attractive.

I tend to simplify all objects that I make or buy -- first of all taking them apart and deleting any pieces which are unnecessary for its function. For instance, a TV will come with vestigial speakers -- delete, and an unnecessary "remote control" -- delete, and a TV stand that isn't really needed, -- delete. What was once maybe 12 prims is now only 2 prims -- the TV and it's screen.

I came across a device called a "People detector" which maintains a list of people who come within a 10 meters radius. I removed the script -- the part that actually does the function -- and put it in something that always stays in the house -- like the coffee table. It still does its function -- and takes no prims.

There are radios, but I just put them inside lamps, and the lamp is simplified to a single light bulb or ball -- just floating above the living space. All in all, I am using several thousand individual functional devices, but most of them are in the form of scripts within a minimalist array of prims used for the walls, floors, rugs, couches, lamps, porches, and so forth.

I also have land which is somewhat fragmented, so that is in 4 different main properties, and even more actual "living spaces" and maze-like rooms.

The main building cluster 1 has a living room and a bed room, plus some floating rooms. Each room has "Teleport" pads that lead to some of the other living spaces. The teleports that cross the SIM boundary can only do system map requests, allowing the avatar to teleport or not, whereas the teleports within a SIM are normal and direct transfer operations, such as from one room to another a few meters away.

Another building in property 1, along with the Pyramid Garden, is used only for a kind of museum -- it has lots of pictures and hallways. There is more "walk about" room in this area.

Another strange tubular building floats above the others like some kind of baroque UFO, but it has beds, chairs and wide screen TV, as well as a panoramic view of the land.

Another living space floats at the 700 meter level -- above building 1, a pyramid with chairs and a radio. Falling from this level reveals many intermediate buildings that various architects have left half-finished in the clouds.

Building 2 is in a separately purchased strip of maybe 64 square meters that connects with building 3 and (its cross-simulator brother - which has a TV, some chairs and nice, stained glass windows, beds etc.) It is in danger of being surrounded by other stuff, signs and so forth. I may raise it to the 400 meter level, just for the heck of it.

Building 3 is the monkey temple, a simple structure which optically deludes the avatar into seeing anything but whatever ugly signs may still exist in the land.

Each of these places represents many man hours of labor in instructing the 3D rendering software in shaping, texturing and programming the primitive objects which then form the world and operate whatever teleports, devices, doors and so forth.

Also I have designed clothing. It is possible to buy clothing with L$ (funny money) that is used for in-world currency. Mostly I make symbols on T-shirts or Jackets and use a limited number of adequate pants on a sort of "out of the box" avatar that only vaguely resembles me. I haven't yet decided on any "skins" which seem somewhat pretentious to me, but I may go ahead and do that. It is hard to look like yourself, but easy to look like a thug in a spiked collar.

So I guess I own a slightly above average amount of land, perhaps $200 worth in real US currency. But the value is not in money, but in the artistic works that I've labored to create on this amount of land. No amount of money would seem enough to have done this just to sell it.

I have only just begun to understand the entirety of capabilities in Second Life. I don't know if I will do everything possible to do -- just the things that interest me. For instance, I have no interest in dancing yet some people have gone to great effort in producing various animations such as dances, sexy walks, sultry poses -- and especially some ridiculous antics (perhaps a tribute to the Ministry of Funny Walks of Monty Python fame.)

I will remain slightly more dignified and quiet in Second Life. I will just do art and sculptures, perhaps a little fancy programming here and there if I can do it worthy enough. I think I can.

The Death of Planet Earth

Our planet has been wiped of life several times in its 4.5 billion year history. The first time was during its creation, since no life could exist on a planet that was mostly high temperature gases and melted rock, with no water and no place to evolve.

The second time is debatable, mostly because it was about 3 billion years ago and things are very difficult to clearly prove about life in the early, tumultuous centuries when planets could crash together to form smaller pieces that formed the moon and more sterile, melted rock and high temperature gases again on the surface of our planet.

But with each new generation of Earth, and thus for the new generations of life forms that evolved here, the traces and clues to what happened are slightly more provable. Myriad asteroid collisions, chemical imbalances, runaway hot and cold periods and "positive feedback" events caused life to snuff out nearly to zero many times over.

Usually, after a bad wipe out, new life forms were free to evolve from the ashes. What once would have been a toxic environment for the majority of species of archaic single-celled organisms might become the preferred soup for the new breeds. The switch from hydrogen or methane based chemistry to oxygen was one of the most severe changes, but was an important one. It resulted in whatever microbes eventually evolved into worms and fish and apes -- thus into us.

But the wipe outs continued. Framed by random punctuations of bad weather, collisions from space debris, runaway feedback events like methane or CO2 greenhouse warming or total ice ages, life had thousands of periods of relative stability. Some of these periods lasted for millions of years, some for only a few thousand years.

Variations in solar radiation can account for some of these periodic catastrophes. There are sunspot cycles today that effect our weather. So are nearby stellar explosions which cause high energy particles and cosmic rays to effect the gases in our atmosphere and thus effect the cloud cover and precipitation over certain periods in history.

All of the events happened in ways that eventually allowed life to never be completely extincted. Maybe 90% of life was wiped out, maybe only 1%, maybe more than 99%. It varied greatly, and all the reasons are difficult to prove since the fossils that remain from eons past are not always helpful in determining the causes of death.

Yet, some events are clearly distinguished by coincident volcanoes, asteroid debris, continental collisions and separations, biochemical changes, methane ice melts, great fires and many other large scale murderers. And there are many cases of animals themselves causing their own starvation by eating all available food to extinction. Usually, obviously, there is not a total starvation, merely a massive reduction in population of the offending glutton, such as when coyotes eat too many rabbits.

But once in a while there evolves some animal that is so successful and deadly that it completely wipes out its food source and that is that. It no longer survives. Most of the great carnivores in the past fit into this pattern, although sometimes bad luck and bad weather helped nail their coffins shut. Sometimes the food source itself is what changes, such as when only poisonous plants are left alive when all non-poisonous plants have been consumed by an unstoppable herbivore.

Sometimes the culprit can be oxygen buildup by photosynthesis, resulting in a great burn-off when certain gases or fuel sources spontaneously combust. Whole forests can be felled by sudden methane releases into a high oxygen environment. Yet seeds might survive the holocausts, allowing rebirth of the forest once the chemistry of the planet has stabilized.

Obvious to all but those with industrial "blinders" in place are the current chemicals and pollutants produced by our modern technological civilization and its ever increasing population of human consumers. We are a very successful carnivore and herbivore. We can even eat bacteria or fungi directly. There are few things we cannot eat, but we can usually eat the things that can eat those inedible things. In short, if we set out minds to it, we could eat the entire planet down to the irreducible rocks, lava and metallic core.

Then what? Once the last shred of edible material had been consumed, then what? Do we eat ourselves ala Soylent Green? That could not last long even if we could lower ourselves to cannibalism without a societal collapse. There are practical limits to the amount of humans that can exist on this planet under ANY conditions. There are even greater limits to the number of humans that can CO-EXIST with other life forms that make life worth living here.

Presumably, by necessity, our species will somehow stabilize at a sustainable population, or we will collapse almost to zero. But we will not grow at the current rate for much longer. Whether the number is 10 billion, 100 billion, or only 1 billion -- I don't know. If other planets can be utilized for mankind, perhaps the higher number is possible. If that is not possible, then perhaps even less than 1 billion is the stable point.

Oil will not last forever, nor will coal or any other kind of fuel that we currently utilize. Nuclear energy might help, especially if fusion reactors are possible, yet almost nobody believes that technology is any less problematic in the long run. Even just the entropy of the system would result in a kind of heat death when the nuclear engines radiated their lethal qualities into the environment. Nothing is free of penalty. 100 billion humans cannot live here without converting the planet into a kind of hell.

Perhaps humans could cut back on their life styles to that of deer or rabbits, but even overpopulations of deer and rabbits has disastrous results. What are the coyotes for the humans? Other humans? Would we result in a "Time Machine" world of Eloi and Morlocks? Would a privileged class of humans simply exterminate "excess" members of the non-privileged class?

I hope not, and think that we are probably not that evil as a group. We would find some other, less hideous method. Just use rational birth control methods -- find ways of balancing our chemical systems with nature -- don't leave all the lights on in all the skyscrapers all the time. There are solutions to a sufficiently motivated population. Bad weather, starvation and the decomposition of civilizations will be highly motivating.

Yet Another Climate Change Warning

Today, in a variety of newspapers, web sites and on TV, the "news" that global climate change is a real and serious problem -- caused primarily by human pollution -- and there is not a lot of time left for us to turn things around. I have harped on this for many posts, and I will harp on it again.

I know that we will NOT turn things around. That is not what humans do. They procrastinate until their world comes crashing down. All civilizations have failed, eventually, due to built-in human conditions that are well known to everyone -- greed, jealousy, hatred, violence and (most of all) poor planning.

Rome decayed from within, until it was easy for barbarians to finish her off. The pharaohs reined for thousands of years, but eventually the Nile could not support the population when bad times fell, such as when volcanic explosions disrupted the normal cycles of life in that region. Before them, in the Garden of Eden (or somewhere near Babylon), what was once a cradle of civilization grew barren and wasted.

In all of the cases, humans pushed the limits of their survival until the straw that broke the camel's back was all there was left to eat. In the Americas, where once there were great Incan and Mayan pyramid builders there lay only ruins overgrown by jungles after the inhabitants had overpopulated beyond the land's bounty. In their places are the scattered remnants of native tribes -- the survivors.

Later, while the Aztecs were still able to survive in a similar, grandiose manner, the Spanish ships came and the soldiers destroyed them. The Aztec religions and traditions could not fathom the effects of an outside force that could perform the impossible -- cross the ocean. The cause was not so much greed as pride -- and belief in religion rather than one's own eyes. The Spanish were guilty, greedy and pompous, but their empire fell eventually, as well.

This story has been told thousands of times with different players -- the Greeks, the Trojans, the British, the Ottomans, the Americans. All the civilizations have cracks in their foundations. All will come tumbling down.

Now, with billions living on a planet with certain limits of growth, we are once again approaching a time when our world can come crashing down. But this time there are warnings. There is history. There is science. But, unfortunately, there is human nature. We will fail again. And this time it will not be just the Egyptians or Greeks or Americans. It will be much more similar to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

I hope I am wrong. I hope that science will prevail instead of greed and religion. For my grandchildren, I hope I am wrong.

Dog Meat

There are very few dogs that won't eat a piece of meat thrown to them. One kind, however, is a trained military attack dog. They are the canine version of a British Guard at Windsor Castle, they won't budge or show any emotion (beyond a kind of intensity like that of a wound spring). Looking toward their master for reassurance, for permission to kill, to maim, to revert to the natural instincts of a wild dog -- they await wound up and ready to explode.

A small child might confront such a dog -- "Hi puppy!" and the dog would ignore it completely. The child does not fit the profile of the enemy. Yet, with one word from their Master, "Get 'em!", or a secret code meaning the same thing, the dog would tear the child to shreds. Of course, the dog may have been trained completely in code, so that only a few trainers, or just one man, might be able to control the thing.

Military dogs are primarily German Shepherds and Doberman Pincers because of their strength, dedication and shear intimidating appearance.There is no reason that other breeds would be exempt. As long as they were tough enough for the job, they could be trained.

One also applies the same traits, in a less admiral way, to skinheads, street punks, and gangsters -however I would not expect them to be as well trained. Perhaps a better example might be a special forces soldier, with the severe haircut and ability to eat scorpions, if necessary -- perhaps a necessary evil.

Yet there are other possible military attack dogs -- the larger, meaner Poodles, short but extremely devious Bull Terriers, or even the teddy bear looking Newfoundland (a big black furred St. Bernard-like thing that is able to tear your head off in a playful way -- by accident.)

The possibility of meeting the toothed end of one such dog is fairly low for most people. Yet, in today's world of terrorists and NRA machine gun enthusiasts, their naturally violent Pit Bulls and other bone crunching hyena-like pets might be living right next door.Or it may be the guy with the pet monitor lizards and Gila monsters. The trained dog is at least trained, and hopefully is under control of the unfriendly owner,but there is little to gain by training giant lizards. It may be remotely possible (to some small extent) but don't count on it.

But I do admire the skill the trainers of wilder beasts. It is difficult enough to train intelligent beings like human children, and no one would trust a human child with knives or swords.To walk amongst animals that can just as easily kill you as swat a fly takes great courage. Those who train tigers or elephants must also risk great harm if anything goes wrong.

Some of the best trainers use no violence, such as women who seem to intuitively know the inner workings of animal minds, if indeed an animal can be said to have a mind -- perhaps they have no human-like mind, but they certainly have some symbolic abstractions that comprise the world they operate within. To a cat there is a "generic bird". They do not care so much whether a bird is green or white or whatever other notable trait. So a cat operates on a symbolic abstraction that a human would label as a "bird".

One of the difficulties with training animals, however, lies in the fact that other people know how to train animals, and how to breach the training by another person. This breaches overall security where the animal is used, of course. For this reason, many animals are trained by a single person, so that no other soldier, friend or foe, can control that dangerous animal. Hopefully only the enemy is challenged by such an animal, and not some innocent noncombatant. The soldier dog "defaults" to assessing any victim as "enemy" in the event the trainer is lost, much the same way that a trained soldier behaves with the lack of a commanding officer.

It is in this light that we have released "the dogs of war" upon the world. The world can only hope the training of those dogs has been thorough, and that the dogs do not go wild, ripping to shreds every imagined enemy that they happen upon. But once trained for war, the same dogs will not make good babysitters.

Game Not A Game

Land Baron Von Daffodil

I already expanded my little 256 sq meters to 400 sq meters. This was to buy out the huge "4 sale" signs on little 16 sq meter "sign" lots, where only signs ever get posted, 9 of them. The total cost for all 400 sq meters is about $35 in Real money, about L$7000 in SL money This allowed me to build a giant sculpture that occludes most of the remaining huge "4 sale" signs, but peace can mostly return once again to Daffodiliac, Adscita, in the Cyber Citystate of Second Life.