Satire -- Why Most of us don't count

This thing about autonomy is really overrated. The fact is most people can be shown, using brain scans to have one or more areas in their brains where the connectivity is just plain lousy or, due to genetic factors or, perhaps, lead poisoning, to have a smaller than average frontal cortex.

Though nearly everybody is capable of developing some skills, because of their cerebral limitations, relatively few are capable of of seeing the big picture and acting appropriately. Given the fact that we live in a time of cultural disintegration brought on by advancing technology and disrespect for religious and spiritual traditions as well some real and serious environmental problems, we need folks with the best quality brains available to lead us.

The people who should lead us are, in fact, the working rich. By showing their ability to create wealth they have displayed for all to see the excellent quality of their brains. The rest of us, including myself, should not venture to assert ourselves against them or to confiscate their earned wealth through taxation or other means. By earning their wealth they have shown that they in fact possess better comprehension of the world than most of us.

Another way they show their worth is by the existence of serious disagreements among themselves. This shows that they are not a monolith, incapable of changing direction, but rather a collection of vibrant thinkers and doers. The rest of us, limited as we are, would do best to get out of their way and follow their lead.

Some stuff about painting.

I've ordered several tubes of Primatek watercolors from Daniel Smith. The ones I've used so far are Sodalite, Serpentine, and Lapis Lazuli. Sodalite seems darker than a remember and granulates a lot if used in a wash, but does make a nice blue-black. Serpentine seems to consist of two components. One is extremely green and seems to stay suspended in the water for a long time. The other component is reddish, looking similar to red ocher or other iron containing clay pigments. This rapidly settles out of the wash, giving a granulated effect that I like. From a distance, a passage painted with Daniel Smith Genuine Serpentine appears an earthy yellowish-green, a good color for painting weeds or brush. Lapis lazuli despite the great name was, in my opinion, the least satisfactory paint, as it has low tinting strength. In my test painting I used it for the sky in a sunset and, while the grayish blue worked well for this, it did not do anything a mixture of less expensive pigments wouldn't have done.

Ruby

I've been going through the Edgecase Ruby koans in an effort to learn Ruby. I'm little over a third done. It's not a break though but it is an impressively elegant scripting language.

I like the orthogonal design with everything being an object. My husband, on the other hand doesn't like that sort of thing. He's sees the purpose of objects as modeling things in real life. There aren't strings and arrays in real life so why should these be objects?

Mixing Fantasies

My husband and my daughter are talking about their respective fantasy worlds. My daughter's is based on Marvel Comics and includes a heavy dose of magic and mythology, as well as a superpowered character she identifies with.

My husband does not have a hero whom he identifies with and his world is full of interesting alien races based on scientific speculation. He does not include magic and includes a lot of adult politcal cynicism. It is assuming to see my daughter mix her creations with my husband's. If an adult mixed magic with my husband's science fiction, it would be butchery, but I'm enjoying my daughter's fluid, though still immature imagination.

Men and Violence -- Writing Escapist Heroes

The other day I read an article on Science Daily suggesting that some kind of female animal, I forget which, loses interest in males who lose fights. Their was a suggestion that human females would feel the same way. For writers the implication would be that to be attractive to female readers, a male hero should never lose a physical fight.

Though I've been attracted to men who I imagined were skilled fighters, I think that human females are a little bit more complicated than this, at least when they are sober. In popular fiction, male heroes can be skilled fighters, but two other intertwined qualities are also important.

The first is having good judgement in stressful situations. The hero shouldn't be an idiot who would charge a tank with a sword, no matter what crimes the tank driver has committed. A writer can even get a little sexist and have the hero's love interest test him by suggesting doing something dangerous. The hero should be able to refuse her. He comes across as a better man if anger, fear and lust are not able to truly corrupt his judgment.

The second quality is honor. While he needn't be and probably shouldn't be a virgin milquetoast goody-goody, he should have some lines that he won't cross. He can drink, swear, and get into some avoidable fights, but he should show fidelity to a personal code, even at some cost to himself.

No doubt men and women who have acted heroically in real life might find the above somewhat silly. After all, a real hero is often an ordinary person who did the best he or she could do in extraordinary circumstances, but I am trying to describe a type of male character that would be entertaining for me to read about, not to dissect real life heroism.

Arsenic Based Life?

Yesterday their was a NASA press release about a bacteria that uses arsenic as part of its DNA. This doesn't really mean that it is based on arsenic, like every other life form on earth it relies of the ability of carbon atoms to form four strong covalent bonds. Instead what is truly interesting is that by using arsenic instead of phosphorus in the backbone of its DNA the bacteria is performing a biochemical trick that nobody ever realized was possible.

The implication for science fiction that is that while realistic aliens will be limited in what they can do by basic physical laws, the details of there metabolisms would be impossible to predict. What we see as toxic minerals or dangerous industrial chemical waste might be lunch for them.

Education -- Some Rambling Thoughts

There is an endless drumbeat on how people in the US need to be better educated. I'm not arguing that education isn't good, but I question the ability of education to help us compete in world markets.

Obviously, if everybody in the US had mathematical skills equivalent to John Von Neuman, a key designer of both the hydrogen bomb and the modern computer, we would have something to sell abroad. However, I don't believe that any type of education could reliably produce that kind of genius unless it also involved some type of invasive brain modifying technology.

Also, though he sufficient social skills to be able to marry and raise a family, he also had some foolish habits such as attempting to drive and read at the same time.

I think that education, while it must be partially aimed at employability, must really be aimed at equipping average people with what they need to live a good life as mature human beings. This means, though I don't knock regimentation and drill, that students cannot spend all of their time studying academic skills, as for many people these will not be the most important aspects of their adult lives.

Ultimately, I fear the problem of what and how to teach can be addressed narrowly in a scientific way. For instance, we can learn, though controlled trials, how best to teach arithmetic. However, in a broad sense it is too large and value laden to ever be perfectly addressed. In particular, national competitiveness seems to be a wrong standard. If my children are reasonably happy and healthy than I simply don't care about whether they or children in China are the best ones at Calculus.