Motivations

In the US, there are groups who urge social justice for Native Americans, who consider the election of a black president redemptive of the abuses from slavery, and who are critical of how humans have ill-managed environmental resources. Materialistic, greedy, short-sighted are a few of the adjectives connected to a doomy view of the planet’s, our human, future.

At the same time that we worry about the death of the planet, we are extending the life of individual humans with new technology to support perinatal challenges and various disabilities, extending the length of time each of us stays alive, and trying to forbid voluntarily sanctioned easy death.

I am wondering about connecting this unwillingness to be comfortable with the death of any one individual and the global sense of shame at the much-discussed death of the planet.

Denial? Reparation? Redemption?

Titles

Titles for books to be written, ideas to be developed, indeed, only beginnings. Or maybe endings, enough.

Imperfect Copies

The Seventh Day

Turtles All The Way Down

fractals

The Moment of Parting

Where Was Everybody?

One U:

The Upsets Of The Day

Becoming Mrs Rochester

Mending

Round Two

Unleavened

Zebras Everywhere

The Discover Bee

Total Recall

I watched the authors of Total Recall describe how they’d scanned in their whole lives - receipts, medical records, medals, contracts, business plans, emails, phone calls ... - and developed software to organize it. They gave examples of using the bits to find forgotten items, a phrase from an email, the name of a contact, ...

I search my email this way too, and sometimes the whole internet, and finding that phrase or name releases more of the related memory. Yet I began to think about information overload and time and realize that the amount of time looking backward through this material is time not looking forward and time not in the present and I wonder how having access to so much of one’s own history, one’s DigitalMe, will impact musing, daydreaming, philosophizing, the ability to wander around in one’s mind, rummage through.

I had reluctances when library card catalogs - the serendipity of browsing through the authors - became electronic, and I’ve learned a different kind of browsing.

So possibly with total recall, there will evolve a different kind of remembering and creating. And our plastic brains will adapt. Will we recognize ourselves?

War is not a sports event.

War is not a sports event.

The human species proudly differentiates itself by its consciousness, values, morality, choices. How then explain brutality, and war?

Creating humanitarian principles to guide behavior towards each other as part of the internationally accepted Rules of War has a starting place that accepts war as a given. That false start leads to destruction of persons and property and worst, of kindness. War is an insufficient justification for managing an overload of ambition.

A search for simmer

Buddhism is about emptying the mind and having an awareness of now.

The Dalai Lama says emptiness is not vacuum, nothingness, but rather that nothing is fixed, there is a lack of form, motion, change, manifesting.

Physics states that observation removes choice by fixing a result, that observation fixes what is observed, makes possibility actual. Thus observation slows time. We know how elastic our perception of time is. We encapsulate this idea in “a watched pot never boils.”

So if the pace of human activity is speeding up, as it seems, thinking, doing, faster, faster, moving, ... while Buddhism spreads it’s awareness, slowing, slowing, and fixing/manifesting ... ?

The pot boils over? The bubbling stops?

Tech Hubris

The health care industry is excited about electronics, electronic health records, savings, coordination. They’ve decided to use robot phone calls to customers and patients. I am expectant when the phone rings, between rings wondering who might be calling, kindly reaching out to me. When I hear the robot, instant rage covers my disappointment. I scheme about how to turn off the phone, turn off the ring, never ever answer, never ever hope.

I use TiVo to record chosen television programs, and watch a day or several days later. The first few minutes of a program I just watched was an emergency alert interruption, local flood evacuations, site of shelters, ... But it had no date, only times, evacuate now it commanded in a red trailer and command voice. Do you think there is no message developer at the National Weather Service who thinks that some of the audience time shifts?

As I experience each of these technology innovations, I feel less and less an individual, more a bit in a marketing audience.

Consume the host

I’ve been reading about parasites and predators. Some living things lay eggs inside other living things and then, from the inside out, take nutrition bit by bit, eat up the very nest that is sheltering them. They live; nurturer dies. Humans are doing the same thing to earth. For our own species survival and growth, we are consuming our host.