Budaeli

Randy Pausch‘s deep and human lecture, his last, introduced me to the concept of the head fake. If you haven’t seen his speech, go watch it now.

A head fake is where an action looks different from the act itself. Pausch’s lecture was about achieving childhood dreams, but it was really about something else, and turned out to be for someone else altogether. That head fake is probably the most tear-inducing one in existence.

In sports, a head fake can be a play that tricks the opposing team into following someone who they think has the ball so that they miss the person with the real ball who doesn’t normally have that job.

In film, a head fake can be a plot where the audience completely misses the real protagonist or what’s really going on, often resulting in a crappy movie.

In blogging, you could be reading a post about one topic when it’s really about something else altogether. Or the entire blog is about a something else. Like Budaeli. :)

The best scene in Tom Robbin’s novel Another Roadside Attraction involves Tarzan’s attempt to get Jesus to stop reading the Torah and cut back on his ascetic adherence to spiritual thinking. While he failed, the most important part of the story involves the little angel sent by God to watch over Jesus (you’ll just need to read the book to know what I’m talking about).

During the conversation, Tarzan embarrasses Jesus by saying that the son of God is a lot like Pan.

Technically, Pan is the Greek god of nature. Above the waist, Pan looks like a normal man with curly black hair, but with horns. Below the waist he looks not unlike a goat, with cloven feet. He was invoked for fertility, and was often sporting a judicious erection. He love to play the flute, and even had the balls (boy did he!) to state that he was a better musician than Apollo, the god of music. Symbolically, Pan embodies the essence of man: half intellectual, half wild animal. Jesus was embarrassed because he wanted to live a spiritual life devoid of his carnal instincts.

I think the concept of Pan was created by people who wanted a way to personify the duality of being able to invent mathematics and build great buildings and write poetry and play music, while at the same time wanting to set things on fire, get into fights, and have wild amounts of sex. To be human is to do all of those.

And yet, we seem to want to go to one extreme or the other. Some of us want to think great thoughts, create great machines and great works of art. Others want none of that. I take that back: we think we’re one or the other, but do both anyway. It’s how Christian ministers can spread the fiery word of the Gospel, but still want to drive fast cars and bone the secretary. It’s how Shakespeare can write the beautiful verse…about a drunk hedonist who corrupts a future king. And it is the definition of Richard Feynman.

How are able to seamlessly integrate such disparate goals, celestial and earthly*, without much issue? Is there even a difference? Duality of anything, to me, seems like a gross simplification. Especially for philosophical constructs that we all accept without question. Take morality: there is no such thing as good or evil, but we’re taught it because it’s the easiest way for a child to understand the world without a wooly explanation, and to help us comprehend some of the more horrific acts we have committed. Yet, how do we tell what is done with bad intent? We’re the only creatures who seem to act upon selfish impulses beyond mere attempts at survival.

In Pan, we can visualize the marriage of the part of us which is very much a part of nature, and the part of us which wants to be more than that. In truth, it’s all the same. We’re all great horny musicians.

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*Completely off topic but worth sharing: some dude at Microsoft said in a podcast that the human mind is still at version 1.0. It was developed on the savannah of Africa and hasn’t changed much. We’re wired to fear creatures that look like the predators we used to have, to enjoy procreation in hopes of having enough offspring to continue, to crave foods high in sugar for the energy and to eat as much as possible because tomorrow may have less food, and to yearn for the company of other humans because we can better defend predators when in groups. Thousands of years later, everything we do is still defined by these rudimentary specifications. Think about that for a moment: you, with your stocks and your smartphones and your sneakers are still acting like you’re trying to survive against impossible odds in the wilderness of Africa.

Sure, there’s already a post about the Beijing Olympics. But I’m not a big sports fan, so my take on the US gymnastics teams, for example, shouldn’t be taken as my absolute opinion. For example, I didn’t know that the men’s team lost some of their best members yet got a medal; while the women’s team was considered the top contender, only now everyone thinks the Chinese team is the best in the world.

But do know a little more about culture and economics. And China is on display right now. The Olympics organizers are working fiercely to hide the negative and unpretty aspects of Beijing and China, but there’s a lot of people in the world who care enough about the welfare of poor and disadvantaged Chinese that it can’t be completely hidden.

In the US, China is presented in the press as a competitor to America, a rising power that will overtake us much in the same way as Japan was presented in the 80s…and except for Blade Runner  and Neuromancer, that didn’t quite happen. In fact, Japan has been battling deflation and awful credit problems ever since.

Will China turn out the same way? Probably not. But we in the US both overestimate and underestimate China’s future in the world*.

Overestimating China

It’s easy to oversimplify the Chinese economy and think that all those big numbers mean that it’s over for the dominance of the American economy. For one thing, it appears that our economy is faltering at the moment – but take a step back; most people think of the economy in the short-term. Hell, the media looks at the economy short-term, so reports of unemployment, a collapsing housing market, and a bear stock marketing are played up as being the end of our way of life. What’s really happing – and the most fiscally prudent way of looking at it – is that our economy is restructuring. When unemployment goes up every once in a while, that’s a good thing. Companies are correcting their overstaffing and trying to streamline their business. Having the price of homes drop significantly in certain markets is a good thing, because they’re overpriced as it is. Rising food prices is a little worrying though; cheap food is always a good thing. But, for most households food is still a very small expense compared to income. Our grandparents and great-grandparents had to spend a larger portion of their earnings on food than we could ever imagine.

The reason I’m not worried about the American economy is because it’s very likely the most efficient economy in the world. American workers are highly productive (though I know a few people who could challenge that assumption), and most of us enjoy an incredible amount of material wealth. We only think we’re suffering because some people always seem to have even more. But look at it this way: even the poor have televisions and fairly cheap food. I’m not discounting the very poor who don’t even have those luxuries, but that’s a problem without a fix**; a very large swath of average-earning people in the US have access to things which are essentially luxuries (extensive education, sophisticated labor-saving devices, enough forms of entertainment to keep people constantly occupied, etc).

Conversely, the Chinese economy is very inefficient. There are aspects that are improving, like transportation infrastructure and education; but the economy is still very dependent on agriculture and manufacturing, which stopped being major components in the US long ago. There is a staggering number of people, largely hidden from foreign observers, who are just barely getting by growing crops and livestock; while others are just a step better working in what would be called a ‘sweatshop’ over here.

But the biggest thing holding the Chinese economy back is a free flow of information. I may overstate the issue because I find information management fascinating, but what makes makes for an efficient allocation of resources is an unrestricted flow of information about the location and strengths of resources. That’s what makes the American economy so efficient: an investor can do pretty well relying on free resources like Yahoo Finance and a plethora of finance blogs and resources, without having to spend anything on the really expensive institutional tools. Or that anyone with some sense and an internet connection can find enough free information to start a successful business.

Underestimating China

Most of these issues are short-term, and can be easily fixed over time. Providing things go in a general path, Agriculture will be come a smaller part of the Chinese economy, and the flow of information will get better. Think of China today as America in the late 19th century. The opportunities to make a lot of money are great and that the only direction most people have to go is up. The difference is that China is much, much bigger; there’s no frontier (it’s an area that has seen civilization for thousands of years), so there isn’t an easy-to-grasp place where people can go and start new lives***; and that  many of the restrictions on people’s freedoms are artificial (the government restricts information, people are limited in what they can do and where they can live, etc.).

But – and this is a big one – the relative lack of economic development in China also means there’s many people who not only dream of a better life, they have the drive to achieve it. All those kids growing up on poor farms see that they can have it better, so they get an education or just go out and start making money. It’s that hunger that really grows an economy. I bet there’s a lot of boys and girls with that hunger that will make China a force to be reckoned with in the future. There’s plenty of people in the US with that certain hunger, but most haven’t experienced the lack of wealth that many of their Chinese counterparts have, the kind of poverty that makes some people achieve great things.

There are a few developments which could derail China’s growth. For one thing, if China had an efficient economy as the US, there simply isn’t enough resources on Earth to accommodate that. China also has a pretty uncooperative government for the type of growth that people want. The sort of openness that has pushed China this far, can be easily be hampered by a government too concerned for the survival of itself to give its citizens the freedom they need to be even more successful. It’s those kind of fringe groups that the Chinese government is restricting provide the foment necessary to keep the culture fresh and dynamic. One only has to look at China’s history to see what happens if it’s taken to an extreme: when during the late Ming dynasty (I think), China slowed down its trade and communication routes with the outside world, which led to their falling far behind European economy and culture, creating the situation of upheaval in the early-20th century and which led to the establishment of the current Communist government.

So will China be as big and powerful as America, or will it derail and morph into something else? I don’t know, it could go either way. China has lots of people hungry for a better life, but a frightening restriction of information. It’s a good time to be Chinese and smart.

*It’s an odd feeling using one word – ‘China’ – for 1.3 billion people.
**What I mean is that no one has ever come up with a successful way to eliminate some people from suffering economically.
***This is something I find fascinating about American history. By having a place where a person could go where there’s literally nothing but what you can make of it, was a powerful force in America. It’s what made us emphasize the individual, to encourage risk-taking, and to enforce those same freedoms into law for the future. But if there’s no physical frontier, where is a person to go and start over? The best suggestion I’ve heard is entrepreneurship: there’s always an untapped or underutilized market somewhere, and you can be your own boss and make your own rules. Hopefully we’ll start colonizing space, and then that will be the real frontier.

Not many people read books for entertainment anymore. There may have been a slight uptick when Harry Potter was still new, but most books sold now are textbooks, self-help and business books.

For all of those who haven’t picked up a book for pleasure, I understand completely. The number of different forms of entertainment available, not to mention the sheer quantity just waiting to be consumed – is staggering and nearly impossible to comprehend. With movies, engrossing television shows, fistfuls of music recordings, video games, phones with games, the web, online forums, and any number of hobbies now available thanks to the wealth of most Americans – who’d want to use their imagination to bring mere words to life?

But for those of us who do read novels, short stories, plays, poems, and the like for enjoyment – we’re a hard lot to sell books to. It’s because we’re also sharing our time with other entertainment, in addition to living our lives. What’s a publisher to do?

What seems to have happened, I think, is that publishers are picking books for publications that will be read by the largest reading demographic group. And the largest group…is women. Most new books appear to b geared toward woman.

Equality, feminism, sexism, and all that aside; most women tend to like stories in a certain way that don’t normally ring with men*. I wish I could put what makes these stories different, just that I can sense it. They don’t affect me the way that stories normally written by men affect me. And it seems to be true with other men.

I first noticed it when I started reading more science fiction by female writers. They just…didn’t give the details that I was used to reading and wanted to know about. It reminds me of when I was young and was at my uncle’s house; her daughter (the only girl cousin I have, out of 6 on both sides) had a toy Volkswagen Beetle. And as my brothers and I were playing with her, each one of us went to the toy car and tried to open the hood, but it wouldn’t move. The hood was not made to be opened. Because it was a pink Barbie Beetle. Girls who would want to open the hood of a toy car don’t play with pink Barbie Beetles.

But this isn’t about the differences of the sexes, I’m talking about literature. There is something I call Masculine Literature. It’s literature with a masculine bent. It’s nearly impossible to describe, but I know it exists. It doesn’t matter if the main characters are male or female, it’s something deeper. Unfortunately, hardly any new fiction is masculine. It’s feminine. And I just can’t wrap my mind around feminine literature most of the time. So I’m stuck reading old stories, because I can’t find any new masculine fiction.

Off the top of my head, here are examples of masculine literature: Invisible Man, Ham on Rye, Madame Bovary, A Season In Hell, “The Waste Land”, Ulysses, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom, White Teeth, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Fuck Up, and Vanity Fair.

*I’m only talking about Western Civilization, specifically in America; so your mileage may vary.

As the presidential election process is beginning its change from ignorable insanity to mindblowing lunacy (I just saw an article where Mitt Romney condemned Time’s choice of Putin as their Person of the Year – never mind that the choice is based on who is the most newsworthy…Hitler was person of the year in ’38), I have sided with the economists and decided not to bother voting.

The viewpoint boils down to this: a single vote means very little in an election, the larger the vote the less it’s worth. And the effort most people must make to go out of their way to vote is disproportionate to the value of the vote itself. The only instance where a single vote may be worth casting is in local elections.

Call it disillusionment after being on the losing side of the last two presidential elections, but I agree. Appearantly economists feel ashamed when they vote! Of course if one gets a sense of purpose out of voting or politics is their subculture, then it’s worth the effort. But when someone like me sees little difference between politicians and parties – hell, even thinks the party system is a terrible way to run a democratic republic, there’s better things to do with one’s time. Like read Perez Hilton.

One last thing: if you do decide to vote, please research the candidates. It is very annoying when people vote for the one candidate that will, say, actually make them lose money or rights.

This post was inspired by the discussions on voting at the Freakonomics blog – which, along with the book of the same name, helped me get back into economics. Quick side story: I had one of the highest scores in economics in the years I participated in Academic Decathlon in high school (I was tricked into joining)…and yet I couldn’t be bothered to do the work to get a passing grade in any econ class, except for the college classes I took.

Here’s a quick thought exercise: try to conceptualize infinity.

How do you see it? Our minds are not built to deal with the number infinity, primarily because we live in a finite world where there is a limit to everything*.

So how does a god feel? What’s it like to be able to know and understand not just the extraordinary vastness of our universe, but everything beyond it**?

This is a concept I like to toy with from time to time. I try to visualize infinity (or at least something so massively large it has the appearance of infinity) by creating a mental picture of space and to points as many points in the image in my head as possible. For example, to try to keep track of every star and galaxy in the image…and then move through it.

After about five minutes of this I usually start mumbling incoherently and then black out, so it’s not something I do regularly (but it’s safer than taking hallucinogenic drugs…I think).

*Except the stunning variety of stupidity in humans.

**Of course there’s things beyond our universe. Where else do you think the idea for furry fanfic came from?

This has been bugging me for a long time: Fermi’s Paradox sums up like this: The universe is so big that the chance there are other technologically advanced civilizations is huge. So then why haven’t we seen any evidence?

What’s been bugging me is why haven’t we found anything? Is there something we’re missing? Are advanced civilizations deliberately blocking contact with us for some reason?

While it would be immensely beneficial for us humans to discover life other than earth, especially intelligent life, we should plan as if we are a beautiful, fragile, fluke in the universe. That the life on earth is rare and should be preserved at all costs. The only problem is that we, as the dominant species on the planet, are doing a terrible job with that.

Preservation of life and the natural processes on earth is a given, sure. We don’t necessarily need to protect the environment, we just need to live with it (my guess is that if we do trigger a calamitous climate change, we’re going to die off and life will keep going…it’s done it before and chances are it’ll do it again) .

However the ease in which all life can be wiped clean from our planet due to catastrophes beyond our control – cosmic radiation from a nearby supernova, giant asteroid attack, things we don’t even know about – means we should be working very hard to spread life elsewhere. Fuck the preservation of the composition of existing planetary bodies. There should be concerted attempts to get life growing on mars, massive artificial satellites with gardens teeming with life, even primitive life put in probes and shot out into space in all directions.

That is to say, I am wholeheartedly for biological imperialism, if only because we haven’t found life anywhere else. We’re probably not doing it because we have enough problems living on our own planet, and dealing with our own species. But I think there’s another reason.

People don’t care about space exploration anymore because of video games.

It’s so easy to fire up a game where you simulate owning your own space ship, taking it out to mine ore, and trade with other gamers in a virtual galaxy – all without having to deal with the always present threat of death when in space, not to mention waiting patiently for the technology to catch up with our dreams (I’m talking about EVE Online, which is a great MMO regardless of my opinion). Who wants to work hard to try to live in space when you can pretend you’re doing it right now with pretty graphics and a killer soundtrack?

Previous generations had only science fiction novels, movies, and TV shows to pretend with, and I think those passive expressions motivated people to work hard enough to get a tin can on the moon*. Then came Asteroid, then Space Quest, and before long nobody cared anymore. We became too busy with our own entertainment to launch the Jupiter 2.

There appears to be enough advanced technology just lying around to get the ball rolling – just the gadgets I’ve acquired on my measly pay are pretty much what existed in old sci-fi stories – a communication device that fits in my pocket that has video and access to the largest library the world has ever known – and still lets me communicate with anyone I want no matter where I am on earth, an audio and video player that can hold more music all the LPs most people have space to store in their homes, and a computer that looks like a console on a slick spaceship…that can simulate one too! No flying car though…damn.

The point of all this rambling is that we shouldn’t try to solve Fermi’s paradox, but rather do our damnedest to ensure the longevity of the life that currently exists on our planet. Why keep such a great secret to ourselves? Let’s spread it around!

*The computer used in the Lunar Module was as powerful as the Apple //e…with 32k of RAM…compare that to the computer you’re using now, and despair at how much processor power you’re wasting!

Technorati Tags: space, science fiction, fermi’s paradox, space exploration, intelligent life, extraterrestrial life, end of the earth, technology

The other day I was talking with a coworker about his observation that all the people with weird deformities are popping up in China – the woman with the backward feet, the guy with green sweat, the unicorn people. I responded by saying it was probably a combination of China’s massive population and really bad pollution. Think about it: one out of every five humans is Chinese, and one out of every five humans is Indian!

The conversation died, until a few minutes later I became very worried: what if the first mutant superheroes appear in China rather than in the US? That would totally tip the scale of who is the most powerful world superpower, right?

It soon occurred to me that I was worrying about something that only appears in comic books, expensive action movies, and low-budget children’s cartoons. I’m having trouble telling the difference between fantasy and reality. It’s like how people are big into pirates, ninjas, and zombies – like they really exist*. Or the dude who wanted his senior picture in his school’s yearbook be of him in his chain mail armor and with a broadsword.I’m just saying…this is the inspiration for some very good stories.

*Pirates do exist. They just don’t normally have one leg and a funny accent anymore…well, unless you consider a filipino accent funny.

About three years ago I discovered newsfeeds; you know, those streams of data that allow any curious early adopter to be utterly overwhelmed with information from dozens and sometimes hundreds of websites, every time said websites update their main page.

Every time they update. Especially blogs, which are fine-tailored to funnel as much information as fast as possible.

In theory, this is brilliant. It makes solves the problem of having to remember to check one’s favorite websites (which on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, ranks just above safety needs). Theoretically, a person could just subscribe to their ten or so favorite sites and be done with it.

In practice, news feeds are addictive – there’s always a new update on some website out there…and waiting for updates becomes unbearable…so you subscribe to more websites. Then you figure, “what the hell, sometimes I need a gossip fix” and next thing you know you’re receiving daily updates on celebrity spottings in Manhattan; then minute-by-minute blows of Steve Jobs’ keynote; then receive no less than three hundred posts as users of Digg fight the site’s moderators to publish AACS decryption codes. All the while, BBC and CNN are updating their feeds with news as it happens, and Boing Boing keeps on churning out wonderful things. None of this is necessary at all – people used to get their news from a six-hour-old newspaper, then supplemented with an evening news show on TV…and yet, my half-hour ride on the train from work, where I have to do without my precious newsfeeds feels unbearable.

Well it did. Nowadays, I never get about 100 posts a day from the feeds I’m subscribed to with Google Reader…and I even feel that’s too much. But this is because I’ve come to terms with my information addiction. Honestly, I still suffer from “too much information” syndrome, only now I instinctively know how to find more and more and more and yet more and once again more information without needing to rely on websites to feed me. It’s the downside of having the talent of being able to efficiently find information – I can’t un-learn it, meaning if you give me an internet connection and a decent web browser (not even decent; I bet I’d be just fine with Lynx) and I’ll occupy myself for many, many hours*.

This comes to the crux of my situation. It no longer has anything to do with newsfeeds. I, meaning we, simply have access to too much information. Too many websites, too much history, too much culture, too many interesting people doing too many interesting things. What happened is that the world population has grown a great deal in the last fifty years, giving us more people making creative and interesting things. Add to this the ridiculously low barrier to entry in making things (think how cheap video cameras are); throw in the low overhead required to share these things (hello…how are you reading this? On a plane? From paper? That’s weird.) and the result is the absolute worst way to test the human mind’s ability to forget the things it sees and hears and experiences.

I’m talking about Google Search, Google Image Search, Google Blog Search, Google Trends, Google News, Google Reader (damnable enabler), Google Earth, Digg, Slashdot, Engadget, Daily Kos, Gawker, Defamer, Perez Hilton, Wikipedia, CNN’s website, BBC’s website, MSNBC’s website, Fox News’ website (sad, but true), The New York Times’ website, The Wall Street Journal’s site (if you can pay for it), YouTube, Last.fm, Pandora, Kottke.org, let’s not forget Boing Boing and MySpace, or Facebook, 43 Folders (ironic, isn’t it?), sweet Post Secret, every website that posts anything about Apple or its products, Apple’s own website…and those are the ones I thought of without any outside help.

Boy, was that cathartic!

The irony in all this, is I’m ranting about information using an invention that started the acceleration of information…a weblog.

Thank you for reading this far and putting up with my gratuitous linking, I think it helps get the point across**; but I have two more: Douglas Adams’ video Hyperland…I’m glad it the web of today isn’t as simple as in the video; and Hobbes’ Internet Timeline, my favorite timeline of the internet.

*Not in that way, mister!
**There is no point.

(Note: the title for this post came about because I tried writing “Too Much Information” when all I could hear was the title of one of my favorite Chuck Berry songs…and then unwittingly typed it.)