Geek in the Pink

Millennial Gen Xer (Xennial?), Daneswedlish American, autodidactic polymath, persistently inconsistent, anachronistic but (hopefully) not misanthropic, earthbound misfit

[potted-dandelions]

Imagine a greatly simplified universe containing just one lonely spiral galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its center. The outer edge of the universe is constantly expanding outward while the black hole is constantly devouring the galaxy.

All known physical laws apply here. Importantly, the laws of thermodynamics apply so no matter or energy can be created. The black hole at the center will eventually consume all matter while the universal edge will eventually grow to surround the black hole with an infinite expanse of empty space. Then, heat death.

The black hole will eventually evaporate all of its mass away as Hawking radiation and, having successfully cooled all matter down into pure energy, it will blink out of being and the inner terminus of the universe will pop like a soap bubble, its once-massive energy fully spent.

But long before the heat death of the universe, the galaxy will swirl around for billions of years with its inner bulk imploding as though being consumed from within while its outer fringes are simultaneously compressed from without, the very space itself expanding around it. We actually observe something like this effect in other galaxies throughout our own universe. Most galaxies appear to rotate much faster than their apparent mass would allow, so they would seem to have some hidden mass we call dark matter because its existence can only be inferred.

At the same time, some inferred force is also causing the space in between galaxies to expand without actually stretching it, as though new threads are being woven into the fabric of spacetime itself, causing the distance between distant galaxies to naturally increase over time. Cosmologists estimate that this dark energy accounts for the bulk of all mass/energy in the universe, exceeding even dark matter which itself greatly exceeds all observable matter and energy.

But perhaps dark matter is merely a fictious force, an emergent property of dark energy. For although dark energy appears to act only upon empty space whilst dark matter affects gravitationally-bound matter, maybe the only reason dark matter is dark is because it's not matter at all, it's simply the observable effect of dark energy compressing galaxies from outside.

Ultimately, dark energy will expand the empty space between distant galaxies so rapidly that not even light will have enough time to span the gap, meaning distant galaxies will disappear from each other's perspectives and casual observers will see that their galaxy exists alone. So my original proposal isn't so far fetched. It is, in fact, the fate of our own galaxy—and all the other gravitationally-bound galaxies within the Local Group subsequent to their eventual merger with ours. Our distant ancestors may yet occupy a lonely galaxy in a dark void.

As the matter in our Local Group is gradually consumed by the supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A* (read eh-star), objects approaching the event horizon will undergo 'spaghettification' stretching. Even solid objects will be drawn down into threads of matter just one atom thick. Each thread will constitute a one-bit matter stream, yet each bit will preserve the information it carried with it from the farthest reaches of the galaxy. In a sense, the surface of the event horizon measures the state of incoming matter and records that data holographically.

Information, as it happens, is equivalent to energy, comparable to the way matter and energy are mutually exchangeable, so it is therefore bound by the laws of thermodynamics. Information can only be sorted and garbled, never created nor destroyed, not even by a black hole.

Eventually, the holographic information about all the matter that has fallen into a black hole will evaporate away from the event horizon, bit by random bit, as Hawking radiation. Each bit will carry a small amount of the black hole's mass away with it, causing it to shrink. The cosmic microwave background radiation, although too dim and too red-shifted to be seen by human eyes, is still bright and warm enough for now to counteract the paltry Hawking radiation emitted by even very small black holes, so no black hole will be evaporating away anytime soon.

But picture the universe from a singularity's point of view. The holographic image recorded upon the surface of the event horizon is a stained-glass window as seen from the other side, and the scenes it depicts are perfect memories of everything that ever happened in the galaxy. Those images are greatly distorted by the gravitational forces and spaghettification to which all matter succumbed as it plunged into the universal abyss, but with corrective lenses, even gravitational astigmatism may be undone and the holograph's finest details can be revealed.

If a mind could dance upon the surface of the event horizon, watching matter streams go by like a channel-surfer looking for something to watch on T.V., such a mind might be able to perceive the former goings and doings of individual creatures long dead on distant worlds. From the singularity's perspective, this black hole dweller aims the corrective scope at the precise azimuth and elevation to view life from anybody's perspective while turning the focus wheel to scrub through their timeline. The focus wheel would in fact be a time-focus wheel.

Only a godlike mind could conceivably correct such severe distortion, but for all we know, that mind sees the inside of the event horizon projected upon the outside of a globe like an interactive, rewindable recording of real-time satellite feeds in a Google Earth VR interface.

And for all we know, our own minds are peering through such scopes, only the azimuth and elevation is fixed and the focus wheel is motorized so that we experience everything through but one human's perspective along a fixed and finite timeline. What a depressing fate indeed.

The part of me that believes in the free agency of the the soul rejects the implications, but my mind is open to the idea that we're watching events unfold in reverse, that the focus wheel is rolling backwards, and that the black hole is really a white hole spewing information. In that case, we are perceiving the outcomes of our decisions before we make them, guiding us to make the choices that we must in order for our perceived selves to survive from the moment of our death to the moment of our inevitable birth when we will finally avert our gaze.

Thus are we able to predict the past while remembering the future, but with the focus wheel turning backwards, our perception of causality is reversed, making us think we are predicting the future while remembering the past. This part of the plan will be rather controversial.

The heat death of the universe is going to take a very, very long time to reach its conclusion, yet we only have until then to observe everything that has ever mattered throughout all of spacetime. When the soap bubble pops, we're out on our own with the information we collected.

[potted-dandelions]

"And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country," is a bold admonishment, one which Americans have failed to live up to in the face of social pressure to elect those candidates who promise to give us the most free stuff.

Way back when JFK spoke those words, they were welcomed by patriotic Americans across the nation. People want to be useful, to contribute, to make a difference in the world, and the United States has traditionally been a place where that attitude is encouraged and even rewarded.

So don't ask why the USA lacks universal healthcare. Ask why do Americans uniquely donate so much more of their income to charity than the rest.

Partly it's because we're better paid, but largely it's to support our communities while maintaining our sense of individuality. Here's the thing: when the sovereign attempts to buy its citizens' loyalty, people discover that loyalty can be sold, and that insight is devastating to our inherent patriotism. Entitlement programs compel us to ask what our country can do for us, to reject JFK's admonition.

Americans have long understood that governments exist primarily to govern and secondarily to provide what social services only governments can. We begrudgingly accept government as a necessary evil while we work to provide for ourselves and take pride in our ability to do so. As young and pioneering as our culture is, we've acquired a frontier spirit that has worked so well for so long that we are loathe to abandon it. So we still look out for our neighbors in lieu of the dole, only applying for government services when better options are unavailable.

That's why Americans have the highest rate of individual charitable donations in the world. Charities let us provide for the needy and enjoin us to personally help our fellow citizens get back on their own two feet. But our own government cynically competes with us on that score.

I realize how jaded this sounds, but the government dole is a vote-buying scheme disguised as charity. Ideally, taxpayers would feel like they've contributed something useful to humanity for having paid their taxes, but instead it engenders a blithe have-the-maid-do-it mentality.

Truthfully, government welfare programs aren't that much more wasteful or less efficient than the average charity organization, but if a charity wastes revenue, we can always redirect our donations to another one or simply stop donating outright. Taxes by contrast are compulsory.

Americans are keen to wasteful government spending since we have no choice but to pay up, but since we're also human beings, we always want more government benefits for ourselves. Thus are more Americans becoming greedy socialists these days and it's killing our frontier spirit.

Alas, I fear the flame of our charity is threatening to snuff itself out in the face of socialist greed. Charitable giving is harder to fit into the household budget when the government takes so much and then uses it to buy our loyalty. Wealth redistribution is lethal to charity.

There ought to be a constitutional amendment which states that if the people can adequately provide for themselves and each other, the government cannot butt in and directly complete with any charity. Oh wait, there already is, and it (the 10th) was ratified over two centuries ago.

Our 'federal' government transformed itself into a national government so gradually that nobody has lived long enough to notice. Now, Uncle Sam has his hands in far too many domestic matters. Welfare, Medicare and social retirement funds are rightly matters for states to decide. States, after all, are far more accountable and accessible to 'We the People' than our distant and opaque federal government. We deserve more of a say in the dispensation of our tax dollars and far more transparency than federal entitlement programs provide.

As it is, most of us tend to just pay Uncle Sam and then leave him to his own devices, blindly trusting that he's got things under control, only checking in on him every two to four years. This have-the-maid-do-it attitude has an antidote: if you want it done right then do it yourself.

Unlike all federal entitlement programs, you can directly contribute your time, your diligence and your oversight to many charitable organizations by volunteering. You'll accomplish far more for your fellow man in that way than by simply paying your taxes and hoping for the best.

And you'll forget what the government owes you when you see your donations and your personal efforts make a real difference in your community. You'll embody John F. Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you" mindset and you'll abolish socialism from your heart.

It's entirely possible to eliminate all federal entitlement programs and replace them with some combination of state entitlement programs, charitable organizations and a robust insurance industry. It's something we should do so our federal government can embrace federalism again.

It's long past time we stopped thinking of the government as our Uncle Samta Klaus come down the chimney with gifts of free healthcare, pensions, and family leave. He only wants your loyalty and he'll buy it with your own taxes. Give your loyalty instead to your fellow Americans.

Give more than your loyalty. Give also of your income, that which you can spare, and give of your free time as well and it will signify that your loyalty is not for sale because it already belongs to your community, your nation and your God. Blessings shared are blessings earned.

[potted-dandelions]

If we were truly a democracy, we would live in perpetual fear of the day when the majority of voters were stupid or crazy enough to vote against the secret ballot (Murphy's Law, after all). That would not be the end of our democracy but it would be the death of our personal liberty.

To reign in government corruption, those entrusted with power must be held accountable for their actions. Republics accomplish this with public records of all important votes held in the legislature to alert the People when to replace their representatives for legislating poorly. In exchange for granting our representatives the power to legislate and govern where they agree, we reserve the right to vote for them in secret. Nobody wants to answer for their voting habits when, say, applying for a job or a loan, but most would gladly hold others accountable.

In America, our representatives have to answer for their voting records every two years, senators every six. The Electoral College insulates us from electing the President directly, but presidential electors cast public ballots. Our secret ballots are not to be taken for granted. Indeed, it might not be long before some grifter argues against the secret ballot citing nebulous and spurious 'threats to our democracy.' In time, they might whip up enough moral panic to cost you your privacy in the voting booth forever. All for the greater good, of course.

Right away, your ballot would accompany every background check others request for you. In a few years, it would weigh on your credit score. That'll damn sure influence the choices you record on your ballot; you'll side with the majority every time as a simple matter of survival. Your agency will vanish if that happens. No longer able to vote your conscience, you'll resign yourself to letting public opinion surveys choose for you. Even the few brave enough to answer surveys honestly would bow to public pressure come Election Day.

Democracy truly cannot be. Just when you think you've achieved something closer to a true democracy, it ceases to function as intended and rapidly mutates into some form of monarchy, maintaining all the outward trappings of democracy with none of the accountability. It's too easily corruptible to survive.

Perhaps they'll con you out of your privacy with promises of more direct control over the decision making process. Digital direct democracy looks mighty tempting lately. But who's got time for it? We hire representatives to make policy for us because we've got better things to do. Imagine coming home from your 8-hour workday and having to sit for another four hours of Zoom meetings debating public policy after dinner. If it had nothing else going against it, direct democracy would be more than exhausting enough to warrant a republican form of government.

That's why even ancient Athens, the first democratic city-state, left most of the politicking to orators and lawyers. Every head of an household was expected to participate in a number of (secret) votes every month, but few had the means to dedicate their daily lives to politics.

This is the most important part of the social contract that people usually gloss over. There is an ethical burden that goes along with the franchise. It's not a right and neither is it a privilege. Voting is a duty. Not everybody is up to it and that's ok; abstention is a right. But those who do vote bear responsibility for all the government's actions thenceforth (that is, as much as much responsibility as each snowflake bears for the effects of the blizzard). It's a responsibility not to be taken lightly because it affects us all; be glad it's private.

The secret ballot is armor against becoming a true democracy. We hold our representatives responsible for their votes while absolving our neighbors for theirs. As long as that arrangement holds, we remain a republic, which is good news because true republics are less corruptible.

[potted-dandelions]

When it came to COVID vaccines, we all used our gut instinct whether we took them or not. It didn't have to be rational to be the right decision, or the wrong one.

It is in human nature to assume that practicality and rationality go hand in hand, and it feels correct since we tend to do impractical things for irrational reasons. But sometimes it's rational to do impractical things—we call this rationalizing—and sometimes it's practical to do irrational things. We saw numerous examples during the pandemic, but it's useful to look just at vaccination rates because people used a broad mix of reasoning, both good and bad, to decide whether to take what turned out to be a mislabeled product, the mRNA COVID vaccines.

Notably, the definition of the word 'vaccine' was adjusted after Moderna and Pfizer wanted to sell their products with that designation attached to it. People generally trust vaccines so giving their products that name helped to win public trust for an entirely new class of drug. The trick has always been to associate mRNA drug technology with proven treatments that use altogether different chemistry.

We ought to be willing to admit that the old definition of the word 'vaccine' was just clever marketing wank because the fact is that no vaccine has ever prevented infection. They simply accelerate immune response so infections, when they do happen, never grow out of control. The new vaccine definition is just as clever, admitting that infections are not preventable so as to lower expectations without totally discouraging consumers.

So a drug which offers mere prevention against a severe viral infection, not necessarily one which reduces infection rates, is now called a vaccine. But what about herd immunity? We who took our chances with the vaccine hoped to prevent ourselves from transmitting the virus to others. But today it's widely known that mRNA COVID vaccines are insufficient to lower COVID's reproduction number below 1.0, meaning herd immunity is impossible to achieve with mRNA vaccines alone. This was always the case, it's just a question of when did our betters realize it.

Initially, mRNA vaccine makers had loads of confirmation bias to tell them their products would shorten the pandemic but the only way to know for sure was for everybody to take it, and somewhere in the back of their collective mind they understood this. Cue the vaccine mandates. A mandate exists to make people do something they wouldn't necessarily choose to do on their own. Modifying incentive structures is a time-tested and proven way to manipulate human behavior, and threatening to take away somebody's livelihood is a powerful incentive. It's also tyranny.

Pharmaceuticals marketed a fancy new drug by calling it a vaccine so we would want it, and when it turned out that only 2/3rds of us did, they lobbied the Biden administration to make the remaining 1/3rd take it just to prove something to themselves and the world at large. Sure, they were motivated by profit, but even profit motivated companies avoid doing evil if for no other reason than to protect their public image. Really, they needed to know if 100% vaccination was possible, practical, or effective because it had never been achieved before.

So, pharmaceuticals irrationally convinced themselves that forcing life-saving drugs upon the public would be appreciated. After all, the evil of depriving us of our agency was counterbalanced by the good of shortening the pandemic, and life trumps liberty, at least in their minds.

But at the end of the day, people will exercise their personal agency unabated by government mandate, and damn the consequences. That may have sounded irrational before the Supreme Court weighed in and struck down the broadest vaccine mandate a year ago, but its perfectly practical to go with your gut feeling regarding your health.

The gut is, after all, an important part of the human immune system. It must destroy harmful microorganisms while allowing helpful gut flora to flourish within limits. Its 'brain,' the enteric nervous system, isn't involved in cognition but it does inform your decision making. Without a prefrontal cortex, the gut's enteric nervous system is incapable of rationality but by the same token it is also incapable of irrationality. The gut only deals in hard facts and practicalities, what works and what doesn't, what makes you healthy and what makes you sick.

Operating on gut instinct isn't always rational, but the law of natural selection has improved its odds of success beyond what random chance allows, and your statistically unlikely existence is proof of that. You are the product of countless generations who threw the dice and won. Sometimes your gut is wrong, but it never lies to you. You can't always believe it, but you can always trust it. So if it tells you not to use mRNA drugs, take its advice with a grain of salt but take it seriously. Its wise admonitions are informed by millions of years of evolution.

Gut instinct is practical in ways our rational minds may never comprehend, but it exists for one specific purpose: to promote healthy consumption habits. (Incidentally, our senses of taste and smell and our eyes' color sensitivity all serve that same purpose by identifying poison.) So when you get vaccinated and then feel sick a few minutes or hours later, that's your gut telling you that you've ingested poison. Trust it. And then remind yourself that all medicines are poison depending on the dose, and all poisons are medicine depending on the illness.

mRNA drug technology is amazing. Trying to cure COVID with it was amazingly stupid. And mandating its use was simply evil, if for no other reason than it has turned the public against the most promising potential cure for cancer we've ever seen. And it's all down to patent law.

Although the forthcoming cancer cure will be patentable on its own, the mRNA/lipid nanoparticle suite of technologies it will employ has been undergoing research for decades now and patent protection only lasts up to 20 years. For practical reasons, the COVID vaccine was rushed to market. Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna had to have known from the very start that curing coronavirus was a fool's errand. Scientists have tried for decades, especially after the SARS pandemic, but it mutates so rapidly that no vaccine maker can keep up, not even seasonal flu vaccine makers.

Nothing was rational about using mRNA to attempt a coronavirus vaccine but the pharmaceuticals were motivated by practicality, not rationality, so they did it anyway. Simple government corruption did the rest; nothing else kills rationality like having fuck you money in your pocket. Despite it all, I hope mRNA technology flourishes. I hope it does make cancer curable and I hope people learn to trust it. But if our trust is gone forever, the pharmaceuticals and our governments can only blame themselves. No force can overcome irrational practicality except irrational practicality itself.

[potted-dandelions]

Like WD-40, a Little Democracy Goes a Long Way

Democracy sounds nice in theory, but it can be taken only so far before it ceases to serve its purpose. This is because it rests on the fallacious moral principle that the majority is always right despite countless examples to the contrary throughout history.

The majority is often wrong precisely because mobs of people are so easily swayed by sophistry and rhetoric. That a majority of Germans once loved Adolf Hitler cannot be brushed off as an historical anomaly. Tyrants were all and always loved (and feared) by their contemporaries.

Democratic societies tend to elect 'strong' autocratic leaders who surreptitiously take control of the power centers of government, for good or ill, buoyed by what they call the people's mandate: a simple majority in public opinion approval surveys. It is by this very mechanism that mob rule always decays into dictatorship. The democracy initially wanders about like a rudderless sailboat riding the erratic winds of popular opinion. A skilled statesman eventually takes the helm and rides those winds to where they all align. As long as the winds all blow in the same general direction, the helmsman can sail the boat in virtually any direction, even upwind, provided he doesn't steer directly into the wind. Skilled statesmen can steer nations toward atrocity with popular opinion on their side.

The minority cannot trust the majority to always make balanced decisions when majority rule is so temptingly easy to abuse. Justice demands that the minority be protected from the sometimes atrociously evil whims of the majority, so democracy must be used only sparingly. It is for this reason that Americans are allowed to elect only their representatives in government. If we were allowed to vote on legislation, taxes and tariffs, international treaties, war declarations, etc., the majority would tyrannize the minority at every opportunity.

The U.S. Constitution grants a republican form of government to each state within the federation while establishing a republican federal government to manage the union. Representatives may be elected democratically and certain states offer limited means of democratic legislation. But no mere citizen may participate in federal government beyond voting in federal elections one day every other year. If you smoked just one cigarette every other year, you would not call yourself a smoker. Neither should we call our republic a democracy.

And thank your lucky stars that we are not a democracy. Our tripartite government, the separation of powers and the system of checks and balances between them are there as countermeasures against popular opinion. The electoral college is the perfect example. In 2000 and 2016, the electoral college elected candidates who had received less than 50% of the aggregate vote of all states combined—the fictitious 'popular vote.' In both elections, the system saved the majority from itself, preventing would-be tyrants from assuming power.

Triumvirates are inherently unstable, so the Constitution pits the three branches of government against each other in such a way that, were one branch to usurp another, the third would intervene against the usurpation, restoring the balance. The effort is expensive and fruitless by design. Public servants thus occupied have fewer resources to devote toward tyranny, and though the federal apparatus has ballooned into an enormous and costly bureaucratic behemoth, it's the price we pay for a government that mostly allows us to make our own choices and mistakes.

And the right to make our own mistakes, provided we are kept from causing injury or harm to those around us, is as precious as any other right. Some people only learn from their own mistakes and to bar them from making any would delay their development. To keep us from causing harm to those around us with our vote, the franchise must be limited to that of electing representatives alone. Were it otherwise, we might be held accountable for our personal voting habits. Electing representatives to legislate on our behalf is a fair trade for waiving liability for the votes we cast. This isn't democracy, but it is a form of self rule and that must suffice. To grant voters more power than that would be ruinous.

It must be said that to oppose the majority is, by definition, undemocratic. Lately, the rhetoric has escalated to where opposition to the majority is labeled a threat to democracy itself, an act of treason if not apostasy (casting democracy as both government and religion). I hope to have demonstrated that democracy isn't our government and we shouldn't worship at its godless altar. Democracy as religion claims that popular opinion is as the word of God, infallible, eternal, and omnipotent. That hubris caused the Holocaust and it'll cause another. Despite the rhetoric, democracy is not the yardstick of justice. Far from it, democracy competes with justice for control, and justice must prevail. So do not be afraid to oppose the majority and be called a threat to democracy. You might be wrong, but then so might the majority.

[cop-disliker69]

He rules so hard

[official-kircheis]

"A great President (me)" is a top-tier opener and "(which I have hosted)" is an amazing closer. No one Posts like the Donald

[mr-deep-downer]

he would do numbers on here

[urbanfantasyinspiration]

The first shitposting president. I’m so proud

[no-x-in-nixon]

One of the funniest men alive and I'm not even sure he realizes it.

[urbanfantasyinspiration]

Oh he knows it and he enjoys it

[kindaokmemes]

It’s that time of the year again :)

[potted-dandelions]

Olds play Truth or Dare.

GOATs play Could You/Should You/Would You:

Chug a beer?

Fight a bear?

Ride a steer?

Run for mayor?

Hunt a deer?

Say a prayer?

Shed a tear?

Rip a tear?

Disappear?

Clear the air?

Volunteer?

Split the fare?

Be sincere?

Name an heir?

Wait a year?

Truth or Dare?

[potted-dandelions]

The Worst Haiku You've Ever Read

Babe, we need to talk You see, I've met someone else Can we still be friends?

[potted-dandelions]

Truthfully, Dennis Villeneuve’s film rendition of Frank Herbert’s epic sci-fi novel Dune, exciting as it is for fans like me to see it so beautifully rendered on the big screen, has the same pacing issues as the novel it adapts and that does make it pretty boring for the uninitiated. But without giving away any spoilers, let me just say that you’ll find Dune (part 1 of ?) a lot less boring if you think of it as the spiritual prequel to Avatar—which it is. Cameron’s Pandora is Herbert’s Arrakis with trees in place of sandworms. Jake Sully fulfills the same messianic role for the Na'vi as Paul Atreides for the Fremen. And there are many other parallels.

As ripoffs go, James Cameron’s plagiarism of Frank Herbert was more faithful than George Lucas’s attempt: Star Wars. But you have to give it to Lucas for conveying the importance of spice better than any version of Dune ever has by giving Han Solo a line explaining navicomputers in his own charming way:

“Traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that’d end your trip real quick, wouldn’t it?”

No big deal, just let the navicomputer have a think and away you go.

But in Dune, navicomputers have been hard banned throughout the empire because interstellar route calculation at faster-than-light speed requires both sentience and prescience, the sort of thinking machines from which humanity had escaped total enslavement only a few millennia prior.

Spice addiction provides the only alternative.

My biggest gripe with Cameron’s Avatar is that it downgrades spice from the equivalent of crude oil and fentanyl to a nominally valuable MacGuffin colloquially referred to as “unobtainium” with no real name or purpose given (although the visuals imply that it’s a sort of room-temperature superconductor). Will Avatar 2 go into more detail about this stupid mineral’s true importance, both to human commerce and to Pandora’s ecosystem?

An answer to that would be a nice touch, but the more important question is why did the Omaticya tribe decide to recruit Jakesully the moment they learned he was a warrior? They talked it over for no more than 30 seconds and then boom, it was decided. The Na'vi had designs on Jake from the moment they met him, and the cultural contamination he wreaked gave the Na'vi in general and the Omaticya specifically far more war power than they would have ever obtained naturally without industrializing themselves.

In that respect, the Na'vi of Pandora imitate the Fremen of Arrakis to a tee.

So, will the Na'vi continue the imitation, taking over the galaxy in a bloody campaign killing billions? And if they do, will viewers recoil or rejoice? Here’s hoping neither sequel disappoints.

[pandoraheadcanons]

While I’m not familiar with Dune here’s what I can add; the Omaticaya accepted Jake at first bc of him being a warrior/soldier. They hadnt personally met any human soldiers, so their decision to keep Jake around was to learn about that aspect of him, and what human warriors are like.

Unobtanium is important to the human economy bc it is a super-conductor. It’s revolutionary in that it doesn’t melt or degrade as a normal conductor. The RDA is a multi-national corporation that essientially runs an energy monopoly. It’s implied to revolutionize the transportation aspect of earth life.

And I can pretty assuredly say the Na'vi will not have a galaxy-wide conquest lol.

@pxayopina-unilsiyu if you don’t mind, you’re more familiar with Dune, yes?

[katiritu]

im not fully familiar with the entire series, all i can say is that Dune was among the first of its kind in terms of huge scifi anthologies and it has an influence on the entire genre both actively and passively. you cant tell a scifi story without there being parallels drawn to Dune and other early scifi, it’s a “Simpsons did it first” type scenario, and the concept of “people want very important resource but something or someone is standing in their way” is not very unique or even new relative to Dune. it’s just a Gone Native trope, it’s been done before, hell it’s even occurred before in the real world, that’s where the basis for the fiction trope even comes from. so im hesitant calling both Star Wars and Avatar ripoffs and accusing their creators of plagiarism, they were definitely inspired by Dune, Avatar in particular is very similar in its overarching plot structure but what matters is the details: and zooming in closer, Dune, Avatar, and Star Wars are all unique stories in their own way.

also, it’s not really explained in the movie which i’ll concede on but we do know what unobtanium is, what it does, and why it’s so important. it is pretty much on the same level as spice in terms of importance: the ISV Venture Star and its sister ships need unobtanium to make the trip to and from Pandora as fast as it is, and on Earth, it’s needed for the worldwide railway systems and just in general to help fix the power crisis. it’s a room temperature superconductor which even now in present day we would have a use for and it would greatly improve our infrastructure. 

and yeah, the Na’vi are definitely not set up to have a galaxy-wide takeover like Paul’s Jihad in the series. there was a reason Paul went further than just liberating Arrakis, the Na’vi on the other hand really have no reason for wanting to fight beyond Pandora imo. they really just want to be left alone. i think it should be left to the humans to reckon with their own corrupt systems.

[potted-dandelions]

I agree that a Na'vi galactic jihad is highly unlikely knowing James Cameron's agenda. I'm not here to disagree with any of your excellent analysis. But my questions remain unanswered.

The value of room-temperature superconductors is obvious, and there are applications we have yet to imagine—energy and transportation breakthroughs aren't the half of it. Human uses for unobtainium are technological, but that is not to say the Na'vi have no use for it. It was no coincidence their Hometree grew atop a rich deposit, and the Hallelujah mountains would just be normal mountains without it.

Do the enormous trees of Pandora burrow deep enough to extract unobtainium and introduce it into circulation throughout the biosphere? If so, could the Na'vi even survive offworld without unobtainium-derived micronutrients in their diet? And having gained control of the only known source, will they leverage their position to eventually monopolize transportation, commerce, and banking like the Spacing Guild in Dune? We'd like to think the Na'vi would remain uncorrupted by their prolonged, violent contact with humanity, but how likely is that? All wild speculation, I realize, but I trust Cameron to do enough of his own world building to differentiate his creation from Frank Herbert's.

But I don't trust Cameron to answer the more important question. The Omaticya were far too eager to recruit Jake to have been merely curious about him. All's fair in love and war, I suppose, but I have to imagine they were hoping a warrior like Jake would stroll in eventually and they already had plans for just such an occasion. Surely they never expected him to lead them in war against his own people, so what did they need him for? Were relations with the other tribes not going so well after so many generations without a presiding Toruk Makto?

The Omaticya got far more than they bargained for with Jake, a man who didn't fear death because he had an extra life. So when an unlikely new Toruk Makto blew in after heralding mass destruction upon their tribe, it took them basically no time to forgive him. Using Jake to reunite the tribes without firing a shot or spilling a drop of blood wasn't plan A, but you have to give them credit for pivoting to a better plan when the opportunity barged in on the back of a flying war elephant.

[potted-dandelions]

Waterspouts. Painted in VR and conceived in my nightmares—which curiously ceased when I started flight school.

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The glass has been scratched and crazed from decades of tourists in thick rubber boots treading upon it. No amount of triboelectric scrubbing can compete with the lunar dust and its stubborn ability to levitate in a vacuum on electrostatic charges, so the throngs have been inadvertently walking on the glass with fine grain abrasives clinging to their felt booties.

Squinting doesn't help to see through the five centimeter thick glass, although people have always tried. And they've always looked so surprised after slapping their own face shields because they were reaching up to rub their eyes. It was funny to watch the first hundred times it happened, but it got annoying after the thousandth time. School groups on field trips didn't have the same reaction. Moonkids were accustomed to vacuum suit excursions, so instead of slapping themselves, they only complained about the haze obscuring the view.

It couldn't be helped. As a preservative structure, the glass could only be replaced by an act of Congress, and the site just wasn't attracting the crowds it once did so they could never seem to find room in the budget. Anyway, the once-transparent viewing platform hanging five meters above the landing site of Apollo 11 was closed to the public and nobody ever complained about it.

That was surprising, and it stung a little, too. And to think, there used to be people who refused to believe that NASA astronauts walked on the moon way back in the 20th century, and now anybody can walk on the moon to see the evidence for themselves but they simply don't bother. People never change.

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Truthfully, Dennis Villeneuve's film rendition of Frank Herbert's epic sci-fi novel Dune, exciting as it is for fans like me to see it so beautifully rendered on the big screen, has the same pacing issues as the novel it adapts and that does make it pretty boring for the uninitiated. But without giving away any spoilers, let me just say that you'll find Dune (part 1 of ?) a lot less boring if you think of it as the spiritual prequel to Avatar—which it is. Cameron's Pandora is Herbert's Arrakis with trees in place of sandworms. Jake Sully fulfills the same messianic role for the Na'vi as Paul Atreides for the Fremen. And there are many other parallels.

As ripoffs go, James Cameron's plagiarism of Frank Herbert was more faithful than George Lucas's attempt: Star Wars. But you have to give it to Lucas for conveying the importance of spice better than any version of Dune ever has by giving Han Solo a line explaining navicomputers in his own charming way:

"Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?"

It's such a perfectly Hollywood line, but the real danger is pointing your starship directly toward your destination and arriving to find yourself nowhere near it because you didn't lead your target. Through the telescope at your port of origin, you only see where the star used to be years, decades, or perhaps centuries ago. To learn its current vector you must account for the gravitational influence of nearby heavenly bodies, themselves wandering about under the influence. Then you have to plot a course for the patch of apparently empty space which the math says your destination now occupies.

No big deal, right? Just let the navicomputer have a think and away you go.

But in Dune, navicomputers have been hard banned throughout the empire because interstellar route calculation at faster-than-light speed requires both sentience and prescience, the sort of thinking machines from which humanity had escaped total enslavement only a few millennia prior.

Spice addiction provides the only alternative.

My biggest gripe with Cameron's Avatar is that it downgrades spice from the equivalent of crude oil and fentanyl to a nominally valuable MacGuffin colloquially referred to as "unobtainium" with no real name or purpose given (although the visuals imply that it's a sort of room-temperature superconductor). Will Avatar 2 go into more detail about this stupid mineral's true importance, both to human commerce and to Pandora's ecosystem?

An answer to that would be a nice touch, but the more important question is why did the Omaticya tribe decide to recruit Jakesully the moment they learned he was a warrior? They talked it over for no more than 30 seconds and then boom, it was decided. The Na'vi had designs on Jake from the moment they met him, and the cultural contamination he wreaked gave the Na'vi in general and the Omaticya specifically far more war power than they would have ever obtained naturally without industrializing themselves.

In that respect, the Na'vi of Pandora imitate the Fremen of Arrakis to a tee.

So, will the Na'vi continue the imitation, taking over the galaxy in a bloody campaign killing billions? And if they do, will viewers recoil or rejoice? Here's hoping neither sequel disappoints.

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The true wealth of nations is not in the high peak of the supply curve but in the long tail of the demand curve. The miracle of free-market capitalism is in its ability to make luxuries affordable to the masses so the average Joe today lives better than the average king a century ago.

Communism as a theory and Marxism in particular were synthesized around the time that mercantilism was collapsing around the globe. German-born Marx was living in London as sunset loomed over the British Empire, and in his mind a workers’ uprising was simply a scientific inevitability. He and his compatriot Engels coined the term ‘capitalist’ to deride those who did nothing but sign everybody’s paychecks and absorb all financial risk and debt liability in exchange for the meager profits they were never guaranteed to make in the first place.

It backfired.

The free market emerged in the New World because the Monroe Doctrine, unevenly applied though it often was, managed to prevent the last vestiges of Old World mercantilism from depleting the Americas of our vast natural resources. Thus we proudly adopted Marx’s slur by calling our system 'capitalism.’

In so doing, we provoked the ire of socialists and communists worldwide who took advantage of the spotty application of our long-standing international policy to seed their parasitic ideals, first in Cuba and most recently in Venezuela, always with predictably disastrous results.

Meanwhile, we industrialized, guided by the “invisible hand” clearly visible on the supply and demand chart, until our currency became our most valuable export because it was the most secure and could be exchanged either for gold—yes, real gold—or any other American export.

Unfortunately, neither is true any longer and our currency is currently backed solely by the might and technical superiority of the United States military and its tendency to burn through enormous sums of credit. Debt has become our most valuable export, and China has bought most of it.

A century ago, J. P. Morgan pulled his funding for Nicola Tesla’s research at his Wardenclyffe wireless power station because he recognized that it had some serious drawbacks: its efficiency would vary with the local weather and it wouldn’t work during thunderstorms, but most importantly to Morgan, without an ironclad monopoly on wireless power transmission, it would be impossible for competing electric power distributors to bill their customers properly. That is because, unlike the wired power grid, the resonant electric field which Tesla’s system tapped is a communal resource like an aquifer or the electromagnetic broadcrast spectrum.

Its greatest feature was simultaneously its biggest flaw in that it allowed consumers with counterfeit hardware to easily tap the wireless power field without paying for the service. High power leeches would be easy to locate much the way lightening strikes are pinpointed today, but low power devices wouldn’t even need to be grounded so portable devices would work untracably without batteries—and without metering devices. Imagine an all-electric fleet of batteryless American cars, buses and trucks teeming the roads along with silent trains and airplanes crisscrossing the land, and all powered cleanly by wireless power—and taxed by the mile, eek!

In many parts of the country today, the local power co-op is communally owned and more or less democratically managed, but in the early days of grid electrification, power transmission was a capitalistic venture. Cities were electrified wholesale so monopolies were common. Power sharing agreements have always existed of course, but the amount of power shared can be measured directly. Because the power lines are out in the open, it’s simple to figure out who to bill for the service, and bootlegging is rare because handling high voltage can be a fatal hazard.

J. P. Morgan understood that the days of mercantilism were behind us, that state-chartered monopolies would never again be tolerated, and he saw the writing on the wall for free-market monopolies as well. So Morgan killed Tesla’s financially delusional marvel of technology.

Yes, the Tragedy of the Commons ended Tesla’s dreams of selling cheap, wireless power and communication to everybody simply because his system could not control the means of distribution.

As a free-market capitalist, it’s hard to sympathize although I think wireless power would be amazing. But to make it possible, it would have to be a national endeavor. The wireless power grid would be like the strategic petroleum reserve; we would need to pump in as much energy as we draw from it—it’s not free—and we would have to pay into a national power fund with our taxes.

Such a mechanism could be cobbled together eventually and the result might resemble the Interstate Highway System with each state responsible for supplying a share of power to the electrifer equal to its residents’ usage. But let’s face it, we can’t even figure out how to build high-speed rail.

In fact, we can’t find external funding for any of our domestic programs and public works. When we sell more debt to pay for federal entitlement programs, the power of Congress compels the Social Security Fund to buy it because nobody else wants it, least of all China. Our national credit rating is AA (formerly AAA before we borrowed too much), but our reputation is toxic because we spend our debt on waste with no hope of ROI.

Our Chinese financiers will soon pull their financial support the way J. P. Morgan pulled the rug out from under Nicola Tesla, just as he was on the brink of ushering in a world of technological wonders powered wirelessly by a magical array of giant metallic mushrooms dotting the landscape.

Perhaps we’re better off. It’s criminal to saddle future generations with trillions in debt while we reap the benefits today. 'Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die’ is among the most selfish phrases in human history, but its modern manifestation ‘you only live once’ is commonly celebrated.

Utopia isn’t achievable, and when you really think about it, neither is it desirable. Human nature is to struggle for more, and the effort we put into satisfying that desire only makes it grow. In over two centuries of existence, our nation has endured only a few years of peace. The struggle is our raison d'etre and we call it The American Dream. To be American is to want more. And in pursuit of that dream we have sold our future to the last bastion of mercantilism (whom you’ll notice abandoned their communist economics decades ago while preserving their one-party state).

Lean times are ahead, but that’s when Americans are at our best. It may mean war or it may mean economic depression, and it’ll likely feature both, but we see challenges as opportunities. And our greatest challenge as I see it will be learning not to buy what we can’t afford.

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You're out for a walk in an unfamiliar neighborhood when a gang member confronts you to say, "You're in the wrong part of town." You apologize and promise to leave the way you came, but he promises you'll be shot if you go that way. He's surprised you haven't been shot already.

He offers you safe passage to the edge of his territory but you'll have to do something first. He reaches his arm behind his back and pulls a gun from his pants, a 6-shot revolver. Frozen, you study his every move as he opens the loaded wheel gun and removes five bullets. With the flick of his thumb he spins the cylinder before slamming it home, then he holds the piece out to you.

"Put this gun to your head and pull the trigger," he says with a threatening smirk. When he sees the hesitation on your face, he rejoins, "Or go without me if you'd rather take your chances. Personally, I doubt you'll make it to the end of the block."

With sweat beading on your forehead, you quickly glance around. It's getting late, the sun is going down, and maybe it's only your imagination but you see motion in the shadows.

Is this it? Are you going to die today? Shot in the back or in the head? By a stranger's hand or by your own? Do you take a known risk or face unknowable odds? Do you choose for yourself or let someone else decide for you?

You take the gun.

Serendipity. The gun issues a loud click when you pull the trigger, but nothing more. With a sigh of relief, you lower the gun from your throbbing temple and return it to your protector's outstretched hand. To your surprise he produces a cloth mask and a surgical mask with his other hand and tells you to wear them both.

You follow him in masked silence wondering how many others he's escorted, and how many were not so lucky. He soon brings you to a convenience store near a busy intersection where he says you can take off the masks, and you thank him for his guidance despite your deep misgivings as you both exchange a parting fist bump. Only when he turns to walk away do you allow yourself to wonder, what danger did he save you from compared to the risk he made you take?

The COVID vaccines are much less likely to kill you than a game of Russian roulette—the odds against are around 30,000:1. I pulled the trigger and lived but others have not been so lucky. The vaccines have saved potentially millions of lives at the cost of killing thousands. While billing taxpayers for such lousy vaccines, big pharma have engaged in textbook protection racketeering.

The government could be forgiven for buying good-enough-for-government-work vaccines, but president Biden crossed the line with his illegal vaccine mandate. The only time it is ok to sacrifice a few lives to save many is when the sacrifice is voluntary. It's one thing to offer a potentially fatal vaccine to those who want it, but forcing people to play Russian roulette to remain employed is entirely unethical.

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If you cook a man a steak you feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to raise cattle you create civilization.

We think of farm animals and pets as species that we domesticated, but it would be equally true to say that they domesticated us. The co-evolution of humans and dogs has been well documented, but given that dogs made humans better hunters, how did we ever manage to domesticate prey animals like cattle, and how did they civilize us?

Modern domestic cattle and zebus are both descended from wild aurochs which went extinct only 400 years ago. Cattle, however, are among the most populous animals on the planet, so you could say that aurochs have gained a degree of immortality. It's no wonder the Hindus revere them as reincarnated souls.

And after all, why not? If you were alive 10,000 years ago and you observed a local herd of aurochs that tended to follow your nomadic band of hunters around, that would pique your Cro-Mangon curiosity. Why does your food keep you within eyeshot but just out of reach?

The carrion feeders you understand: they eat the garbage you leave behind like the fabled first dogs who were said to be a pack of hungry, curious wolves. But aurochs don't eat carrion, they feed on grass. And like other herd animals they're vulnerable to your group hunting tactics so aurochs are understandably skittish. But these particular ones are behaving predictably for some reason, and they're the only herd animals you've ever seen behave predictably. With a little planning, your tribe could wipe them out in a day and feast for a year.

There are really only three ways to interpret such behavior. Either you see their stupidity as your good fortune so you hunt the herd and their behavior to extinction. Then every new herd of aurochs you encounter will retreat out of sight, and the hunt will never match that one glorious day when you killed that stupid bull that led his herd into your trap.

Or you might come to see the herd as your kindred spirits, perhaps the reincarnated souls of your fallen tribesmen watching over you from afar. Or you may simply recognize the practical benefits of maintaining a breeding population of aurochs nearby, slaughtering only the older ones or those that leave the herd on their own. Either way, you'll soon put it together that this irrational behavior breeds true, and then your ancestors will learn to exploit that trait to domesticate the herd.

And irrational though it may seem to you, from the aurochs' perspective it makes perfect sense to stay close to a dangerous yet benign pack of violent ape-men. They're a menace to predators and prey alike, making loud and unpleasant noises, starting fires on purpose like maniacs, and killing anything that gets too close. So the aurochs who are lucky enough to range near a tribe with enough sense not to hunt them to extinction will be safe from wolves, tigers and bears, and they won't have to compete with mammoths or buffalo for food.

It is believed that all 1.5 billion of today's Taurine cattle descended from just 80 aurochs tamed in Turkey sometime around 10,500 years ago. It couldn't have been easy to domesticate that herd, what with the inevitable interbreeding with wild herds making it difficult to keep track of which offspring carry the recessive don't-fear-humans trait.

It would have taken a few human lifetimes to solidify that tamable aurochs trait, mostly by spreading it to the surrounding wild herds. The interbreeding they thought was working against them actually worked for them: it wasn't until the surrounding wild herds inherited the tamable trait that the captive herd was finally domesticated.

Before getting to that point, humans would've needed some way to corral and tag the animals so somebody had to invent fences and writing. But to make that possible, they had to invent civilization first. As it happened, both civilization and cattle domestication occurred together. Indeed, neither was possible without the other.

So it was that when the tribes of Isreal recently freed from their bondage in Egypt reverted to the pagan ways of their ancestors, they chose a golden calf to worship. Their choice of idol was no idle choice: their ancestors revered the calf as the seed from which civilization sprang forth. It was an all too common example of a decadent society turning its collective back on God to worship itself instead, which is why it brought the wrath of Moses down upon the Israelites when he returned from Mount Sinai.

The domestication of cattle is a human achievement, yes, but we do not deserve all or even most of the credit. Just remember the brutes we were before we had herds to shepherd. Whether you believe chance favored a prepared mind or divine intervention brought man and cow together—and why couldn't it be both?—aurochs could not become cattle until mankind became civilized. We owe our modern maturity to our fellow beasts and their willingness to put up with us.

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How they work is complicated. Why they do is simple.

Quantum computers use Fourier analysis techniques to do something that digital computers simply cannot do: they arrive at precise answers to imprecisely asked questions, rapidly. So rapidly that they will make digital processors obsolete before your eyes like the box of VHS tapes gathering dust in your attic.

For all it can do, binary logic has a crippling limitation: the CPU bit depth constrains the math in such a way that doubling the precision of a calculation more than doubles the computation time due to the added overhead of managing more memory.

Here's an example: your pocket calculator with a 10-digit display is noticably slower than your old 8-digit calculator. Its dirty little secret is that the 3 least significant digits take just as long to compute as the first 7. To make it go faster—enough to run Crysis, or Skynet—you need more logical bits, more silicon and metal, more electricity and cooling, all of which depend upon more infrastructure, more industry, more resources and ultimately more power, more money, more problems. Even so, you cannot escape the P versus NP problem inherent to digital computers.

In contrast to the brute force algorithms sorting 64 neatly arranged ones and zeroes at a time to the beat of a tiny crystal metronome through the hard binary logic circuits of our ubiquitous digital machines, quantum Fourier algorithms actually make the correct answers to your queries sing out like piano strings vibrating at their resonant frequencies with high precision.

The humble digital computer could theoretically compute such an algorithm, but it is not known whether it could do so to reasonable precision in a human lifetime, so nobody is going to try. Quantum computers make it possible to achieve that precision in mere seconds compared to the decades it would take today's fastest digital supercomputers. Given the current state of the art, I think it's safe to predict that quantum machine learning will match human capabilities within the next 5 years.

Quantum computers operate by tuning a true random number generator called a qbit in such a way that a statically significant distribution of its output noise follows a well-defined curve when subject to frequency analysis. In essence, these machines listen to the fundamental frequencies of physical matter at the quantum scale like piano tuners listen to their tuning forks.

The tuner stretches the qbit to just the right tension to resonate at the fundamental frequency of a calculus equation. The beautiful thing about piano strings is that they do not need to be struck in precisely the right place to play precisely the right note. Most of calculus works by making reasonably close guesses at the correct answer to start with, but quantum computers do not have that limitation (however, I don't believe this will ever prove that P=NP because, while the logic is superpositional, the memory is still binary, for now anyway).

Quantum programs, then, are sheet music and the tones they generate are the output of a Turing-complete quantum scale music box. This obviously begs the question, what melody does pi calculated to 1 quintillion digits play?