inkbluesky

bombs and roses 

Enhancing Humanity 

The most often repeated claim is that we are on the verge of technological breakthroughs – in genetic engineering, in pharmacotherapy and in the replacement of biological tissues (either by cultured tissues or by electronic prostheses) – which will dramatically transform our sense of what we are and will thereby threaten our humanity. A little bit of history may be all that is necessary to pour cooling water on fevered imaginations. In 1960, leading computer scientists, headed by the mighty Marvin Minsky, predicted that by 1990 we would have developed computers so smart that they would not even treat us with the respect due to household pets. Our status would be consequently diminished. Anyone seen any of those? Smart drugs that would transform our consciousness have been expected for 50 years, but nothing yet has matched the impact of alcohol, peyote, cocaine, opiates, or amphetamines, which have been round a rather long time.

[  ]…So don’t hold your breath; you’ll die of anoxia. Of course changes will come about eventually. But it is the pace of change that matters. We can individually and collectively adapt to gradual technological changes; that is why they never quite present the insuperable challenges some doomsayers and dystopians anticipate. In Victorian times, it was anticipated that going through a dark tunnel in a train at high speed (30 mph) would be such a shocking experience that people would come out the other side irreversibly damaged. In one of his last poems, published in 1850, Wordsworth opined that the infantility of illustrated newspapers – the first tentative steps towards the multimedia of today – would drive us back to “caverned life’s first rude career” (’Illustrated Books and Newspapers’), and he felt that the endless influx of news from daily papers would incite us to a level of unbearable restlessness.

There is a lot of this article or really a book review combined with an essay that I tend to agree with. Though there are some details I would argue with and a few things that I would have added. One aspect that should always be considered with technological changes, including biotech is that with every benefit there is a trade off. Some people are thrilled with Twitter to announce every little move they make to the world or using MySpace to reveal the most intimate details of their lives. In Twitter’s case Even a month’s worth of glib messages will not make me feel closer to someone or give me more insights into the human condition then a Melville novel. Personal details and MySpace, well sometimes its just more then I needed to know - in many cases its poorly written Henry Miller. All OK except when a trend sweeps people up in a new social standard. Suddenly you’re reluctance to keep some personal things personal becomes a snub to others when all you’re doing is keeping your personal affairs personal. Truth or Dare becomes truth or else you’re an outcast.

The other dilemma they we’re increasingly headed toward to the better living through chemistry. That’s a little more complex and does involve questions about the fundmental nature of who we are.

Yes, we shall change; but the essence of human identity lies in this continuing self-redefinition. And if we remember that our identity and our freedom lie in the intersection between our impersonal but unique bodies and our personal individual memories and shared cultural awareness, it is difficult to worry about the erosion of either our identity or our freedom by technological advance.

Kate Winslet.    Little Children (2006), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Romance & Cigarettes (2005) - The last not widely seen because of studio politics. It’s bacause of incidents like this that some studio executives and lawyers are rightly called weasels.

Subprime Loans = Primetime for Vampire Lenders

The subprime schemes are run through an intricate, intertwined system of loan brokers, mortgage lenders, Wall Street trusts, hedge funds, offshore tax havens and other predators. To entrap borrowers, the industry created an arsenal of arcane financial devices and maneuvers known by such exotic names as “exploding ARMs,” YSPs, teaser rates, low-doc mortgages, loan flipping and equity stripping. Ultimately, these schemes are scams, extracting high payments from the families, sucking out any equity they might build up and stealing their homes.

This is one of those economic stories, like the savings-and-loan scam of the 1980s, that are usually buried back in the business section of newspapers. But, just as with the S&L collapse, this debacle is growing too big to contain, and all of us need to be paying attention. The built-in traps of the subprime mortgage market have already taken the homes of more than a million people in just the past year, and the dangers are quickly rising for millions more.

Regulation has been a buzzword for a couple of decades now. Regulation is bad for business, bad for jobs, its just bad. Here we are a quarter of a century after the so-called Reagan deregulate revolution and the S&L scandals of the which all but the political history wonks have forgotten and we’re now  enjoying the sequel. Deregulation didn’t create jobs, they went to China and India. Deregulation didn’t make the middle-class stronger, their purchasing power has gone down while executive salaries have gone up. This crisis isn’t going away. Someone will have to pay and most of that will come out of the pockets of once again the pockets of the people who actually work for a living.

complimentary angles 

Balance: In Search of the Lost Sense 

“Balance,” which opens with the gutsy Holmesian salvo “Aristotle was wrong.” The error in question is Aristotle’s contention, advanced in his treatise “De Anima” in the fourth century B.C. and perpetuated ever since by kindergarten teachers around the world, that there are five, and only five, human senses: sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch. McCredie has made it his mission to crack this bit of dogma by elevating balance into the sensory canon, on the basis of its evolutionary antiquity (540 million years, give or take), its necessity for well-being and survival (it is likely impossible to live without), and its surprising relationship to human cognition. Balance, McCredie argues, “may prove to be the most primary — as in primordial, life-sustaining, essential — of all the senses.”

On rare occasions I’m ahead of the curve. Well to be honest most second year biology students are too. There is a mechanism in your brain that constantly monitors where and how your body is positioned in space. If you have tried the infamous office chair spin the first thing you ( your brain) tries to figure out after spinning  is how to orient you physically - head position is very important -  equilibrioception.

sea oats and beach wallpaper. this is a stock photo of a beach in the south east, a few years old, but still one of my favorite places and one of my favorite photos.

A few years back I remember Bruce Willis on a talk show whining about working in the humid tropical heat to make a movie. It was rumored that Willis was paid around fifteen million dollars for that movie plus a precentage of the profits. Six months or 180 days works out to about 84 thousand dollars a day. Figure his co-stars and supporting cast worked in that same heat and made quite a bit less. Then there were the extras who didn’t have trailers to retreat to. In this essay on horror films The Milner Brothers’ 1957 film From Hell It Came actor/wrestler Chester Hayes talks about playing a tree that is the resurrection of a witch doctor,

“The producers needed someone who could walk in the costume as well as take the overall weight of it,” said Hayes. “I don’t know how much it weighed, but . . . it was not designed for casual movement or walking, even at the most reasonable pace.” (Parla, “Wooden Performance,” 62) As Tabanga, the tree monster, Hayes had to kill natives and carry women, all of whom had to help him balance and see where he was going. To complicate matters, the wire mesh inside the hot, heavy costume lacerated Hayes’s face, and its rubber legs started to tear. Between scenes, the tree monster languished on the sidelines while actors recited pages of plodding dialogue. “They would unintentionally forget me for a while,” said Hayes. “I’d be standing in that costume, waiting for my next call.”

Dennis Hastert (R-Ill) Worst House Speaker in American History

The House that Hastert built was neither a check nor a balance on the excesses of the Bush presidency. Hastert’s House allowed the president to go to war and then initiate the long-term occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan without declarations, it rubber-stamped the administration’s anti-Constitutional assaults on civil liberties, it made no complaint when the president attached signing statements that effectively exempted him from hundreds of laws that had been passed by the chamber.

Hastert’s House was a crude and unworkable place, where members who sought to uphold their oaths to “defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic” were held up to ridicule and forced to hold hearings on issues involving the most extreme abuses of presidential authority — lying to the Congress and the American people about matters of war and peace — in basement rooms.

As a man, Hastert was as cruel and uncaring about the fate of the American people he was uniquely empowered to serve as he was about the interns dispatched to the office of Florida Congressman Mark Foley.

Denny has annouced his retirement. Too bad for the sake of the country it wasn’t years ago. He went to Washington did as much damage as he could do and will now have a fat comfortable life courtesy the working class tax payers for whom he had so much contempt.

yellow ginkgo leaf

The digital divide is obvious enough. Those with a computer and net access and those without. There is another divide too. That between people with high speed connections and those on dial-ups. This annoucement from Google that they will begin putting up videos with their news feeds points up the somewhat defacto service level of the internet. Those with broadband connections get first tier service while those with slower connection either miss out or take a tremendous amount of time and patience to try to be somewhat as informed as first tier users. Imagine the increased disparity if certain media companies get their way and we do away with Net Neutrality and the content pie is divided up in a solely in accordance with enhancement of their bottom line.

Will smoking make you a literary genius? Probably not, but it seems that way after reading this, Is this the end of English literature?

What do the following have in common: Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, T S Eliot, W B Yeats, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Evelyn Waugh, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis?

The answer is, of course, that if they were to come back to life in Gordon Brown’s Britain and wanted to go out to their club, or a restaurant or café, they would not be allowed to indulge in a habit which sustained them during the most creative phases of their lives.

The moment they popped their favoured cigar, cigarette or pipe between their lips and lit up, they would have been fined on the spot.

There were, we must concede, books before there was tobacco in Britain

But is it mere chance that the lifetime of Sir Walter Raleigh (1552?-1618), who introduced tobacco-smoking to England, was also the time when the great story of English literature really began? Milton - a smoker -and Ben Jonson - a smoker - ensured that the Elizabethan glory-age was not to be a flash in the pan.

I have been racking my brains to find a single non-smoker among the great English poets or novelists of the 17th, 18th, 19th or 20th centuries. Possibly, Keats had to lay off the pipe tobacco a bit after he developed tuberculosis.

Otherwise, from Swift and Pope to Cowper and Wordsworth, from Byron to Charles Lamb, they were all smokers.