Well, this article here makes the point pretty well... this man was a badass among badasses, able to live up to his own legend in a way that Hemingway could only dream about, a king by his own hand, who indeed wore his crown upon a troubled brow.
When asked if she thought he had been good for California at all, porn star Aurora Snow
answered, "Heck no! So happy to see him out! He cut education & security!"
It was a screed on Twitter, after all. Perhaps elaboration would bring her points into perspective. Seriously, though? She seems like a nice, smart girl, but this, in a nutshell, spells out to me why as a species we're doomed, and why democracy is a total failure.
I don't even live in California, man, but I hear an awful lot about what a bad job this guy is doing.
I mean, he took over a sinking ship when he took office. He kept his finger in the hole and kept the boat afloat for seven years. That's an accomplishment, right?
What, he made cuts? Uh, didn't he take office promising to make cuts and stuff? Wasn't the economy notoriously in the crapper already?
Can we pretend for the moment that democracy isn't a sham and a joke and assume that Obama's presidential record is somewhat meaningful as something other than a cover story? Let's do that. It is immediately apparent that in the realm of politics, people have an attention span that makes goldfish look like fucking illithid elder brains. Why the hell would Obama have anything but the full support of the people who voted for him for at least four years of trying to correct Bush's fuck-ups? Oh, right, this is the same electorate that mostly didn't show up to EGG HIS CAR when he stole his second election.
Fuck it. People get what they deserve. California, getting what it deserves. American people, getting what they deserve. A bit harsh, eh? That's democracy for you. You get what you deserve.
Monday, January 3, 2011
Saturday, January 1, 2011
7 things I figured out in 2010.
1.> Finding the right balance between zen and motivation is less like juggling on a tightrope and more like sliding down Occam's Razor on your crotch.
2.> It's ok to give yourself a break once in a while.
3.> When in doubt, go for a walk. Seriously. I've made my first headway this year against a 16 year fog of depression and the key to it was walking. Making your brain make happy juice turns out to be easy... at least, things seem more manageable. I just want to point out that I am not a huge fan of exercise for its own sake, but I'm always glad after forcing myself to do it.
4.> About knowing yourself: we are creatures of habit. Your cognitive override is a quiet little voice riding on the back of a crazy monkey. That said, the monkey is trainable. Form good habits and then sit back and let the trained monkey do the work. Changing attitudes and behaviors isn't really an uphill struggle without end, just a conviction to overcome the inertia.
5.> If you are depressed a lot, or for a long time, that will change the physical structure of your brain to the point where it will become a self-sustaining state. Looking in the mirror and saying 'shee, I'm pretty awesome," is not about wishful thinking or pathetic overreaching... it's a way to reprogram your mental state. Surround yourself with supportive people as much as you can.
6.> Keep a clean, well-lit space for writing. That applies to every aspect of your life, really. Clean up the house. Clean up your head. Do all your email every day. Make those phone calls. The most prolific writers in the world (Isaac Asimov being a great example) had a habit of answering every fan mail they ever received.
7.> As for the existential crisis: we are built to see meaning in things and to react to perceived meaning. That fact is in and of itself either meaningful, or it isn't. People who assume that it isn't are exceeding their programming and wind up insane. So, even if God is dead or the sky is an empty black void or whatever, the awakened individual should understand that it is necessary to believe in something. What you do has meaning. The way you live matters, until Cthulhu rises.
2.> It's ok to give yourself a break once in a while.
3.> When in doubt, go for a walk. Seriously. I've made my first headway this year against a 16 year fog of depression and the key to it was walking. Making your brain make happy juice turns out to be easy... at least, things seem more manageable. I just want to point out that I am not a huge fan of exercise for its own sake, but I'm always glad after forcing myself to do it.
4.> About knowing yourself: we are creatures of habit. Your cognitive override is a quiet little voice riding on the back of a crazy monkey. That said, the monkey is trainable. Form good habits and then sit back and let the trained monkey do the work. Changing attitudes and behaviors isn't really an uphill struggle without end, just a conviction to overcome the inertia.
5.> If you are depressed a lot, or for a long time, that will change the physical structure of your brain to the point where it will become a self-sustaining state. Looking in the mirror and saying 'shee, I'm pretty awesome," is not about wishful thinking or pathetic overreaching... it's a way to reprogram your mental state. Surround yourself with supportive people as much as you can.
6.> Keep a clean, well-lit space for writing. That applies to every aspect of your life, really. Clean up the house. Clean up your head. Do all your email every day. Make those phone calls. The most prolific writers in the world (Isaac Asimov being a great example) had a habit of answering every fan mail they ever received.
7.> As for the existential crisis: we are built to see meaning in things and to react to perceived meaning. That fact is in and of itself either meaningful, or it isn't. People who assume that it isn't are exceeding their programming and wind up insane. So, even if God is dead or the sky is an empty black void or whatever, the awakened individual should understand that it is necessary to believe in something. What you do has meaning. The way you live matters, until Cthulhu rises.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
The David Boyle / Katie Lucas Letters
Me: I confess I'm sort of amazed that you're not all sort of 'Star Wars'ed out for one lifetime, but I dig the enthusiasm.
KL: I mean, I am, but its part of the job. I also love how much you guys love it. Makes me happy.
Me: I hope the noise from the cynical dicks isn't quite so loud at that end as it seems from here. They were good movies... I find the not-subtle political commentary getting missed by everyone but the kids elevates the movies to performance art... I figure someday we'll look back on this era and your dad's movies, shake our heads, and say, 'Well, we can't say we weren't told.' Unfortunately, art and reason and imagination seem to be losing the war to repetition and demagoguery. More movies needed.
KL: Millions were affected by the Star Wars vision. My father followed his passion, and inspired others. That's all that matters. The bottom line is: you can't please everyone. The movies are what they are and they're not going to change. Same with The Clone Wars. We do our best to create something worth watching, but some people dismiss it as though it were easy. It’s not!
Me: Thanks for the thoughtful reply. It saddens me to see you are practiced at defending something that shouldn't need defending. After a man transforms movies, imagination, and generations of people forever, I'm not sure what he can do for an encore. What he did was create solid entertainment that hit its target audience, made money, and pushed SFX forward AGAIN. I know JarJar has haters but they aren't real. My dad laughed at JarJar. So did my nephew. It was on the mark. It was fine. And the haters themselves are a solid revenue stream so what does that say about them? Anyways. I don't mean to bore you but I think I'm a smart guy and nothing about Star Wars was that far off the mark.
KL: It doesn't bore me at all. It’s nice to get thoughtful, kind responses once in a while. And yes, it does suck to be so practiced at defending your parents' legacy.
Me: Well, some of us are keeping score for real. I'm just sorry there's so few of us. The cynicism of people my age is actually a bit worrying. I'm just sort of outgrowing it myself. Get me talking about Battlestar Galactica sometime and I'll show you that I can be a cynical, critical dick... when it's warranted.
Secrets of the Universe?
1.> Matter distorts space-time. This is what we call gravity. It turns out also that matter in complex arrangements produces consciousness. I donno. Maybe consciousness is a distortion of space-time as well?
2.> The universe is, in fact, conscious, in that it can be said to contain you enfolded nonlocally within its, uh... want to call it universalness? potentium? matrix? You are a superdetermined part of the lattice of being, and the dreams, thinks, and feelings you have are written on the same slate as the laws of physics, made of the same stuff as found in the hearts of stars. This should freak you right out.
3.> Either our insistence on observing meaning is meaningful, or it isn't. We are probably better off assuming that it is.
2.> The universe is, in fact, conscious, in that it can be said to contain you enfolded nonlocally within its, uh... want to call it universalness? potentium? matrix? You are a superdetermined part of the lattice of being, and the dreams, thinks, and feelings you have are written on the same slate as the laws of physics, made of the same stuff as found in the hearts of stars. This should freak you right out.
3.> Either our insistence on observing meaning is meaningful, or it isn't. We are probably better off assuming that it is.
Saturday, September 4, 2010
From a letter to a friend.
Commenting on the French Revolution, somebody-or-other said it was still "too soon to tell". I find myself agreeing with that more and more, along with a dawning realization that constitutional democracy sort of came into being alongside banking, which made it possible to buy votes and governments. I know the arrival of the billionaire industrialists was the end of America as a land of free and private farmers. I know that the liberalism we claim as our heritage is a privilege afforded by the same extreme affluence that makes it so easy for us to devolve into apathy, sloth, and narcissism... what allows us to value life so highly also tempts us to care nothing for community or civic virtue.
I feel that since 2001 we have been living in an age of post-history. Reason and enlightenment and free press and the informed populace it is supposed to prop up... it's officially dead. Nothing to see here, folks. The golden age is over and the darkness will be fast upon us. I think it will be a sort of drab, stupid, stultifying darkness, though... a slow roast apocalypse of idiocy while we ride the dying momentum of the squandered wealth our ancestors left us to while away the hours of our squandered future.
My only problem is that this is the kind of conversation I usually find myself trying to make on a first date.
I feel that since 2001 we have been living in an age of post-history. Reason and enlightenment and free press and the informed populace it is supposed to prop up... it's officially dead. Nothing to see here, folks. The golden age is over and the darkness will be fast upon us. I think it will be a sort of drab, stupid, stultifying darkness, though... a slow roast apocalypse of idiocy while we ride the dying momentum of the squandered wealth our ancestors left us to while away the hours of our squandered future.
My only problem is that this is the kind of conversation I usually find myself trying to make on a first date.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
The David Boyle / Dr. Dave Goldberg letters
David Boyle:
My admittedly vague understanding of Hawking's model of the Big Bang seems to me to suppose that there was a very definite "beginning" of the universe in a linear sense. First A happened, then B, then C, but the track was already laid down before the train started forward.
My admittedly vague understanding of Einstein's theory of relativity seems to me to suppose that linearity is a subset of universal being, rather than the reverse. A, B, and C are all there enfolded in the superdetermined structure of the multiverse, and the order that you pass through them in depends entirely on your approach vector.
I imagine an orange rolling across the ground, apparently in a straight line, without any real sense that it's actually just interfacing parts of its surface with the surface of a much larger sphere, the big picture of its motion revealing the truth of its straight line to be a petty illusion. Is that where this arrow of time nonsense comes from?
David Goldberg:
I'm afraid Hawking has very little to do with it. The Big Bang picture predates him by a good margin. But you're basically right. The timeline of the universe seems somehow inconsistent with the notion that "time is relative" to the motion of the observer. Sort of. First, how you're right. When cosmologists talk about the big bang, we need to be clear about whose clocks we're using: whether we imagine people floating around at "average" points in the universe, or whether they are uniformly spaced. This is a "gauge choice" and affects the details of things like the growth of structure. They do _not_ affect_ the order in which events occurred. Relativity describes two events as "timelike separated" when no matter how you observe them, "A" always precedes "B" (or vice-versa). If there really is an ambiguity between the two, they are "spacelike separated." If there are two events that happen in the same place as one another but occur at different times, those events are timelike separated to everyone, and it makes sense to talk about the timeline (as we do in our book, and everyone else does in theres). That's exactly how it worked in the Big Bang.
Make sense?
David Boyle:
Right, I guess Hawking strikes me as someone so caught up in the prettiness of his mathematics that he ignores the fact that a lot of what he says makes no sense. So, I like to pick on him (I can't really do math that well). Er, so I was being a bit of a smart-ass, I actually know who Ed Hubble was, sort of.
You asked me if what you said made sense. After thinking about it for a couple of days, yeah it does, but I sort of get the feeling someone is playing a joke on us. Honestly, very little about physics makes sense to me for long before my head starts to hurt and I need to go shoot the dog with the garden hose.
So, some follow-up questions that have been bugging me since I was 12...
What would happen if you got in the millenium falcon, pointed it , say, north, and flew off towards the edge of the universe as fast as possible, then looked in the rear-view mirror? There'd be an event horizon described by the limit of the expanding universe, right? Does that mean we live in someone's singularity? The idea that we're all in a black hole appeals to me because of a> the fractal geometry of nature seems like a good indication that it is, in fact, turtles all the way down (it would make sense to me if our universe contained nearly infinite variant subsets of itself) and b> you could get some kind of escherian top-down conservation of mass if the matter we were funneling into black holes was being replaced by being funneled in from somewhere else.
This apparent expansion of the universe really feels like it must be related to the sense we have of time moving "forward".
My Dad thinks the red-shifted light isn't indicative of an expanding universe at all, it's just what happens to light when it gets old and goes really far. Can you explain to me why he's full of shit?
Regards!
David Goldberg:
Sorry for the delayed response. As you might imagine, I got swamped with entanglement followups after my last column.
Anyway, if by "as fast as possible" you mean "at sublight speeds," then the short answer is that the horizon for the millenium falcon would be the same as the horizon for whatever star system it was passing. Event horizon and horizon, in this case, can be used interchangably.
If, on the other hand, you mean "at superlight speed", then I'm afraid the question is ill-posed. We just don't have an answer.
My admittedly vague understanding of Hawking's model of the Big Bang seems to me to suppose that there was a very definite "beginning" of the universe in a linear sense. First A happened, then B, then C, but the track was already laid down before the train started forward.
My admittedly vague understanding of Einstein's theory of relativity seems to me to suppose that linearity is a subset of universal being, rather than the reverse. A, B, and C are all there enfolded in the superdetermined structure of the multiverse, and the order that you pass through them in depends entirely on your approach vector.
I imagine an orange rolling across the ground, apparently in a straight line, without any real sense that it's actually just interfacing parts of its surface with the surface of a much larger sphere, the big picture of its motion revealing the truth of its straight line to be a petty illusion. Is that where this arrow of time nonsense comes from?
David Goldberg:
I'm afraid Hawking has very little to do with it. The Big Bang picture predates him by a good margin. But you're basically right. The timeline of the universe seems somehow inconsistent with the notion that "time is relative" to the motion of the observer. Sort of. First, how you're right. When cosmologists talk about the big bang, we need to be clear about whose clocks we're using: whether we imagine people floating around at "average" points in the universe, or whether they are uniformly spaced. This is a "gauge choice" and affects the details of things like the growth of structure. They do _not_ affect_ the order in which events occurred. Relativity describes two events as "timelike separated" when no matter how you observe them, "A" always precedes "B" (or vice-versa). If there really is an ambiguity between the two, they are "spacelike separated." If there are two events that happen in the same place as one another but occur at different times, those events are timelike separated to everyone, and it makes sense to talk about the timeline (as we do in our book, and everyone else does in theres). That's exactly how it worked in the Big Bang.
Make sense?
David Boyle:
Right, I guess Hawking strikes me as someone so caught up in the prettiness of his mathematics that he ignores the fact that a lot of what he says makes no sense. So, I like to pick on him (I can't really do math that well). Er, so I was being a bit of a smart-ass, I actually know who Ed Hubble was, sort of.
You asked me if what you said made sense. After thinking about it for a couple of days, yeah it does, but I sort of get the feeling someone is playing a joke on us. Honestly, very little about physics makes sense to me for long before my head starts to hurt and I need to go shoot the dog with the garden hose.
So, some follow-up questions that have been bugging me since I was 12...
What would happen if you got in the millenium falcon, pointed it , say, north, and flew off towards the edge of the universe as fast as possible, then looked in the rear-view mirror? There'd be an event horizon described by the limit of the expanding universe, right? Does that mean we live in someone's singularity? The idea that we're all in a black hole appeals to me because of a> the fractal geometry of nature seems like a good indication that it is, in fact, turtles all the way down (it would make sense to me if our universe contained nearly infinite variant subsets of itself) and b> you could get some kind of escherian top-down conservation of mass if the matter we were funneling into black holes was being replaced by being funneled in from somewhere else.
This apparent expansion of the universe really feels like it must be related to the sense we have of time moving "forward".
My Dad thinks the red-shifted light isn't indicative of an expanding universe at all, it's just what happens to light when it gets old and goes really far. Can you explain to me why he's full of shit?
Regards!
David Goldberg:
Sorry for the delayed response. As you might imagine, I got swamped with entanglement followups after my last column.
Anyway, if by "as fast as possible" you mean "at sublight speeds," then the short answer is that the horizon for the millenium falcon would be the same as the horizon for whatever star system it was passing. Event horizon and horizon, in this case, can be used interchangably.
If, on the other hand, you mean "at superlight speed", then I'm afraid the question is ill-posed. We just don't have an answer.
Dave Goldberg, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Drexel University Department of Physics
"A User's Guide to the Universe: Surviving the
Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes, and Quantum Uncertainty"
http://www.usersguidetotheuniverse.com
io9.com's "Ask a Physicist"
askaphysicist@io9.com
The David Boyle / William Gibson letters
The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel.
- Neuromancer
Me: Is there a port above the sky?
William Gibson: No telling. But it's turtles, all the way down.
- Neuromancer
Me: Is there a port above the sky?
William Gibson: No telling. But it's turtles, all the way down.
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