On Raising Kids
I have a foggy recollection that someone in the comments section of this blog once asked me how to raise kids. It was half a joke -- one of the many memes that was making the rounds of the blogosphere at the time. Be that as it may, I brushed aside the question then because I was not an expert on the topic. I still am not, but here and now, ten years later, I present one or two things I may have learned along the way. Talk about slow reflexes!
Don't raise your kids to be clones of yourself. It almost never works, unless your kid isn't terribly bright. And besides, why would you want a clone? Let's face it, you kinda suck. You want your kids to be different, and better, than you.
Treat your kids like adults, as long as they treat you like an adult.
Accept the fact that you stopped being cool a long time ago. Be proud of how lame you are and remember that it is not your job to be cool; it is your job to be responsible.
Give your kids the best start in life you possibly can, and then -- and this is the hardest part -- stand back and accept the fact that it is their race to win or lose.
Want to hear a good rant? Who doesn't?
I fucking watched Dune.
I do want to disclose that I read the book in my teens, and I liked it.
Well...
There are things I did as a teenager I would not dream of doing today. I would be ashamed to. Liking Dune was one of them.
It is a shit story.
To start with, it claims to be science fiction. This is false advertising. It is a soap opera set in space, circa 10,000 CE. Or bad historical fiction. Take your pick.
Consider the plot.
The main draw is a dude who traces his lineage back to Agamemnon. And he gets into a scrap with an Emperor whose name is Padishah Shaddam.
That, my friends, is Greeks versus Persians. Historical fiction masquerading as science fiction. This pile of trash as much science fiction as I am Puerto Rican.
The details also suck. As in, the story wants us to believe some really silly things. Like what the future will look like.
If you follow the arc of human progress as this rubbish would have it, then you must uncritically believe the following.
In the last two thousand years, we went from dying of mosquito bites to having our phones order breakfast bagels for us. And then in the next eight thousand years, we perfected...sword-fighting?
Yeah, pull the other one, guv'nor.
When you boil it down, the theme of the story is a white Mahdi (why not name him Lawrence?) leading a bunch of space Arabs, who are fighting an evil Persian/Turkic overlord.
Rating: UG -- Unimaginative Garbage
The Great Observatories
I find it sort of startling that if you asked a good portion of people on this planet the names of the four gospels, they will name them correctly, no sweat ("Bill, Bob, Fred, and Mary"), but they will not be able to name the four space telescopes.
The four telescopes I am talking about are what NASA calls the Great Observatories.
NB: To be honest, there are many more than four space telescopes at the moment, but let's not have the details get in the way of a good story, shall we.
For those who are curious, the four space telescopes are named below.
Compton, which operates in the gamma ray spectrum.
Chandra, which operates in the X-ray spectrum.
Hubble, which is an optical telescope, and therefore operates in the visible light spectrum.
Spitzer, which operates in infrared, and is now deactivated. The James Webb Space Telescope also operates in infrared, so I don't know if NASA is considering a replacement for Spitzer.
Why do we put telescopes in space?
Ground based telescopes suffer from atmospheric interference. Optical telescopes have to account for weather and well, daylight. X-ray telescopes are useless on the ground because Earth's atmosphere absorbs X-rays (Note: This is a Good ThingTM).
Putting a telescope in space eliminates an entire set of observation problems. The skies are really clear up there, so to speak.
Okay, but why do we need telescopes that operate outside of visible light? Why can't we get away with just putting optical scopes like Hubble in space and calling it a day?
Visible light is not the only way to see things and understand them.
For example, extreme high-energy events like supernovae emit tremendous quantities of gamma rays, which are high on the spectrum, well past the frequency of visible light. Neutron stars and pulsars also emit gamma rays. Best way to study these--you guessed it--are telescopes that can collect gamma rays.
Young stars are born in nebulae. These stars are often completely obscured by huge clouds of gas and dust. Visible light does not penetrate these clouds, but infrared does. These stars are invisible to optical telescopes. Enter infrared telescopes.
The universe is speaking to us in many languages. The space telescopes are the interpreters.
The Cutest Human
Yeah, yeah, I am biased, but this is my daughter when she was about seven or eight. Cute as a bug. This came up in a memories spotlight in google photos. You forget, but google remembers...dunh dunh dunh
The Getaway
Faint of Heart
Aliens, Part II
In my previous post, I talked about aliens landing on our planet and that we will be toast if they did.
But why would they land?
All alien movies show alien ships making landfall. The aliens get up close and personal just so Hollywood can treat us to some office jockeys, suddenly turned urban warriors, going pew pew with a rifle against tentacled alien murder-bots.
See here's the thing. We have long known that the best way to kill something is to stay out of range of that thing you are trying to kill so it doesn't try to kill you back. That is why we invented bows and guns and artillery and bombs that we drop from the sky. If we understand this, I am positive that an alien civilization with millions of years of evolution under its belt will also understand this.
And they will stay out of range.
In my previous post, the wooden ships of the Spanish Armada get destroyed by Hellfire missiles of a modern navy in a hypothetical battle. The Hellfire missiles travel over the horizon from seven miles away, and the Spanish do not see the enemy. Aliens landing on Earth is like the modern navy deciding that the best way to destory the Spanish fleet, instead, will be to board them, cutlass in teeth, and engage in hand to hand combat. No sane admiral would entertain that thought.
Apply that to the aliens. An equivalence may be that they will park their starships in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri, which is 4 light years away and well out of reach of humans. Hell, even the Oort Cloud will work nicely. And they will deliver whatever civilization-ending superweapons they have, from there.
Easy breezy.
But that's not all, folks. Let's talk about weapon delivery.
We just got done assuming that alien weaponry will be delivered, ballistic missile style, from deep space. Three-dimensional space, to be exact.
Why?
An alien tech could conceivably deliver weapons through four-dimensional space, and we would have exactly zero ways to detect or stop said weapons.
No, I am not high. Stay with me. We know that higher spatial dimensions are possible. We can do the math and it checks out. But we cannot influence anything beyond three dimesions; we don't have the tech. But an alien civ could have the tech.
Here's how it would work. Let me explain with an example. Take a piece of paper and draw a stick figure on it. Now imagine that this stick figure can only crawl around on the surface of that paper. It cannot rise up out of that paper. It's vision and movement goes only up/down/left/right on that piece of paper. And boom! you have just created a 2D being. A Flatlander.
You, as a 3D being, have immense power over Flatlander. If you wanted to destroy Flatlander, you have a number of unstoppable ways to do it. You could cut through the paper with a pair of scissors, and Flatlander would not see or feel the prongs until it was torn in half. You could bring down a hammer on its smarmy face. You could drop a bunch of acid on its torso. You get the idea.
Having access to a higher dimension is a game-breaking advantage.
An alien with access to 4D will have exactly the same advantage over our 3D selves that we have over Flatlander. We will be powerless to stop alien weapons delivered over 4D because we will only feel those weapons nanoseconds before vaporization.
Glad I could brighten your day. Laters.
Postscript: I cheated a bit when I said Flatlander has no way to detect you. It does. Your 3D self casts a 2D shadow on the paper and this is what Flatlander sees. A fat lot of good it does since you cannot interact with or harm a shadow, but still, detection is possible. Similarly, we would indeed see huge 3D shadows (yep, 3D shadows) of 4D weapons hurtling down on us.
But...if the aliens wanted to take even this little bit of...ummm...satisfaction away from us, they could.
What would you do if you wanted to prevent Flatlander from detecting you? You could simply increase the ambient light in 3D space so that you cast little or no shadow on Flatland. Movie sets and photo studios do it all the time.
In the same way, the aliens could increase the ambient light in 4D space, and then, the only hint we would have of our imminent destruction would be, ironically, what we would think of as, a really bright sunny day.
Aliens
I like the movie Skyline. It is an alien movie. I own it. Most everybody else hates it. But I like it because I think it shows us exactly what will happen if an invasion-minded alien fleet lands on our fair planet. Humanity will get curb stomped.
It will not be a contest, it will not be a fight, it will be a one hunderd percent one-sided true blue extinction event. When you point bug spray at a bunch of flies, you don't think of yourself as being in a fight, do you? The only debate there is to see which fly can fly away fastest from your can of death, and given humanity has only managed to go as far as its own moon, which is a tiny distance, cosmically speaking, that option will not be available to us when squaring off against a bunch of star-hopping aliens. So sorry.
In case the outcome is still in doubt, let me paint a picture.
Once upon a time, there was this thing called the Spanish Armada. It was a fleet of 150 ships that the King of Spain unleashed upon the world. It was big. It was invincible. It was fearsome. And other such nice words. It was the biggest and most expensive European fleet at the time, and it was the pinnacle of naval warfare.
Now imagine that fleet going up against a modern navy. The modern navy will not techically need a single ship to do the actual killing. A group of thirty Reaper drones with standard issue Hellfire missiles will be enough to take out the entire Armada, turning every ship into matchsticks and killing every single sailor on board. The entire affair (I hesitate to call it a battle) will be over in thirty minutes.
Hellfire missiles have a range of 7 miles, so the Spanish will not even be able to see who or what killed them.
Consider that what I talked about is pitting our own technology against the past. An evolution of five hundred years. And that is the result. Now imagine the technology of a species possibly a million years ahead of us on an exponential tech scale. A tech that makes travelling the mind-numbing distance between the stars possible.
Imagine that tech blasting us in the face. My hunch is that, much like the Spanish, we won't even know it when we are dead.
Suck it, Romeo
Horror movies. Whether you love 'em or hate 'em, you gotta wonder about something. In these movies, when a demon or somesuch is attacking, a fucker with a bad haircut in a frock waves a cross at them and commands them to bugger off. That is all well and good if the demon is Christian, but what about a Hindu demon? Or a Muslim demon? They won't vanish if you wave a cross at them. They will laugh at your stupid cross.
Ah love, could you and I with fate conspireOmar Khayyam wanted to shatter this world and remake it closer to his desire.
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire
Shatter it to bits and
Remold it closer to heart's desire.
Let's think about that. Say you were given the task of taking this world and remaking it. How would you best design this new world? I assume that if you are not a fucking psychopath, you would want to make it the fairest, most satisfying world to live in.
For yourself.
That is how most people would approach the problem. They would imagine a world that does not hurt them.
There is an idea in ethics called The Veil of Ignorance. American philosopher John Rawls outlined this idea, and if there was a designer of the universe, this would be the blueprint that it would follow.
The idea is simple. You put yourself behind a veil of ignorance and design the world without knowing your place in it. That is the key idea: not knowing your place in the new world that you have designed. This virtually guarantees a fair design.
If you put income inequality in your brave new world, there is a chance you might find yourself on the wrong side of the tracks and be born poor. So you would not do that. If your world allows for slavery, you may be materialized in this world as a slave, so you don't entertain that design. If the politics in your universe heavily favor kings, you risk being a serf. So in your own best interest, you strive like a mofo to get the design right.
It really is that easy.