Supply and Demand
Big Boss and Working Joe were touring a car factory, to inspect a new line of welding robots.
Big Boss joked, “You wondering how you’re going to get them to join the union?”
Working Joe replied, “No, I’m wondering how you’re
going to get them to buy cars.”
Moral: Give to
get.
Super-Retort
Once upon a time, Captain Blue was flying towards Big Boss’s mansion, to attend a big dinner-party. He looked down and he saw Working Joe, standing in a muddy ditch, using his heat-vision to weld a sewer line; for Working Joe needed the money.
Captain Blue called down from the sky, “Poor Working Joe! If only he knew how to flatter Big Boss, then he wouldn’t have to weld sewer lines!”
Working Joe replied to the sky, “Poor Captain Blue! If only he knew how to weld sewer lines, then he wouldn’t have to flatter Big Boss!”
Moral: Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.
Civic Fixture
Menace, one of the stupider supervillains, threatened Working Joe’s family. Working Joe went to Captain Blue for help, but Captain Blue said “Give up your day job, and come with me to fight crime.”
Working Joe said, “I’m no trust-fund baby like you, I got a wife and kids, I gotta work for a living.”
So Working Joe then went to Big Boss. He said, “I’m not asking you for anything, I’m just telling you I can’t work under these conditions, and I’m thinking of leaving town.”
Big Boss said, “No, stay. Don’t worry about that moron. I’ll take care of him.”
Working Joe said, “So what do I owe you?”
“Nuthin’. You worth plenty as is.”
And what do you know, the very next day it was Menace who suddenly left town.
Moral: Follow the money.
Meet Working Joe
My daughter Hannah and I have, between us, invented an alternate comic-book superbeing; “Working Joe”. He’s not a superhero, nor a supervillain; more like a super-worker. He has the usual superpowers, but he uses them strictly for heavy construction work. He’s the guy who cleans up the mess after the superheros and supervillains stop battling. Unlike superheros, he’s in it for the money; unlike supervillains, he wants only honest jobs.
Working Joe neither fights crime nor commits it; he just works, very very hard. Don’t call him a superworker, he doesn’t like being set apart. He’s a Union man, of course. His contract with the Metroville Reconstruction Authority states that after a superfight, he does the heavy lifting and the dangerous labor, and the other Union people do detailing. What with all the superfights, all the time, it’s steady work.
I envision an episode consisting of nothing but him cleaning up after an action-packed sequence, all off-stage; we see him pick up the pieces afterwards, commenting all the while on the super-fighter’s super-carelessness. After restoring the city to its pre-fight glory, Working Joe says, “Another job well done!” and flies home.
No secret identity for him; but he has a wife and kids (all of them super) so he can’t afford to antagonize anyone. He’ll do honest work if the pay is good. So Working Joe moonlights as an independent contractor, building fortresses for both superheros and supervillains! The superheros look down on him for his mercenary streak; the supervillains despise him for his habitual honesty; he consoles himself that they need him more than he needs them.
Wife and kids also have superpowers. The wife is Home-Maker. She has super-endurance, she can read minds, and she can see out of the back of her head. The boy is Hyper; he has superspeed and ADHD; the girl is Goth; a moody teen with the power of invisibility. Raising superkids is super-expensive - so many home repairs! - so that’s why Working Joe has that mercenary streak. Part of the hidden joke of the comic is that he always needs money. He has wealth-creating superpowers, yet the system is rigged so that he constantly has to keep hustling.
And how did he get those superpowers? His origin story is that his maternal grandmother was not only an alien, she was an illegal alien!
Other characters in Working Joe’s Metroville: GoodCop/BadCop, Bankster, Suxel, and supersalesman “Bob”.
Once Working Joe met a boyhood hero of his; Fireman. Working Joe stammers his admiration, Fireman graciously returns the compliment. “Who built all the firetraps I rescue people from? Guys like you! Who do I rescue from those firetraps? Guys like you! Who pays my pension? Guys like you!”
I visualize Working Joe as wearing denim overalls and a helmet, and drawn in angular buff Socialist Realist style. Something like Spain’s “Trashman”.
Three Berkeley Trips 3
Trip 3, by Abstinence
Or: Planet of the Boobs
The nurse said, “You need to schedule another blood test next week.”
I shrugged. “OK.”
“And to test hormone levels,” she continued, “you’ll have to abstain from all sexual activity.”
“All sexual activity? For a week?”
“Mm-hm.”
“Including masturbation?”
“Mm-hm.”
I shrugged. A week without masturbation sounded easy enough. We scheduled the blood test, I went home and put away my one-hand magazines. (These were in the days before the Internet.)
A day came and went without inconvenience, then another. But on the third day something odd happened. I was walking down Telegraph Avenue, and I noticed that every woman on the street had unusually large breasts. Not just some of the women; all of them. This strange change in half the human population of Berkeley persisted all day, and I realized that it wasn’t them, it was me.
My perceptions were distorted, due to hormonal imbalance. Every woman’s breasts weren’t really bigger than before; they just seemed that way to me. I was hormone-addled, and seeing things strangely; I knew this, but the knowledge did not decrease the perceptual distortion effect.
The effect increased on the fourth day. Every woman, everywhere, had an amazingly ample bosom. I knew that was an illusion, but it was a very convincing illusion. I tried not to look, or seem to notice; but my judgment was probably as impaired as my perception; so if you noticed, then please forgive my peeking, dear women of Berkeley!
By the fifth and sixth days, I was adrift in an impossible parallel universe of fantastic mammary antigravitation. I knew that I was hallucinating, but still I saw the mirage as plain as day. I was amazed how clear, specific and florid the hallucination was; and as before, knowledge of illusion did not dispel illusion.
On the seventh day I went to the clinic and gave a blood sample. Then I went home and got out the one-hand magazines.
The next day, every woman’s breasts were back to normal size.
Three Berkeley Trips 2
Trip 2, by Sleep
Or: Which was the Dream?
I was sitting up in bed, reading a book. It was late, I was tired. Then I noticed something odd; the words of the book were changing and shifting. But why? Then I noticed something even stranger; my eyes were shut. I felt my eyelids firmly sealed together; yet I could see. But how?
I realized that I was asleep and dreaming. Within that lucid dream, I looked up from the book and scanned the room. There was the bookshelf, there were the knick-knacks, there was the couch, there was the computer desk, there were the windows and shades… all dreams.
Then I willed myself awake. I opened my eyes, and the first thing I noticed was that I was slumped over. I sat up, closed the book, and looked around. Same bookshelf, same knick-knacks, same couch, same computer desk, same windows and shades.
The two rooms were identical.
Three Berkeley Trips 1
By a Goat, Sleep, and Abstinence
I had some wild times during my days in Berkeley, California. The Sixties were long gone by the time I got there, but some of the spirit lingered, and I sought it out. My three trippiest times there had nothing to do with drugs. These three weird experiences were caused by, respectively, a goat, sleep, and abstinence.
Trip 1, by a Goat
Or: Thurber’s World
I was visiting Marion Zimmer Bradley’s house. After a few rounds of dilemma chess with the fantasy writer’s son, I stepped out to their back yard for a stroll and a breath of fresh air.
It was evening; the zenith had darkened to deep blue, the horizon glowed orange and red. A crescent moon shone, and a few stars, and Venus too.
I stopped, amazed; for there in front of me stood a goat. An Angora goat, waist-tall, with silky white hair… and a single horn.
He was Lancelot, a successful animal-husbandry experiment by Morning Glory and Otter Zell. At the goat’s birth, they had surgically fused Lancelot’s two hornbuds together; the fused hornbud grew into an imposing monohorn.
Lancelot was a unicorn. That surgically-modified Angora goat looked like he had stepped out of a medieval tapestry. Morning Glory and Otter Zell claimed that surgery like theirs was entirely possible for the medievals; so perhaps unicorns had been real enough all along.
Just then, in the evening twilight, with Moon and Venus overhead, that unicorn looked more than real; for Lancelot was eating Marion Zimmer Bradley’s rosebushes. Those of you who have read James Thurber’s stories know the one about the unicorn eating the rosebushes. In that surreal moment, I learned that a visit to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s place can put you in a Thurber story.
I also learned that unicorn droppings are about one centimeter long and about half a centimeter wide.
In Praise of Vermin
I write this essay in praise of all those critters that survive despite all mankind’s best efforts to exterminate them. I do so out of respect.
So kudos to weeds, pests and plagues! Tough enough to take us on! Here’s to dandelions, crabgrass, poison ivy, poison oak, and kudzu! Here’s to roaches and flies and fleas and mice and rats! Here’s to Asian carp, tiger mussels, raccoons and coyotes!
I think it the height of hypocrisy for us humans to complain of invasive pests. It’s no easy thing to be an invasive pest; you need some advantage. Raccoons have hands, rats have colonies. Invasiveness requires adaptability, as we well know, being invasive pests ourselves.
I praise vermin and weeds because they prove that life’s vitality exceeds ours; so a natural history beyond ours is guaranteed. I take comfort in this reflection. The raccoon’s hand proves that this planet needs hands, and if we drop the job then there will be another team to pick it up.
I have a modest proposal; that we find some rapidly-warming steep-sided Arctic island; that we stock it with all of the weeds and pests mentioned above. Then stand back, and watch the ecology of the future evolve.
I’m sure that experiment is already in process!
Family Shames 4
A Shameful Tale
If you put together the speculations of the previous three posts, then you get a truly shameful tale of human prehistory, as follows:
In the old days, Big Men had harems, and all other men were losers. The only hope the loser men had was to slay some Big Man, kill his children, and then rape the women. Of course the women detested this lion-like system, but those compliant to it reproduced more than those resistant to it, which left a genetic trace that our species bears to this very day; as proven by our adulation of killers and tyrants.
One day a loser man discovered a marvelous magic trick. Simply share spoiled fruit juice with an otherwise resistant woman. She will lose control before he loses potency. This trick spread. Women easily made drunk reproduced more; a genetic trace that our species bears to this very day. The same evolutionary pressures that created violent men and submissive women, then started to create devious men and drunken women. In other words, rape started to shift from force to fraud.
Eventually someone figured out the brewing of beer. It requires settled colonies and the hard labor of farming; an indignity that men were willing to suffer, for the sake of a magic sex potion.
Big Men dominated these colonies, but soon were outnumbered, and they were forced by political necessity to institute sexual socialism; share and share alike. The losers won… it seems. It’s fraudulent of course; Big Men still gather harems whenever possible.
Civilization is full of fraud, for it is based upon fraud; a genetic trace that we bear to this very day.
Mr. Charisma
The Catholic Church is still reeling from the pedophilia scandals; but the priests are not alone in this. There have been pedophiles amongst teachers, nurses, coaches… anywhere that adults routinely meet with children. Why is this so?
This tendency reaches its peak in isolated cults, whose leaders show a consistent tendency to monopolize the youngest females. This is clearly reversion to a harem-based reproduction strategy, common in the animal kingdom, and not unknown in biblical history.
I have elsewhere explained monogamy as sexual socialism; an artificial modification of human sexuality imposed by church and state to minimize the political dangers of masses of unattached men. But that same church, and that same state, had their historical origins in Big Men, who were never monogamists at all.
The Big Men were winners; all other men were losers; but the losers outnumbered the winners, so eventually they won after all. But it’s an artificial victory, and a recent one, barely ten millennia old. Every so often natural man peeks out, and civilization is shocked.
Family Shames 2
A Magic Trick
Women are biochemically more vulnerable to alcohol than men are. They are more strongly affected by the same amount, even when measured against body weight; and they take longer to metabolize it away. Why this difference?
Any frat-boy can tell you why. If you want her to say yes, then get her drunk. If he matches her drink for drink, then she’ll lose control before he loses ability. Alcohol is the original date-rape drug.
What a simple and effective mating strategy! From the point of view of late Paleolithic man, booze must have seemed a magic potion! Late Paleolithic woman may have had a different opinion; but the ones who said yes tended to have more children than the others; with predictable evolutionary consequences.
Some anthropologists theorize that agriculture, and with it civilization, was started not exactly for food security, but specifically for the brewing of beer. Farming’s hard work, and a hunter-gatherer can hunt or gather food anywhere; but for a magic sex potion, even a proud hunter will stoop to farming!
Civilization began with a magic trick; drugged date-rape; a mating strategy still imprinted on our genes.
Family Shames 1
1. O so Masculine
2. A Magic Trick
3. Mr. Charisma
4. A Shameful Tale
I write these essays to expose three Family Shames; and the family I refer to is the entire human species. I see, in certain quirks of human behavior, the genetic imprint of successful mating strategies dating back to the Paleolithic; and these strategies are not exactly admirable.
1. O so Masculine
I see in the news that George Zimmerman, famed for shooting to death a 17-year-old armed with Skittles, is in trouble again, this time for domestic abuse. He had already left his wife; this is another woman; and the question is, why would any woman seek such a man?
GZ is not alone in enjoying such curious solicitude. Death Row inmates are routinely mailed marriage proposals from women utterly unknown to them. This effect goes beyond the personal to the political; for it is also routine for the worst tyrants to inspire the greatest loyalty. Why?
I think this resembles a curious custom amongst the lions. A lion pride has one adult male; sooner or later he is challenged by a wandering younger male; if he is defeated then the young male takes his place; and the first thing he does is kill all the lion cubs. What then follows is (to a human) mind-bending; namely, the lionesses make new cubs, and this by mating with the very same male who had just killed their cubs!
From an evolutionary point of view this makes sense. The new lion is strong, so his cubs will be strong too. I suspect that a similar logic used to apply to Paleolithic humankind. It was a strategy that our distant ancestors borrowed from the lions; truly the King of Beasts, for I have a low opinion of kings, and now of lions, and now of our distant ancestors, who gave us tendencies that we bear to this very day.
Who First Ate Cheese?
Somebody had to be the first to eat cheese. I feel sorry for that someone, but admire that someone’s courage and luck. Surely there had been nothing else to eat, for miles and miles around, and for a long time too. All that was left was this smelly gunk at the bottom of the milk jug. But our heroine ate it, and survived.
Do you think our heroine’s tribe thought cheese to be health food? Not at first, and rightly so; no doubt her tribefolk had all sorts of bad reactions to cheese, starting with lactose intolerance and going on up to obesity and heart disease. But evolution proceeded, and now lactose intolerance is a rarity, and Frenchmen eat cheese yet stay thin.
I wonder about the origin of other healthful foods. Yogurt, for instance. Somebody had to be the first to eat that. Again, it must have been hard times.
Evolution continues unabated, even within civilization; for now civilization is the environment our genes must adapt to. If milk and cheese are cheap, then lactose intolerance is a genetic defect, and milk becomes health food. If you need readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic merely to survive on these mean streets, then so long dyslexia. If flu, measles and the common cold regularly go pandemic in the cities, then your grandchildren, if any, will have kick-ass immune systems.
I predict that in 10,000 years, Cheetos will be a health food.
On Orthopsychology and Parapsychology
My cat Charles can appear to teleport. Once I turned around in my chair to see him coming out of the wall. “I saw that!” I said, and he winked at me. I turned my head and there was Katniss sitting there like she had been there all along. I said, “You’re good!”
Some friends of mine have observed similar phenomena and concluded that cats are psychic; but to me, a “psychic” power is “parapsychological” - i.e. one where the practitioner outwits the witness. I define ‘orthopsychology’ as psychology where the investigator is smarter than the subject, ‘parapsychology’ as psychology where the subject is smarter than the investigator. Therefore orthopsychology tends to be Classical; its logic is rationalist and its results are reproducible; whereas parapsychology tends to be Romantic; its logic is surreal and its results are... elusive. “Psychic” powers are “mental” powers, where ‘mental’ comes from the Latin “mentir”, to lie.
So yes, by that definition, cats are definitely psychic. So are Penn and Teller. But though Penn, Teller and cats are parapsychological to us, they are orthopsychological to themselves. Disillusionment is the price of mastering illusion.
One of Mother Nature’s Little Jokes
Amongst humans, ‘race’ is an illusion. Except for obvious genes like skin color and bone structure, the genetic differences between the so-called races is less than the differences within the so-called races. Genetically, skin color is skin deep; it is not a good predictor of pretty much anything else.
This should not come as much of a surprise, given the evolutionary time-scale of skin color. It takes only a few thousand years for deep tan Asians to become pasty white Inuit; or for palefaced Central Asian horse raiders to become swarthy Indians. Basically what we call race is a genetic tan.
It’s not even a matter of color but of hue. As I noted in another essay (“Do White People Exist?”) the color of Caucasian skin is not even close to the color of clouds, paper, milk and cloth. A glass of milk the color of Patrick Buchanan would clearly be undrinkable. All humans, except possibly the rare albino, is in fact a shade of brown. To say one sees white people is to literally confess a hallucination.
So race is an illusion, both genetically, and if you inspect the visual evidence objectively. And yet even infants react differently to people of different skin hue. Babies are born racist!
Racism is genetic, even though race itself is not! Another one of Mother Nature’s little jokes.
Olber, Meet SETI
Recall Olber’s Paradox: why is the night sky dark? If the universe were infinite and static, then a look in any direction in the sky should eventually intercept a distant star; so the sky should be a solid sheet of sunfire. Why is it not?
The answer now given is that the universe is expanding; so it is finite in age, so only a finite amount of light has reached us; and also that distant light sources are receding, and so their light is doppler-shifted to the red. So, for instance, the 3 degree background radiation is the redshifted light of the Big Bang fireball. So in a sense the night sky is a solid sheet of sunfire!
Now recall Fermi’s Paradox: where are they? Meaning, if there are extraterrestrial civilizations, why do we not see them? A special case of Fermi’s Paradox is the Silent Universe. Try as the SETI people might, they have yet to detect radio transmissions from alien civilizations. Why not? After all, in an infinite static universe, no matter which way we point our radio telescopes, we should find in its field of view a radio-transmitting civilization. Therefore the night sky should be a solid sheet of intelligent radio sources. But it isn’t. Why not?
No doubt you see the similarity of the Silent Universe Paradox with Olber’s Paradox. The latter wonders why the sky doesn’t glow in light; the former wonders why the sky doesn’t babble in radio. Therefore they have the same resolution; the expansion of the universe, which gives the universe a finite age and hence only finite time to beam light or radio; and which also redshifts distant light or radio sources down to invisibility.
So riddle me this: why is night dark and quiet?
Answer: because the universe is expanding.
On Cousinhood
Assured of Man’s supremacy?
Oh silly sibling, don’t be smug!
For great and wide’s our family tree;
Dear sister seaweed, brother bug!
First cousins are those who share a grandparent; second cousins share a great-grandparent; in general Nth cousins share an great^(N-1)-grandparent; or in other words share a parent N+1 generations back. Therefore siblings are zeroth cousins, and one is one’s own negative first cousin!
For what value of N are all human beings Nth cousins? This is a matter of evolutionary history. The present human species is about 200,000 years old, and at about 20 years per generation, that comes to 10,000 generations; so I would guess that we are at most 10,000ths cousins of each other; and probably much less. There is some genetic evidence of genetic bottlenecks in human prehistory; so I would guess that we are at most 7000th cousins of each other, probably much less.
And what of other species? I found the following figures at the site www.evogeneao.com
chimp = 240,000th cousin
gorilla = 310,000th cousin
cat = 27,000,000th cousin
cow = 28,000,000th cousin
robin = 170,000,000th cousin
frog = 175,000,000th cousin
fish = 195,000,000th cousin
snail = 300,000,000th cousin
dragonfly = 300,000,000th cousin
octopus = 300,000,000th cousin
According to that website, one can’t properly define cousinhood for bacteria. If we did, then I suppose that we’d be zillionth cousins to redwood and mildew, for some absurdly high value of zillion.
In any case, it’s nice to have such a big and talented family. Blessings, cousins!
Hominid Thermostat
The North Pole is melting. The Northwest Passage will soon be open on a regular basis; expect shipping patterns to change accordingly. So long, polar bears. What other little surprises does dear old Mother Nature have in store for us? That’s the trouble with climate change; you can’t predict just what the changes will be; but civilization needs predictability.
I’m philosophical about it all. I have a theory, which I call the Hominid Thermostat. It goes as follows; Gaia, the planetary biosphere, noticed that that it’s been suffering from periodic ice ages lately. This will not do; so the biosphere evolved a species of semi-intelligent fire users (that’s us) to dig up and burn gigatonnes of coal and oil, and thus warm the planet. In typical Gaian fashion, the process is self-regulating; for as soon as we put enough CO2 into the air, then the seas will rise, drown out most of our cities, and thus end the process. How ecological!
The fish will like Florida; but Al Gore is anthropocentric enough to try to stop the process. He will probably fail because he’s trying to counter human political disunity, plutocratic greed, and ideological stupidity. Contra Naturam!
Oh, by the way; according to New Scientist, part of the long-range global-warming forecast is that certain areas will each year experience a combination of heat and humidity high enough to kill an unprotected human within hours. (Unprotected as in; naked, sopping wet, in the shade, sitting in front of a fan, drinking water constantly, but you die before the day is done. Only air conditioning or a deep cave would save you.) These heat-stress areas include parts of China, parts of Africa, parts of South America, all of the USA’s South and Eastern Seaboard; and all of the Indian subcontinent. So India had better plug in the AC (and hope the power stays on) or dome over the cities, or dig in like hobbits. Or leave, or die. And they, and the rest of us, will have at most three centuries to prepare.
Computer Laws
Moore’s Law: Computer hardware doubles in speed and capacity every 18 months.
Gates’s Law: Computer software doubles in languor and bloat every 18 months.
The Cyber-Siesta: Computer boot-up time remains a constant 60 seconds over many computer generations. Show me a petaflop machine, and I will show you a machine that must do 60 quadrillion floating-point operations to turn on.
Hellerstein’s Limit: If you keep your computer loaded with the very latest software, then over its lifetime it will do at most twice as much work as it did in the first 18 months.
Proof: 1 + ½ + ¼ + 1/8 + 1/16 + … = 2
The Digital 90-10: Analog systems are 90% effective, and 10% ineffective, 100% of the time; but digital systems are 100% effective 90% of the time, and 100% ineffective 10% of the time.
