Taking the Gentle Approach
Posted on | February 1, 2010 | No Comments
One intriguing perspective shift I was reminded of yesterday was that everything is an event. This does not mean that my having coffee this morning amounts to high drama ranking up there with The Ring Cycle (pick one) worthy of a rapt audience following every minute detail thereof, as many twitterinos seem to believe. It is more an attempted altering of focus by some professional smart-ass or another (Alfred North Whitehead, bless the Google, coauthor of Principia Mathematica, bless the Wikipedia) implying that there are no “things”, but only processes that shift from one form to another, akin to the principle of conversation of energy. Notably, he spoke of the pyramids as being events in time, with a “before” moment, when they were but heaps of rock and potential chemical energy stored in the bodies of the workers that will erect them, and a hitherto undefined “end” when they will crumble to dust or be blown to smithereens to build the brand spanking shiny new Sahara hovercar bypass.
Many would say this is natural and, like so many simple ideas, obvious. However, many would also say that life is natural, however, life itself is an attempt at staving off this “natural” procession of things, at the voracious expense of external energy sources (the Sun, geothermal vents, gajillions of chemical reactions, you name it, life eats it in one way or another). Occasionally, in attempting to beat entropy, elements of multicellular life take a wrong path and turn into unkillable parasitic cells that ultimately destroy their own host, therefore kind of kicking themselves in the arse. I’m talking about cancer here, of course, and continuing the line of thought from the previous post, the fact that most cancer treatment techniques thus far focus on forcibly killing that which cannot be killed, making these treatments sort of like a zombie hunt. You may be Shiva incarnate with the shotgun, but the more widespread the initial infestation, the lower your chances are of getting ‘em all before one of them gets you.
A team of researchers seems to have taken an alternate approach, and they are making serious headway. Instead of taking a bullet to each of the cancer cells, they are trying to learn the language of these buggers, so as to be able to tell them: it’s okay, you can rest now… and thereby making them stop struggling and quietly give up the ghost like any good cell should. To me, this appears to be the right way to shoot for immortality – not trying to preserve everything untouched and unharmed, like fiddling with telomeres and oxygen absorption and whatnot, but simply getting the old and broken bits to die quietly, while making new, healthy and fresh bits grow to replace them.
Now, admittedly, the article I linked to is a horrendous hodgepodge of biochemical jargonatry worthy of a special prize for being impenetrable, one that anyone spending their days absorbed in translation, writing, ukulele strums and general farting about can’t even begin to fathom, but why this is not making the headlines in a more digestible form while Steve Jobs’ burp of a tablet has everyone in hypnotic thrall is beyond me.
I guess that’s humans for you.
“Hey, we will cure cancer!”
“Meh.”
“Hey look! Shiny beads!”
“Woooo…”
I May Yet Live Forever
Posted on | January 22, 2010 | No Comments
Well, I refused to rip that last one out, despite stern admonishment from my General In Satan’s Army. They made me lose two, and to be honest, they were giving me hell back there, creating a nyarlathothepian gnarl of twisted flesh about them. I’m likely better of this way, though it did hurt like all hell. What appeared through the haze of anesthesia to be a pair of white-clad silverback alphas in a fit of murderous rage chipped away at my skull-bone for an hour until they got every last shard out, along with a splash of extra bone and about a bucket of gore.
Unrelated side note: they tell you it won’t hurt a bit, that it’s just a small pinprick until the drugs kick in, and then it goes numb all over. They lie. It hurts like a motherfucker. They shove that needle in about a dozen places around your gums and fill something that most definitely was not a bodily cavity of any sort prior to their pumping it full of anesthetic, which in turn probably does something to the pain, but if it was meant to kill it, they were throwing rocks at the godsdamn Borg Cube. So yeah, it hurts, and hurts quite a lot, not even counting the next two days of hazy, throbbing blur best spent watching the first two seasons of Eureka back-to-back.
But enough reminiscing – point is, I refused to have my remaining wisdom teeth extracted and was promptly chastised for this by several people – including said General – only to be promptly vindicated by Japanese researchers. It turns out, the little bugger still hanging in there could potentially keep me alive and fully-toothed for ages to come thanks to novel methods of extracting stem cells from wisdom teeth. They are already kicking in with some basic dental applications, and I’m guessing “new teeth from wisdom-stems-cells” are a technology that will be ripe just when I will need it most – some 15 years from now.
Considering the fun little fact (wildly overlooked in the news) that they are starting to efficiently kill/remove relatively large tumors without them metastasizing (yes, I know it mainly deals with breast cancer, but any sufficiently immobilizable body part can undergo a similar procedure), the medical profession seems to be on the right track to keep us alive forever.
This Year We Make Contact
Posted on | January 15, 2010 | No Comments
When the dust settled after the New Year and Christmas frenzy, one of the things I noted is that there were a total of three greeting cards in my work email and two on my private account. Rewind to last year – all active inboxes are overflowing with kitchy sparkles and humorous photoshop collages. For a moment I was stumped – am I that much of a cranky hermit that a single-handful of people cared enough to spam me? But Facebook dispersed this notion, with hordes of the sparkly and the humorous arriving in the form of applications, wall posts and private messages. That’s when I realized.
I’m all alone here. Look! Tumbleweeds!
E-mail? Why, that’s a business communication/document exchange tool. Even my mom transitioned to IM and I myself am guilty of switching all my link-sharing activities, pokes and peeks, even writing godsdamn book reviews (that should rightly belong here) to the Twacebook ecosystem. Yes indeedy, it is convenient. But then, I do not want to give up this spot. Not just yet. It feels cozy having my own private domain, with my own private Wordpress, with my own private FTP space, and my own private three and a half readers.
So, the Internet shifted. It is not just private communications and holiday greetings. Despite them being announced as the second coming of Jebus and the end-all cure-all for democratizing media production, apparently, at least 95% of all blogs are abandoned, and those that remain are mostly, let’s be honest, not blogs, but news sites.
I may clock in at under one post per month, but this place still does not qualify to be abandoned, so yay me! I’m one step above the hordes of angsty teens writing lengthy journal entries on what they had for lunch and how much they hate their parents and getting bored of it after a month. What an accomplishment! They all moved on to Twittering about the rage, while leaving bloggery to us old farts. The subtitle of this place feels vindicated.
Now I just have to hang in there until blogging stops being merely passé and becomes vintage.
On Worthy Causes
Posted on | November 4, 2009 | No Comments
Autumn arrived two days ago.
Just as I was polishing off a sexy introduction about how we didn’t have a proper autumn in ages, mostly just caroming straight from the scorching blast of subtropical ultraviolet into knee-deep slush and slippery streets and the sheer poetry of it being announced not by the flip of the calendar or the birds migrating south but a brown maple-leaf getting blown through the baker’s door, a day later all hell breaks loose and now we are in up to our ankles in the gray-brown splash of winter in a big city.
It is increasingly hard to justify leaving the bed in the morning, and the weather sure isn’t helping. One of these days I will just give up and give in, spending the day wrapped in blankets, head full of the taste of home-made chocolate muffins, lounging in our bean-bag with bleary eyes locked on content that had its copyright not just infringed, but dragged out in the street, beaten to a bloody heap of gelatinous gibs and then left to fend for itself in the wild, as the howl of ravenous wolf packs draws inevitably closer.
There are things wherein my being of the piratical disposition really presents absolutely no moral quandaries, as is the case with most musico-cinematic offerings these days. They are either completely and utterly fecal in every imaginable way, completely unavailable through legal means, or simply hopelessly overpriced and lagging for months or years in release time behind the competition, or indeed, behind themselves in different geographical regions. Nagging case in point: the local SciFi channel, trying to woo us with PREMIERES! of shows that actually aired a year or two ago in the US. Neglecting the fact that you would need to be 11 or a virgin or possibly both to truly give a flying copulation about Legend of the Seeker, I have to wonder how deep the fucking hole is wherein TV and movie execs live, or at least bury their heads, ignoring things like, oh, I don’t know, the invention and proliferation of the FUCKING INTERNET.
Yeah, I will not be subscribing to HBO, Cinema Plus or the Hustler Channel, thankyouverymuch, I have broadband access and at least seven different ways to leech (and seed! always seed!) whatever tickles my pickle in a manner of minutes. With movies, you could argue that a quality DVDRip often arrives months after even the belated local cinema premiere, but with TV shows, the time between initial airing and global availability is something measured in the hours it takes to repack what has just been captured. It is good to know, though, that some people (and, by extension, companies) are not completely out of touch and are taking the entire “disrupting your shit” paradigm to the eyeball-bleeding edge (side note: is there a way to buy Google shares from here?)
But I digress, and having ranted on this very issue in the last post, should move on. The thing is, I don’t pay for entertainment, for various reasons, the most prominent one being convenience. If I can get it fast, easy and free, then why should I make an effort to do it the hard way, for an unreasonable amount of money and laden with shit like DRM and anti-piracy warning clips that cannot be skipped? Why should I pay exorbitant prices with no basis in the market conditions for a belated subpar non-scarce product that discriminates based on accidents of geography and attempts to impose artificial limits on what I can do with the product? Morals? Starving artists? Having analyzed the way the percents divvy up, sane people will steer clear of this grimy, foggy, winding dead-end of an argumental street.
There are two exceptions, though. One is stuff performed live, where I pay for the true, physical time-space scarcity of an item. The other is if a friend did something and I want to support them (though I can’t help nagging them about the need to git with the times – I don’t want to buy your album/DVD/dead-tree-book, but I will buy the artsy T-shirt and pay to hear/see you perform!) This was the case at the book fair this last weekend, which, in retrospect, offered more food for thought than it appeared at first glance.
The cogs really started ticking after I nearly punched the lights out on an antidarwinist fucktard selling distilled hate speech disguised as creationist “books”. The girls considered what he was peddling funny, and wanted to buy a couple of books for our growing collection of “light reading” that sits on the bookshelf we installed in the shitter, but I was adamant that I will not give money to support and encourage religious retardation. A brief discussion ensued wherein the girls did not think with their hormones as I was doing at that moment, still simmering with the suppressed urge to implant my elbow in someones nose. Instead, they suggested we then purchase something to counter the balance and support the good guys. Being an idiot I refused, with the dubiously valid rationale that I do not read translations of books I can read in their original versions and would rather purchase those, though they were entirely absent at the fair.
Not being a complete idiot, I did listen, though of course, being a bit of an idiot, not right away. They had the valid point that the intent in purchasing the book would not be to pay for something to read, but to support an idea, akin to donating to a worthy cause. This is something I already do in the exact same form – purchase newly published SF books by local authors even though I could probably get them for free, what with being great friends and by now, in some way or other, also related to the publisher, and even though I’ve mostly already read what is in there in one form or another. The thing is, while I like having SF novels by local authors on my shelves and I like having books like The Selfish Gene or Gödel, Escher, Bach on my shelves in their original, English-language editions (which, right now, I don’t, hint, hint, birthdaycomingup, hint, wink, hint), I would not want them taking up space in their translated versions that would merely collect dust. Not to mention that I haven’t read a dead-tree version of a book in… ages. I forget what paper and glue smell like.
But, as is always the case (except, perhaps, with the problem of cats chasing shadows and thus ripping gaping holes in walls), someone on the Internet already came up with a solution. Cory Doctorow has a cute little school-library-exchange thingy going on, so I will just blatantly copy it and start buying relevant books as I would if I were to read them, and then donate them to… hell. Libraries? Schools? Just random people on the street? What is a relevant target for a small-scale pop-sci book donation?
Ideas? Certainly more than welcome.
Tags: book fair > books > copyright > disruptive technology > donating > paradigm shift > piracy > seasons > tardis
Pass The Glitter, Please
Posted on | October 15, 2009 | No Comments
No excuses this time. Right beneath your window, burly muscle assembles wood, carpeting and floodlights into an impromptu black-carpet private affair, complete with bouncers, hostesses and those silly aluminum posts with bits of velvety rope strewn between them to herd the new arrivals in an orderly line. An innocent soul with the shit luck of having parked in the wrong spot at the wrong time has their freshly scrubbed Volvo towed to an unknown detention lot by the diabolical imps of the city parking “service”.
Familiar souls congregate before the entrance, trading jokes and typing furiously on their communicators before descending through the carpet-strewn portal. An hour into the affair, you stomp down from your elevated perch on the opposite side of the street, an odd figure, coatless in the near-freezing temperatures, past the bored muscle, straight into the welcoming smile of a familiar looking hostess (Am I supposed to know her? Who the hell is she? Why does she look so damn familiar? The strobing flash of recognition hitting you hours later – you occasionally share the same bus to work in the morning), with corporate-branded forehead furrowing amidst shifting silver-glitter gown folds as you mutter your affiliation, the esoteric password for entry into the magical realm of free drinks and The Schmooze.
Descending into the gray underworld, well known faces abound and the twisted night of awkward encounters is free to play its wild improvisations as confused paparazzi snap pictures of goggly-eyed nerds confused by the unfamiliar territory and sudden flashing intercepting them at the entrance. Good luck picking the celebrities out of that potage.
Wait, what? Celebrities?
Well, the concept twists and turns oddly during the evening. Who are the proper celebrities here? Who are the proper VIPs? The regular club crowd here for the drinks and an odd (Wednesday) night out? The glitterati, in their moderately haute couture mildly amused by the subject of the event and severely confused by the small throng of unfashionable eyewear sporters that have invaded their realm and are interfering with the already overtly hard work of being noticed amidst the silvery flashes of waiters with branded foreheads balancing trays brimming with glasses chock full of ice cubes. Or is it the gruff cabal of writers and writer wannabes, orbiting the focus of their universe, Notre-Dame de la Publication, silently observing the proceedings from behind the central slot of the impractically positioned concrete table-slabs, with the occasional snigger or snide comment shout-whispered in their neighbor’s ear. Or perhaps, could it be that there is a sweet spot, embodied in a singular chimeric figure of the fan who is also an author who is also a journalist who is also a blogger who is also a twitterer who is also a regular nightlife connoisseur?
Perhaps, or perhaps not, yet the night unfolds further, into an orgy of ill-planned incursions, a veritable clash of parallel universes with little in common, delivering no high drama as the genre is oft fond of imagining, but instead awkward pauses, people holding speeches none can or want to hear, yawn-inducing modern-dance interpretations of science fiction by people who can’t tell Star Trek from Star Wars in front of an audience that considers both to be light years beyond passé, the repetitive dull thump of promo jingles for failed shows attempting to brainwash through repetition those already annoyed beyond continence by repeat calls to tune in for such epic flops as Flash Gordon! on the very TV channel being promoted that everyone already discovered either through word-of-mouth or by pure chance during aimless channel-hopping sessions.
They can stop now. The intended audience is not interested. Double the dose of TNG and Futurama reruns sloshed amidst the regular B-movie fare and everyone will be happy. Really. All the brand! spanking! new! shows were downloaded way back when they first ran them across the Atlantic and no one was impressed enough to keep watching. Geography ain’t what it used to, and an entity calling itself Scifi (and thank Our Lord of Undead Resurrections that they have not expanded the vomitorial SyFy re-branding over here) should be the first to understand that this is the future, baby. Shit’s gone global faster than you can say transplanetarianism.
Onwards the show! The xmas-tree decoration dancer survives repeatedly banging herself against the swinging spotlights and various unforeseen structural supports, tangling and untangling among the struts held together by duct tape (a sweet nerdular touch if done intentionally, if not, a sure candidate for There, I Fixed It) and thereafter things rapidly disintegrate in a cloud of half-brained dance remixes and rhythmless attempts to bust a move by angular lads attempting to impress their escorts while the in-crowd sips their drinks, faces indistinguishably pasty-white for reasons entirely different that the nerd patrol, with “going out” being solely a vampiric after-dark activity reserved for smoke-filled underground bunkers where the music is too loud to talk yet too shyte to dance.
On your way to help a friend fetch a drink, you are lost in a series of increasingly eccentric orbits taking you further and further out until you are breathing fresh air, glittery silver confetti crunching under boot soles. Dreamy, but not surreal, the word you are looking for is definitely awkward. Good stuff, you think to yourself as the chill wind hits your sweaty scalp signaling its time to make like the atom and… you know.
Split.
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