I like my useless body-composition weight scale. It gives me numbers and plots with labels describing things I want to know. The numbers come from computations based on scientific studies. The numbers have a certainty to them even though I have no idea where this health story will end up. I am entertained watching the show of my own making.
We are told with remarkable unison across all governments, as if instructed by a solitary God, that we need to be protected from nature, and against or own nature. The current tablets come in the form of mandatory schedule of vaccines and mandatory social-credit passports. Those governments are presenting these tablets to the people and are observing a similar incongruity Moses faced. They are rapidly approaching the moment that will forever define their character. Will they smash their tablets like Moses did his?
We discovered the killer and in our attempts to put a stop to the villain we set off a world wide conflagration of the modern equivalent of the upper middle class, its comfort and its source of wealth. The story is still unfolding, but I wonder whether it may all end up like the Name of the Rose, the only thing remaining is the word itself.
We look back at the recent history and are frustrated that we can not do what they were able to do. We live in a world with many more rules, and a lot less opportunities. The conditions are like that of the experiment: we are frustrated in finding relief and observe what increasing appears completely random occurrences of success. The modern examples of people who do succeed, even in the technologies, appears more to be the case of the person being lucky at being in the right place at the right time rather than being particularly visionary or brilliant. Success is random, and consequently so is the pain of the lack of success. Success is also increasingly rare, leaving a large population in frustration, yearning for its master to save them.
Oral story telling was the original big data. The various oral stories were saved in persistent memory and captured a large volume and variety. The invention and adoption of written works displaced the oral tradition and that brought and end to that earlier big data. In this sense, our current excitement about big data may be a rediscovery of a capability available our ancient ancestors. Big data and oral story telling tradition both offer inexpensive and durable means to manage a large number of distinct and very individualized stories. In the modern era, we are rediscovering the need to collect individual stories and thus granting them ability to circulate like what happened in the preliterate society of oral story tellers.
We are experiencing an end of history. Unlike the essay of that title from the 1990s that proposed that the development of democracy has finally reached the ultimate good in terms of social/political development, I am referring to a period where we methodically erase all evidence of the past. Perhaps by the end of the century there will be no evidence there was any history that existed before this century (that last remaining evidence may be the junk we left behind on the moon). Even if the remainder of the century is generally peaceful, the evidence of the past will be destroyed or replaced with modern replicates that lose the connection with the actual past.
Recently I have been enjoying many videos on the LindyBeige YouTube channel. In particular, I enjoy watching his presentations of his theories of various historical weapons or warfare tactics and how they were used. I do not know much about him outside of these videos but I’ll grant that he is an archaeologist, a…
Lately, I have been stumped by a problem with my neat little theory of separating sciences into present-tense science (collecting well documented and controlled observations) and past-tense science (scrutinizing and interpreting previously collected observations). The problem came up when I based a conclusion that time travel was a nonsensical concept by suggesting that time…
In my discussion of HG Well’s time machine, I mentioned that I originally read the story for its science fiction of traveling in time rather than the social commentary. It is usual for a young person to be fascinated about the idea of traveling in time, but I like to think that it was…
In a couple recent posts, my argument stumbled over confusing maturity with competence. I attempted to clarify that the two ideas are distinct and serve different purposes. I want to return to the original mistake of implying that maturity can be a proxy for competence. I suggested other “bright” (well defined and controlled)…
Hypothesis Discovery 