I didn't realize I hadn't made this obvious, but seeing as I've had two people over the past few weeks refer to me in some way as a "transhumanist", apparently my disconnection from that subculture has gone somewhat under the radar.
So anyway. I am not involved in "transhumanism" at this point.
I do not call myself a transhumanist anymore.
I used to, but then I got tired of the baggage associated with it.
I also got really tired of the constant (boring, distracting) arguments over "What is transhumanism?", in addition to the stealth-eugenics stuff that some (not all, but enough to be a problem for me) transhumanists were trying to defend all the time.
I actually started feeling cognitive dissonance pretty early on, when I got involved in discussions where it seemed I was expected to dismiss the arguments of, say, disability-rights advocates (who I saw as making really good points) as "disability extremism".
But I stuck around hoping that maybe I could help some of the people calling themselves "transhumanists" (who I did find myself also agreeing with on some points) see how their own strident defenses of morphological liberty in the direction of permission/enablement to self-modify as desired actually converged with the disability advocates' long history of similarly defending atypical, nonstandardized bodies and brains and their existence in the world.
But I was up against too much. I had a few apparent allies, but not enough.
And eventually I couldn't find any good reason to keep calling myself a transhumanist -- not when I was at the point of feeling like if certain people on some of the mailing lists I was on had had their way, I'd never have even been born in the first place.
Mind you, I know that different people are at different points on their individual philosophical existential learning-about-the-world journey. I do not immediately reject the views of people who happen to be calling themselves transhumanists now (and am thankful for those who did not reject my views or assume I had nothing to say when I was calling myself that).
And I don't have any problem being friends with someone who still calls xyrself a transhumanist, or engaging in respectful discussion with such a person. With very few exceptions (e.g., Nazis, Raelians, Amway salespeople), I don't care a lick what someone's associations are -- I am very much about taking people on their own terms, probably to a fault.
But, the bottom line is that I am most definitely not self-identifying as "transhumanist" these days.
There's nothing about being interested in biogerontology and robots and cyborg body parts and whatnot that beholds anyone to a highly self-referential (and sometimes irritatingly insular and hypersensitive) subculture such as transhumanism.
And I am not a "pessimist". (See blog title? Yeah, I really mean that.)
Just because I think superlativity tends to distort dialogue and make it difficult to focus on what can actually be done in the real world does not mean I disparage the power of human imagination or our capacity to change things for the better.
When I say that superlativity is annoying and damaging to longevity-medicine dialogue, I am saying that no, it will not in any way, shape, or form help your grandmother live longer if you go around spouting off and gesticulating about how someday super-AIs will be able to extract the molecular patterns of people long-dead out of the atmosphere and reconstitute those people in some strange zombie homeopathy.
What will help is advocacy to improve elder care so that people don't end up wasting away in nursing homes. What will help is good, solid research. What will help is a shift in attitude away from judging people on the basis of how many hours they can put in in the cubicle farm and toward greater valuation of all kinds of people, regardless of age or disability or anything else.
I'm sorry if that sounds plodding and boring, but I actually want people to live, and I am not getting the sense from actually looking at reality that engaging in homeopathic zombie and upload fantasies in any context outside science fiction or salon philosophy is going to help anyone actually live.
And anyway, my interests themselves haven't changed.
I am still advocating for actual morphological freedom (that is, the right to control one's own configuration regardless of whether that means modifying or not modifying one's various aspects).
I am still absolutely in favor of and eager to support good, solid, biogerontological research. I still volunteer for the Methuselah Foundation and plan to keep doing that for as long as I can be of help.
I haven't suddenly decided that it's great to die of probably-preventable things at ages when you'd much rather be writing novels or stargazing.
I haven't stopped thinking robots and AI and cool science-fiction stories about parallel universes and Vast Amazing Futures are really nifty.
I've just realized that I don't owe anyone anything for having the interests I have, nor do I need to be a "member" of any transhumanist organization in order to have the kinds of interesting discussions that I've always been interested in having.
If that's somehow not okay with you -- well personally I don't care, but you might want to seriously examine your thinking. I can't survive cognitively in environments that force everything into false dichotomies, and nobody should feel hurt, slighted, or bitter because of my doing what I need to do for the sake of being able to actually use my brain.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
The Action for Children Autism Ad, Revisited
Having done a bit more digging into the history and origins of the Action for Children autism ad, and having read a few more responses to said ad, I'm beginning to get a sense of why this kind of thing needs to be addressed critically.
(I stand by what I said in my previous post about not wanting to presume that an autistic person expressing views different from mine must have been "coerced" into stating those views.
Certainly coercion and undue influence happen, but without concrete evidence of their happening I don't figure I have any business claiming knowledge that they did happen.)
But: one thing I hadn't really considered in writing my previous post was the fact that (as Sharon pointed out in a comment on my prior post), this was not a matter of Dan reflecting on his experiences on his own blog or other individually-generated publication.
(I would love to hear what Dan has to say for himself -- meaning, what he'd say if he wasn't being called upon to advertise for "Action for Children", and if his expressed thoughts were not filtered through the marketing lens -- but I haven't yet.)
Rather, it was a matter of a charity organization deciding to self-promote, hiring an ad agency, and orchestrating an advertisement. There may have indeed been some solicitation of actual client input -- but there were also marketing folks and even "art directors" involved in the generation of the ad.
Hence, the result cannot be viewed only as "Dan's own words about his own experiences", but as the result of the efforts of people whose job it is to come up with novel ways of sending particular messages in eye-catching ways.
So, again, while I will not claim to know what Dan actually thinks (and while I would never ever suggest that he should change his own message to be more in line with what I think), I am definitely willing to state that I think the campaign is missing the mark.
"Action for Children" may not have meant for the ad to portray autistic children as "monstrous" (or in need of institutionalization to "civilize" them), but that seems to be the predominant interpretation of the ad based on almost all the commentary I've seen so far.
Good intentions don't put any charity's actions above reproach or criticism, and if "Action for Children" really wants to stand behind their stated aim of helping vulnerable youth, they have an obligation to listen to those who are pointing out the potentially harmful effects of the imagery and message in their advertisements.
(I stand by what I said in my previous post about not wanting to presume that an autistic person expressing views different from mine must have been "coerced" into stating those views.
Certainly coercion and undue influence happen, but without concrete evidence of their happening I don't figure I have any business claiming knowledge that they did happen.)
But: one thing I hadn't really considered in writing my previous post was the fact that (as Sharon pointed out in a comment on my prior post), this was not a matter of Dan reflecting on his experiences on his own blog or other individually-generated publication.
(I would love to hear what Dan has to say for himself -- meaning, what he'd say if he wasn't being called upon to advertise for "Action for Children", and if his expressed thoughts were not filtered through the marketing lens -- but I haven't yet.)
Rather, it was a matter of a charity organization deciding to self-promote, hiring an ad agency, and orchestrating an advertisement. There may have indeed been some solicitation of actual client input -- but there were also marketing folks and even "art directors" involved in the generation of the ad.
Hence, the result cannot be viewed only as "Dan's own words about his own experiences", but as the result of the efforts of people whose job it is to come up with novel ways of sending particular messages in eye-catching ways.
So, again, while I will not claim to know what Dan actually thinks (and while I would never ever suggest that he should change his own message to be more in line with what I think), I am definitely willing to state that I think the campaign is missing the mark.
"Action for Children" may not have meant for the ad to portray autistic children as "monstrous" (or in need of institutionalization to "civilize" them), but that seems to be the predominant interpretation of the ad based on almost all the commentary I've seen so far.
Good intentions don't put any charity's actions above reproach or criticism, and if "Action for Children" really wants to stand behind their stated aim of helping vulnerable youth, they have an obligation to listen to those who are pointing out the potentially harmful effects of the imagery and message in their advertisements.
Monday, January 26, 2009
The Action for Children Autism Ad: Not Just About The Monster
There's been a lot of commentary lately around certain corners of the Web regarding a UK ad campaign put out by Action for Children, a charity which (according to their website) "...supports and speaks out for the most vulnerable children and young people in the UK".
In this ad, an autistic teenager called Dan (it doesn't say whether or not that's his real name, but I will presume at least it refers to a real person) describes how he used to be "loud, obnoxious, and generally bad-tempered". He says his parents went to seek help for his autism because it was beginning to become "a pain in the bum", and also says that (before residential treatment) he "wasn't a great brother or son".
All this is accompanied by cartoonish drawings depicting Dan as being "controlled" by a monstrous creature, sometimes actually being the creature, and only becoming free of its grasp after being sent away to some sort of residential facility.
This ad has drawn tremendous criticism from autistic self-advocates and allies over the past few days. I can see why. After all, it seems to perpetuate some of the worst stereotypes about autistic people: that when we react to bullies it's because there's something wrong with us, that we disrupt families, etc. Not only that but one could look at the ad and get the impression that it is suggesting that autistic people can only ever become "civilized" via institutionalization.
But: at least according to some of the letters received in response to those who wrote to "Action for Children" in protest, the ad and the drawings in it were actually created by Dan. Blogger Sharon posts just such a response here. The excerpt quoted below stood out to me when I read it:
If that's actually true -- that Dan himself produced the content of the ad -- that changes things, at least as far as I'm concerned.
It changes things because I think all autistic people -- regardless of whether or not I happen to agree with their viewpoint -- should be able to express their views through whichever media they prefer.
And given that I know what it's like to be told, "You don't really think that, you actually think this!", I definitely don't want what I write in response to the "Action for Children" ad in question to be a similar negation of what Dan thinks. Dan has every right to speak for himself and describe his own experiences in his own words, and to distribute those words as he sees fit.
So the following is addressed, not to "Action for Children" so much as to Dan, and to other autistic teenagers who may perchance come across this post.
I remember as a youngster (when I had no clue why I did things the way I did them, why I had "meltdowns" and "outbursts", why I "overreacted" to things, why I wanted to walk around with headphones on all the time, etc.) saying to people who asked any number of things I'd heard in passing or read in magazines, just so they'd leave me alone.
I also remember thinking, for a long time, that I was probably a really bad person. That I was inherently "selfish", lacking in self-control, rude, disrespectful, etc., etc. Even though I didn't feel like I was behaving intentionally in those ways, I didn't have any better explanations to offer (I essentially lost every argument I tried to engage in on the subject of my motivations), so I felt I had no choice but to accept those descriptors.
It wasn't until I was in my late teens that I started becoming remotely able to accurately describe anything about my internal processes, and not until my twenties that I became able to put things in anything resembling accurate context. That is, it took me ages to separate "words and phrases people have applied to me" from "words that actually pertain to how I experience reality".
Learning how to do this -- to put introspection into words -- has been a long and grueling process. It has involved not only discovering that I was probably not responsible for certain things I was always ashamed of (like being late to to learn certain self-care skills), but discovering the areas in which I can and should improve my character.
I don't know how Dan actually thinks of himself. I don't claim to, and there isn't nearly enough information to garner from the ad to give a clear picture.
But I can say (based on personal experience) that when a person grows up responding to their environment (and the people in it) in ways that constantly get called "strange", "rude", "overreacting", "random", "attention-seeking", "anti-social", and so on, they can definitely end up with some self-image issues.
Not only that, but they can develop a skewed sense of what it means to be "improving", "gaining skills", and so forth. I and several others on the spectrum I know have had the experience of being told that we seem "better" or "higher functioning" when we're actually worse off than we could be, and this has resulted in the development of various unhealthy behavior and thought patterns.
For people who already tend to struggle with body awareness and the ability to put feelings into words quickly, it can be very harmful indeed for us to be "trained not to react" to certain things outwardly -- because we still have all that stuff going on internally, and eventually it will come out whether we want it to or not.
(I remember even in college wondering what was going on when I would suddenly have the urge to bolt out of the classroom, and it wasn't until I learned about sensory overload -- and just cognitive overload in general -- that any of that started to make sense.)
So again, while I do not want to negate Dan's (or anyone else's) right to free speech, I do have to say that when I see the "monster" ad, I want to know if anyone's ever assured him that no, it's not okay for people to bully him.
That discrimination is not appropriate for any reason.
That while of course it's good to learn constructive ways of dealing with anger, it's okay to be angry.
That it's okay to say things like "No", "I don't know", "It's too loud in here", "I need a break", etc.
That needing to say these things, or communicate them in ways other than words if necessary, does not make you weak or badly behaved.
That having unusual body language or perceptual experiences is nothing to be ashamed of.
That being autistic never made you a lesser member of the family.
That you had every right to feel "betrayed" when your parents left you with strangers.
That being autistic does not, and did not ever, make you a "monster", nor anything other than a person, just as valid and valuable as any other person.
If you've never been told any of that, or taught any of that, you've been treated unethically.
And that is the real problem that needs to be addressed here.
In this ad, an autistic teenager called Dan (it doesn't say whether or not that's his real name, but I will presume at least it refers to a real person) describes how he used to be "loud, obnoxious, and generally bad-tempered". He says his parents went to seek help for his autism because it was beginning to become "a pain in the bum", and also says that (before residential treatment) he "wasn't a great brother or son".
All this is accompanied by cartoonish drawings depicting Dan as being "controlled" by a monstrous creature, sometimes actually being the creature, and only becoming free of its grasp after being sent away to some sort of residential facility.
This ad has drawn tremendous criticism from autistic self-advocates and allies over the past few days. I can see why. After all, it seems to perpetuate some of the worst stereotypes about autistic people: that when we react to bullies it's because there's something wrong with us, that we disrupt families, etc. Not only that but one could look at the ad and get the impression that it is suggesting that autistic people can only ever become "civilized" via institutionalization.
But: at least according to some of the letters received in response to those who wrote to "Action for Children" in protest, the ad and the drawings in it were actually created by Dan. Blogger Sharon posts just such a response here. The excerpt quoted below stood out to me when I read it:
As a charity we're committed to giving vulnerable children and young people a voice about issues that affect them-and this approach was central to the way we designed and produced the ads, and why we feature real voices and real experiences and are highlighting the story of a child suffering with autism.
Dan tells his own story in his own words, and he chose to name his condition, the drawings that you see were also drawn by Dan, the pictures depict how he saw himself before we as a charity got involved and helped Dan and his family.
If that's actually true -- that Dan himself produced the content of the ad -- that changes things, at least as far as I'm concerned.
It changes things because I think all autistic people -- regardless of whether or not I happen to agree with their viewpoint -- should be able to express their views through whichever media they prefer.
And given that I know what it's like to be told, "You don't really think that, you actually think this!", I definitely don't want what I write in response to the "Action for Children" ad in question to be a similar negation of what Dan thinks. Dan has every right to speak for himself and describe his own experiences in his own words, and to distribute those words as he sees fit.
So the following is addressed, not to "Action for Children" so much as to Dan, and to other autistic teenagers who may perchance come across this post.
I remember as a youngster (when I had no clue why I did things the way I did them, why I had "meltdowns" and "outbursts", why I "overreacted" to things, why I wanted to walk around with headphones on all the time, etc.) saying to people who asked any number of things I'd heard in passing or read in magazines, just so they'd leave me alone.
I also remember thinking, for a long time, that I was probably a really bad person. That I was inherently "selfish", lacking in self-control, rude, disrespectful, etc., etc. Even though I didn't feel like I was behaving intentionally in those ways, I didn't have any better explanations to offer (I essentially lost every argument I tried to engage in on the subject of my motivations), so I felt I had no choice but to accept those descriptors.
It wasn't until I was in my late teens that I started becoming remotely able to accurately describe anything about my internal processes, and not until my twenties that I became able to put things in anything resembling accurate context. That is, it took me ages to separate "words and phrases people have applied to me" from "words that actually pertain to how I experience reality".
Learning how to do this -- to put introspection into words -- has been a long and grueling process. It has involved not only discovering that I was probably not responsible for certain things I was always ashamed of (like being late to to learn certain self-care skills), but discovering the areas in which I can and should improve my character.
I don't know how Dan actually thinks of himself. I don't claim to, and there isn't nearly enough information to garner from the ad to give a clear picture.
But I can say (based on personal experience) that when a person grows up responding to their environment (and the people in it) in ways that constantly get called "strange", "rude", "overreacting", "random", "attention-seeking", "anti-social", and so on, they can definitely end up with some self-image issues.
Not only that, but they can develop a skewed sense of what it means to be "improving", "gaining skills", and so forth. I and several others on the spectrum I know have had the experience of being told that we seem "better" or "higher functioning" when we're actually worse off than we could be, and this has resulted in the development of various unhealthy behavior and thought patterns.
For people who already tend to struggle with body awareness and the ability to put feelings into words quickly, it can be very harmful indeed for us to be "trained not to react" to certain things outwardly -- because we still have all that stuff going on internally, and eventually it will come out whether we want it to or not.
(I remember even in college wondering what was going on when I would suddenly have the urge to bolt out of the classroom, and it wasn't until I learned about sensory overload -- and just cognitive overload in general -- that any of that started to make sense.)
So again, while I do not want to negate Dan's (or anyone else's) right to free speech, I do have to say that when I see the "monster" ad, I want to know if anyone's ever assured him that no, it's not okay for people to bully him.
That discrimination is not appropriate for any reason.
That while of course it's good to learn constructive ways of dealing with anger, it's okay to be angry.
That it's okay to say things like "No", "I don't know", "It's too loud in here", "I need a break", etc.
That needing to say these things, or communicate them in ways other than words if necessary, does not make you weak or badly behaved.
That having unusual body language or perceptual experiences is nothing to be ashamed of.
That being autistic never made you a lesser member of the family.
That you had every right to feel "betrayed" when your parents left you with strangers.
That being autistic does not, and did not ever, make you a "monster", nor anything other than a person, just as valid and valuable as any other person.
If you've never been told any of that, or taught any of that, you've been treated unethically.
And that is the real problem that needs to be addressed here.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Help - 3 Column Templates?
Existence is Wonderful very badly needs a template update (and just a general aesthetic/structural overhaul).
In particular I want to go to a 3-column layout, with the main post text in the middle and two sidebars (which will contain archive and profile links, various lists, etc.) on either side.
There are a number of example 3-column Blogger templates around the Web I've found, some of which are kind of cool and might work okay provided I could customize them a bit. But so far, all the examples I've tried have given me errors when I've posted the code into the HTML field. Blogger has a few templates to choose from, and there's some limited WYSIWYG customizability for these, but it's a bit too limited for my taste, in particular in that none of the standard templates have 3 columns.
I know that part of the problem here is my own limited knowledge as far as Web authorship tools go. I used to be decent at HTML back in the Web 1.0 days, but now with all this new CSS and Java and XML and other miscellaneous featureage being part and parcel of making one's website look nice and behave well, I'm afraid I'm woefully behind the curve, much to my geekish embarrassment.
In any case, I would very much like to remedy my ignorance, but I haven't had much luck finding good tutorials on using 3 column layouts in blogger. I've googled a lot already and I know it's easy to find example templates and supposedly downloadable freebies (which can then be customized), but all the tutorials I've come across seem to either (a) suggest things that don't seem to work when I try them, and/or (b) go way over my head.
So if anyone reading this can point me toward any -- preferably ones you've actually personally used and confirmed to work -- I would be most grateful.
(Also, right now I am not planning on switching to Wordpress or Typepad or any other service, so I am not looking for suggestions to that effect, I am specifically looking for help doing what I want to do in blogger.
Maybe at some point I'll switch services, but I don't want to deal with moving domains and all that right now and worrying about my posts actually getting transferred over properly, I just want to update the appearance and make the blog a bit more navigation-friendly overall.)
Thanks in advance!
In particular I want to go to a 3-column layout, with the main post text in the middle and two sidebars (which will contain archive and profile links, various lists, etc.) on either side.
There are a number of example 3-column Blogger templates around the Web I've found, some of which are kind of cool and might work okay provided I could customize them a bit. But so far, all the examples I've tried have given me errors when I've posted the code into the HTML field. Blogger has a few templates to choose from, and there's some limited WYSIWYG customizability for these, but it's a bit too limited for my taste, in particular in that none of the standard templates have 3 columns.
I know that part of the problem here is my own limited knowledge as far as Web authorship tools go. I used to be decent at HTML back in the Web 1.0 days, but now with all this new CSS and Java and XML and other miscellaneous featureage being part and parcel of making one's website look nice and behave well, I'm afraid I'm woefully behind the curve, much to my geekish embarrassment.
In any case, I would very much like to remedy my ignorance, but I haven't had much luck finding good tutorials on using 3 column layouts in blogger. I've googled a lot already and I know it's easy to find example templates and supposedly downloadable freebies (which can then be customized), but all the tutorials I've come across seem to either (a) suggest things that don't seem to work when I try them, and/or (b) go way over my head.
So if anyone reading this can point me toward any -- preferably ones you've actually personally used and confirmed to work -- I would be most grateful.
(Also, right now I am not planning on switching to Wordpress or Typepad or any other service, so I am not looking for suggestions to that effect, I am specifically looking for help doing what I want to do in blogger.
Maybe at some point I'll switch services, but I don't want to deal with moving domains and all that right now and worrying about my posts actually getting transferred over properly, I just want to update the appearance and make the blog a bit more navigation-friendly overall.)
Thanks in advance!
Thanks, But I'll Take Test Tubes of Enzymatic Slime over 'Fountains of Youth' Any Day
For several years now I've volunteered with the Methuselah Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to funding and arranging research into mitigating the bodily changes which occur with increasing age and lead to deadly disease (cancer, atherosclerosis, etc.). As far as the nature of my volunteer duties -- I've had to do things I can fit in around my day job, and that can be done on a fairly flexible schedule, as I never know how much "free" time I'm going to have during a given week or month. So mostly I've done things along the lines of helping proofread and edit publications, going through donor data and organizing that data into a spreadsheet, printing address labels, mailing complimentary books to Foundation donors, etc.
I've also tried whenever possible to write about longevity science and developments therein here at Existence is Wonderful. This is something I was doing before I got involved with the Methuselah Foundation, and isn't technically a "volunteer duty", but I figure that anything I can do to help inform people about developments, possibilities, and issues in biogerontology is definitely worth doing.
However, recently (as opposed to when I first got started writing about this subject) I've been a lot more careful and hesitant about what I publish. As someone who is keenly aware of being neither a biologist nor particularly well-versed in public relations, I want to make sure to whatever extent possible that I write things which are (a) scientifically valid, and (b) not somehow likely to make things worse as far as public longevity discourse goes.
You see, I come at this from a position of being very interested in, and enthusiastic about, potentially vast developments in biogerontology -- but at the same time being very sensitive to what my rhetoritician friend Dale Carrico calls superlativity.
It is likely that I very probably sounded a bit, well, "superlative" myself when I started blogging about longevity. Coming at the subject from a naive science-fiction-geek's perspective, I honestly didn't know any better at the time, and didn't initially see what was wrong with going on about "technological immortality". But now I do (despite still being a science fiction geek and probably still plenty naive in many respects), and I take Carrico's (and others' -- physics professor and nanotech scientist Richard Jones has also written of the pitfalls of superlative thinking) critiques quite seriously.
Consequently, sometimes I feel like I'm caught in the middle between, on the one hand, well-meaning folks (who might very well be contributing plenty from a scientific and fundraising standpoint to longevity research) who nonetheless see superlativity critique as pessimistic or irrelevant, and other folks (such as Jones and Carrico) who in my assessment seem to have very astutely identified particular problems in public technology discourse (including that surrounding biogerontology) as it presently stands.
My favorite kinds of articles to write about longevity are those which allow me to go off and read a lot of neat literature on animal biology, and then "translate" what I read into something (hopefully) more generally accessible.
For instance I particularly enjoyed writing A Menagerie of Longevity and Of Monotremes and Mole-Rats: Metabolism, Membranes, and More. I also really liked writing my article on "replacement parts" for the body, Livers and Kidneys and Hearts (Oh My!) - Bioartificial Benefits in Emerging Longevity Medicine.
These are the kinds of articles I'd ideally like to write a lot more of -- because not only are they really interesting to research, and fun to write, I see them as demonstrating that yes a person can write about nifty biogerontological stuff without invoking notions of "technological immortality". I don't think anyone could read those articles and claim reasonably that they were written by a "pessimist" or a "defeatist" or by someone who was somehow "afraid of science"!
But you will notice if you do read those articles that I do not claim that any of the developments being discussed are somehow representative of an inevitable convergence of technology toward humans being able to run around forever in indestructible robot bodies, leaping deftly through spacetime and tunneling through Einstein-Rosen bridges and whatnot into sanctuary universes in order to escape the heat death of our own. That sort of thing is fine if you're writing science fiction stories, or even just daydreaming for the fun of it, but it has nothing to do with what can be accomplished within a reasonable timeframe given what humans know now.
Now, I don't relegate the above speculative scenario to science fiction because applying it to actual reality is "too geeky" (I'd be a right hypocrite claiming immunity to that!), but because doing so distorts the way people think about the subject at hand.
By this I mean that superlative predictions tend to tempt people toward glossing over the "...and then a miracle happens!" step between now, when we still have people dying at 90 of heart failure and a potential future in which five-hundred-year-olds run weekly marathons (or accomplish some other feat associated culturally with vigor and youthfulness).
I certainly don't think such a future is impossible, but neither do I think one needs to believe in such an outcome in order to make healthcare improvements (for the elderly and everyone else) a priority.
There is no magical property to handwaving that somehow makes handwaved potential outcomes more likely to happen, and I am quite worried in fact about the effects of large groups of people thinking that they can personally stave off age-related illness and death through sheer indignation at its occurrence (and in doing so, potentially losing sight of the fact that while they're fantasizing about nanorobotic cell repair, we still have kids in the United States dying because their family couldn't afford proper dental care*).
Certainly it is probably impossible to totally extricate motivations and efforts to improve medicine in general (or toward any specific end) from raw human existential anxieties and survival instincts, and I do not mean to suggest that inventors must go into their inventive efforts with no picture in their heads of what the outcome may look like -- but we can still at least work to develop better self-awareness of how our ambitions reflect these deep entanglements.
Recently I was forwarded an article on some of the efforts taking place at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute. The article is entitled Researchers seek to create 'fountain of youth', and it briefly describes the work being done to study and alleviate the effects of "storage diseases" -- that is, conditions thought to be caused at least in part by the buildup of compounds in the body over time that cannot easily be broken down.
Philosophically, this concept is similar (as the article points out) to that of environmental remediation, in which particular microbes are introduced to break down pollutants. The notion of applying this concept to animal (including human) bodies is a pretty neat one, and it seems that the Biodesign Institute team (including Methuselah Foundation-affiliated researcher John Schloendorn) has already identified:
How totally cool is that? Definitely a promising development. I am really intrigued by this research and I could seriously see it producing benefits for plenty of people still alive today.
But -- and I don't mean at all to denigrate any of the actual research going on, as that stuff is the bee's knees -- it seriously makes me cringe to see it being described as "seeking the fountain of youth". I mean really, now. I'm not just whining about semantics here, and I don't think this is "making a big deal out of nothing" -- I genuinely think describing real, legitimate research in terms of mythical metaphor tends to have a distorting effect.
The content of the article is mostly good, but I have to wonder how many people would just stop reading after the title thinking it was going to all be about some kind of newfangled quacky vitamin pill?
Again I have a lot of respect for much of what the Methuselah Foundation has accomplished so far -- I wouldn't volunteer with them if I didn't, and I'm tremendously picky in that regard -- but I do think in the long run it would be better if popular articles written about actually-useful longevity-related work did not have phrases like "Fountain of Youth" in the title. I think that longevity researchers and anyone who is actually serious about medical progress need to be more insistent with reporters who try to portray actual research in terms similar to that used in ads for Bob's Wrinkle Cream.
Sure, that sort of thing might be attention-grabbing, but at what cost? Do we want to invoke legends and myths in describing interesting and potentially promising science experiments, or the reality of present-day healthcare needs (and potential real-life improvements thereof)? I would definitely lean toward the latter. It may be less glamorous, but when it comes to science and ethics, I'll take the hard (but ultimately more promising) practicalities of the present reality over daydream-invoking glamour any day.
*I am not arguing here that healthcare service distribution has to be made absolutely equal before any "higher tech" developments become ethically permissible -- from a practical standpoint, that is likely impossible to begin with, and furthermore, I don't think that caring about one thing means you automatically don't care about another.
In other words I do not think that it is appropriate to say, "well, we need to first make things better for children before helping the elderly" -- I am not in the practice of trying to weigh lives on a scale of value based on someone's supposed economic productivity or anything like that. But I do think that when people get really wrapped up in superlative thinking, they are doing something very different from simply caring about their and others' long-term health -- they are letting themselves be swept into an unrealistic picture of what actual infrastructure exists, how existing systems affect actually-existing people, etc.
I've also tried whenever possible to write about longevity science and developments therein here at Existence is Wonderful. This is something I was doing before I got involved with the Methuselah Foundation, and isn't technically a "volunteer duty", but I figure that anything I can do to help inform people about developments, possibilities, and issues in biogerontology is definitely worth doing.
However, recently (as opposed to when I first got started writing about this subject) I've been a lot more careful and hesitant about what I publish. As someone who is keenly aware of being neither a biologist nor particularly well-versed in public relations, I want to make sure to whatever extent possible that I write things which are (a) scientifically valid, and (b) not somehow likely to make things worse as far as public longevity discourse goes.
You see, I come at this from a position of being very interested in, and enthusiastic about, potentially vast developments in biogerontology -- but at the same time being very sensitive to what my rhetoritician friend Dale Carrico calls superlativity.
It is likely that I very probably sounded a bit, well, "superlative" myself when I started blogging about longevity. Coming at the subject from a naive science-fiction-geek's perspective, I honestly didn't know any better at the time, and didn't initially see what was wrong with going on about "technological immortality". But now I do (despite still being a science fiction geek and probably still plenty naive in many respects), and I take Carrico's (and others' -- physics professor and nanotech scientist Richard Jones has also written of the pitfalls of superlative thinking) critiques quite seriously.
Consequently, sometimes I feel like I'm caught in the middle between, on the one hand, well-meaning folks (who might very well be contributing plenty from a scientific and fundraising standpoint to longevity research) who nonetheless see superlativity critique as pessimistic or irrelevant, and other folks (such as Jones and Carrico) who in my assessment seem to have very astutely identified particular problems in public technology discourse (including that surrounding biogerontology) as it presently stands.
My favorite kinds of articles to write about longevity are those which allow me to go off and read a lot of neat literature on animal biology, and then "translate" what I read into something (hopefully) more generally accessible.
For instance I particularly enjoyed writing A Menagerie of Longevity and Of Monotremes and Mole-Rats: Metabolism, Membranes, and More. I also really liked writing my article on "replacement parts" for the body, Livers and Kidneys and Hearts (Oh My!) - Bioartificial Benefits in Emerging Longevity Medicine.
These are the kinds of articles I'd ideally like to write a lot more of -- because not only are they really interesting to research, and fun to write, I see them as demonstrating that yes a person can write about nifty biogerontological stuff without invoking notions of "technological immortality". I don't think anyone could read those articles and claim reasonably that they were written by a "pessimist" or a "defeatist" or by someone who was somehow "afraid of science"!
But you will notice if you do read those articles that I do not claim that any of the developments being discussed are somehow representative of an inevitable convergence of technology toward humans being able to run around forever in indestructible robot bodies, leaping deftly through spacetime and tunneling through Einstein-Rosen bridges and whatnot into sanctuary universes in order to escape the heat death of our own. That sort of thing is fine if you're writing science fiction stories, or even just daydreaming for the fun of it, but it has nothing to do with what can be accomplished within a reasonable timeframe given what humans know now.
Now, I don't relegate the above speculative scenario to science fiction because applying it to actual reality is "too geeky" (I'd be a right hypocrite claiming immunity to that!), but because doing so distorts the way people think about the subject at hand.
By this I mean that superlative predictions tend to tempt people toward glossing over the "...and then a miracle happens!" step between now, when we still have people dying at 90 of heart failure and a potential future in which five-hundred-year-olds run weekly marathons (or accomplish some other feat associated culturally with vigor and youthfulness).
I certainly don't think such a future is impossible, but neither do I think one needs to believe in such an outcome in order to make healthcare improvements (for the elderly and everyone else) a priority.
There is no magical property to handwaving that somehow makes handwaved potential outcomes more likely to happen, and I am quite worried in fact about the effects of large groups of people thinking that they can personally stave off age-related illness and death through sheer indignation at its occurrence (and in doing so, potentially losing sight of the fact that while they're fantasizing about nanorobotic cell repair, we still have kids in the United States dying because their family couldn't afford proper dental care*).
Certainly it is probably impossible to totally extricate motivations and efforts to improve medicine in general (or toward any specific end) from raw human existential anxieties and survival instincts, and I do not mean to suggest that inventors must go into their inventive efforts with no picture in their heads of what the outcome may look like -- but we can still at least work to develop better self-awareness of how our ambitions reflect these deep entanglements.
Recently I was forwarded an article on some of the efforts taking place at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute. The article is entitled Researchers seek to create 'fountain of youth', and it briefly describes the work being done to study and alleviate the effects of "storage diseases" -- that is, conditions thought to be caused at least in part by the buildup of compounds in the body over time that cannot easily be broken down.
Philosophically, this concept is similar (as the article points out) to that of environmental remediation, in which particular microbes are introduced to break down pollutants. The notion of applying this concept to animal (including human) bodies is a pretty neat one, and it seems that the Biodesign Institute team (including Methuselah Foundation-affiliated researcher John Schloendorn) has already identified:
...five microbes from soil and sludge samples capable of decomposing a molecule called 7-ketocholesterol. This cholesterol variant is widely accepted as a cellular toxin and thought to be a primary culprit in the development of atherosclerosis. The body does not routinely degrade it and its accumulation causes hardening of the arteries, which in turn leads to arterial blockages and heart attacks.
The researchers are now exploring the use of microbial machinery to biodegrade 7-ketocholesterol to attempt to reverse the cause of arterial distress.
How totally cool is that? Definitely a promising development. I am really intrigued by this research and I could seriously see it producing benefits for plenty of people still alive today.
But -- and I don't mean at all to denigrate any of the actual research going on, as that stuff is the bee's knees -- it seriously makes me cringe to see it being described as "seeking the fountain of youth". I mean really, now. I'm not just whining about semantics here, and I don't think this is "making a big deal out of nothing" -- I genuinely think describing real, legitimate research in terms of mythical metaphor tends to have a distorting effect.
The content of the article is mostly good, but I have to wonder how many people would just stop reading after the title thinking it was going to all be about some kind of newfangled quacky vitamin pill?
Again I have a lot of respect for much of what the Methuselah Foundation has accomplished so far -- I wouldn't volunteer with them if I didn't, and I'm tremendously picky in that regard -- but I do think in the long run it would be better if popular articles written about actually-useful longevity-related work did not have phrases like "Fountain of Youth" in the title. I think that longevity researchers and anyone who is actually serious about medical progress need to be more insistent with reporters who try to portray actual research in terms similar to that used in ads for Bob's Wrinkle Cream.
Sure, that sort of thing might be attention-grabbing, but at what cost? Do we want to invoke legends and myths in describing interesting and potentially promising science experiments, or the reality of present-day healthcare needs (and potential real-life improvements thereof)? I would definitely lean toward the latter. It may be less glamorous, but when it comes to science and ethics, I'll take the hard (but ultimately more promising) practicalities of the present reality over daydream-invoking glamour any day.
*I am not arguing here that healthcare service distribution has to be made absolutely equal before any "higher tech" developments become ethically permissible -- from a practical standpoint, that is likely impossible to begin with, and furthermore, I don't think that caring about one thing means you automatically don't care about another.
In other words I do not think that it is appropriate to say, "well, we need to first make things better for children before helping the elderly" -- I am not in the practice of trying to weigh lives on a scale of value based on someone's supposed economic productivity or anything like that. But I do think that when people get really wrapped up in superlative thinking, they are doing something very different from simply caring about their and others' long-term health -- they are letting themselves be swept into an unrealistic picture of what actual infrastructure exists, how existing systems affect actually-existing people, etc.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
What Each Of Us Notices - Socket Edition
I notice electrical outlets, sockets, and plugs a lot. It is difficult to explain why -- they're just something I've always tended to look at and think, "Oh, how neat." I figure it's probably just one of those things, like how some people get really fascinated by trains or stamps or model cars.
In any case, I was at the hardware store earlier today and I had my camera with me, so I took some socket pictures. There really are a fascinating array of shapes, sizes, colors, and current capacities -- not to mention the number of adapters available for different situations.
I don't travel much, and have actually never been out of the United States, but if I did travel you can bet I'd have the camera ready to start the international section of my outlet image collection. =D
In any case, I was at the hardware store earlier today and I had my camera with me, so I took some socket pictures. There really are a fascinating array of shapes, sizes, colors, and current capacities -- not to mention the number of adapters available for different situations.
I don't travel much, and have actually never been out of the United States, but if I did travel you can bet I'd have the camera ready to start the international section of my outlet image collection. =D
Monday, January 19, 2009
Writing and Speech are Two Different Things
I'd have though the title of this post was an example of "stating the obvious", but apparently (at least according to a number of random comments I've come across recently), it isn't where some are concerned.
I'm going to try and keep this short, because I really want to ask here is: what is your impression of the relationship (cognitive, linguistic, etc.) between speech and writing?
For me, writing is definitely "easier" than speech as far as enabling me to produce actual, communicative content.
I used to imagine this was probably the case for pretty much everyone. But why, then, did my interactions with people tend to go so much better when I "met" them via e-mail first, as opposed to in person or on the phone first? I wondered well into my twenties why my co-workers were insisting on using the phone so much when there were all these wonderful text-based tools (such as email and instant-messaging) available.
But eventually I heard enough comments from other people such that I realized that I was considered unusual on the basis of my favored communicative mode.
And that's still really difficult to acknowledge, because, well, it feels so normal inside my head as far as this stuff goes.
But I digress.
If I was going to rank communication modalities in terms of how brain-friendly I find them that list would look something like this (favorites first, least-favorites last):
1 - Asynchronous text-based (e-mail, bulletin boards, etc.)
2 - Realtime text-based (Instant Messaging)
3 - Speech prepared in advance (i.e., something I've written down and can read from)
4 - Spontaneous in-person speech, supplemented by notes
5 - Spontaneous in-person speech, no notes
6 - Telephone (except if it's someone calling to say, for instance, "Hi, I'm coming to pick you up" -- those calls are OK because they are usually concise, clear, and giving me Very Important Data about when and how a transition is going to occur)
Of course this list does not include every possible means by which any two or more people might communicate. There are many forms of communication (diagrams, art, music, 3D models or sculpture, gestures, etc.) that can often "say" things that words simply aren't up to the task of. There are also forms I don't personally know how to use (such as American Sign Language) which I haven't included just due to my own lack of experience with them.
Nor does the list above represent my preferences at all times, with all people. There are some people I can communicate rather a lot with via realtime text chat (sometimes moreso than via email) just because our vocabularies and cognitive styles seem to be similar enough to allow us to use far fewer words than either of us might need to with less-similar people.
Nevertheless, it's a pretty accurate ranking when it comes to basic, everyday, language-based communication. In general, if I get tired, stressed, sensory-overloaded, or just plain "talked out", speech is the first thing to go.
I can usually write long after I've lost the ability to make speech make sense, and I can write asynchronously usually even when I can't respond fast enough to make an IM conversation worth having.
Furthermore I have a lot more knowledge-access in writing -- for years I thought I knew a lot less than I do about certain things because I'd been trained (mostly by teachers) to believe that "if you can't explain something verbally and spontaneously, you don't understand it".
But once I started writing out more of what seemed to be in my head -- as I fit the shapes of thoughts to phrases that way and saw them laid out in front of me, I found that I actually understood a lot more than I could possibly explain with my voice.
And I've heard the same thing, or things very similar, from many others on the autistic spectrum, including some of whom were thought to be basically unthinking or mostly unaware of their environments until they were given the opportunity to type or write or whatnot.
So, what are your preference rankings for this sort of thing? What contexts do you prefer different types of communication in, and why? And do you tend to assume that someone's writing ability is predictive of their speech ability, or vice versa, or not?
I'm going to try and keep this short, because I really want to ask here is: what is your impression of the relationship (cognitive, linguistic, etc.) between speech and writing?
For me, writing is definitely "easier" than speech as far as enabling me to produce actual, communicative content.
I used to imagine this was probably the case for pretty much everyone. But why, then, did my interactions with people tend to go so much better when I "met" them via e-mail first, as opposed to in person or on the phone first? I wondered well into my twenties why my co-workers were insisting on using the phone so much when there were all these wonderful text-based tools (such as email and instant-messaging) available.
But eventually I heard enough comments from other people such that I realized that I was considered unusual on the basis of my favored communicative mode.
And that's still really difficult to acknowledge, because, well, it feels so normal inside my head as far as this stuff goes.
But I digress.
If I was going to rank communication modalities in terms of how brain-friendly I find them that list would look something like this (favorites first, least-favorites last):
1 - Asynchronous text-based (e-mail, bulletin boards, etc.)
2 - Realtime text-based (Instant Messaging)
3 - Speech prepared in advance (i.e., something I've written down and can read from)
4 - Spontaneous in-person speech, supplemented by notes
5 - Spontaneous in-person speech, no notes
6 - Telephone (except if it's someone calling to say, for instance, "Hi, I'm coming to pick you up" -- those calls are OK because they are usually concise, clear, and giving me Very Important Data about when and how a transition is going to occur)
Of course this list does not include every possible means by which any two or more people might communicate. There are many forms of communication (diagrams, art, music, 3D models or sculpture, gestures, etc.) that can often "say" things that words simply aren't up to the task of. There are also forms I don't personally know how to use (such as American Sign Language) which I haven't included just due to my own lack of experience with them.
Nor does the list above represent my preferences at all times, with all people. There are some people I can communicate rather a lot with via realtime text chat (sometimes moreso than via email) just because our vocabularies and cognitive styles seem to be similar enough to allow us to use far fewer words than either of us might need to with less-similar people.
Nevertheless, it's a pretty accurate ranking when it comes to basic, everyday, language-based communication. In general, if I get tired, stressed, sensory-overloaded, or just plain "talked out", speech is the first thing to go.
I can usually write long after I've lost the ability to make speech make sense, and I can write asynchronously usually even when I can't respond fast enough to make an IM conversation worth having.
Furthermore I have a lot more knowledge-access in writing -- for years I thought I knew a lot less than I do about certain things because I'd been trained (mostly by teachers) to believe that "if you can't explain something verbally and spontaneously, you don't understand it".
But once I started writing out more of what seemed to be in my head -- as I fit the shapes of thoughts to phrases that way and saw them laid out in front of me, I found that I actually understood a lot more than I could possibly explain with my voice.
And I've heard the same thing, or things very similar, from many others on the autistic spectrum, including some of whom were thought to be basically unthinking or mostly unaware of their environments until they were given the opportunity to type or write or whatnot.
So, what are your preference rankings for this sort of thing? What contexts do you prefer different types of communication in, and why? And do you tend to assume that someone's writing ability is predictive of their speech ability, or vice versa, or not?
Friday, January 16, 2009
A Quick Word on Communication, Change.org's Autism Section
Lately I've been quite impressed with some of the content at Change.org (not to be confused with Change.gov - Change.org is not administered by agents of the presidential office).
Of particular interest to me is Change.org's Autism section. It is co-authored by Dora Raymaker (who is herself autistic, not to mention an artist, complex systems scientist/grad student, and generally awesome person. Seriously, she knitted a PDA case for me with a robot on it!) and Kristina Chew, formerly of Autism Vox, who is a classics professor and the mother of a really cool autistic kid named Charlie who enjoys swimming and bike riding.
Anyway, I not only wanted to point out Change.org's autism section in general, but in particular a truly excellent post from Dora on communication -- a subject that one cannot help but encounter when one engages with anything autism-related (and which is more than relevant for people in general, regardless of neurology).
In this post, entitled The Dynamics of "Communication", Dora writes:
Dora's post also contains a really nifty diagram (the "image above" referred to in the quote) representing the process of communication, which you should definitely have a look at.
Over and out!
Of particular interest to me is Change.org's Autism section. It is co-authored by Dora Raymaker (who is herself autistic, not to mention an artist, complex systems scientist/grad student, and generally awesome person. Seriously, she knitted a PDA case for me with a robot on it!) and Kristina Chew, formerly of Autism Vox, who is a classics professor and the mother of a really cool autistic kid named Charlie who enjoys swimming and bike riding.
Anyway, I not only wanted to point out Change.org's autism section in general, but in particular a truly excellent post from Dora on communication -- a subject that one cannot help but encounter when one engages with anything autism-related (and which is more than relevant for people in general, regardless of neurology).
In this post, entitled The Dynamics of "Communication", Dora writes:
The DSM critiera for Autistic Disorder includes "qualitative impairments in communication." But the word "communication" is typically taken for granted without definition. Communication has a mathematical definition, which can be visualized in the image above. A sender has a message which she transmits through a channel to a receiver. During transmission, noise may distort the original message. The receiver decodes the message and then he feeds back to the sender. While this is a formal model, it is considered an accurate, if simplified, representation of communication between people.
...
Communication is dynamic. It is an active relationship. Communication is not something an autistic person does or does not do. Communication is something that people do or do not do together. In order to have effective communication, all parties in the relationship are responsible for keeping the communication flowing.
Dora's post also contains a really nifty diagram (the "image above" referred to in the quote) representing the process of communication, which you should definitely have a look at.
Over and out!
Monday, January 12, 2009
Supercomputers and Moon Wombs - Ridiculous Fun with X Minus One
Folks who enjoy classic science fiction might enjoy, as I do, the X Minus One podcast. X Minus One was, apparently, a science fiction radio broadcast that ran between 1955 and 1958.
Having been born in 1978, I missed out on the so-called Golden Age of SF, but thanks to the nostalgic impulses of at least a few computer-literate people, I can now plumb the archives of the retrofuturist treasure trove that is early short sf.
Granted I've been reading a lot of similar stuff (mostly in mouldering old anthologies from libraries and flea markets and basements) since primary school, and there are even some X Minus One stories I know I've read (such as some of the awesome Ray Bradbury material). But until recently I'd had no idea of the number of delightfully melodramatic audio renditions of some of the sf work from the 1940s - 1960s.
And in that regard, X Minus One is an excellent means to genre delights aplenty.
I recently listened to a story that almost had me on the floor laughing, though somehow I doubt the author intended the story to be funny. Frankly it was funny because of how utterly ridiculous it was. It was not one of the better episodes from a writing or plotting standpoint -- if I didn't know better I'd almost have guessed it a parody of the kinds of adolescent boy wish-fulfillment fantasies characterizing a certain percentage of oldschool sf. But no, it seems to have been written in earnest.
Called Honeymoon in Hell, the plot revolved around an Actual Rocket Scientist, a HAL-like supercomputer, and a world in peril. Male babies are no longer being born -- meaning that the world will first be overrun with women (oh, those incomprehensible creatures!), and then the whole population will of course die out within a few generations.
Of course, it turns out that the gender imbalance is due to "some kind of radiation". An experiment is henceforth proposed -- send a man and woman to the moon, have them get busy, and see if they can conceive a boy.
Of course our fearless protagonist is recruited as the male half of the couple, and he gets "married" to a hot, smart (but not smarter than him!) Russian pilot.
The two of them depart to the moon with, I kid you not, cases of Scotch and vodka, and a directive to "go get acquainted".
Then there's some stuff about blobby green aliens, and a daring escape...or so it seems. This is of course followed by the protagonists Saving The World through drunken, hypnotized mating. On the Moon. International cooperation follows.
Again, I kid you not.
And then we find out that the whole thing - spoiler alert! - was orchestrated by the two biggest most complicated supercomputers in the world, which just happened to be located in the USA and in Russia.
Well.
There are some literary gems on X Minus One, don't get me wrong. But stories like Honeymoon in Hell are fascinating because, well, they're terrible. Hilariously terrible. To the point where I am immensely glad someone took the time to preserve the audio, because let me tell you, it is incredibly instructive for modern folks like me and my fellow nerdlings to get a nice whack over the head now and then with the fact that science fiction is not about the future, but about the present.
The future we are actually living in is not one, thank goodness, in which women are relegated to Moon Womb status. So while I love science fiction dearly, and while there are assuredly some modern works whose speculative worlds (as seen through the lens of today) are more thoughtful and less ridiculous, I definitely try to keep in mind when reading the fact that the "lens of today" is a permanent feature of every today that ever was and ever will be.
This is not, however, a sad limitation -- just something that ought to be understood and acknowledged in one's explorations of literature that can be at once fun, fantastic, and yes, even ridiculous to the point where you don't know whether to laugh or count your blessings that things didn't turn out according to the author's speculations.
Having been born in 1978, I missed out on the so-called Golden Age of SF, but thanks to the nostalgic impulses of at least a few computer-literate people, I can now plumb the archives of the retrofuturist treasure trove that is early short sf.
Granted I've been reading a lot of similar stuff (mostly in mouldering old anthologies from libraries and flea markets and basements) since primary school, and there are even some X Minus One stories I know I've read (such as some of the awesome Ray Bradbury material). But until recently I'd had no idea of the number of delightfully melodramatic audio renditions of some of the sf work from the 1940s - 1960s.
And in that regard, X Minus One is an excellent means to genre delights aplenty.
I recently listened to a story that almost had me on the floor laughing, though somehow I doubt the author intended the story to be funny. Frankly it was funny because of how utterly ridiculous it was. It was not one of the better episodes from a writing or plotting standpoint -- if I didn't know better I'd almost have guessed it a parody of the kinds of adolescent boy wish-fulfillment fantasies characterizing a certain percentage of oldschool sf. But no, it seems to have been written in earnest.
Called Honeymoon in Hell, the plot revolved around an Actual Rocket Scientist, a HAL-like supercomputer, and a world in peril. Male babies are no longer being born -- meaning that the world will first be overrun with women (oh, those incomprehensible creatures!), and then the whole population will of course die out within a few generations.
Of course, it turns out that the gender imbalance is due to "some kind of radiation". An experiment is henceforth proposed -- send a man and woman to the moon, have them get busy, and see if they can conceive a boy.
Of course our fearless protagonist is recruited as the male half of the couple, and he gets "married" to a hot, smart (but not smarter than him!) Russian pilot.
The two of them depart to the moon with, I kid you not, cases of Scotch and vodka, and a directive to "go get acquainted".
Then there's some stuff about blobby green aliens, and a daring escape...or so it seems. This is of course followed by the protagonists Saving The World through drunken, hypnotized mating. On the Moon. International cooperation follows.
Again, I kid you not.
And then we find out that the whole thing - spoiler alert! - was orchestrated by the two biggest most complicated supercomputers in the world, which just happened to be located in the USA and in Russia.
Well.
There are some literary gems on X Minus One, don't get me wrong. But stories like Honeymoon in Hell are fascinating because, well, they're terrible. Hilariously terrible. To the point where I am immensely glad someone took the time to preserve the audio, because let me tell you, it is incredibly instructive for modern folks like me and my fellow nerdlings to get a nice whack over the head now and then with the fact that science fiction is not about the future, but about the present.
The future we are actually living in is not one, thank goodness, in which women are relegated to Moon Womb status. So while I love science fiction dearly, and while there are assuredly some modern works whose speculative worlds (as seen through the lens of today) are more thoughtful and less ridiculous, I definitely try to keep in mind when reading the fact that the "lens of today" is a permanent feature of every today that ever was and ever will be.
This is not, however, a sad limitation -- just something that ought to be understood and acknowledged in one's explorations of literature that can be at once fun, fantastic, and yes, even ridiculous to the point where you don't know whether to laugh or count your blessings that things didn't turn out according to the author's speculations.
Saturday, January 03, 2009
Memories, Stuff, and Molecules
Well, the apartment organization project continues.
I'm almost done, at least relative to the gigantic mess I started out with. I did not even shower today until around 4 PM because I'd spent the morning and afternoon mostly sitting on the living room floor trying to find storage and categories for the most difficult-to-sort of all my stuff.
Things like books and clothes are easy; we have bookshelves and closets for those sorts of items.
But what does one do with a pile consisting of (for example) several intact play-doh canisters, a weird light-up smiley face thing on the end of a stick that spins when you press a button on the side, an empty plastic eyeglass case with magnetic closure, innumerable rubber bracelets, a handmade glass 6-sided die, several USB adapters, a plastic "ray gun" that shoots small foam discs, a miniature metal lunchbox thing with "Smarties" printed on the side, a nifty but ill-fitting Lego watch, two pairs of prism-lens glasses (the kind with cardboard frames), a tiny plastic frog keychain, glow in the dark plastic beads, and multiple SD memory cards (functional but too small to be of much use these days)?
I had several piles of precisely that sort of stuff to sort through today.
And I sorted them -- mostly.
I weeded out lots of random weird bits of paper from all that stuff too -- mainly notes to myself written over the past three years or so, directions to places I only went once, greeting cards, etc.
What struck me by late afternoon was just how emotional this sort of thing is for me. I thought I was merely tired at first, when I found myself starting to move very slowly and stare into space a lot, but then I realized that I felt at once weirdly light and oddly weighted.
You see, every piece of paper, string, plastic, etc., is a pointer to a plethora of memories -- which means that going through the piles I went through today led to a rapid-fire review of several years of my life, in full epic color detail in my mind's eye.
Not only that, but seeing as I am quite space-limited in my present apartment, I had the task of taking each pointer-to-a-memory and judging it.
I had to take each thing, and the memory it called up, and determine how much I valued that thing, what it meant to keep it, whether I could or should throw it away, whether I might want to give it away, etc.
I know I won't necessarily forget everything associated with the stuff I did end up discarding, but nevertheless, something in me felt like it was...apologizing every time I found something that I determined didn't fit in my life anymore (no matter how small).
This might all come across as horribly materialistic, but really it's not that -- I can live very comfortably with very little, in fact. It's just that I guess I've gotten to an age now where stuff has accumulated, and it's weird to be at a point where some of it has to go.
When I was younger, it seemed like my family tended to have the exact required amount of everything important and no more, and very little was ever thrown away. My dad especially raised me to note the differences between "expensive" and "well made", and to actually repair things when they broke rather than just go off and buy something new.
Mind you we didn't have literal garbage around everywhere (and I don't now) -- I am perfectly capable of throwing away a moldy orange peel, milk carton, or shredded bag of junk mail. Apparently my brain is at least somewhat selective when it comes to that sort of thing.
But nonetheless, there is something about the culture I've grown up in the midst of that seems alien to me, and was not the way things worked in my actual household. I was shocked when I got older to find out that it was considered normal and acceptable to get rid of something functional just because it had gone out of fashion.
So, I guess I am what you might call a "pack rat". It's genetic and environmental for me; I couldn't really not be one, given my dad's very similar tendencies in this regard.
These tendencies have served me very well in some respects; so long as I'm employed, I find saving money practically effortless because it so infrequently occurs to me to "go buy a new X".
I've also always tended to have interesting materials around to build things, make art, and do other projects with. (If not for all those old school binders I kept, I'd not have had the nice clear plastic I used for ID windows in my first handmade duct-tape wallets!)
And I am also happy to have things on hand that someone else might need or want -- being able to give something away is probably the best "fate" I can imagine for an object with memories attached to it but which I cannot physically keep.
I like the idea of that object being able to potentially collect more memories, and associations for someone else; somehow that makes me feel as if the item is being "done justice", if that makes any sense.
Furthermore, I have gotten quite concerned with sustainability issues as of late. Humans really do throw away a lot that could probably be very easily repurposed, repaired, or cleaned up and re-used -- and in the sanitized suburbs of the United States, I think there's a tendency for people to forget that when you throw something away (presuming it isn't recycled right away), it doesn't just blink out of existence - it just goes somewhere else where you can't see it, and becomes (in the case of landfills) someone else's problem.
So in addition to just naturally tending toward keeping stuff, I feel like I've got a bit of an impetus to avoid "egregious waste" to whatever extent possible -- and that means sorting stuff very carefully, not just glancing over it and chucking whatever seems to be creating the most physical inconvenience for me. (I realize that having this amount of choice over what happens to "my" stuff is itself a privilege, as someone on their way to becoming homeless doesn't really have the luxury of sorting his or her belongings into recycle-or-dump, and I don't take that for granted either.)
Someday I know that all these little things, so full of memories and links to events and feelings and impressions of a particular time, will disintegrate (or be ground up in some piece of junkyard or recycling equipment). I have a tendency, it is true, to hang onto particular forms for as long as I can -- to celebrate those forms even if only silently to myself -- but at the same time, the thought of each form becoming part of something else someday, or reverting back into constituent parts or molecules, is never far from my mind. There are very very few materials that can physically last in any given form for all that long as far as the timescale of the universe is concerned.
I am okay with this both because I have to be, and because on some level I know that the exploration of form and pattern by reality as time unfolds is part and parcel of the beauty of reality. But at the very least, within the timescale I actually inhabit, I will never find the process of sorting the forms I encounter (no matter how ephemeral) trivial, least of all when some are kept and some are passed along.
I'm almost done, at least relative to the gigantic mess I started out with. I did not even shower today until around 4 PM because I'd spent the morning and afternoon mostly sitting on the living room floor trying to find storage and categories for the most difficult-to-sort of all my stuff.
Things like books and clothes are easy; we have bookshelves and closets for those sorts of items.
But what does one do with a pile consisting of (for example) several intact play-doh canisters, a weird light-up smiley face thing on the end of a stick that spins when you press a button on the side, an empty plastic eyeglass case with magnetic closure, innumerable rubber bracelets, a handmade glass 6-sided die, several USB adapters, a plastic "ray gun" that shoots small foam discs, a miniature metal lunchbox thing with "Smarties" printed on the side, a nifty but ill-fitting Lego watch, two pairs of prism-lens glasses (the kind with cardboard frames), a tiny plastic frog keychain, glow in the dark plastic beads, and multiple SD memory cards (functional but too small to be of much use these days)?
I had several piles of precisely that sort of stuff to sort through today.
And I sorted them -- mostly.
I weeded out lots of random weird bits of paper from all that stuff too -- mainly notes to myself written over the past three years or so, directions to places I only went once, greeting cards, etc.
What struck me by late afternoon was just how emotional this sort of thing is for me. I thought I was merely tired at first, when I found myself starting to move very slowly and stare into space a lot, but then I realized that I felt at once weirdly light and oddly weighted.
You see, every piece of paper, string, plastic, etc., is a pointer to a plethora of memories -- which means that going through the piles I went through today led to a rapid-fire review of several years of my life, in full epic color detail in my mind's eye.
Not only that, but seeing as I am quite space-limited in my present apartment, I had the task of taking each pointer-to-a-memory and judging it.
I had to take each thing, and the memory it called up, and determine how much I valued that thing, what it meant to keep it, whether I could or should throw it away, whether I might want to give it away, etc.
I know I won't necessarily forget everything associated with the stuff I did end up discarding, but nevertheless, something in me felt like it was...apologizing every time I found something that I determined didn't fit in my life anymore (no matter how small).
This might all come across as horribly materialistic, but really it's not that -- I can live very comfortably with very little, in fact. It's just that I guess I've gotten to an age now where stuff has accumulated, and it's weird to be at a point where some of it has to go.
When I was younger, it seemed like my family tended to have the exact required amount of everything important and no more, and very little was ever thrown away. My dad especially raised me to note the differences between "expensive" and "well made", and to actually repair things when they broke rather than just go off and buy something new.
Mind you we didn't have literal garbage around everywhere (and I don't now) -- I am perfectly capable of throwing away a moldy orange peel, milk carton, or shredded bag of junk mail. Apparently my brain is at least somewhat selective when it comes to that sort of thing.
But nonetheless, there is something about the culture I've grown up in the midst of that seems alien to me, and was not the way things worked in my actual household. I was shocked when I got older to find out that it was considered normal and acceptable to get rid of something functional just because it had gone out of fashion.
So, I guess I am what you might call a "pack rat". It's genetic and environmental for me; I couldn't really not be one, given my dad's very similar tendencies in this regard.
These tendencies have served me very well in some respects; so long as I'm employed, I find saving money practically effortless because it so infrequently occurs to me to "go buy a new X".
I've also always tended to have interesting materials around to build things, make art, and do other projects with. (If not for all those old school binders I kept, I'd not have had the nice clear plastic I used for ID windows in my first handmade duct-tape wallets!)
And I am also happy to have things on hand that someone else might need or want -- being able to give something away is probably the best "fate" I can imagine for an object with memories attached to it but which I cannot physically keep.
I like the idea of that object being able to potentially collect more memories, and associations for someone else; somehow that makes me feel as if the item is being "done justice", if that makes any sense.
Furthermore, I have gotten quite concerned with sustainability issues as of late. Humans really do throw away a lot that could probably be very easily repurposed, repaired, or cleaned up and re-used -- and in the sanitized suburbs of the United States, I think there's a tendency for people to forget that when you throw something away (presuming it isn't recycled right away), it doesn't just blink out of existence - it just goes somewhere else where you can't see it, and becomes (in the case of landfills) someone else's problem.
So in addition to just naturally tending toward keeping stuff, I feel like I've got a bit of an impetus to avoid "egregious waste" to whatever extent possible -- and that means sorting stuff very carefully, not just glancing over it and chucking whatever seems to be creating the most physical inconvenience for me. (I realize that having this amount of choice over what happens to "my" stuff is itself a privilege, as someone on their way to becoming homeless doesn't really have the luxury of sorting his or her belongings into recycle-or-dump, and I don't take that for granted either.)
Someday I know that all these little things, so full of memories and links to events and feelings and impressions of a particular time, will disintegrate (or be ground up in some piece of junkyard or recycling equipment). I have a tendency, it is true, to hang onto particular forms for as long as I can -- to celebrate those forms even if only silently to myself -- but at the same time, the thought of each form becoming part of something else someday, or reverting back into constituent parts or molecules, is never far from my mind. There are very very few materials that can physically last in any given form for all that long as far as the timescale of the universe is concerned.
I am okay with this both because I have to be, and because on some level I know that the exploration of form and pattern by reality as time unfolds is part and parcel of the beauty of reality. But at the very least, within the timescale I actually inhabit, I will never find the process of sorting the forms I encounter (no matter how ephemeral) trivial, least of all when some are kept and some are passed along.
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