Interstellar, Foresight, and the Fear of Falling

I've noticed a common underlying thread to a lot of media in these last few years, and it's recently become even more insistent. It's especially prevalent in the film and video gaming industries, but pervades in at least some area of almost all American media I encounter.

I'm referring to the trope/meme of Mankind's Last Hope; the outlaws have killed the sheriff and started collecting tithes, the skies darken with alien landing craft, Earth's natural resources careen toward total depletion, and rumors abound that Blockbuster is about to re-open. These must surely be the end times, and the only question is whether civilization bleeds slowly out through thousands of tiny needle-wounds, sliding ever so slowly down into mud-soaked, unremembered oblivion or implodes catastrophically in a spectacular vortex of blazing fire and blood-soaked violence. Things are, it could be said, Very Very Bad.

But wait! What's this? A hero appears before us, his gaze piercing and his jawline unmistakably sculpturesque even through his just-rugged-enough stubble. He is one, only one, armed only with his personalized pearl-inlaid revolvers (which can also take the form of swords, magic rings, a set of launch codes, and the common cold) and a steely-eyed will to survive. There is an opportunity, a single shot-in-the-dark chance, and using his skill, resourcefulness, and sheer aftershave-scented animal magnetism, this single point of light will optionally assemble a team of qualified experts to stand against the encroaching darkness.

Their window of opportunity is tiny, and the odds are astronomically against them. Their mission is arguably impossible and certainly suicidal, and there is only one mission; all others have been attempted. And failed. And everyone involved was killed. Especially the characters you liked. It all comes down to this one-in-a-million, trial run-less, desperate trump card play. Succeed, and we might make it. Fail, and we won't be around to worry about it.

Examples of this trope abound, so I'll just list a few that come to mind. The Mass Effect saga focuses on Commander Shepard's suicide mission to defeat the Reapers (sentient machines who destroy all organic life every so often to start over from scratch. Yes, really.). The film Sunshine is about Earth's last-ditch attempt to give a dying Sun a jump-start with a colossal bomb of sorts. Even The Lord of the Rings exhibits this pattern to a certain degree, with the Fellowship's desperately-outnumbered race against time to deliver the One Ring to Orodruin before Sauron can gather enough power to fully freak out and destroy the Free Peoples entirely. More recently, films like Interstellar and a very similar movie whose name escapes me follow a few desperate adventurers on a journey to find humanity a new home (since Earth is so unbelievably, unsalvageably borked).*

These sorts of stories, when well-written, fire my imagination a great deal, and they're undoubtedly gripping to watch. Logic dictates that the heroes lose, but emotional investment (which you have, if the story is well-presented) insists that they absolutely must win, and the conflict between the two halves of your mind only serves to make the conflict on the page or screen all the more sensational. 

I always wonder, however, about a single nagging and extremely annoying question: how in God's name did we end up in such a fix? I know the world outside can seem grim at times, but one minute we forget to tip the waiters and the next minute we're serving them up as the entrée? 

It's the cultural manifestation of an increasingly common thought pattern, I think, and it's one that worries me a great deal. These sorts of stories, as a generality, represent the logical extreme of an assumption that people are not necessarily actively evil, but naturally passive. There's a good deal of evidence in support of this theory, actually, and a great deal of psychology focuses on something called the bystander effect. Especially in crowds, people very frequently become paralyzed by the assumption that Somebody will surely do something soon. Any given individual isn't important enough, or strong enough, or well-groomed enough to actually act, but we're always sure the proper authority or plainclothes hero will be along shortly enough. And so we stand, and Kitty Genovese gets stabbed in front of 38 witnesses.

A related but separate idea is the basis for the Milgram experiment. In general terms, participants were ordered to perform a task that conflicted with their conscience and caused pain to another person (delivering electrical shocks by way of a button, for example). This experiment found that people have a surprisingly high threshold for the unethical, as long as an authority figure told them to do it. Put another way, people are perfectly willing to do bad things as long as there's some ethereal Them for us to put the blame on. "Nah, I was just following orders!"

Both of these effects, and an increasing public awareness of them (along with a host of other things that piss me off extremely, likely to be discussed in the future), contribute to what I've decided is called socially-mediated disassociation of ethical agency. Now, in actual, non-pretentious English, I'd call it the Ethical Shrug Effect, a slightly-less-debased form of nihilism. People (particularly young people, from what I've detected) arrive at some sort of ethical fork in the allegorical road. The young mind in question can't see all the way down both forks, and insists they need more information or input to make an informed, sound, and generally "good" choice. 

The next realization is that we can't have ALL the necessary information about the variables involved in making a decision, because (as I wrote a while back, actually) life is almost infinite in its complexity.  Since we can't have all the information required, we therefore can't make a good choice. Therefore, we don't make a choice at all, because we have an annoying tendency to be looking for better options at all times (another topic). Because we made no decision, we become the bystanders in our own lives, standing and spectating as we drift indifferently through life. We never vocalize our opinion about dinner with friends, so we end up getting generic Mexican food every single time. Aware of our meekness, we then go and talk about the bystander effect with our other friends, or on Reddit, or, say, on a blog.

We never go up to that pretty girl or the handsome guy in class, because we're afraid of that unknown potential for rejection that we've all been told is waiting. He or she's way out of our "league," and so on. We walk timidly by the house echoing with sounds of domestic abuse because it's not our problem, and therefore not our place to do anything. Someone will help, we figure, so we squash the instinctive impulse to do it ourselves. On some grander scale, maybe we as a species do run our planet out of every natural resource because we're too short-sighted to see the danger and too meek to object to those in power if we do. 

I, however, have news for you, people of the world. These are all possibilities, it's true, possible outcomes in the grand tarot of life. Unpleasant possibilities, nothing we would wish for, but it's essentially down to chance, right?

Wrong. Life is so infinitely complicated as to be random to our perception in some ways, and the sheer unpredictable chaos of it all can be overwhelming. In the voluminous morass of seemingly random red smudges, however, there are clearly-defined line segments, collimated bars of order so hot they're blue, continuously advancing rays of choice and will. One of those bright blue stars burning through the chaos, dear reader, is you.

Before this goes any longer, I'm going to truncate for the sake of brevity, and boil it all down to a single word of advice. From all my life experiences (and they are many and varied), all the peaks and troughs, there's one single word of advice I wish to hell someone had given me. So if you're reading this, and no one has told you this yet, or you're just in need of a reminder:

Choose. Make a choice, any choice. Hell, it can be the wrong choice, and some of them will be. It is infinitely better to explain what went wrong while you tried to do right than explain why you did nothing in the face of wrongness.

TL;DR Bad things happen, but you can choose good. The only way to become a virtuoso is the brave humility to mess up the scales.

Adam and Eve

So for anybody who's unaware of the story, it goes like this: God woke up one day and decided He was awesome, so he made a little dude in his image and called this little dude Adam. Being an empathetic sort of divine energy mass, God realized little Adam looked lonely and decided to tear out one of Adam's ribs to make a little lady friend for him, and named her Eve. Realizing His living dolls needed a house to play in, He then created a paradise on Earth for them to live in, called Eden.

This was ravishing, as far as God and the two newcomers were concerned. Unfortunately, God had also made a snake at some point, who may have been an emissary of Satan, or the Big Ugly himself, and in either case was one of those individuals you invite to your work party even if you don't want him there, because otherwise he will be quite put out.

The garden of Eden also had a tree within it, which carried fruit containing knowledge (of some variety; people get twisted about this part a lot). Adam and Eve were told to "not bloody well eat that," so of course they decided to listen to the mysterious snake in their garden and eat it anyway. When He found out his creations had realized they were naked and invented fashion, He was reportedly quite peeved and cast them out of the garden, making them mortal and cursing them to live in the world and Original Sin and yadda yadda.

So, if you take this story literally (which you shouldn't, because that would be stupid, but we'll get to that), people take issue with several points. First of all, man being created in God's image is a problem for a lot of people. Additionally, the idea of women being created out of men (and, implicitly, secondary/inferior) gets many people in a twizzy, and the idea of original sin pisses off pretty much everybody.

Before I really start, I want to point out that the entire argument over this story is pretty much moot, because it's in the book of Genesis, which is in the Bible, which is a religious scripture, and is therefore a giant mass of allegory written by people inspired by a brush with the divine but informed by the sociological and cosmological context of an ancient society. That, however, is a long sentence with lots of words, and we don't like them round here.

The first point!

The idea of the Imago Dei (humans being modeled after the divine) is irritating to people for a few reasons. Some take the idea to mean that we're modeled after a sublime being and should therefore be rather more sublime ourselves, and are frustrated with our flawed species. Others take this to mean that we are inherently subservient to that sublime being, and nothing gets people angry quicker than saying there might be something more interesting than they are. Indeed, the idea of being "made" at all has come under a lot of fire, because of the "creation vs. evolution debate."

I won't talk about this at great length, because the idea of debating it bores me, to be totally honest. I'll just frame my opinion in two points for you.

1. I don't think we interpreted the "made in His image" part quite right. I think what was meant was: "we were made by the divine, of the divine." Since the entity in question is divine, I doubt we look much at all like it, and indeed I doubt it "looks" like anything as we'd understand it.

2. The debate over whether creationism or evolution is the right theory has never ceased to amaze me. It seems to me that yeah, everything did have a single origin; it was probably the Big Bang, we think. For people who think this should disprove the existence of God, or whatever point they have, I have a point. What specifically you believe in actually has no bearing on this, now that I think of it. Does anybody (sane) honestly believe that, through our mortal intelligence and scientific apparatus, looking at the workings of the infinitely vast and complex universe around us, we could ever possibly figure it out? 

The second issue!

It bothers people that, in this allegory, women seem to have been created strictly for a man's companionship, and were made out of him, implying fundamental subservience. That's pretty understandable; I think all genders are equal and ought to be treated that way, and this binarization in the creation myth bugs me a little too. I think, however, we could alleviate this by thinking about it a little more.

Firstly, for humor's sake, remember that Adam was made out of some scraped-together dust to have "dominion over the Earth," which at that point basically made him God's appointed cat-sitter/gardener. If ever anybody (presumably male) starts to get uppity with this story as part of his argument, just toss him that one.

Secondly (and more seriously) I think it bears keeping in mind that, before eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve didn't have much of a sense of the world around them. They weren't even aware that they were naked, to give you an idea of the state these folks were in. Realizing this, then, I have to conclude that Adam and Eve couldn't even have known gender existed, and therefore (because gender is largely a matter of perception), it didn't. We look at this story in terms of our established gender binary, which is the source of our anger and angst over the topic. However, it bears keeping in mind that this binary is a culturally-mediated phenomenon, and there's nothing inherently binary about the nature of things. To cut this short before I ramble, I'm going to compare culture to quantum mechanics (because obviously). We perceive things to be binary: white and black, male and female, yes and no, whatever. The universe, however, is actually made out of things that defy this binary perception; we named them "positively" and "negatively" charged, in keeping with our perceived binary structure, and then we found out there were neutrons and oops.

The third problem!

People of all denominations get upset by the idea of original sin; those who believe it feel variously doomed, hopeless, and unworthy, and those who don't assert that it's a tool to make people feel inferior to keep them in line. I thought about this one for a long time, and came to a few points that change the nature of the issue.

For the first one, stick with me in the Christian tradition for a second. Adam and Eve, as with all other things, are actors in a great divine scheme of Stuff. They were made from dust by God, and to dust and God they inevitably return. In the Christian idea, God is a funny being; He simultaneously knows everything that will happen but does not void the principle of free will. Knowing this, then, He made Adam, Eve, the tree, and the snake, and caused them all to come together. Given that God knew what the result would be and still chose to combine all these ingredients in His Great Big Chemistry Set, I have to come to the following conclusion: He knew, and humans eating the fruit (that is, allegorically becoming self-aware and knowledgeable actors) was what He planned.

Furthermore, the "punishment" for their "transgression" was to be sent out into the Earth we're all familiar with, away from the unique intermediary/semi-divine plane that was Eden. This was enacted in response to their new status as beings equipped with knowledge that they themselves had chosen to acquire, and they were left to their own devices on Earth.

Well, now, hold on a minute, what the hell?

Adam and Eve were ostensibly created to have dominion over Earth, and that's where they wound up, freely roaming and founding the great family that is humanity. They were also supposedly created in the image of God, a being of infinite knowledge, and they wound up with great knowledge of their own.

Finally, Adam and Eve were "punished" to wander the Earth for the duration of their natural lifespan, ending with death, at which point they would return to the transcendent state. I want you to do something for me now, dear reader; go outside your house, or apartment, or dormitory, or wherever you live. Lift your gaze away from the pavement and the bustle, and look up at the sky, at the treeline, at the ocean, whatever you can see. Feel the wind, hear the birds sing, smell the falafel frying, whatever, and think about anything you want, using that miraculous instrument that is your brain.

Adam and Eve (those lovely metaphors again) were "punished" by being placed into this state.

Not a very harsh sentence, in my book.

TL;DR It's long as hell, I dunno. Religion is metaphor, God is you, me, everyone we know, and everything we don't, humanity is in a good spot.

The Frog

Brace yourselves, everybody, this one's gonna be random.

So if you have a frog and drop him in really cold water, he immediately goes "OI WOT" and jumps immediately back out, as he finds the freezing water to be most disagreeable. Replace the cold water with some near boiling, and he will issue the same proclamation and leap out almost instantly. In either of these extreme situations, the frog is instinctively aware that, if he remains, the water will kill him.

People are like this too; we have a highly-evolved intuitive sense for danger. That's the human advantage in evolution, and the key to why our seemingly physically underwhelming species has lasted so long. We may not outrun the lion, but we're aware of the signs that lions are near, and to a certain extent we have an extra, inexplicable sense for danger. To call it the sixth sense is inaccurate (we have far more than five senses), but the term serves to describe the phenomenon. I don't need to give you examples of this because everyone has experienced the sensation; nothing is outwardly wrong, but you just get a feeling.

In this way, humans share an animal's sense for painful situations, as well as an anticipatory ability to avoid them based on their precursory signs. That's fine. Consider, however, a different scenario.

If you drop the same intrepid little amphibian into a pleasantly warm pot of water, he won't react to it at all, and think something like "ah yiss, dis is niiiiice." That's his natural temperature, after all, and even we mighty humans can relate to the enjoyment of mucking about in warm water. So, he (and we) will swim around aimlessly and enjoy the experience.

Here's the problem: what if you turn the temperature up? Not a lot all at once, mind, but incrementally, a little at a time.

This is a strange paradox. Once the frog gets used to the starting temperature of the water, a little additional heat just feels like the pleasant warmth from earlier. He adjusts again, more heat feels nice again. This can continue for a while, until the temperature gets to the point of fatality, at which point the frog will again think "ahh, pleasant warmth" and, as they say, croak, having never realized how hot it was getting.

"What a foolhardy amphibian, to not notice he's being boiled!" we mighty humans proclaim. "I would surely get out of the water."

Well, that's the issue, isn't it? We humans are even more adaptable than frogs as far as temperature is concerned, having our own internal mechanisms to adjust our bodily function rather than being totally subject to the whim of the environment as cold-blooded creatures are.

Getting used to a temperature is easy, and you can motor along through life at basically any temperature. Spikes in temperature (dangerous situations) are obvious and can be managed; we're smart, generally, and we have fair bit of knowledge about how to not die. Consider, however, the frog who never notices the temperature slowly rising around him because he's so acclimated to it. When you suddenly feel something boiling up inside you and the temperature is spiking, stop and ask yourself:

"What temperature have I been at?"

TL;DR Being used to something =/= it being a healthy state.

P.S. I came to this realization after burning myself in the shower. Just in case someone thought I was being insightful or something :P

Fundamentalism vs. Fanaticism

It's time for another Semantic Distinctions that Irritate Me for No Reason At All post!

In these last few years we've heard the word "fundamentalist" thrown around in the news a lot, especially (let's be real) with regard to Islam and Muslims. It was an understandable reaction in 2001, and I don't think I need to remind anybody why. Religious extremism was, and is, a very scary thing, to say the least.

At this point, I think it's important to delineate the difference between a fundamentalist and a fanatic. Firstly, "fundamentalism" as a word was originally coined to refer to a specific set of Christian doctrine, specifically in opposition to so-called Modernist Theology. The differences between those two aren't the topic of this post (or something I especially care about, to put it crassly), but there's the word origin. Fundamentalism, in its very least refined form, could be put as "sticking to the basics." It pertains to a political movement as well, also known as being "conservative" (although God knows that word gets a bad rap now too). "Fundamental," the root word, refers to something "forming a necessary base or core; of central importance."

As an interesting side note, if the word was stripped of its connotations, I could be labeled a fundamentalist Christian. It's that part about believing in things "of central importance;" the details of doctrine are essentially unimportant when measured up against underlying core concepts. That, unfortunately, is not what the word refers to, and is also off topic. I return.

The word "fundamentalist," deprived of its Christian context, structurally goes like this: strict adherence to the written tenets of a religion. You could think of it as similar to what Constitutional strict constructionists believe, modified for religion; use what is written and do not modify it, essentially. That segues with comical slickness into my next point.

The people responsible for the World Trade Center attacks were not fundamentalists. If I was being properly fiery, I might even say they weren't genuine Muslims at all, drinking the warping poison of al-Qaeda as they were. A "fundamentalist" Muslim, reading the Qur'an through the lens of a strict interpretation, could never have conceived of anything like the motives behind the attacks, let alone actually carrying the bloody things out.

I'm going to digress briefly to give you some quick facts about Islam and simultaneously explain why the media have got it completely bass-ackwards, as they say. First of all, Allah and God are the same entity. I saw a news report attempting to explain "Allah vs. God" to the American public, and I just about gave up completely. Yes, one of these names is used by a religion that originated in the Middle East, and the other is used in a religion that originated in... oh.

The errata: Moses is mentioned more than any other person in the Qur'an. Mary is mentioned more times in the Qur'an than in the New Testament. Other little details in the Qur'an include lots of people like John the Baptist, Solomon, David, Noah, Adam, and Job, and so on ad infinitum. The one I want to bring to your attention is a minor character named Jesus.

That's right, everybody; Jesus is mentioned as an ordained prophet in the Qur'an. So no, I don't think it's valid to try and explain all the ways in which Islam and Christianity are different or how one is the enemy.

This, obviously, begs the question: if they weren't fundamentalist Muslims, what were they?

Fanatics. We didn't kill a Muslim when the S.E.A.L.s (er, excuse me, DEVGRU) executed bin Laden; we killed a fanatic. And fanatics everywhere, no matter the color of their skin, or the beliefs they claim to represent, or where they were born, or how they act out their fanaticism, are the same.

TL;DR "Islamist" is not a word. I could keep elaborating, but you're smart and you undoubtedly caught on.

East vs. West Fight Night II

I did a thing about the differences between Japan (that is, anime) and the United States (that is, poorly-executed action movies) a while ago, and I've been thinking a lot more about the differences between the "East" and the "West" recently. I've already talked about our differing perceptions of the snake in another post too.

I think it's fair to say that East and West have been pretty different right from the get-go. Here's where the broad brush comes out; I'm grossly over-generalizing, but stick with me. Western society tends to focus on individualism and devotes a lot of attention to those who deviate, or strike out against convention to be their own person. Eastern societies, on the other hand, often have a greater emphasis on social duty, to the family on the small scale and to the overall community at the larger scales.

Religions from the two regions are superficially very different as well. Western religions (those that survive, anyway) are generally monotheistic. Eastern religions tend to be polytheistic (at the surface level; more on this later). Western religion also generally holds humanity to be fallen and morally corrupt in some way, casting humanity as undergoing a struggle to overcome its wicked nature and reunite with divinity. Eastern traditions also hold that humanity has its flaws to overcome, but tend to emphasize a much more positive view of nature, both human nature and nature in general.

The differences continue endlessly, but that's a good baseplate for what I want to talk about: the underlying reason all these cultures sometimes seem incompatible across the imaginary East-West "line."

The main division is one, simply, of world view. I mentioned that the two regions' religions were respectively mono- and polytheistic, and I may have been a little disingenuous; that isn't actually the problem. Many of the superficially "polytheistic" religions are merely paying homage to many avatars and aspects of one essential divine entity, when you consider them more deeply. So if that's not it, what is?

My opinion, anyway, is that the fundamental difference is how the divine entity is positioned in our mind, as opposed to an issue of its single or multiple nature. Western religions as a whole hold the divine being to be a sort of great originating point, a single Fact that was, and from which all other things and energies emanate. Take, for example, the Jewish title Ehyeh, sometimes translated as "I AM," or Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, confusingly "I am to continue to be" (essentially equivalent to the Christian "was, is, and is to come"). Christianity speaks extensively of God the Creator, the single primary entity that always has been and looked out into nothing to create everything.

The East has a different and somewhat more complicated view of the whole matter. All the gods of Hinduism, for example, are manifestations or representations of an ongoing and consistent energy flowing through all things. Well, wait, isn't that the same as in the West? Ah, tricky. No, the East has gods that represent aspects of an all-powerful energy, and the West generally has one single deity that is the energy's source.

So, put shortly: the West thinks God is the starting point from which all other things proceed, and the East thinks God is also present in the procession of things. In the West, God is the source of all energy, and in the East God is closer to being the energy itself.

This is a post mostly intended to a) express my opinion regardin the starting point of the fundamental differences between the East and West and b) inform the reader. I know I don't propose any solutions here, but I thought this would be something useful to think about while understanding various cultures and how they interact.

Also, to be clear: difference does not imply a hierarchy. No, I do not think Western religions are evil because of the Crusades, nor do I think India is full of heathens praying to false idols, or whatever. It's impossible, in my opinion, to study religions and come up with many really negative thoughts, if you're doing it right.

The History of Creativity

Creativity is something people usually associate with painting a picture or writing a story or something like that, but I think its broader definition is important to remember. "Creativity," says the almighty Wikipedia, "is a phenomenon whereby something new and valuable is created." "Something new" is a seemingly mundane phrase that I think has much more meaning than we give it credit for; what it really means is "there is now something where before there was no such thing."

Creativity isn't strictly human, either, though we seem to be the only beings truly capable of relating to it and performing it. For instance, at the very beginning of things, all the universe existed in a hyper-concentrated blob, wherein temperatures must have been so high that we can't accurately apply our modern rules of physics to it. At some point, the blob underwent a cataclysm of indescribably huge proportions, resulting in the blob un-blobbing. As it expanded, the blob also cooled.

At one point during the Great Un-Blobbing, atoms formed. It's easy to read that sentence very casually, "oh, atoms, those things that are really small and make up stuff," but I want to stress exactly how remarkable that event actually was. In our studies, we've found atoms to be the essential building blocks of us and everything around us, and they've existed for huge amounts of time, so a human perspective can very easily turn "an unthinkably long time" into "forever." But think about it: at this point in the Big Bang, there weren't any atoms, and then all of a sudden there were.

Skip forward an unthinkably long time, and we have stars forming out of those atoms through gravitational runaway. At this point, pretty much everything is hydrogen, and if it isn't hydrogen it's helium resulting from hydrogen being fused. Everything's cooking along nicely, until suddenly, oh no! Some stars run out of hydrogen to fuse. Stars rely partially on the energy of fusion to hold their structure, and when they run out of fuel they start to collapse.

This has never happened before either; stars have been for a long time, but never has there been a collapsing star. Again, all creation was totally uncertain as to what would happen when these crumbling suns passed their breaking point. What knew? It might have been the end of everything; there was no precedent for this solar tomfoolery.

But it wasn't the end of everything. The endgame of any star can result in a display of godlike destructive power, but out of this cataclysm came something new. Fusion of new elements happened. Where there had previously been hydrogen and its helium cousins, suddenly carbon and other elements were splattered out into the cosmos. Now this was interesting.

So, we skip another indescribably long and important period of time, and our little planet has collapsed together from swirling dust and gravel. Theia has come by and nearly destroyed it, ultimately forming the moon-Earth complex. The surface of the planet resembles how most people today would draw hell; meteors slam down into the surface with unpleasant regularity, the air is mostly ammonia, methane, and carbon dioxide, the surface is still so hot as to be liquid in many places, and so on. It's called the Hadean Eon, to give you an idea.

Let me be clear: nothing is alive on this version of Earth. Nothing swims in the hot baths of acid, nothing crawls over the burning rocks. Nothing flies. Hell, there's barely enough of an atmosphere for flight to even theoretically work. "Inhospitable" isn't the word.

And yet, suddenly, at some point, something was. We still struggle to figure out when, and how, and what exactly, but something happened. A crude sort of membrane developed, the first example of something with an inside and outside, and in that little chamber tiny molecules collided to form bigger molecules and then suddenly it lived.

We'll ignore how breathtaking that is in the interest of speeding along as we follow our brave little post-Hadean hero. It, and its friends, soon discovered that the only way to continue being was to drink in the energy of the sun and use it to assemble other compounds, so they invented photosynthesis. This was great. Life was actually doing pretty well as the Earth began to relax and hell subsided. Great colonies of these old bacteria spread all over, replicating freely.

They, unfortunately, had made a crippling oversight in their development; they made oxygen through photosynthesis, and there was only so much oxygen the earth's iron and oceans could absorb. When the oxygen level in the atmosphere passed that point, it was discovered that oxygen is poisonous to the things that were making it.

Uh. Damn!

So, yet another change was necessary. Through yet another incredibly complex, time-consuming, poorly-understood process, the tiny organisms learned to live in groups and specialize, ultimately forming single larger masses that we currently know as eukaryotes, or, with a little extrapolation, us.

At all these junctures, something arose, or happened, or was invented that had never been so before. These were not modifications of things, mind you, but entirely new things arising out of nothingness, at times when the universe could only be personified as shuffling its feet in uncertainty.

So the point I'm getting to is this: when you're uncertain in life, it's pretty normal. It was 14 billion years of uncertainty that created you, after all. Uncertainty is our natural state. The best things, the most lasting things, always arise out of turbulence of some kind, whether that means the boiling surface of the young Earth or the whirling, distracted realm of your mind.

Don't worry about being uncertain. It's a stressful sensation in itself, obviously, but what I mean is don't worry over the fact that you're worrying. "But I don't have all the data!" Nothing, and no one, ever has. Creativity is just the act of applying energy to uncertainty until something amazing is created.

TL;DR You are the latest in iterations beyond counting of uncertain things. There are infinitely varied and equally uncertain futures available to you, and all of them are the right one.

Restlessness

I hear lots of people (myself really included) complain of a feeling of restlessness or a sense of non-direction. They do many things, from class to games to drugs to advocacy, but nothing seems to quite put us at ease, and it's annoying in the extreme.

This is the sort of uneasiness targeted by professionally-crafted advertisements, whether we openly acknowledge that or not. A lot of advertisements, boiled down and deprived of all their bright colors, come down to "Feeling unsatisfied? This is what you are missing, and I will sell it to you, for money!" Consumerism and some materialist philosophy is actuated on this principle; the uneasiness I feel is because I perceive the things I have as insufficient, and wish to acquire more things, of one form or another.

Only humans (as far as we're aware) experience this sensation, the strange tension that comes when we're not tense. Every other animal fights to survive and looks for the basics of life (food, shelter, and so on), but we have these pretty well in hand and aren't satisfied. Having figured out how to systematically grow and ranch our food and become a globally dominant species, effectively stabilizing and guaranteeing our ability to fulfill the basic drives of life (for now), we still find ourselves not content.

So what's wrong with us, then? Are we just forever doomed to wander out our short existence, sitting on a hollow throne as we master the earth and find it wanting? Is something just fundamentally and totally inaccessible to us? Do we feel the echo of humanity's fall from grace, of our separation from divinity as many other traditions hold it?

No, sir or madame, this restlessness is no curse to blight the walkers of the earth. This, rather, is the evidence of humanity's single greatest gift. What is it, this buzzing that stirs in all our minds, the voice that nags you when you sit down exhausted after an odious task, demanding you do something else? Why do you wake up at God-awful hours of the night and morning, wondering why exactly a burrito is neither the tortilla nor the things inside, but some greater combination of the two?

The answer is simple. That restlessness is creativity.

People are constantly uncertain about the future, and it causes us a lot of stress. That's obviously not the best thing, but I think there's a silver lining to how "always in motion the future is" with the dark side's clouds and all. The thing about it is that creativity loves ambiguity. Can you imagine how dull your life would be if you were simply handed a script at the beginning and told "welp, here's what we're all doing, go for it?"

No, we feel this strange uneasiness and uncertainty for a reason. We humans, in "natural" terms, are really nothing special. There's no one thing in nature we're good at; we don't run especially quickly, we're not insanely strong, we can't breathe water, nothing. And yet we survived to the present day by creating our way out of whatever mess we found ourselves in. Natural selection acted on our species in a strange way. Given nothing else to work with, evolution simply emphasized our ability to reason and innovate in order to compensate for our physical shortcomings.

Us, and only us, out of all the myriad species of life, countless in their legions and endless in their diversity. Only we see a door and wonder abstractly where the key is, who has it, how they got it.

If ever you're tense without knowing why, consider the possibility that your fundamental essence wants you to be creating something, and I don't mean making a macaroni wreath or anything physical like that. It's totally possible to have a creative experience without doing anything. Just sitting and mentally wandering as you listen to music or the sounds outside can be extremely creative.

We're set up to do this sort of thing, and to not do it goes against our nature. That's why I'm always so concerned when schools start dismissing their art programs or their music departments, and when people write off humanities majors as easy or too "ethereal" or whatever. It's not that more quantitative fields inherently stifle creativity so much as our approach to them does, but that's another point.

There's a spark burning constantly in the back of all our minds, telling us to go and solve that math problem, or showing us a pretty cloudscape in our minds, or figuring out how a type of food is made, or whatever. It's annoying, to be totally honest; it never goes out, and it certainly isn't easy to control (imagine all the times you've suddenly become convinced your desk decidedly needs cleaning when you have a test the next morning). This little spark is a mercurial and fickle fairy, and causes us a great deal of tension by not always being on our side or not being accessible on command, but it's the most beautiful part of every single person.

I think that's what the Bible meant when it said we were made in God's image, not this silly material matter of iconography. We have hands, and eyes, and brains. Other animals can use tools and solve puzzles, but we can make things, inspired by a force we have no words to describe. I think it's easy to forget how wondrous and, yes, divine that power is, the drive and splendor of that little divine fire in your soul.

I'm getting distracted and lyrical, so let me just leave you with an awesome quote. The anthropologist A.L. Kroeber said that the best things can happen at "the highest degree of tension that can be creatively borne," and I think that's really awesome to consider. So, there's that.

TL;DR You're not bored because there's anything wrong with you.

P.S. Imma do a history of creativity tomorrow or the next day, depending on many things. Come back! It'll be fun, and there will be scones.

Value

It's a Hearthstone concept, and it's applicable to real life! Isn't that awful?!

Hearthstone is a digital representation of one of THOSE card games, the ones that have cards with lots of text and numbers and are only ever played by the three people at your local game store. In this game and games like it, each card has a different effect or set of effects, in addition to a cost associated with it. As you might assume in a game with standardized card text like this, it stands to reason that cards will fit into categories, and will inevitably draw comparisons. As such, certain cards will simply be categorically better than others, and figuring out the best cards is actually a major part of the game.

This is a concept called value. Some cards are extremely effective for their cost, some require a massive investment of resources to get rid of, and so on. I won't go into actual game mechanics (because that's not the point for this post), but the essential idea is that if one of your cards takes two of your opponent's, it was valuable, and so on. Hearthstone's a complicated card game, but boiled down, as long as your pluses ad up to a greater number than your minuses, you're on track to win.

The same principle can be applied to a lot of things in real life. You're a person, with all the potential and limits that implies. You have a significant (but finite) amount of resources available to you inherently, and it's up to you to decide how they're going to be distributed.

Consider the concept of Hearthstone's trading, modified to fit real life. Both my opponent and I have a set of cards, none of which are known to the other player. My opponent plays a card, and I have to make an assessment about what I want to do; do I use one of my own cards to eliminate it, effectively resetting the board? If so, which? Do I let it persist and draw more cards to have more options later, taking the risk of it becoming part of a combination?

The whole idea of this is, basically: how bad is the situation? That established, how much of my hand do I want to invest in order to resolve it? Also, which solution do I want to use?

For real life, I think it would be a gross understatement to say the math is a little more complex than a "do I want to use my whole turn to kill that" sort of scenario. For one thing, your hand is not composed of clearly labeled cards, and your own resources might be substantially greater or lesser than you initially think. Also, you don't usually have a single opponent, and sometimes it seems like everything is your opponent. The principle, however, is valid. Take careful stock of your resources at any given juncture and consciously decide how you want to allocate them.

Say, for instance, you're a member of a club that's having an event on Saturday. You also have a midterm on Monday, and all the other usual necessaries of life in addition to these two. Now, if you're like me, you go promptly to mental pieces thinking about everything at once and manage to do full justice to absolutely nothing in your scatter-plot. Effectively, I focus on everything at once and wind up focusing on nothing at all.

A healthier response, in my opinion, is the exact reverse. Focus on one thing to the exclusion of all else. It doesn't even matter which one, just pick something off the list of things and do it. Do nothing else during this time. Food in the microwave? It's not going anywhere, certainly not after you've cooked it. Boys blowin' up yo phone? Don't worry, they'll still be walking around in the same daze in ten minutes. Whichever thing you choose to do, do only that. Listening to music? Rock out for a while. Studying? Permit no other thoughts. Cleaning your desk? Cleanse it with fire.

The short version goes like this: pick a single opponent, observe its play, and play one of your cards in response. Go turn by turn until it's done. With a little practice at this, I think you'll discover the wonderful arithmetic of everyday life. Taken out of their overwhelming number and dealt with fully and singly, each problem is never as bad as it was with all its friends. That's the thing about life trying to swamp you with cards to deal with; all the opponents have to try and overwhelm you with numbers, because one-on-one your cards are incredibly overpowered.

TL;DR Your hand rocks; just take situations one at a time and try to go plus in each one.

Binaries

Binaries are a common thing, and nearly everyone hears about them at least once nearly every day. They're usually not called binaries, but they exist. The "he" vs. "she" binary is a familiar one, as is "good" vs. "bad." A lot of parables and mythologies are heavily binary in structure as well, a familiar example being heaven vs. hell. Sun and Moon are often set as opposites as well. You get the idea.

For a long time in human history, nobody really thought of this universal duality from a detached standpoint. "Us" vs. "them" wasn't a construct of any particular cultural context, it was simply a fact of existence. You had your loved ones, and then there was everyone outside that group, and that was that. You didn't think of it as a psychoexistential complex of negative value, because you wouldn't a) have the word "psychoexistential" yet or b) care.

In more recent times, having moved into (arguably) a broader awareness of the world and of each other, people have also taken a step back to observe the things created by our cultures without our awareness. There are endless volumes of articles and entire books on this, but I'll give you a synopsis: humans think in terms of absolute binary duality.

With awareness of this, many people are involved in efforts to solve the issues inherent in a binary system of thought. The field of ethnicity is a prime example. For many centuries race was a starkly binary issue; you were either white, or you were from a group white people were stepping you in some way. Colonialism, in my opinion, represents the modern symptom of a truly ancient human ailment, our inability to easily think in more than two terms. The relationship of master to servant is binary, as is that of any leader to his/her subjects.

Another hotly-contended example of recent times is the gender binary. Debates rage about gender identity, what constitutes a gender, how many genders there are, and so on. I won't delve into it; there is much anger. One thing I do find very interesting, though, is the concept of a "non-binary transgender" person. This type of person identifies with neither gender, and so are said to be non-binary, which might seem to break down our ordinary binary way of thinking (as there are now options outside the two-term mental diagram). I think it should be noted, however, that these individuals simply occupy a binary different from that of the "normal;" where the normative, purely biological binary is man and woman, a "non-binary" transgender person is simply positioned as the second part of a binary where the first term is that original binary itself.

That all got rather tangled, and I could continue to tangle it further, but the (belabored) point is this: humans think in binaries. Man and woman, day and night, right and wrong, earth and sky, left and right, whatever, we think in twos. In a way, evolution and biology contribute to this. We are bilaterally symmetrical creatures, with a left and a right half, and left and right sections to our brain, so two is one of the most primal and accessible numbers to us.

It makes sense, then, that we try to label the transcendent in terms of a binary. In nearly every doctrine, the benevolent deity is opposed by some malefic agent. In Christianity, God and the legions of angels are opposed by his fallen angel Lucifer and his fellow traitors. Zoroastrianism, I think, is the best example of the binary transcendent. In this faith Ahura Mazda, the "Wise Lord," is constantly at odds with Ahriman, the "Destructive Principle." Some traditions have the binary as our transcendent soul against our crude body. Obviously, there are many more examples and they are all more complex than this "greatest hits" approach can do justice to, but the point is made that we ascribe the binary nature of our own thought to the divine.

I'm pretty sure we're wrong.

The problem I have is that binaries are, for the most part, an essentially human construct, a product of the way we think and experience. I mentioned a "psychoexistential complex of negative value"above, and what I mean is this: the way each of us defines his/her self is as not all these other things. Language works the same way. The word for tree refers to a tree; more specifically, it does not refer to all the things that are not a tree.

Binaries are a thought pattern, and sometimes a physical reality. The issue is that I don't believe the divine operates on human terms like these. It doesn't work on any terms, really, because terms are things we tiny mortals create and comprehend. Divinity as I hold it wasn't created, and it defies any attempt we might make to comprehend it. It's us trying to put something incomprehensible and indescribable into some form we can work with, not the thing itself. I really doubt there was any such thing as a literal "War in Heaven;" war is something we do, and beings of transcendent, omnipotent power would have no need to fight one in any way we'd understand. The War that Christians believe in is a human metaphor describing the banishment of Satan and friends from heaven for their (variously interpreted) crimes.

It is, however, purely a human metaphor, because the reality of the divine is this: God, with a little or a big G, and whatever it opposes, whether it's Satan or Ahriman or the titans, are not at all separate. We separate and name things because we are human, and we categorize in order to survive. As far as the divine itself goes, however, all things are merely... aspects of the same, I suppose I would say.

TL;DR We're thinking in two, and we've forgotten everything is really one.

Light

Light is a funny thing in our universe, and I think it represents a funny thing pertaining to our universe as well.

Light is funny in the sense that it is a wave and a particle. Not in the sense that it behaves like both a wave and a particle, mind you; it exists in these two normally mutually exclusive states at exactly the same time. The nature of light as we perceive it depends entirely on how we detect it, with some instrumentation showing that light is a particle and other instruments showing it as a wave.

It could be said, then, that light is either inherently dualistic in nature, or has no nature at all until we apply one to it.

Clearly, this post is now about religion and the nature of the divine!

Light, in my estimation, is a very good way to try and grapple with the issue of the transcendent. It could be said that light is the closest thing in the material universe to transcendent matter. What I mean by this is that light, as much as we try to group and explain everything scientifically, light appears to inhabit a category by itself.

As far as we're aware, light is alone in the universe. Nothing, or nothing we're yet able to observe, moves as quickly as light does. Light (and some other very small things) progresses through spacetime as we do and yet experiences no effect of aging as we would understand it. Light is everywhere and nowhere to our ordinary perception; we experience a vibrant world filled with shape and color, but we have no sensation of receiving the light responsible. Small wonder there are cultures that worship(ped) the Sun; aside from being a thing of great physical majesty and the driving sustenance of most life we are familiar with, I think the cultures in question intuitively tapped into something about the nature of light with their inclination to pay homage to the source of light.

I may have been a little disingenuous when I said light is a good way to try and imagine the transcendent, the divine, or whatever you want to call it. In fact, it doesn't matter what you want to call it, because you can't call it anything. Even my use of the ambiguous word "it" is invalid when referring to divinity, because "it" denotes a "thing" or a "concept," and divinity simply does not work in terms such as those.

The atheists, or the secular humanists, and that field of people, maintain that God does not exist, or that divinity does not exist, or whichever phrasing. This is a huge catching point for debate between believers in such things and the atheist movements, as we all know. I'm going to be frank here; this debate strikes me as incredibly stupid.

On the one side, we have the atheists and secular materialists, who posit that God does not exist, and never did. To most of them, God is a concept created and perpetuated by human authors, for purposes that are too many and varied to discuss here. This may surprise you given that I have previously professed to be Christian, but it is my belief that the atheists are absolutely right.

On the other side are the theist camps, who maintain both that a) God exists and b) they, in various ways, know and can quantify what God is. Again, perhaps surprisingly, I claim that the theists are absolutely wrong.

To explain: the atheists are right that God does not exist. This is because existing is a physical and mental state. God, or whatever handle you call him/her/it by, is held to be beyond space and time. I struggle to even write this, because there is no expression in English to say that something "does not be." It's nonsense, it's gibberish, and it's the best way I can come up with to try and describe how divinity must be.

The theists, in my estimation, are wrong in maintaining that God is something identifiable and quantifiable. Another long-standing debate is about how we represent God, whether it's a racist and hegemonic act to represent him with a fatherly old white man, or where the line between appropriate statuary and sacrilegious idolatry lies. I have long been flabbergasted, since I gave the matter serious thought, by the human assumption that God is something we can represent accurately in any terms at all. There are no terms.

The thing people cite frequently is that God "made humans in His image," and so we represent God as a human form. Consider, however, a photographic portrait of a person. This thing was made in that person's image, and can have depth and implication, and all the things described when we discuss art. It is, however, both a separate thing in and of itself and at best a pale, fragmentary imitation of the original subject.

Another feature of debates about God is the inevitable human binary system. This one gets me every single time. The debate is to whether God is good or bad, or masculine or feminine, and so on. The binary is evident in an old Christian issue, as to the nature of Jesus; whether Jesus was man, God, half-man and half-God, part of God, fully God, fully man and fully God, a creation of God, and so on is a major deal. (Relatedly, read about the Arian heresy, because it's interesting.)

In my opinion, the binary way of thinking about the divine is incredibly narrow-minded. Binaries are material, and crucially they are human; we perceive things as different or separate based on opposing them in a binary with all others. I will say no more about it, other than to reiterate that binaries are a human invention, and I do not think it is valid to hold such an earthly lens up to the indescribable.

I'm going to cut myself off here, because I could write books and volumes about this topic (and probably contradict myself on several different tangents) and I feel I'm getting off topic or too complex. It comes down to an old saying: "The best things are impossible to describe, transcendental of language. The second-best things refer to that which cannot be named directly. The third best are what everyone talks about."

Instead of a TL;DR as normal, I would like to throw a plea at your feet, dear reader. Please consider what I've written, and feel free to form an opinion as to whether I'm wrong. Tell me that opinion or keep it private as you wish, but consider. Feel free to show this to your friends or family if you think it's worthy, or tell me if it isn't, or paint a picture of a unicorn, or whatever. Thank you.

P.S. I will probably post more about this, elaborating on the various subsections of what I talked about briefly here and making my muddy thoughts more clear, so if you liked it, huzzah! If you didn't, uh... apologies in advance, but I have been struck with an inspiration. My daimon is talking, as Socrates might have said.

P.P.S. I realize these haven't been particularly about UC Berkeley lately. Apologies. We are all about deviating from established guidelines here, is the lame-duck justification I'll throw out. :P

Pointing at the Moon

There's a lot of ideological fervor flying around in the news these days. I say "ideological" because it isn't just the issue of religion as some people think; while religion has long been a major catalyst for conflict, and is mainly what I'll talk about today, the same sort of fundamentalist zeal ordinarily associated with religious fanaticism is commonplace in the arena of earthly politics as well.

There's an old analogy from the Buddhist tradition regarding religion, although it can be taken to refer to belief in general. In the story, a man is travelling and encounters a wide and rushing river, deep beyond easy reckoning and impossibly dangerous to ford or swim. The man is fairly resourceful, and soon constructs a raft from trees along the river's bank, using the raft to cross in relative safety. Having reached the opposite bank, the man considers his raft and is grateful for it, and then continues his journey, leaving the raft on the bank behind him.

One moral of the story is that, along your path through life, you will occasionally come across significant obstacles that escape your current ability to handle. In your human resourcefulness, you will cast about for a tool or vehicle, find one, and with its assistance overcome the obstacle. I think that in itself is pretty soothing to remember.

A crucial part of the story, however, is that the man leaves the raft behind. He needed it, he built it, and he abandoned it when its purpose was complete. Religions and belief systems work a lot like this; they are healthy things to practice, and fantastic for self-improvement and ethical decision-making and so on, but they are not to be clung to if they become extraneous. You are grateful for your raft, and you do not turn from it with spite, but neither do you break your back carrying over miles of open land out of fear that another identical river may appear.

There's another metaphor, which I think is less old but no less Buddhist (but I'm not sure). The most famous person to have said this is Bruce Lee, in Enter the Dragon. The exercise is this: go out at night and point at the moon with one finger. We're all pointing up at the same moon, but we have lots of different fingers that can come to distract us. I won't belabor the point, because Bruce Lee summed it up nicely: "Don't concentrate on the finger, or you will miss all that heavenly glory."

It is my contention that almost all people involved in politics have gotten caught up in their fingers.

Any ideology or belief system is, ultimately, an instrument, created by and saturated with human data. They are informed by the sociological context at the moment of their creation. Does this invalidate them? Certainly not. The faiths and ideologies have valid advice and guidance for the living of an ethical life, but it is essential to remember that the transcendent is just that. The divine is, to describe it, indescribable. Any religious doctrine is written, and therefore mediated by its human author, even if it does originate in the divine realm. I'll talk about that in a later post, but there's the point.

All the world religions are pointing at the same gorgeous, indescribable moon of divinity. All the political camps are also pointing to the same end, the human good, although that one is indescribable in the sense of being too complicated to describe. No matter how starkly you seem to disagree with someone, there's a very good chance you two have at least some sort of common ground to stand on, and I think that's at least a little reassuring.

TL;DR Don't get zesty about dogma.

Standardization

Standardization is the practice, in short, of making everything the same. We standardize testing for education to ensure everyone is at least on the same page. We standardize machine parts to make the process of maintenance easy and as vulgarity-free as possible. We try to get everything to a uniform baseline for ease and efficiency of function, essentially.

We at Berkeley tend to think this is a Big Damn Problem. A significant subset of students here believe that the idea is to be as classically non-standard as possible. These are the people who represent the Berkeley stereotype, who listen to the most underground music possible and have a high percentage chance of having dreadlocks. You know the ones I mean.

Indeed, we have a more generalized attitude that everyone is unique and has a unique perspective and a unique contribution to make. I think this is the right attitude to have; for better or worse, there is no one quite like you, no matter how "normal" or "weird" you think you are.

It bears repeating, however, that "unique" and "special" are different words with different meanings. The members of that subset of Berkeley students tend to act under the assumption that they are special. Their problems only happen to them and are more severe than those of "ordinary" people. Their opinions are incredibly more enlightened than anyone else's; after all, it would take a true visionary to come up with something as incredibly stupid as anarchism.

Reminding such people that their opinion is just that, an opinion, usually results in indignant outcries about "repression," or, in the truly enlightened groups, about how the "sheeple need to wake up." This group of people, those who assume themselves to be the enlightened intelligentsia privy to the underlying mechanisms of The Man, are a very small group responsible for giving all of us a bad name. Our college was a nexus of activism in the '70's, and these are generational echoes without an actual cause. They are why people raise their eyebrows when you say you go to UC Berkeley.

The point I'm getting at in a very muddled, circuitous way is this: it's perfectly all right to be different from everyone else. As far as I'm concerned, it's impossible not to be. You might espouse doctrine or act a certain way as you put on someone else's coat, but you as a person are unchanged. The underlying you is unique.

However, being unique is not the same as being special or superior. The idea of standardized education, whether it's working or not, is to hold everyone to the same (ideally high) standard. This isn't repression; this is preparation. There are a set of standards the world will hold you to as an adult, and whether you make the choice to fulfill them or strike out against them, you need to at least know they are there.

Humanity is not a homogeneous species. We're comprised of infinitely varying individuals. It's been said that people are like individual, beautiful snowflakes, each with a unique crystal pattern that can never be replicated. I think that's true, but the damn things are still made of snow. The way your pieces are arranged might be different and unique, but we're all made of essentially the same things. Everybody is divine, which means no one is any more divine than anybody else.

The parts of machinery are standardized because the machine will simply be unsustainable otherwise. "Well, a rotating gear gave out and it was entirely unique. Guess we have to open a new steel mill." We're all part of a massive, complex social machine of sorts, but I don't think that's a problem. As long as we all know we're part of the workings and understand how they turn (and are not dominated by them), we're all good.

TL;DR You're unique, exactly like everybody else.

Nerd

This, too, is a word! This one refers, variously, to people who wear thick-framed fake glasses to take selfies, people who get better grades than average, and people who play either ADOM, D&D, both, or some comparable combination. A "nerd" is, in its most common application, anybody who doesn't get their kicks through the ordinary routes of team sports and/or casual promiscuity.

First, we have the self-advertised "neeeerrdddyyyy" people. We're not going to talk extensively about these people, because they're horrible. You know the ones I mean. Yes, you do.

Second are the semi-legitimate nerds. These ones don't necessarily wear fake thick-framed glasses, but neither is it a rule that they don't. These people have about a 50% chance of "liking school" or, at earlier stages of life, "reading books" and such things. You might catch them "studying," even. This classification of nerd as been known, in many cases, to own something called a "MacBook Pro."

The third category of nerd  is deeper and darker. These people might wear thick-framed glasses not because they're just suh cayute, but because they actually require some kind of vision aid. The traditionally-held belief is that this impairment is a result of staring at books/computer screens/tiny jewels/ancient artifacts. These ones traditionally shun sunlight and interpersonal interaction entirely. To give you an idea, they don't play any team sports, at all!

Right, now that I'm done being bitter about all the profiles I fit, let's discuss his word "nerd." I would unquestionably fit into the third category, in no small part because I use words like "unquestionably" instead of "totally (breh)." I have also been known to Dungeon some Dragons from time to time, and I actually go to my classes because I like them.

Now, nerds (especially of the higher orders) are held to be a very small and much-abused minority in our culture. These poor kids get swirlies in high school, don't get dates to prom, and later become the Unabomber. Shucks, this high school movie's rough.

My opinion, however, is that the set "people who are nerds" includes everyone.

No, sorry, just checking to see if you were awake. Let's try that again.

Everyone.

But not everyone is in a board gaming group, or likes computers, or plays with telescopes in their spare time! That's true, but in my estimation that isn't what it means to be a nerd.

A nerd is someone with a deep-seated fascination (some might say fixation) with a particular thing, to the exclusion of other activities. They never go outside because they're tinkering with computers all day. They never play team sports because they're reading books.

Well, I got new for y'all. Everybody has a deep-seated fixation on something, and yours is no more or less valid than mine. They're incompatible, yeah, but they're all valid. Your fixation may well be team sports or hanging out in large crowds of strangers, but that doesn't mean my inclination to read books is wrong. That type of thinking, "I am right; ergo you are wrong," is playground logic, and it doesn't do to have adults thinking that way.

TL;DR We're all nerds, just for different things.

Cheap Difficulty

I'm gonna start out, as I do, with a definition. "Cheap" difficulty is mostly a video game concept. There are different kinds of difficulty to a game; it can be legitimately challenging to your mind/skills/reflexes as a player, or it can be "cheap." Difficulty counts as cheap, generally, if it's unavoidable, totally random, and/or results in an instant loss.

For example, ADOM is a very hard game to beat, because you have only one life, roughly five (complicated) ways to win, and a few hundred ways to die along the way. In this game, one of the bosses is called the Ancient Chaos Wyrm and is very difficult to fight because he shoots you with bolts of great nastiness and confuses you, making you stagger around like an idiot while he bolts or claws you to death. 

The Ancient Chaos Wyrm constitutes legitimate difficulty and can be beaten with sufficient knowledge, preparation, and skill. However, another event in ADOM: any time you walk into a dark area, there is a very small chance you will be "eaten by a grue" and killed instantly, with no recourse to any sort of defense or reaction on your part. The grue event is, in my opinion, extremely cheap difficulty. It can happen at any time, to any character, no matter their power and preparation, and there's no defense against it.

Real life, oddly enough, is even more full of cheap difficulty than most video games. Reality has an incalculable amount of randomness in it, regardless of how reckless or cautious you are. This is not a card game we live in, where you can carefully watch the board and your single opponent and evaluate each play. Life is much more akin to rolling dice every time you take an action. It turns out that, rolling that many dice over the course of a given day, a certain number of them come up with very poor results.

Other times, life isn't just hidden probabilities, discoverable and otherwise, turning over and around. There are times when life is like playing curling in pitch darkness, but that's a different matter.

Emotion is often a major source of life's cheap difficulty; I once heard it said that everything you say would offend at least four people. This person is preposterously oversensitive to blue silk shirts, and so you never even got a fair chance at the job interview. That person is a staunch vegan, and your joke about bacon got about a zero out of ten. Again, sometimes life's variables get into a configuration that just isn't on your side (see the Occam's Razor shenanigans for more about life's configurations), and you would have to get a 12 on a six-sided die to come out ahead.

My point is that people have all sorts of little triggers that set them off, for whatever reason and to whatever extent. I don't intend to blame people for this or make fun of them. One of my triggers personally is the sound of one person (specifically one person) softly clapping their hands. There's no "reason" behind any of it, and there's no way to anticipate or prepare for all the possible mines you may step on while navigating around humans.

Take heart! What I said was that there's no way to anticipate or prepare for all the possible, individual mines, which sounds a little dreary. From my perspective, however, this is actually awesome. Nobody can be ready for all the mines, so what the hell? Stop worrying and trying to plot a safe path, and just get your plow out and run for it! Mines will go off in your face, and some of yours will undoubtedly blow up on some other people, but in the long run it will (not always, but often) be a memory the two of you laugh about someday.

The important thing is not to be worried about which types of mines there are and where they may be. The important thing is to be aware that you are standing in, and a contributor to, a minefield of infinite danger, complexity, and beauty. Some of the mines make beautiful fireworks displays in the distance when you step on them! Others release deadly nerve gas. It's a flexible thing.

My point is this: life's hard, but the thing is to not make it excessively hard. Be polite to people, but don't be a pill-bug. Understand that people are neurotic, compulsive, and insane, just like you. You're going to make some people really angry in life, and some others are going to make you tear all the wiring out of your office in a fit of rage. This is a fact; the important thing is to be aware that your mines are there waiting to be stepped on, and try to control your reaction. Because that's all it is, a reaction, and you want to mount a response.

TL;DR ADOM is fun, if you're a masochist; life's tough, but so are you.

Triad of Expectation

This is something my dad, in his unparalleled wisdom as Bearer of the Sacred 'Stache, passed on to me. I don't know if it's an original or if he got it from somewhere in turn, but here ya go.

The thing was created to apply to purchasing products or services, but I've found it applies more broadly to things in life. It's one of these classic formations in triangle form, where you can select two to emphasize at the cost of the other one.

The triad is composed of Good, Cheap, and Fast. If it's cheap and fast, it likely won't be good, but if you get it good and fast, it certainly won't be cheap.

My dad applies this sort of thinking to airplane parts and other manly workshop-y things like that, and uses it as a sort of risk vs. reward thought. The questions of how badly something is needed vs. the time-frame it's needed in vs. how long it needs to last and so on ad infinitum all stack up against one another as his gears turn and grind, and eventually a decision gets spat out of all the whirling, steaming machinery.

As overly simplistic as the plain triangle figure is (life is complicated), I actually find it's a helpful quick-and-dirty reference for judgment. Knowing that people are limited by the basic constraints of the triangle is very helpful in terms of telling which things are worth a second look and which get immediately filed under "Purge."

For instance, I recently received two offers via email, both related to my grades. The first was an invitation to submit an essay about questions of ethics in the modern world. It featured the prizes prominently (one of which was for $2,000 cash, to give you an idea), of course, because that's how contest entry works. The contest was also free to join. Now, this is Good and Cheap; I didn't need to pay anything, and there was potentially a pretty substantial payoff. Notice, however, that it wasn't Fast (or Easy, maybe); competition was going to be stiff, and writing such an essay would take a lot of thought and effort investment on my part. Ultimately, I realized writing the requisite essay, combined with the rest of the school experience, was so un-Easy that I decided not to do it (I didn't even like the questions, either, the pretentious buggers, but that's separate).

The other offer was to join something called NSCS, the National Society of Collegiate Scholars. For $95, I could join this little organization and network easily with all its other chapters and members, giving me All Types of Things! Career-wise, this was advertised as a major break, because they had people in Positions X and Y in Industries Gamma and Lambda, and working in the offices of Guy 3, and so on. So, let's examine this; $95 is no pocket-change fee, but for the supposed payoff that's pretty Cheap. Speaking of the payoff, that would be insanely Good. Finally, I was supposed to be able to gain employment and benefits and things immediately; it was supposedly Fast in the extreme. With all three points of the triad impossibly present and imbricated with their generally sketchy presentation (the third question on their FAQ was "Is this a legitimate organization? Yes!"), I passed on that with no conflict of conscience.

So keep this lovely little triad in mind in life, not just as applied to finance but more broadly with regard to opportunities and everything. I try to cultivate a degree of optimism here, but always remember: as a general rule, things that seem too good to be true often are. The exceptions to the rule are fabulous, but it is the exceptions that make that particular rule.

There's no such thing as free or infinite profit; if there was someone would have tapped it long ago, rest assured. The same is true of life experiences in general. The costs aren't always apparent until later, but be certain that there is at least some cost associated with everything, whether it's simply the time invested or something more sinister.

As an example of something that seemed to meet all three points on the triad and didn't reveal its consequences until later, let's talk about crack!

Crack is a major issue even today, but it was an absolute epidemic in the mid-80's and early 90's. This was, and is, a hell of a drug. It started flowing in with great exuberance during the Iran-Contra Dealio, and there are lots of allegations about the CIA's (in)direct involvement with the issue. With the greater availability, it became, comparatively, extremely Cheap, to the point that people could feed their addiction off simple petty theft or robbery (hence the massive crime spike at the time). It's one of the Fastest drugs available in terms of its effects, taking effect immediately (hence the movie image of the person doing a line and then, by the time they sit back, already showing the effects). And, most of all, it apparently makes you feel really Good, to the point that it can eliminate other things' ability to make you feel good.

Most people who got hooked on crack weren't aware they were going to get hooked. Their friends, or dealers, or whoever, just told them it made them feel amazing, and that was their immediate perception. Nobody stopped to apply their judgment. Again, the impact of addiction isn't apparent until later; you're fine, doing whatever, and then suddenly you're robbing a corner store at gunpoint with blood running freely out of your nose and neither of those things bothers you.

I don't mean to be negative! Just employ the triad and carefully examine the options.

This is also where I take a second out to say a genuine "thank you" to people reading this, and "sorry" for my absence. I have been, as they say, occupied, but I'm back now! Thanks, everybody, for being patient with my madness, and hello to anybody who's new!

TL;DR You can pick two; I'm back, thanks for reading.

Good Job

Here at Berkeley, I'm doin' pretty well for myself, at least academically. Socially I couldn't interact my way out of a room with no walls, but that's fine.

The instructors at Berkeley, in my experience, are members of the increasingly-widespread social movement that increasingly focuses on providing personal feedback to each student, especially in the more writing-oriented classes. The idea here is that, if each student has feedback specifically targeted (at a fine level of detail) to their individual work, their individual learning and construction process will be more significantly benefited than if a simple percentage score or letter grade was presented.

I really like this idea, especially for classes in the humanities or other disciplines where things can be a little more interpretive or subjective. Seeing the grader's reasoning is, in a very prosaic and materialistic way, very helpful in terms of figuring out how to tailor your assignments to get better grades. Additionally, having their logic laid out at various points means that, should you disagree, the two of you can have a specific point from which to establish a constructive dialogue about how to improve your writing or make your interpretation of the course content more clear to the instructor. That is to say, "if no like grade, can point at spot, say no, talk more."

Now, this is all about improvement, which is lovely. After all, that's a big part of what learning is about. Making mistakes happens to everyone, and the point of a university setting is to make them in a (relatively) safe and (mostly) non-judgmental environment and to learn from them for the future.

The "improvement" focus puts a major positive slant on most of the feedback; criticism is meant to be "constructive," and avoid being harsh to the point that students are afraid to try again. At some point people started to realize that the "rap on the knuckles" approach was giving young people complexes, and so we decided to go about education with a perspective more focused on improvement. In our society that praises virtues like confidence and boldness in adults, it wouldn't do to have sharp censures for mistakes and only the most grudging of praise for successes from an early time in life.

This is all good stuff, in my opinion. People have a right to helpful and honest feedback about their work so that they can improve it, for their own good and the good of others.

Uh-oh, it's that catching point that comes up in all my posts. "Honest." Oh, no.

The problem with the approach I described above is that most instructors are actively trying to be nice to their students. "But that isn't a problem! Being nice is nice." Yeah, it is, until it hinders any sort of progress.

I think this issue only really affects people who reliably score well on things (or maybe just me, because I'm horrible), but it bears consideration. There are those of us who are extremely used to getting good grades and have been jaded by the experience, succumbing to narcissism and coming to believe that they've attained the best level possible and can simply continue the way they are, breezing through things. These are the people who will likely, in later life, "have people to do that." They'll also have destructive cocaine addictions and a home life full of carefully-concealed domestic violence, but that isn't the point!

Those people, however, are considerably in the minority (I might say roughly 1%, if you get my drift) even among people who get the high scores. The rest of such people are still aware of their own human imperfection and, moreover, still definitely concerned with improvement.

So, the issue: our feedback rarely has anything meaningful or useful to say. For example, my anthropology midterm went really well and I wound up with a 99. The test was mostly comprised of essays, so I turned to that section hoping to see some feedback about strengths and weaknesses, and so on.

What I saw, in reality, was a lot of "good" and "good job" with various little bits underlined, with a little "fantastic!" written at the end.

I had rhetoric papers last semester that had the same sort of issue. I put a lot of energy in, and got an A on both of them, but the feedback was comprised entirely of terms like "wonderful!" and "well argued!" Now, I'm obviously happy about my grades, and receiving praise is lovely. I think the problem is that, when I perform well on something, I expect the feedback to slide up to that standard too.

That's vague, so let me explain. If I write a paper with some serious grammatical problems and plainly misinterpreted (or didn't bother to do) the readings for a course, those are problems that can be easily pointed to as things for me to improve and get into a better place with my work. Even if my work is already in a better place, I want feedback that reflects that; sure, point out where I did well, but I absolutely guarantee that there are places I can get better.

Part of being academically "smart" (I already talked about that word in another post), in my opinion, involves being emotionally mature enough to accept your own imperfection. I don't care if you have a higher amount of computational brainpower than most people if you can't descend from your cloud long enough to clearly state your sandwich order in terms we mere humans can comprehend. There's no longer any such thing as an intellectual elite, or at least not one that implies friendship or peership between its members. In a tossup between a snooty brainchild from a certain -County- in California and an honest, down-to-earth person of less "intelligence," I regret to inform one (and, presumably, one's parents) that one's AP test scores and your 2000+ on the SAT just isn't going to cut it for being a human being. Go forth and seek humility, thou baggage!

I am not one of those airy "intellectuals." I know I make mistakes, and I'm at least emotionally developed enough not to come screaming to your office if you disagree with me. Respect me enough to give me feedback that seriously considers what I wrote through the lens of constructive criticism, no matter what "score" I got.

TL;DR It's a "smart" person-rich environment, for God's sake. Give us all some useful feedback.

Having vs. Being

If you read the post where I got needlessly emotionally and philosophically invested in an animated T.V. show, you might remember the concept of Having vs. Being. In that case it was about romantic love, but the concept applies on a much wider view, and I don't think I really did it justice with that little blurb.

It may have become apparent, over all these posts, that I have kind of a touchy-feely idea about the underlying nature of people. I think I used phrases like "manifestation of the universe's underlying creative drive," and I wax constantly about the exalted potential of each individual person, and blah blah. The point is, I think people are inherently possessed of great potential, for better or worse.

Moreover, I think the underlying state of every single person's mind is naturally one of great calmness. The prevailing view is that humanity evolved (entirely or at least chiefly) in Africa. It's a place of great danger, sure. Our body's highly-developed fight-or-flight response is proof enough of that; people in ancient times were under regular threat from deadly disease or predation from creatures who were, as far as a singular purpose is concerned, more highly-evolved than we were (and are). Life was often simple, short, and messy in humanity's early years.

On the other hand, the entire natural world is filled with places of fantastic beauty, and Africa has some of the most beautiful of all. Evolution is a process of trade-offs, gains proportional to sacrifices, and I think one of the greatest losses humanity ever suffered was when we evolved awareness of the brevity of our own lifespan.

All that preface is leading into this: modern culture is obsessed with doing things; we've only got so much time, we need to leave an impression on the world before we go, so let's all gather the maximum number of awards and recognition and possessions. "Goal-oriented" is one way people refer to this focus on recognizable achievement and success of yourself and (importantly) those you associate with. I call it "pathological."

Still, the fact remains that our lives are busy. We do things, we buy groceries, we text people, we do homework. Now, there's something I want you to do, one more thing on the infinite list. What I want you to do is:

Nothing. Just sit, and don't do anything. As much as you can, don't think about anything. If you have to think about something, think about how you're sitting and how you're breathing. If you need a point to focus on, try to just push your sternum out a little bit, and sit a little straighter. Alternatively, just focus on not fidgeting, as you surely are by now. Nothing more.

If you decided to indulge my little exercise, you probably found it surprisingly difficult. We're incredibly used to juggling a huge number of things in our day-to-day life. There's a paper due in two days, and another next week. Work starts in three hours, and we have to get breakfast and go to the gym before that. Before that, we need to call our boss. Before that, we need to be sure we're getting enough sleep. Before that... well hell, now it's yesterday again, and there's a laundry list of things I forgot to do. Those of you who have kids, especially: y'all know.

This is all leading into one somewhat-belabored point. All the things you're juggling, all the feelings (positive or negative) you have at any given moment, all the titles you have, don't have, or want to get- they're all things that you're doing. They're not what you are.

People introduce themselves, most commonly, with their name and subsequently their profession and other basic, general information. The interesting part to me, however, is how they say it. "My name is Jordan, and I'm a doctor." We're all aware that our name is one of our possessions, but our profession has become equated with a part of our identity. It's not that Jordan "practices medicine" or "works at a clinic;" Jordan is a doctor, as if his job (a set of things he does) is the only thing of any interest or value to the other person.

I have a bad headache, and it's putting me in a bad mood. At this point I might be heard to say "I am pissed off at the universe," or something equivalent. Well, that's just simply not true; I'm not always angry or in pain, and there's nothing about me inherently that makes me that way. It's how I feel at the moment.

This is "having vs. being" in life. People in modern culture develop all kinds of physiological ailments from the stress of rushing around and juggling all the plates of our complex life. Humanity claims to have mastered nature, and it's a strange situation. We survived the Black Plague, only to develop compulsions about hand sanitizer and die from hypertension-related heart disease instead.

We (Americans) have a habit of dismissing cultures we deem "primitive." Historically, the obvious example is our treatment of American Indians, but a lot of us apply the same sort of filter to how we see Eastern culture as well. The mention of meditation results in people making an "ooooh" sound and rolling their eyes, for the most part, because we think it's silly. What's the point, we ask? Sitting around in your garden and just doing nothing? Where's the benefit?

That's the benefit; there isn't a benefit. Meditation, whether it takes the form of the American Indian attitude of oneness with nature or the actual practice of "meditation" (sitting and optionally saying "ohm"), is an actiity that inherently has no goal or purpose in mind. I think that is its single greatest advantage. Just taking a little while to abandon the overly complex, hyperactive life we live and just experience the sensation of being alive in one moment might sound ethereal and silly. I think, however, that that's one of the biggest things the West lost and the East got right; everything, including you, is divine and sublime, and there's no need to go chasing after things to validate that.

There's an old expression in Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew (depending on who you ask): "This, too, shall pass." It's extremely simple, to the point that I think most people overlook it, but think about it for a minute. In two weeks, you won't remember what you were feeling as you read this. Ten years from now, you won't still be worried about college acceptances. Emotions and other occupations, as with our brief mortal lives, are valid but transient. It's not that you are worried about things; you feel that way at the moment.

This may have been something of a blob rather than a blog, but I hope you're able to get through my obscurity to the meaning. I've personally got the jitters right now (waiting to get the last and most worrisome of my tests back), and becoming aware of how frantic and jumpy I felt reminded me of this bit of philosophy.

TL;DR You're still alive, even if you're doing nothing; meditation is the business.

Watch Out; It's the Snake

The serpent, as far as the Western world at large is concerned, has been adopted as the symbol of temptation, or simply of evil itself. Judeo-Christian doctrine leaves it unclear as to whether the Serpent is an emissary of Lucifer or actually the Big Nasty himself, but it makes little difference. In either case, the Serpent was directly responsible for the supposed fall of man from grace. As a result of the Serpent's temptation, Adam and Eve gained knowledge and self-realization, but were forever banished from the paradise in which they lived, separated from their glorious creator.

In Norse mythology, the biggest snake of all is the child of a giantess and the god of evil trickery, and was thrown into the ocean as an abomination. Like any good monster, however, he didn't die, and grew in the depths until he stretched around the world to grasp his own tail. Jörmungandr, as he came to be known, will trigger the apocalyptic battle at the end of the world when he releases his own tail and come up out of the sea to darken the sky with his venom. In the ensuing battle between the "good" pantheon and the various Norse monsters, Jörmungandr will fight the thunder god Thor for the last time (the two are old enemies), ultimately dying under Thor's hammer but poisoning the beloved protector god to death in the process. Painful stories to read, really, both of them.

This distaste for the serpentine shows up all over the place in Western culture. Someone who lies or dissembles is a "snake." The sound of a snake's rattle turns up in our movies any time as a tension-builder. "Snake eyes" is the worst possible result on a pair of dice in most games: double ones, the lowest possible value. Snake Eyes is also the member of the G.I. Joe team, the one who specializes in being a ninja and fighting in ways the other team members find distasteful. He's also a specialist in having an unpleasantly gravelly face and horrible facial disfigurements, further feeding the Unpleasant Snake idea.

So snakes are an embodiment of evil, as far as we Americans and Western Europeans are concerned. They're scaly, they sneak around on the ground loaded with poison, and their eyes are disturbingly configured. What else do we need?

Very strangely, though, the rest of the world holds snakes in no such contempt. Hinduism has a great many deities and spirits who take serpent form, and few are totally malevolent. For this reason, king cobras are held to be sacred animals in many areas, and there are many rituals involving communion with them. One version of asking for nourishing rain, for instance, involves a priestess coaxing a king cobra from his den and talking with him, kissing him on the nose three times over the course of the process. As an aside, Eastern religious practice is intensely more badass than that of the West in general.

For the East, the view of serpents has none of the distaste, fear, or loathing of that in the West. Westerners find the snake's slithering motion and constant tasting of the air repulsive and frightening. Eastern religions, on the other hand, have long held snakes (especially big ones) in a position of wonder and awe, fascinated by the mysterious way of moving and general quietness (believed to indicate great wisdom).

Also, snakes in the West have come to represent treachery, temptation, and especially with deadly venom. In Eastern tradition (and, strangely enough, in the full original context of Judeo-Christian doctrine) snakes are, at worst, representative of duality. The serpent carries deadly venom, but also holds the knowledge of medicine (that funny squiggly symbol on medical equipment is a snake wrapped around a staff, from a story about Moses healing snakebite victims). In other traditions snakes are death and birth; again, the snake carries a payload of fatal venom, but some cultures make a comparison with the umbilical cord as well.

The snake's habit of shedding its skin is one of great importance to mythology and philosophy. The Ourobouros, an ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail, is a metaphorical representation of this habit. In ancient times, a snake's shed skin was perceived to be a dead version of its old self; having served its purpose, it was left behind with respect before it became mismatched and ineffective with the world around it. This metaphor of death to enable new life is huge in Hinduism and Buddhism especially, but persists in traditions the world over.

I'm not going to make any claims about which visions of snakes are right, but here's this: snakes in any mythological incarnation have always been wielders of great power, for good or ill. They're an awesome, profound, and widespread symbol in all parts of the world, and I thought it would be good to present you with more information about differing views, for your own edification and consideration.

TL;DR Snakes, man.