Monthly Archives: November 2010

“Fighting” illness

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Women are also encouraged to inspect their breasts regularly, although “Yep, still there” probably isn’t doing the trick. The health benefits to men of regularly inspecting women’s breasts is still in doubt, but statistics so far indicate that the ideal number of breasts to inspect regularly is less than 3.

No, today’s headline is not meant to worry you. Apart from a tiny head cold and burning my left hand on the wood stove, I am fine, as far as I know. Rather, I want a word with the whole “fighting” thing, which I believe is stupid and counterproductive.

I see this expression used in general, but mostly about cancer. I can see how people may think of cancer as some kind of enemy, since it is dangerous and unpredictable. But it really is no smarter than cursing the chair when you stub your toe. It may make sense at the moment, but the chair is utterly unaffected by your curses. And so is the cancer, I have every reason to believe. And then some, possibly.

Because reading is more or less automatic with me, I sometimes take in headlines of popular magazines in the shop even though I don’t buy them. And there will be a picture of someone who is probably famous in the 3-dimensional world, or at least in the 2-dimensional, and the words “Lost the battle against cancer”, which means the person is dead. What the hell people. Are you a loser because you die from cancer?  Or would these people say “Lost the fight against the lawnmower” if they got run over by their excessively heavy and pricey gardening equipment? That would actually make some sense, but usually you have the good grace to not say such a thing out loud even if you think it.

Cancer is not some guy. It is a malfunction of our own bodies. The body WILL malfunction in some way sooner or later. Even I will die one day, barring an extreme case of divine intervention. (Which seems highly unlikely, though I suppose it would be a nice surprise.) You are not a loser just because you don’t live eternally in this world.

(Incidentally, my ideal obituary would be something like this: “It pleased the Lord to take him home, but it did not please anyone else.”)

The second part of the equation is that fighting, in the sense of being mentally agitated, may actually kill you. All studies that have even looked at the matter show that meditation – the opposite of flailing around – improves the immune system, while stress weakens it. We may question the intelligent design of this, given that any normal person would probably become agitated when diagnosed with a potentially fatal illness. But I guess it does level the playing field a bit, since meditative people probably come later to the feed trough and may also be less likely to procreate. So they should have some benefits so the planet is not completely overrun by barbarians.  (In so far as it is not already.) Or perhaps the Designer just likes people meditating. In any case, it works to some extent, while fighting does not.

Vitamin D also helps regulate the immune system, making it more active when needed and less likely to attack healthy tissue. You can get it from direct sunlight, or if you live in Norway and it is winter, you can get it from cod liver oil, which is cheap and widely available. I suppose vegans will have to take an expensive trip to the tropics to soak in the sun instead, but I have only moderate qualms about cod liver oil. Verily, ye are more than many fishes! is what I think. Besides, they get their revenge in the horrible taste of the thing.

It is indeed a widespread belief that somehow forcing yourself to be optimistic will improve your odds of surviving illness, particularly cancer. However, this is as far as we know just an artifact of  the mind. A study years ago (which I failed to bookmark, it seems) actually did interview people who were newly diagnosed with cancer, about their optimism or lack thereof. A few years later, they interviewed the survivors. There was no connection at all between the initial optimism and actual survival. However, there was a very strong correlation between survival and remembering that one had been an optimist, regardless of whether this was actually true or not.

Life is actually a lot like that. Neurotypicals spend a lot of their time editing their memories to conform to consensus reality, the reality people agree on as opposed to the reality they experience in the moment.

Another fascinating but rather obvious study showed that looking at pictures of sick people actually increases the activity of the immune system. This makes perfect sense, since in the wild humans live in close-knit communities. If you see someone obviously sick, the germs are probably already all over you, or certainly will be in a few hours.

So in short: Don’t be pointlessly optimistic, take your D-vitamin, look at pictures of sick people and meditate. Oh, and don’t divorce your wife, if you’re a male. Exercise daily. Die anyway sooner or later. (But hopefully later rather than sooner.)

Happy Science fanfic

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This screenshot, found on the Internet, shows that TSI members can be pretty in kimono. Hopefully this will figure in the story at some point. The glowing in the dark part, probably not so much, or only figuratively.

I suppose it had to happen. I started on my fifth novel so far this month. While my main story, “Shadow of Yggdrasil”, was inspired in part by Ryuho Okawa’s claim to be the World Tree, most of the story was to be about other things. The new story, however, is an all-out fanfic. It is set in the world of the movie “Buddha Saitan”, which does not actually mean “Buddha is Satan” but something possibly even more blasphemous to the Theravada Buddhist: The Rebirth of Buddha.

Now, the Buddha was most of all famous for breaking the cycle of birth and death and attaining Nirvana, the endless peace. So the notion that he might return is approximately like someone claiming to have found Jesus’ skeleton. However, the movie portrays it in a different light: The Buddha returns, not because he needs to refine his soul or learn anything more, but because he so loved the world.

I am not going to spoil the movie, which you should be able to see occasionally at your local Happy Science temple. But the movie equivalent of Happy Science, more or less, is called TSI. This is short for “Taiyou Sorano Institute”. The reborn Buddha is named Taiyou Sorano. While Sorano is an actual European surname (and the movie character does look half European, half Japanese), if you write his name in the Japanese naming order with family name first, it becomes “Sorano Taiyou”, which is pronounced like the Japanese phrase “sora no taiyou”, the sun in the sky. I could not stop laughing when I first figured that out.

So, my fifth story has the working title TSI, until I find something better. I started with what I thought would be a short piece, a guy telling a bit about his background and how he came to join the TSI. My plan was to have each chapter be such a story, since I suck at long stories.  But the character unexpectedly came to life and I now have over 10 000 words in a couple days, the fastest I have written in… I am not sure how long. Years, probably.

Strangely writing this story seems to be less tiring on my wrist than the others, even though I am writing more over a shorter time. I do not claim divine intervention for this, however. I think I was just more relaxed because this fellow more or less wrote himself.

It is also fun because he randomly inserts pieces of TSI / HS lore and also the occasional reference to Christianity (he is a Japanese raised in America, so he is familiar with Christianity as well, although not from personal experience.)

Since this is basically fanfiction, there is no way I could ever sell it, but then again National Novel Writing Month is mostly a practice run anyway. There are a few people each year who actually write something they can sell (after months of editing, of course), but I have no such ambition this year. I already have a job where I get paid to help people, so I hope to the Light that I can continue working until I am 75, like my ancestors. But in any case, having some writing skill is no sin. Probably. Although I don’t aspire to publishing 600 books and numerous movie manuscript, like the man behind Buddha Saitan.

The future of work

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Those who like what they are doing, would presumably still do it even if others got money for nothing. But within limits, I suspect.

I recently read a short, but interesting essay titled “Jobs Are Bad, M’kay?“. In this, the Young genius argues that people should work only if they produce Stuff (which of course includes services) that cannot be produced better without human labor.

This is eminently logical, and true from a materialist point of view. It ignores the fact that work is a form of love, but then again it is common today to think of love as a very private thing, so this is understandable.  But even without a spiritual perspective, I think his conclusions are very worrying. Not so much wrong as sinister.

A Swedish study a few years ago concluded that approximately a quarter of the population would not be employable in the information society. The numbers are probably higher here in Norway, since salaries are higher than in Sweden; in the USA the numbers may be lower now. But the really disturbing part is that the proportion  is going to change for the worse, and fast.

The children who are born today will not be in the workforce until 20 years from now, at best.  In that time, the performance of computers will increase literally a hundredfold, if Moore’s Law holds up, as it has for the past few decades.

When I was little, manual labor was still common in the countryside. These newfangled digging machines were just starting to take over the digging of trenches, but there was still plenty of other hard work to do.

When I was 20 and had just begun in my first job, we had a whole crowd of former housewives who were sorting documents, putting them in folders in the archive, and retrieving them. I also did my share of this, for it was an entry-level job.

Twenty years later this was gone. All the sorting was done by computers. We did not get woman-shaped robots running to and from the archives, but the housewives were replaced even so. The future comes while we look another way.

That was ten years ago. At the time, speech recognition (as in dictating to a computer or giving it orders with your voice) was expensive, unreliable and really only an option if you could not move your arms and legs. This year, there was a question on the NaNoWriMo forum whether such software was considered cheating, since it was so much faster than typing.

What will you teach your child, that a robot will not be able to do 20 years from now?

When the time comes when only 25% of us are employable, as opposed to 75%, what will we do? Logically speaking, as the Cerebrate points out, there will be more stuff to each of us if we just pay them to stay home rather than building offices or workshops for them to pretend working in. But how will they feel about that? How will those who CAN work feel about that?

For me, work is an act of love. If I can do a job that is actually needed, I will do it even if I get paid the same for staying at home writing novels. (At least unless my novels get better than they are now!) But I don’t think most people look at it that way.  I think they will demand more and more money for going to work at all, knowing that half of their income goes to people who can sleep in and then enjoy a leisurely lunch in their PJs.

And the more you pay the people who actually do work, the greater the incentive to develop robots that can replace them. It is a spiral without an end. Or rather, it seems likely that it will all come tumbling down before we reach the logical endpoint.

The only solution, in my view, is to change from a civilization based on maximizing Stuff to a civilization based on maximizing Happiness. Because numerous studies show that once the median income of a nation go much above $10 000 a year (in the exchange rate of  around year 2000), happiness does not continue to climb with increasing income. In some case, notably the USA, the happiness actually becomes less over time. (In Europe, happiness is still increasing, but very slowly, and this rise may be because of gradual dismantling of old national monopolies and thus increased freedom rather than increased money.)

A huge amount of the stuff you people buy is used to impress your neighbors. If we had a happiness-centered civilization, you would not need to do that. And because the greatest source of happiness is to give happiness to others, everyone would “work” in the sense that they would try to do something for others, no matter how small and simple. And for the directly productive minority, it would be much easier for them to share their Stuff with people who were trying to do some good, even if they were not very good at it, rather than with people who just sit on their ever growing backside and demand more Stuff.

That is what I think, but at least I think at all. How about you?

NaNoWriMo week 1

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That’s the face NaNoWriMo participants have when they catch up with their word count.

So I have not written here for a couple days. I have still not given up the “novel writing month” thing, although I have considered it. There are days that are more and days that are less productive, due sometimes to inspiration and sometimes to limitations of the body. As usual, I over-used my voice (with Dragon NaturallySpeaking dictation software) and had to shut up for a bit. And as usual, I over-used my wrist.

I am approximately on track with my first novel (Shadow of Yggdrasil). The other three are lagging, though.  I guess my strategy works in the sense that I have kept writing something each day, sometimes more and sometimes less. And at the moment it seems to be paying off, in that I have returned to my main novel with new ideas.

The structure of the novel is kind of fractal, as usual for such beasts. There is the book, there are chapters, and there are scenes. Kind of like a tree with branches and twigs?  Now the problem is that I only know the general shape of the tree and a very few of the branches, and the twigs on the first branch, when I start.

So what happens is that I return and there is a new branch, or new twigs. As if they have grown out by themselves in the meantime. But pulling on a branch does not cause more twigs. My writing is more like gardening than anything else I can think of. It requires time, but if I have the time, I can plant a bunch of little plants and they all grow up over time, given enough attention.

Your writing may vary, so be yourself!

America’s election

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In this world, there is something called an accident. This election comes to mind.

So, lots of Republicans in Congress now, from what I hear. Big disappointment (but not entirely unexpected) for much of the educated classes, from which most of my online friends come. I don’t think they really understand what is going on, but then most of them are still young and also don’t have much time to listen to the silence. So, public service announcement here!

This election does not show that America has finally realized that Sarah Palin was sent by God to restore the World’s Greatest Nation to its former glory and purity. It is just a natural, almost mechanical, fluctuation in the voting masses to restore equilibrium. In a democratic society, people really and with a vengeance dislike one-party rule. And it hasn’t been this one-party for quite a while. With the Democrats in control of Congress, Senate, Presidency and Supreme Court, it was no wonder people got cold feet. This is simply not natural, and I mean that in the most mechanical sense.

Let me illustrate with an example from my native Norway. The political constellations are a bit different: The Supreme Court is less politically active, the King not at all. The cabinet is in practice chosen from the majority of the parliament.  The current center-left coalition came into power replacing a center-right coalition. The non-socialists had delivered 4 years of rapid personal income growth, increased economic liberty, lower taxes AND budget surplus. Despite this, they were voted out.  It makes no sense to those who think general elections are some kind of referendum on the success or failure of the government. But that is only part of the truth, you see.

The other part is the modern equivalent of the ancient Jewish tradition of laying all the sins of the people on the head of a goat and chasing it out in the wilderness – the origin of the word “scapegoat”.

With the Democrats everywhere, there was simply no chance of finding a goat elsewhere. Well, they could have started a war, but it is not really their forte. So, the sins of the people are laid on the head of the incumbent congressmen, and they are chased out in the desert.  Just like their Republicans predecessors were less than a decade ago. People seeks some deep meaning in this, but people sought some deep meaning in the goat as well, no doubt. In reality, it is an almost mechanical mass reaction in the collective psyche.

If the election results end up being as first reported, a kind of balance is restored: The Democrats can blame the goddamn idiots in Congress, and the Republican can blame the goddamn idiots in the White House and Senate. There will no doubt be further oscillations in the years to come, if any. But the important part is that everyone now has someone to blame, so can continue their dysfunctional behavior until the next goat-scaping season.

Best before January 2008

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My adventures in dried foods continue. Today I went through my cupboard and found some powder that was supposed to expand into “tomato sausage pot”. The sausage was not mandatory, you could also make a vegetarian version, so of course I did that.

The first thing I noticed when I loaded the dish onto my plate, was the disgusting gray brown color. Now, I don’t want to be judged by my color, so I decided to also give the dish the benefit of doubt. Perhaps it’s just didn’t use artificial colors?

Unfortunately, it did not really taste like human food, or at least not completely. I’m not sure exactly what it tasted like, but I gave up after a few forkfuls. I am sure many starving children in Africa would have appreciated this food, and I like to think that they would also survive it. Especially since I like to think that I will survive it myself. But I quickly concluded that it would be safer to stop, just in case. So I threw away the rest.

I was about to write a warning against the product on my Norwegian-language blog (since this is a product sold exclusively in Norway, as far as I know). But before I came that far, the ever helpful voices in my head (still not literal voices, but “the thoughts in my head” makes it sound like it was my thoughts) told me to go check the packaging. And sure enough: “Best before January 2008”.

The list of contents shows mainly dried vegetable matter, so I am not sure exactly what kind of processes have been at work in the intervening years to transform it into the sludge I found on my plate. But I guess I’m not going to cook any of the stuff I bought before 2005…

“Novel” writing, eh?

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Falling asleep at your desk is perfectly normal while writing a novel. Or so I am led to believe. So imagine writing two!

It is National Novel Writing Month again! And like in so many households around the world (so much for the “national” part), NaNo eve and NaNo day are public holidays. The last hours before midnight are traditionally spent on the NaNoWriMo forums, which slow to a crawl and eventually crash each year.  There is no point in dimensioning the servers for this spike, things calm down after a few days. In the meantime, you can access the forums off the peak hours.  Not hard to do if you live in Norway, of course.  Although peak hours are a bit different when you are a writer, I think. They last till about dawn for some…  (When sanity leaves, creativity comes!)

The first night and the first day are when you pour out on paper (or screen, in most cases) the words that have been dammed up for days, weeks or months as you looked forward to finally bringing your Great Novel (or funny fantasy) into the world.  Of course, the most intrepid (or still reasonably sane) writers have already committed the plot to some kind of external medium in the form of index card (or screen pictures of index cards), charts or “mind maps“. They may also have a character database, so that she does not gaze into his deep brown eyes that were a clear blue, like the summer sky, 14 pages ago. (Although in this age of colored contact lenses, that may be less important and might even add to the plot.) But many of us still have a buffer in our head with a chapter or so of text ready to write.

By the end of Day 1 that buffer is empty. Depending on who you are, the ideas may be gone too. It seemed like there would be enough material for a novel, but actually there was only the first and last chapter and a couple vague ideas glimmering like fireflies in between. Oops.

Yeah, that’s the case for me this year again.  So far I have: Dramatic beginning, dramatic arrival in a strange land, “and then a lot happened”, dramatic declaration of love, “and then a lot happened”, and still working on the dramatic ending.  That does not look a lot like a novel at this point.  I suppose I can still get my 50 000 words by having the main characters discuss their hobbies (which strangely enough would coincide with mine) in painstaking detail, as happened in “The Boy, the Girl and the Werecat”.  But I am planning to take another route this year.

I am starting a second novel. Because, you know, nothing succeeds like fiasco!

Taking a walk is how I get my inspiration. So while walking to the shop and back, about half an hour each way, I got a lot of ideas and completely refilled my brain text buffer. Unfortunately the text had nothing to do with my current novel, but was a reboot of another idea I have had for a long time. In fact, it was a small but important part of DarkEyes, one of my earliest NaNovels. The main character, in times of extreme danger, can escape by sliding to a parallel world. However, he has no control of where. It is similar to his own, but subtly different.

I am sure most of you have had “slider moments” as I call them. (In fact, I called them that before the Sliders TV series. That’s the kind of guy I am. People pick up my ideas and make books, movies and what not from them even if I don’t mention them to a soul. Oh well.

By “slider moments” I mean those moments where you have the distinct impression that you have come to a parallel world where things are almost the same but some significant aspect has changed.  I had that feeling a lot during the Glasnost period.  (Look it up if you are too young to remember it.) The Berlin Wall falling? Not in my world, surely!  Less global examples are where your friend is suddenly going out with that boy she wanted to drop off a cliff and disappear. Slider moments. Dude, where is my planet?

So anyway, this is a comedy mostly.  That is what I write naturally. I may not look like it now, but I used to be quite funny when I was younger. My planned novel for this month is not funny, it is all drama and a little romance and some deep thoughts at the end.  So when I am not in the mood to write that, I write the other.

I am certainly not the first writer to do this. I remember Piers Anthony, the prolific if occasionally indecent fantasy writer, describing his mode of work in his author notes at the end of each novel. You may say a lot about him, and people do, but he did share his technique even though nobody forced him to. And he was a prolific writer indeed. Perhaps he still is, I have moved on from that scene. Anyway, “the best techniques are passed on by the survivors”, and he was definitely one.

At first, when Piers was writing a novel and got an urgent idea for another, he would enclose the alien text in brackets [like this]. Later he would use the word processor’s search function to extract the nuggets, but when writing, the thing that mattered was to keep writing. No matter which book it was for.  After all, that is a writer’s first commandment: Write!

So I may come up with more stories as the days come, if come they do, and then we’ll see what the outcome is.  Perhaps I will have 20 short stories, in which case I may sit down the last day and write a novel about someone who reads 20 short stories. ^_^ Or perhaps I will write hundreds of thousands of words.  Light alone knows, although I have a suspicion.

But now, I have written a thousand words (not counting the picture, which makes it 2000) that are not part of any of my novels.  But perhaps it was “novel” (new) to you?