Category Archives: society

More quiet revolutions (please)

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Preferably as quiet as this. Screenshot from the exceedingly family-friendly anime Kimi ni Todoke (Reaching You), which is not actually sponsored by Happy Science, strangely enough. It is not the happiness that is lacking, at least.

The December issue of Happy Science’s monthly magazine is out. It is mostly about childhood and its enduring influence on your life, and about how you can (and should) look back at your childhood with new eyes and seek to understand your family and yourself as you were at that age. Things that seemed pure bad at the time may make sense now, if you look at it from a much higher perspective than you could then. In this way, you transform your past, and thereby your present and your future.

I have already done some of this before, but I don’t remember all that much about my childhood (except the dirty jokes I read in my brothers’ magazines. It is amazing how well I can remember those after 40 years. I must have a “pornographic memory”.) Anyway, it is said that when you have children of your own, you remember things from your own childhood that you otherwise would have forgotten. Because you have to deal with the same things that your parents had to deal with, and you remember how they did it, and perhaps when you do the same thing to your children you remember how much you hated it and it gives you pause.

I don’t have children so I will probably continue to not remember much other than the books I read. Actually I am not sure I did much at all except reading books (and my brothers’ magazines) and play alone by the streams. Oh, and go to school and taunt the bullies, who would then proceed to beat me up, making me angry so I would taunt them again on the next opportunity. An endless dance or mutual arrogance. But that part of me has already been transformed by self-reflection, which is one reason why there is less hell in me these days than there used to be.

Anyway! More quiet revolutions! The Happy Science Monthly also has an excerpt from a lecture by Ryuho Okawa, the would-be Buddha of our age. “When we first started, we could not even imagine taking responsibility for the happiness of all humanity. However, today, I strongly feel that it is our mission to spread our message across Japan and the world; it is our mission to guide all people to happiness.” Yes, wouldn’t that be nice, if they could guide all people to happiness! There are still almost 7 billion left though, compared to the perhaps 10 million they have supposedly guided to some degree of happiness so far. Keep up the good work!

I am not being entirely flippant there. I may not actually believe that Mr Okawa is a god from Venus, but I do think that if somehow his teachings come to influence the majority of people, we would definitely enter a golden age the like of which has not been seen in recorded history. Love, wisdom, self-reflection and progress is good stuff. Unfortunately, I am all too aware that most people have very different priorities from that, so it won’t be easy. Jesus Christ still has not reached all the world after around 2000 years. And most of us who have heard him haven’t understood much of what he said. So, it is a long canvas to bleach, as we say around here!

Mr Okawa remains optimistic, though. “We are now in the midst of creating a quiet but sure revolution, which will influence neighboring countries, Asian nations, Africa, Europe, and America. By spreading the spiritual Truths, we are gently undoing the mistaken values of today’s society. We are bringing this world back to the world of Truth, where it came from.”

Quiet Revolution? That sounds familiar:

“There’s a quiet Revolution going on,
Like a fire in every corner of the world,
And friends that you have known for many years,
Are talking with a new light inside,
Talking with a brightness in their eyes”
…
“There are quiet celebrations going on,
So many have been waiting for so long,
To see the whole world waking from a dream,
And find a new dimension inside,
See a revelation in our time,
Something is coming now,
Something is coming now.”

-Chris de Burgh, fromQuiet Revolution.

Unfortunately it will probably take some time still for the whole world (or even the reasonably civilized world) to wake from its dream. But quiet revolution is definitely the way to go.

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?

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.

Back to a better future

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Modern, unhealthy food is making inroads in Japan as well. Not a good thing, but at least it beats the Middle Ages.

There are those who say that we live unnatural lives today, and suffer for it. Our genes are those who survived thousands of years of physical labor and a low-fat diet, so when we now have the opposite, our bodies don’t know how to react. The result is an epidemic of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and atherosclerosis.

Hogwash, say others. The lives of our ancestors were nasty, brutish, and short. Human life expectancy is at an all-time high and still increasing, even in the mature west, with about 5 hours a day. In the developing world, progress is much faster, as people are fleeing in droves from the “healthy” life of backbreaking labor and periodic famine.

There is certainly a tendency to make the past more romantic. The people who do so tend to be on the political left, but not all liberals hold this opinion. Some liberals have actually studied history, and it is hard to think of any period of the past that was not worse than our own time in numerous ways.

That does not mean we can learn nothing from it, however. You’d think it would be the conservatives who tried to conserve the few good points of a sad time, but even these tend to yearn for a glorious past that never was: Only their imaginary good times were more recent, some time in the previous century usually. But the decades without condoms but with coat hangers were not a paradise either.

That said, there certainly are new challenges today. Childhood obesity is rampant, and unless some solution is found, it will be very hard for them to reach the age of their parents and grandparents who put on weight later in life. Every process in the body goes much faster in childhood, and this includes the harmful effects of fat in the body. We recently learned that fat has another effect apart from clogging up arteries: It acts as a pro-inflammation agent. This seems to be why autoimmune diseases are rampant in today’s high-fat population.

(Notice that fat induces inflammation when it circulates in the bloodstream. As long as it is stowed away in the fat cells, it is more or less harmless, so a person with lots of fat cells can be obese and have very little fat in the blood, and a person with few fat cells can look normal but suffer from chronic fat poisoning.)

We should certainly do our best to avoid a return to the past, with its backbreaking child labor and tooth-breaking chaff-laden diet. This does not change the fact that some physical movement each day is extremely good for your health. The question is, can we as a society do anything about this, without installing video surveillance in the homes?

Yes, we can, and we already do. In Japan, physical exercise in schools is quite a bit more frequent and more strenuous than in the US, and while children there are fatter than their parents were, they are still lagging greatly behind on the obesity wave. Here in Norway, it has become normal for schools to provide fruit for children to snack on as an alternative to bringing in chips and chocolate. As long as the child does not already have a chronic disease, the school is ideally positioned to boost public health. It is already a prison to most of the kids, after all, so a little extra torture in the form of running a few laps won’t cause an armed uprising.

For the most part, however, our lives are our own. In other words, it is up to you and me to learn from the past and the present, then use this knowledge to build a better future. This future should follow a middle way, I believe. Moderation in all things. Then again, there is a saying that “moderation is for monks”. Strangely enough, monks tend to live long and healthy lives, but the option still remains less than wildly popular.

The few who know

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I did not even know there was chestnut cream on top of Mont Blanc! What is my head filled with?

I am not even talking about esoteric knowledge here, just plain ordinary things that people supposedly learn in high school:  Does radar use sound waves, do antibiotics cure a common cold? Obviously if you ask 1000 coins about this, you will get about 500 yes and 500 no. If you ask a large number of Americans the same, you will get about 55%, usually but not necessarily of the right answer.

55% may sound a decent number.  If 55% of adult Americans know that radar uses radio waves (electromagnetic waves), then high school teachers may still be able to pat themselves on the back. But unfortunately, it is not so well. Remember how we got almost the same result from flipping a coin? Well, not exactly the same result.  We need to find a number that, together with half of the rest, produces 55%.  Or, for the people who don’t think like normal people, X+(100-X)/2=55.  In any case, we find that if 10% of the population actually know the answer, and half of the other 90% are right by pure luck, this gives the result shown in real life.

This also holds true for more complex equations. For instance, there recently was a study showing that 18% of polled Americans thought President Obama was a Muslim, while half did not know. That leaves about a third knowing that he is officially a Christian.  (There was, as you may remember, quite some controversy about the pastor of the church he used to attend, one Reverend Jeremiah Wright.) So, it is obvious that the “Don’t know” fraction should be larger, but should it be larger by 18%?  No, according to our coin toss theory, it should be larger by about 36%.  If the 18% who got it wrong had bad luck, then there would also be 18% with good luck, as it were, leaving only about 15% actually knowing the professed religion of their president.

(Arguably this may be a good thing, since the US officially has a separation between church and state. But as an expression of the overwhelming ignorance of publicly known facts, as a part of a great pattern of “Don’t know, don’t care as long as I can’t eat it or have sex with it”, it is somewhat more sinister.)

How did it end up like that? Well, as I recently wrote, people are stupid and crazy as part of a long-standing tradition going back as far as we can follow. There has been some pressure on some people to be smart and sane, but not many. For most, it was good enough to till the soil and don’t stand out from the crowd.

Contrary to appearances, modern journalism is not actually trying to fix the problem, but make money off it. If you look objectively at the “news”, you will find that much of it is actually more like pornography, except with Wrath instead of Lust.  Or sometimes both.  But the point is, it aims to excite rather than inform, much less elevate to a higher perspective.

Let me take an example that has made the rounds in social media lately. Evidently a large American retail chain has given a generous donation to a political group that supports a candidate who opposes gay marriage. Outrage abounds.

Now, it so happens that in the US (but not everywhere else) the politicians who oppose gay marriage are generally those who promote business-friendly legislation as well. The history of this goes well beyond the bounds of this essay. The businessmen probably did not even consider that anyone would think they had an opinion on gay marriage. Why should they? It is rare even in the countries where it has been legal for years, and it does not drastically alter the shopping habits of those involved. It is highly unlikely that a supermarket chain would be able to notice the tiniest blip on their bottom line in any case.

But “business donates to business-friendly politician” is not a headline suited to create outrage. And outrage is what people want, so that’s what they get.  The fact is that the journalists and their readers are both immersing themselves in hellish thoughts and creating suffering for themselves. But at least it is exciting. People love that. They would rather suffer than be bored.  How a human can be bored while still having all its limbs and senses is something we will never know, we who write online journals.  If we had the capacity for boredom, we would not have the capacity for writing, and the other way around.

And there you have it: The people who create opinions are somewhere in the range of 1-10% of the population, depending on how generous your definition. It is not a long shot that these are the same people who know random unnecessary things. And write about them.

Online libraries revisited

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It will take its sweet time to restock my bookshelves after getting rid of the worthless stuff. But should I really fill them again? What is the chance that my heirs will want to read “The Challenge of Enlightenment”, “Meditations on the Tarot” or “One Cosmos under God”? Chances are they go on the fire or a landfill eventually.

This entry first appeared in my LiveJournal.

I have to say this Questia thing is somewhat impressive. If they had offered an Android client rather than just iPhone, I would probably subscribe. While it seems to be geared mostly at students and young researchers, there seems to be a lot of good stuff in there.

Of course, what I really hope for is that Google gets permission to do something similar. Millions of books, for free, on every imaginable device. It just might spell the end of the bookstore as we knew it. As it is, I use Google Books along with Amazon.com to scope out books before acquiring them (or not, usually).

But so far, there does not seem to be a “killer app”. You’d think governments at least would want to give their citizens an online Great Library, so as to surge far ahead of all other countries in the world and launch the next Renaissance. But perhaps an enlightened public is the greatest fear of a politician. In any case, leaving it to the market is even better. Imagine the world under Swedish hegemony.

There is also the Baen Free Library, but that is somewhat limited (to a subset of Baen books, naturally) and rather non-academic in nature, to say the least.

Project Gutenberg seems to still be geared toward download rather than online reading. It is one of the oldest attempts at creating a Great Library online. Constrained by its volunteer-based approach.

There is also something called “The Free Library” which has somehow been hiding from me until now. It is ugly as all ugly,with an undocumented and self-defeating interface, but it may still be worth much more than you pay for it, considering that it is free.

Anyone have any others?

Yes, we love this Internet

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When Norway’s national anthem starts with the words “Ja vi elsker dette landet” (yes we love this country) most people probably think of the landscape.  It is not all that bad either.  But I love the Internet here too.

17. May is Norway’s Constitution Day. While some countries celebrate their independence day as a national holiday, our National Day is celebrating our constitution. (The third in the world, if I remember correctly.) Our actual independence came almost a century later, but at that point it was just a formality.  Norwegians had implemented our constitution piece by piece during over 90 years of union with Sweden, until there was nothing left but a shared king. Since the king has no actual political power, it was a pretty painless change. Kids today barely know what our Independence Day is (June 5) but everyone is sure to remember 17. May 1814.

The Swedes may be less happy about our independence now, since we have quite a bit more money per head than they.  This is fairly new, however. When I was a kid, the Swedes were still richer.  They probably did not much mind that their poor cousins had to fend for themselves.  But then oil and gas were discovered in the North Sea, and soon the money came flowing in. And like most other countries with such an unexpected windfall, we spent it all and then some.  And then the crisis hit.

After the previous boom, a generation ago, there came a crash which left oil almost worthless.  The price we got for it was less than it cost to pump it up. Suddenly Norway wasn’t so rich anymore.  Widespread unemployment, plummeting property prices, the usual.  But luckily we had only been rich for a decade or so.  We still remembered how to live without that extra money. So we pulled back and pulled together.  Tax money from those who still had jobs was used to buy the banks that failed, and extend the loans for those who had lost their job.  Eventually the crisis blew over, as they tend to do.  When the oil price rose again, it was decided to put most of the income in a fund and only use a little each year.

Because of the fund, we know there won’t be a sudden money crisis. Even if there is a global recession, like now, we simply use some of the savings and continue living like normal. And because this is so, people and businesses can plan far ahead and don’t need to make bad decisions in a spate of panic.  This has the unexpected side effect that society simply works more efficiently. Norwegian productivity is very high.

An unexpected side effect of high productivity and small differences in income is that everyone wants fast, clean Internet.  OK, not everyone, but most.  And where there is a demand, there is a supply.  And no, it is not even state-owned. But we have better Internet than the country that invented it.  I know this because I played City of Heroes again today, an online role playing game. And while American players whined about lag and crashes, it ran just fine here, even though the servers are actually in America.  However, some of them are on the East Coast, which means they don’t have to go through much of America to get here.  Otherwise they would probably be slow here too.  Because in America, the Internet is in bad shape.  Kind of like the roads, and the schools, and… well, those who live there probably know it much better than I do.  But I bet you wish you had used your Golden Age to build up some funds too.

Big pharma or small minds?

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I’m biking too… just more slowly. ^_^

In my somewhat medical entry earlier this week, I portrayed the lung specialist as an incarnation of Big Pharma.  Even as a snapshot of the moment this is not quite as nuanced as my real feelings, and in perspective even less so.

Then again, regular readers will know that I cannot even use the phrase “Big Pharma” without irony, for it is a concept typical of a very different subculture.  It goes along with a thinking that is not just mythical, but pure fantasy firmly believed to be literal truth.  It is a mainstay of progress haters, vaccine dodgers and people who think everyone can get the green light at the same time with no ill effects. And of course envious socialists, who cannot abide the thought that someone may earn money on other people’s illness.

While I eagerly support people’s right to choose shamanism and witchcraft over modern medicine, I am torn about seeing them expose their children to the same experience in applied Darwinism, and I definitely require them to wear a plague flag in public.  As for the Socialists, their intentions are as always good; it is just their realism that is faulty, as usual. Having worked for the State for 30 years, I know that it has great perseverance but very limited creativity. If you rely on the State for medical progress, you better have a long natural lifespan.

With incorporated pharmaceutical companies, of course, the problem is sometimes the opposite:  Things go entirely too fast.  I personally think there should be more nuance to this. When it comes to treatment for illnesses with a high mortality (including most cancers), side effects should not really be a major concern.  Is it really a problem that 5% die from the treatment if 95% die without it?  But the opposite is the case for what I would call “convenience medicine”.  It is unacceptable to have people die from low-level painkillers, for instance, or breast transplants for that matter. There should not be the same rules for these opposites.

***

In any case, do not mistake me just because of my brevity.  I don’t see doctors generally or this particular lung specialist as just greedy salespeople.  I know enough health personnel to realize that most of them are driven, deep down, by a deep urge to help others.  In general, they are better people than me, in the motivations for their work.  (Although I am working on that.) As the Russian journaler Coldheels (I think it was) wrote:  A medical student dissects many frogs not because her heart is cold but because it is warm with love.  (Sorry to mangle the quote, but it has been 10 years.  Feel free to correct me, but I know I got the spirit of it right, because I feel that way too.)

So I do not want to cast aspersion on her motivations.  But she does live and work in the middle of a milieu of “better living through chemistry”.  She went through a long checklist of diagnosis, certainly more advanced than the script of a McDonalds worker, but still very much a script.  Who has written it?  What are the assumptions you make while following it?  It never occurred to her to ask:  “You are a 51 year old man and you are not overweight, but you are not exactly muscular either.  Are you keeping in shape by exercising regularly, or are you simply not eating as much as others?”  (And I did not interrupt her to tell, although to my defense it was only minutes since I thought I would be treated for a chronic throat infection or some such.)

The point for that deviation from the script would be when there was no improvement in my lung function 15 minutes after taking a standard bronchidilating drug.  Hmm… reduced lung function but not disastrously low, no response to common drug, none of the common allergies… childhood asthma….  could it be that this guy simply has spent 45 years meticulously avoiding any strenuous activity, to the point where his lungs simply never grew to the same capacity as the average male?

While I do seem to have some degree of exercise-induced asthma, it is entirely possible that most of my reduced lung capacity as shown by the test simply comes from a life of slow motion, of walking fast but never running, biking but not too fast, always making sure to not get winded.  What does that do to a human lung?  How much is genetics and how much depends on practice?  I know my heart is beating as slowly as an athlete, but I am not an athlete. The heart speed seems to be genetic – in fact, I get the impression that my brother is even more that way than I – but that does not mean lungs follow the same pattern.

I would like to have such thoughts at least considered before committing my only body to a treatment that may be utterly pointless.  (And taxpayer money for the foreseeable future, since this is Norway  and we have socialized health care that Obama can only dream of.)

Not being able to think outside the script is obviously worse if your script is a medieval fantasy, but even a scientist is not immune.  We need to broaden our minds and see things from an ever higher perspective.  This is the path of true progress.

Heroes and history

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If Thomas Edison had not invented the phonograph, would we still have MP3 players today?  Or would there have been no gramophones, no tape recorders, no cassette players, no CDs, a world where canned sound remained as unimaginable as it was to the Founding Fathers?

I think this may be a matter where the world looks very different depending on whether you are a conservative or a socialist. And since most of these have little or no ability to peek over the fence, I shall take it upon myself to give you something at least a bit closer to the truth.

In the conservative view, history is for the most part a result of a few well-known people who have changed its course in one way or another.  Mao, Stalin, Hitler.  Churchill, Lincoln, Washington.  Jesus, Buddha, Moses.  Einstein, Newton, Archimedes. Remove any of these or various other “main characters” and history flows in a completely different direction, leading to a world mind-numbingly different from today.

To the socialist, history is a more or less predictable flow of micro-events adding up, driven primarily by economic conditions. Never mind that Marx’ own predictions were about as accurate as weather forecasts by a five year old. After all, Marx himself was limited by the extreme scarcity of information at the time, thus proving that everyone is a child of their own time. In theory it should still be possible to make a fairly good model of how history unfolds under varying general conditions.

One socialist author wrote with sarcasm about Alexander the Great conquering the known world:  “Did he not even bring a cook?”  The point is, of course, that Alexander would not be able to conquer even a tiny village alone, much less the Persian empire, Egypt and much of India and Afghanistan. This is true enough.  But it is equally true that the thousands of men, whether soldiers and cooks, made no serious attempt at establishing a Hellenistic empire before Alexander showed up.  What he did was give them a focus, a vision, a direction for their abilities.  They did not simply flow like water – someone had to break the dam that held them.

You could say that the most typical political hero is a vessel for the aspirations of the people, acting to contain and concentrate them, directing them toward a goal they may not have been aware of but generally agree with.  This also holds true for the political villain, only with different aspirations.  The difference is not always easy to see if you are very close.  In any case, the aspirations alone are not enough to create the hero. There must also be a vessel of the required stature.  Even with tragic flaws, it is required that you be larger than life.

Cultural heroes seem to be even less predictable than military and political ones. Sometimes they seem to embody a particular age, sometimes to usher one in.  Why do a bunch of them suddenly appear at the same time and in the same cultural area, like in the Renaissance?  What kind of social engineering do you plan to do to create a larger number of people like Mozart or Michelangelo? How do you produce an Einstein? (Apart from having a number of Jews around.)

The thing is, you must be a fool to think history-changing heroes just conveniently appear when the economic “realities” dictate it, kind of like fools of the past believed that flies and rats were spontaneously created in rotting food.  (Pasteur, another hero, proved this wrong.) Then again, you are definitely not going to conquer the world without a cook. And even the greatest teacher of philosophy or faith is of little worth if there is no one to hear. It is the interplay between the guides and the guided that make history advance.  More about that later, perhaps.  It was actually that I wanted to write about, but you see what happened.

Cellphone diversity

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di0908018

No, really, they can’t see your body language through the telephone, not even when you exaggerate it. All you achieve is to entertain people like me, or Konata here.

Some otherwise well-intending people I know believe that they are not racists (presumably because they are not white), yet they have this concept of “diversity”.  It seems to mean that in any group of more than a couple persons, in order to have the right to an opinion, the group needs to comprise different skin colors.  In other contexts there may also be a need for at least two genders, preferably more, but the color thing is the most obvious and baffling. For skin color to have anything to do with diversity, you almost have to be either a racist or a photographer.  But I am willing to tolerate even that. After all, with the cell phones we have today, almost everyone is a photographer…

If you REALLY want diversity, however, you should categorize people based on how they use their cell phone, and include at least one from each of the main three types.

I see them on the street, I see them on the bus, occasionally even at work.  The age, gender and skin color varies wildly, but they all do the same thing, talk in their cell phones. In this regard, there is no diversity at all.  Even when they speak a language I don’t even recognize, they are all eerily similar.  Surely any one of them, even the one who just came here last year from Africa, is more similar to the rest of them than to me.  I claim minority status dammit! RESPECT ME NOW!

So, the three main breeds of human, as revealed by their cell phones.

Type 1: The talker.  This person, in true reactionary fashion, uses the telephone to talk. As if we weren’t in a new millennium at all.  There’s a lot of these people.  You can usually recognize them as soon as the phone comes out, either because it is already ringing, or because it is small, with a particularly small display and plain, functional number keys filling the rest of the front.

Type 2: The texter. There is an overlap between this group and the first. Some people will talk if reasonably private but text in a more crowded setting, such as the bus. But you will also see them walking down the street, texting and relying on the world to not collide with them.  They also frequently receive text messages, which means they either stick with their own type or have somehow conditioned others to use the same channel to communicate with them.  Their phones are larger, to give room for a high quality display and large keys.  Occasionally the number keys are replaced with a tiny QWERTY keyboard, and inventive ways exist to fold this into the phone when not in use.

Type 3: The surfer.  At first glance this may look like a texter, but the rhythm is different. The surfer will click a few keys, then look at the screen for a while, then click again. Sometimes he (are there even any female surfers?) will type for a while, but there is no finality to it.  The phone is fairly large, but most important, it is almost entirely covered by screen. The surfer will most likely type on the screen with his fingertip, rather than a separate keyboard.

No prizes for guessing which type I am.  I have recently completed my phonification of Twitter, Facebook and Livejournal by installing specific clients for each of them on my Android phone.  (HTC Hero, for those who missed the news.) This way I can check or update my social sites on the bus.  Actually I am not very social at all, as you may have noticed, but so much the better that I can get it done on the bus. Or in bed.  Instant gratification!  Not in the shower though.

I have yet to receive a call on it though, thankfully.  Much less place one.