Solipsism Gradient

Bruce Sterling does it again. Here’s an excerpt from his recent book, Tomorrow Now. This is on my list of books to buy…

…You’re just a normal person in a biotech world. You are not some grand chrome-dome master of biotech–no single mind can ever master such a broad field. Biotech is not even your personal line of work; you just live there. Your lawn is aswarm with living things because of social pressure from your neighbors. A mowed lawn is a scandal; you wouldn’t subject the neighborhood to such a sight any more than you’d shave your children’s heads to eradicate lice. You don’t go out there and garden it, either. The lawn tools know more about plants than you do. And they work by themselves. It’s a city lawn, not a wilderness. It’s autogardening. The “wild” animals living in it don’t know they are under surveillance.

…Your bathroom cabinet is full of unguents, greases, and perfumes. There are some pills in there, but most of them do not contain drugs. Instead, they contain living, domesticated organisms that make drugs while living inside you. Some of the “pills” are cameras, with tiny sensors and onboard processing. Nothing in your medicine cabinet is sterile, not even the bandages. Modern bandages contain living organisms that are good for wounds.

“Sterility” is what people do need when they don’t know what’s happening on a microbial level. In a biotech world, sterility is a confession of ignorance. It’s a tactic of desperation.

…You’re into germs because germs are into you. No man ever walks alone. Every human adult carries about two pounds of living bacteria, or about a hundred trillion nonhuman cells. This is entirely normal and good. It’s something you understand about the real world that twentieth-century people did not see and could not perceive. They had this crude, desperate insight they called “sanitation,” while you possess a genuine insight and a hands-on technical mastery of that situation. Unlike those blind primitives, you walk your seething Earth in an aware, fully engaged, progressive, civilized fashion. You swarm inside and out with microbes, and it’s good for you. You recognize and celebrate this. People chat about their germs over coffee – it’s like comparing perfumes. In your world, germs are the perfumes. Anyone who smells bad is an utter ignoramus.

Halley just came out of cataract surgery (and she’s younger than I am, I hasten to add). Seems it was just marvelous:

…I am in some rapturous drug trip. I don’t even want to think of how much I WAS NOT SEEING.

I see a clock — the second hand is SCREAMING at me — hi, Halley, hi, Halley! I go into the bathroom, the chrome faucet looks like it’s on silver fire, I jump back from it to avoid getting scalded by light.

That’s the sort of thing one likes to read after all the bad news one sees elsewhere…

…hopefully doing her second eye will double the effect. I can’t wait to read about it.

I won’t need this sort of thing for some time, but hopefully by then jelly-like replacement lenses will be perfected and on the market; that would allow me to ditch my current glasses. As I have an odd combination of eye problems – 5.5 myopia in the left eye, combined with astigmatism in the right eye, and now presbyopia – I need one set of glasses for driving (or lately, doing almost anything that demands far vision) and another one optimized for working at my laptop.

The latter is optimized so as to put the screen at a virtual distance (focus-wise, that is) of 5 meters. This allows me to work long hours without tiring, as the eye stays perfectly relaxed. Still, it would be great to do without glasses altogether in all situations, but the current state of the art isn’t there yet.

I stumbled upon the Intuitor Stupid Movie Physics site (very interesting, by the way) and of course had to take their Physics Savvy test. Hah! Quail before my l33t physicz skillz, I thought… but I ended up with just a humbling 87.5% score. 4 out of 30 wrong!

Analyzing my four mistakes was instructive. One of them (#17) was due to a linguistic error – I simply forgot that “speed” and “velocity” are not synonyms in English. Another (#15) was due a subtle difference between scalar and vector acceleration – I thought they meant one but they meant the other. Another mistake (#14) involved “sensation” which I was unsure how to interpret in physical terms. Finally, there’s one (#23) which I disagree with.

This brings to mind the arguments I had in school with my various physics teachers… in retrospect, they usually hinged on trick questions or definitions of technical terms. I remember one especially complex one, involving acceleration in multiple moving frameworks, where the teacher finally had to invoke Lorentz contraction to fend me off. 😀

Anyway, I suppose the average movie director and/or movie-goer would get the majority of these wrong.

I’ve been wanting to post this for some time but had lost the reference. Although this has been e-mailed around without attribution, it turns out that it’s a story/radio play by award-winning SF author Terry Bisson. Here’s the full text on his website.

Voice One: “They’re made out of meat.”

Voice Two: “Meat?”

Voice One: “Meat. They’re made out of meat.”

Voice Two: “Meat?”

…

Voice One: “Oh, there’s a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of meat! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

Voice Two: “So… what does the thinking?”

Voice One: “You’re not getting it, are you? You’re refusing to deal with what I’m telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat.”

Voice Two: “Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”

…

This first appeared in Omni Magazine, April 1991. I think it’s one of the funniest things ever published.

If you don’t read taliesin’s log regularly, you should… highly recommended.

Nick ‘taliesin’ Barrett wrote:

taliesin’s log linked to this post

(long comment about tests snipped…)

I’ll return to the subject matter of tests – especially relating to the male/female brain issue – as soon as possible. In the meantime, Nick wrote a post about feedback he gets from readers, calling me a “Brazil-based website baron”… . Thanks, Nick… my trackback stuff broke when I migrated to my new PowerBook, so I can’t ping you properly for that (yet).

Just before our trip to Buenos Aires I read Wired‘s report on artificial diamonds: The New Diamond Age. I remember, as a child, reading about the failed efforts to make large diamonds; however, very small diamond and boron nitride crystals were coming into use as industrial abrasives. It’s a gripping story.

At the airport on the way back I picked up the print version of Wired 11.09, which has that as a cover article (starting at page 096); with a great cover photo, yet. As an aside, Wired is the only print magazine I still buy every month, down from about 30 magazines a decade ago – not only is all the interesting stuff on the net, but the mass (or perhaps mess) of old magazines was becoming too large to handle. However, I still find interesting things in the print version – strange and/or great advertisements, for instance.

Paging through the magazine reminded me of many other things besides my boyhood fascination with weird industrial processes. For instance, on page 025, Josh McHugh exhorts Sony to buy Apple; a little over 19 years ago, flying to California on my first US trip, I read in the paper that Apple should be acquired by General Electric. Emphasis has shifted, however; now, Apple is regarded as so good that it should be bought by a larger company; then, Apple was “beleaguered” and should be bought to avoid closing down. Hmm…

On page 040, the “Jargon Watch” section mentions the new term “bright”, about which I’d written previously. Coming home, #4 of the “The Brights’ Bulletin” was in my e-mail.

On pages 044/045, there’s an ad for the Mazda RX-8 sports car. Mazda is the sole remaining car manufacturer to use Dr. Felix Wankel‘s rotary Wankel engine, whose development I’d followed assiduously in the same magazine that reported on the invention of boron nitride. That was in 1958, if memory serves.

1958 also was when I first read a translation of Bulwer-Lytton’s “Last Days of Pompeii”. Despite the turgid prose, I was impressed by the description of Greek customs. And sure enough, on page 049, Wired reports on the efforts to build a complete 3D computer model of the Pompeii ruins.

Starting on page 076, Wired has it usual tech toys review section, albeit in a new layout. They kept the Splurge/Best Buy/Overrated format, though; and on page 077, the PowerBook G4 appears. It’s the first time I actually bought something rated as “splurge”, and even before it appeared in Wired… 😉

On page 081, one of my favorite authors, Bruce Sterling, writes about “Freedom’s Dark Side”. Of course, Sterling was on the cover of Wired 1.01 – I think I have a nearly complete set of issues, by the way – and also was present on the Buenos Aires trip, as I took two of his books with me: the 1988 “Islands in the Net” and the 1998 “Distraction”.

“Island in the Net” is still a gripping read but oddly quaint and old-fashioned in a futuristic way; the “Net” mentioned in the title means the international phone and TV networks; I think there’s some passing mention of e-mail. On the other hand, Third World-based “data havens” and “data pirates” feature prominently, the latter selling bootleg copies of audio and video, as well as lists of addresses for marketeers and illegally obtained personal data. While I was posting this, I happened upon James Lilek‘s article Why the Record Industry Doesn’t Stand a Chance, commenting on the activities of the EarthStation 5 music pirates, operating in the Jenin refugee camp on the Palestinian West Bank. Wow.

Finally, on page 147 there’s one my favorite Wired features, “Artifacts from the Future”. This one shows a “Melanoma Removal Gel”. As I’m just back from an appointment with my dermatologist, I’m very happy to report that none of my assorted moles, spots or other skin markings are melanomas… she also assured me that the recurring scales and fissures on my fingers weren’t psoriasis but rather the milder, and more easily controlled, Dyshidrosis. Whew.

Venerable net curmudgeon Uncle Al‘s learned alter ego, Dr. Schund, waxes poetically on this subject:

…The human mind is expansively more than the sum of it physical anatomy. The four pounds of its 100 billion neurons and their trillions of synapses, supporting astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, blood vessels and whatnot, are far too coarse a fabric to contain its obvious contents. The warp and weft of its weave are deeply fractal. At its base there flutters quantum mechanical indeterminacy gushing unending stochastic input into a spiraling ascent. Passing through virtual and physical anatomical filters the raw stuff of human awareness, randomness, is shaped and selected. The idiot noise of creation itself is sculpted into the pleasure of a cool summer night shared with a mate and the vague uneasiness that led a primitive ancestor to grasp a rock when its own fist proved insufficient to conquer a planet.

Well said.

We’re back from our trip to Buenos Aires, having arrived shortly before 1 AM. Everything went well; I’m downloading several hundred e-mails and checking out what (if anything) happened while we were away. Hopefully some of the 200+ photos I took will be fit for publication…