earthlien

I never mastered the art of illusion. Never even apprenticed, really. Or is the real me faking off and I wouldn't know? Only my hairdresser knows for sure.

Once I was on the bow of a boat skimming a glass river. The wind in my ears played the Star Spangled Banner, stopping partway through for me to turn my head. I never knew which band it was, but I figured out the wind section has all the tunes. Just grab a noisy chunk of entropy and carve away anything that isn't your song.

The ratio in our neighborhood has shifted noticeably towards the songbird part of the spectrum over the past month.

We went a year or two mostly skies of drifting black spots and no intricate trills in the morning back yard.

I don't know the ecosystem's motive, but I'd prefer it stays this way. When you hear so much bird language, it lends perspective to the intricacy of the daily political news.

No disrespect to crows. Seems like good evolution there, and I appreciate function's form.

It is never calculated the way you might think.

First of all, it's never singular. They prefer multiple twists of fate. They have a trajectory even when you think they stopped.

Second, let's just say they are embedded in a different spacetime. By which I mean "Each one of them." So they create different laws of curvature unto themselves.

All you have to do is read between the curves.

It is today. It is today, 2009. You are reading this using a computer. You are right there reading. You have a keyboard.

How can you not write what you think? How can you not learn what somebody else thinks?

What holds you back? Are you worried someone will learn what you think?

What do you think?

I think you are probably a good person. See, that is part of me, right there where you can see it. I say it is a moral statement, because it is about whether you and I agree what is right. It is also about whether you may tend to do the right things, good things, where people have agreed some actions are "good."

I do not think you are like me. That is also moral. We are similar - genes, many thoughts, many feelings - but we disagree on certain issues. List all the hot buttons: racism, abortion, war, religion, the future, the past. We disagree somewhere. So what? If you do not write what you think, I will never know.

Though you are probably good, you may have done wrong things. Because you are everybody. That is what "everybody" means. I hope you know this word.

Though you are like me, you may not like me. That is different. Morals are not feelings. Morals are about your position: you are standing on a small hill, looking around at the fields, buildings, trees, birds. You see them but they don't see you. You see people, and they see you. What do you say to them? What comments do you make to yourself?

I am an invisible particle like yourself. We float on the surface of a ground, on a planet, near a star, far from a massive scary hole in space. Many holes in space have collected stars, and planets, and grounds.

What is moral is not the ground. It is you, and me, and people like us.

Alfred hammered nails into his desk until the entire codebase was built. "Wham," he said softly to his hammer, peering at the round flat interface between metal mass and tiny nail. There were no marks. It was hard like solid, not hard like complicated.

"Hey, Allo-man, what's breaking?" said Clif from outside the cubicle. He kept his hands in the pockets, not touching any of the buttons on the cube entrance. All were labeled "Push me" but they'd seen no recent action.

"Good," thought Alfred, "He knows the value of distance. Most people in his position only see the value of direction. Vectors with half missing." He waved the hammer hello at Clif. Back to his "computer" or "thing where little lights put on a play, acting the parts of informations."

Clif wandered away towards coffee. It was a law like gravity or sleeping.

Alfred put down the hammer and picked up his keyboard. "If I type at three hundred words per minute, not stopping for punctuation, how much more could I get done?"

Gene next door said, "Huh?" But Alfred had not been aloud as far as he knew.

Alfred typed and typed. Furiously typed typed typed. After a few screens of it, he lifted his eyelids and considered the world at large. Resumed high velocity ejection of words and symbols, function calls, local variables and logical intricates. At a point, he wondered about coffee. It was askew, feeling the world with its 23 degree tilt, or chromosome count, or a combination of the two.

Alfred dropped his keyboard on the desk with a whack. Definitely too plastic. Got to glue some metal on the bottom, possibly dance taps.

He wasn't really paying attention then, or the rest of the day. In his daydream, he had created a system of interactive human emotions, sent from your screen to your friend's, with minor delays for analysis and auto-tags. He had lifted your life above morning concerns, flying you above day-ending relief to splash endless waves into the soft shores of sleep.

In reality it seemed like a database program to others. But it was so hard to tell them what they knew, and framing it as quite rectangular normalcy was the only way to cause progress. The only quiet way. Alfred was quiet, after all. And when he sent the network through the system itself, the result was not exactly a thing of will, but it did stay quiet for its own reasons.

At first glance, the API doc says the method name as "sortOf".

As I finish the program, I picture a broad plain of steel boxes, each containing a Knuth. Some Knuths watch a Geiger counter that produces a monotonically sorted sequence of integers. Some Knuths watch a sortOf'd list that mostly increases (fizzy monotonic).

The handles on the set of all box lids are grasped by every possible Schrodinger. On a few boxes he is rolling dice with his other hand. At many others the box lid is already off, and the reek of rotten algorithms and if-then-else'd Knuths spreads, convincing some nearby Schrodingers to flee holding their lids, others to calmly walk away and leave their waves uncollapsed.

An arbitrary number of Knuths walk away from their boxes, each claiming the key realization.

How much faster is a sortOf algorithm than the fascist monotone?

Self-timed asynchronous circuits we are, multi-stable, full of maxima until the last one impedes its successors forever. Look in your ancestors' pictures and ask them yourself. They'll tell you, in a way.

Up on the fence post beside the latest shreds of fur rubbed off by Cow in her pursuit of happiness, the mosquitoes were having a ten second strategy roundtable to work on their next food runs.

"I have never worked a day in my life," said Harry. "And I never will. Just don't believe in it. Did you find any water today?"

"Bernice was down by the cow pond," said Valery. "You look so plump and juicy I could go cannibal in a country second."

"Anyway," said Tom, who was always the most practical, "I only have another day or so to live, so I'm off to The House to find any kids playing in the yard. The yard is the safest place for them, I say. If I don't see you guys, remember to keep the pointy end towards food." Off he flew, gray ninja of the air, fighting the evil forces of wind.

They chatted for the rest of the ten seconds about the slowdown in the economy, and the nice surge in people at the nearby campground. They split up when Samuel made a tiny twitch and fell off the post, stone dry dead.

"Good meeting!"

"Yeah, good meeting!"

The surprising thing is not that they all liked their meetings so much. It was that they got so much done without a scheduling application.

In the corner office, a swarm of children slaps paint all over the windows one palm at a time. Floor to ceiling, a stretch standing on the chairs and little jumps. The light inside is pastel, shades of a cathedral's stained glass, autumn leaves in the breeze.

Soon the kids are gone. New colors flow onto the business's logo, all the business cards, and the company website. Once you've seen it, the colors are not lost. Orange, pink, blue, green hands cover it all. You'll remember.

In the corner of the room, Sandy is working on her weekend project. She's got the wire and chips and waveguides almost finished. The resin cast is taking too long. It will take a month to go solid, and the launch is next week.

Sandy's care comes in packages by mail, where the river of truth is what she makes with it. She's got another option still: a gel launch container, goop to insulate high frequencies for the critical thirty minutes.

Once upon a moon, Sandy gave birth to a nautical boy, a giant whose future would never sit still. He is still out there somewhere, roaming to points. It's possible he receives the signals. That's the hope.

Twitter.

Twitter is a force of evolution, because people tweet about their kids. And the reality is that reading about people's kids is a factor in today's family planning moments.

How many people read that particular flow of infos is left as an exercise for the universe.

Law of Unintended Consequences, meet Theory of Evolution. Oh, you've already met? I see I see.

Musings on how to survive the cold from a few million years back.

Sure, adapt-and-survive sounds like a simple teaching method. But I'm sitting in a house my genes didn't tell me to inhabit.

Did dinos learn tricks from their peers, or only from the harsh gene and its minions? Complex systems answering complex systems without the interference of "free will." Some lessons are given; others are taken. Learning which is which may be a checkbox on the Big Gun Club entry form.

If dinos ever taught dinos, what does it mean for you to say you are human?

All I can say is: three cheers for atmosphere. I don't think genes could learn so quickly if our nice fluffy blanket were pulled away.

Cats' eyes blinking in the dark round the house. Wildcats with tufted ears, wise little beards, knowledge of night. They ignore all my considered warnings. In my enhanced vision they all turn and face away, hoping a cheap trick snack.

Flames spring above the neighbor's roof, and with howls of dumbass vengeance swarms of dogs seethe through the fence. Dogs with snapping wings, dogs with too many arms, dogs with all kinds of teeth. The dogs have words to say but no way to think them, and so they leap on, charging to the cat army, who rises slow, choosing moments like the exact split of a diamond. Dogs with funnel eyes and chain tails, dogs with a grudge about the fees. I placed a knife on the side table, but I let it be. Cats step up in air.

Next moment is the ruling elite for people like us, the blase' method we all barely remember in the nick of time. I have a tune in my head from the web today, and when I finish it the animals are all collected in one place, having resolved the dispute with some noise, bloods, and negotiation. In the center is a giant black nest of feathers, a raven-winged saucer fit to fly, and she stands in its cup, impatient with me again. She waves her cell phone and I run from the house, leap up, and we are out of there like the shadow in the light of thunder.

"I used to play in those woods."
"I used to play in woods where that building is."
"I am glad they are keeping the old house well."
"That house is new."
"I think there was a tree right there."

"I wonder how people a thousand years ago knew things had changed."


"I wonder what T. thinks about his childhood home in street view. And Y, and H, and D. And D, K, R, G, M, J, O, and N. Do they know things changed?"



Next project: somebody-else's-street view.

All nanotech researchers and lab assistants must spend two (2) hours a year alone in a small room with a swarm of no-see-ums, wearing shorts and no shirt.

Project managers and lead scientists must spend an extra two (2) hours per year in the bug room for every four (4) research staff.

Nanotech R&D projects will be subject to yearly audit for bug room certificate compliance. Certificates will be provided by licensed third-party bug room facilities. The penalty for any compliance failure will be double-time bug room exposure for the project's entire staff.

Use of insect repellant is prohibited. The penalty for use of insect repellant will be double-time bug room exposure for the project's entire staff.

One good thing about having been unemployed is when you go to a party with your friends, you don't spend the whole time talking about work.

In your hundred years
the world changes your fears.
Although you will find
you were free in your mind,
the cost of your thought
never meant what it ought.

Food for thought: will think for food.	(unemployed)
We'll pay you to think for us.	(employer, consumer)
You think for free and you pay for the privilege.	(student)
You think you were free.	(unexamined lifer)
You'll pay to know what you really think.	(therapist)
We'll know what you pay and they'll pay us to think it.	(credit card)
We'll pay you to know what we think.	(lobbyist)
You'll think we pay you but no.	(419'r)
You were paid and thought, but you want a refund.	(life's license lost)

Desperation is achieved by suspending a spoon of highest quality ice cream. A distance no closer than two meters must be maintained.

Carefully turn the night lights on throughout the sky. Keep clouds near the horizon, prepared to attack at any time.

The safe safe world is a happy little place. It breathes in and out, and sleeping bodies flow in, then return whence they came. They don't need to know where they are for this small while.

In the distance, a wolf waits politely for his turn to howl. Sure, there are red plans ahead, but this has to be civilized for it to work, right?

Twitter hashtags are an "inversion of control" experiment in mass communication. I think it's cool the world gets to try this experiment. It's probably good for the humans.

1. Earlier, very centralized control:
Get your "discussion" by reading the paper. Send editorial letters if you have something to say. "Dear Editor, The city needs fewer moles in the soccer field."

2. More recent, but still centralized control:
Years ago, people created bulletin boards and Usenet as a way to organize discussions on the net. With about 20,000 active news groups, you would find a place to talk about soccer by noticing "rec.sport.soccer".

3. Inverted control:
All the world's Twitter discussion is one big stream, like a party with a million people talking. To listen to everybody who has mentioned soccer, search for "soccer" or "#soccer". People who publish stuff are in control of whether their stuff gets organized with other posts.

You see similar inversion of control many places on the web, and indeed on your own hard drive. Previously, you might have to organize files using a list or hierarchy of "folders". Now you can easily search for files all-in-one-place. Consider the photo site flickr: there is no single page for "soccer" photos; you simply search for all photos tagged with the term "soccer". Or "green shoes" or whatever topic you like.


As with all other search tools, hashtags will have to evolve if the twitter style of human discussion lasts, because the current situation starts from scratch (zero organization) and you have to work too much to organize what you read. I think tagging will endure and evolve; people get into twitter because they like having control over what they read and write.

The interesting question is: What good compromises will the humans find between anarchy and order?

1) Everything is a clue.
2) Everybody you see is a character.
3) Every solution is partial.
4) Sometimes, being mistaken is the best step.
5) Don't stop; only pause.

Sandy shores north of Iron Cliff shift and slide as the Earth's core spins in its sleep. Social networks follow closely, and the infinitely dense field lines write the same words over and over.

Replication is the technolithy that leads us to the best words someday. That's the hope, the faith. Say again, somebody. Can we get an Again?

Up on Iron Cliff the north point holds a needle dense with the world's certainty. Never wonders and never needs to ask. The world is always certain, and stands agog at your personal blurriness. Organic chemicals must cause problems. Uncertainty is a problem, right?

The shores slide into the water and climb back out. Some say the water is the one who moves. The water laughs at this with complete certainty.

The far north has its own ways, and escapes off into the sky, leaving a wake of rippled air. The ripples repeat and spread, stretching a globe. A distant sound of thunder to you, stuck here, unable to clear the ground with your little words.