The Kids are Newbs

Let me start off by saying, I like a lot of John Cheese's stuff, and his latest piece for Cracked.com is no exception: "5 Ways We Ruined the Occupy Wall Street Generation."

But I'm not convinced of some of his conclusions.

We've slowly killed off most of the activities where kids get together with other kids and have fun (and in the process, learn how to interact).

 There is a pattern since the mid-Nineties undervaluing online interaction.  Ultimately, it seems to stem from a late twentieth century stereotype of the computer nerd, socially crippled, who interacts solely with dumb machines.  Like all stereotypes, the picture is incomplete.*

The point being, interacting with other people is interacting with people, even if a machine or a network serves as a medium.  When people interact, there are rules governing that interaction; the rules appear emergently, and are one of the foundations of culture.  Follow the rules, and one is rewarded with social success.  Violate the rules and reward is withheld.

Growing up is a process of acculturating the young.  Children learn the rules of their culture, usually in a controlled environment that cushions somewhat their failures and attempts to make clear the lessons to be learned.  Interacting with other children is a step in that process; children learn how to deal with one another, and carry those skills on to their adult lives.

That process still occurs in electronically-mediated environments, like Facebook, Twitter, online Foums, chat channels, Youtube comments sections, or X-Box live.  Children (and adults!) are logging on and interacting with each other.  In the process, they are learning the cultural rules.  Indeed, many such venues have adults who, by virtue of social status if not administrative powers, find themselves able to reinforce successful social interactions and negatively reinforce unsuccessful ones.  Online culture is still culture.

Indeed, there are dark corners of the internet where adult supervision is less-enforced, like /b/.  In places such as these, savvy children, adolescents and young adults get to create their own rules.  Remarkably, a social order of sorts does come into being.  It may not parallel mainstream culture, but a social order does exist.  In the process, children and adolescents do learn social skills and social savvy: much of my social interactions as an adolescent occurred in the local BBS culture.  In a sense, many of my social skills were learned in that environment.

Cheese is correct: kids need minimally supervised fora in which to interact, learn social skills, and have fun.  But the digital computing revolution hasn't necessarily killed that off.  Instead, a local process has simply become more globally distributed.

This last is important.  Networked communications and global trade have made the world smaller.  An American in the 21st century will need to be prepared to deal with people from outside their own local communities: people who may not speak (or type) English well, who have different cultural assumptions, who have a different body of intellectual and artistic references.  Interacting online gives children and teens a chance to learn to deal with a multicultural world.  And that's worth learning.

* In the mainframe and terminal era, and before widespread telecommuting, computer users would frequently occupy labs with one another.  As often occurs with people in close proximity, a culture formed, with it's own conventions rules, and slang.  Many of those cultural and conversational conventions carried over to electronically mediated interactions.  Over time, hackers generated their own culture: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/

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Religious Messages

A pastor friend of mine once promised me, "I will pray for [her] and for you."

I'm a lifelong skeptic and lapsed atheist.  I'm almost certain there's no man in the sky who answers prayers.   There are those militant atheists who would find it hypocritical of me to let it pass.

But I did.

Even though I am not a Christian, I was touched.

Because what he said to me is not "I'm going to inflict a religious ritual upon you without your consent."

What he told me was, "I care about you, and I would like to help.  I am going to do that which I believe is the most powerful, most personal, most compassionate thing I know to do."

And in that translation is everything.

So, my fellow skeptics and atheists, instead of being offended by religious messages and symbolism, let's try to look beyond the shallow meaning of those messages and find the intent of the message.  The humanity in all of the god-talk.

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Climate Change

A reader has asked me to take on climate change.  I've been ruminating on how to approach the topic.  I'm not a climatologist in any sense, so there's not much that I can speak on about the science.  Not that I've let a lack of academic credentials bother me before.

But I think the primary issue I have is that I don't care.  Despite being an avowed leftist who attempts to think in terms of global systems, I don't care about global climate change.  There's not much I know about it.

Here's what I do know:

The Caspian Sea is shrinking.  This isn't purely academic, either.  The Soviet Union stored radioactive materials on an island there, where they'd be safely out of the way.  That island is now a peninsula.  It's not just now accessible from the mainland, it is the mainland.

Lake Chad is roughly half the size it was when it was first charted by Europeans.  The lake anchors the freshwater cycle of a great deal of West Africa.

The Sahara and Gobi deserts are growing.  The American West is getting drier.  Ranchers, farmers, and cities are squabbling over water levels in the Colorado River that drop year after year.  It's entirely possible that the West is coming out of a wetness peak unmatched for the last 40,000 years.

The Tigris and Euphrates valleys used to be a framing area so rich that it anchored the eastern end of the Fertile Crescent.  It's now largely desert and salt marsh.  North Africa was once the breadbasket of the Roman Empire.  It's now losing ground to an ever-growing desert.

The storied snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro are nearly gone.  Glacier National Park is losing its glaciers.  Continent long cracks are appearing in Antarctic ice shelves.  The Arctic summer is increasingly ice free.

Mean sea levels in Bangladesh and Micronesia keep rising.  By the 22nd century, both of those nations may perish from the face of the Earth.

All of this is local climate change.  Some is the result of warming, others the result of desertification. Is any relevant to the debate on "global warming"?  Maybe not.

But when you add up a lot of local climate change, don't you get a global climate change?

,,,
Let's talk a little bit about the carbon cycle.  No, not this one,  This one.  Here are the basics:

Plants grow.  Through a little miracle chemical called chlorophyll, they're able to absorb solar radiation and use that power to convert CO2 and H2O into various sugars.  This process releases O2 into the atmosphere.  Animals come along and eat plants and inhale O2, converting the starches in the plants back into CO2 and H2O and producing metabolic energy.


When everything is working properly, the two processes are more or less in balance.  Carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere, carbon dioxide leaves the atmosphere.  Life, literally, goes on.


The problem is, that oxygen really doesn't care for being alone.  It's a little kinky that way.  Sure, those two oxygen atoms don't mind being in a relationship together, but if they can grab a carbon atom and pull it on in, they'd be much happier that way.  Many current theories of planetary evolution suggest that terrestrial planets like the Earth tend to have atmospheres comprised largely of carbon dioxide and nitrogen.  It's a popular choice, just look at Venus and Mars.  

Earth is special.  Earth gets to have free oxygen.  By all rights, we should have a bunch of carbon in our air, much like our sister-planet, Venus.  But we don't.  That carbon is squirreled away somewhere.  Where'd it go?  Thank the plants (and their tiny friends, the cyano-bacteria).


It's true, animals eat plants, and so liberate carbon back into the atmosphere.  But not nearly as much as could be there, because a great deal of carbon is fixed into plant matter.  It's in the trees.  It's in the soil.  It's in the limestone.  And since trees enjoyed a several million year long success story on the planet, a lot of the carbon that was formerly trees is in the ground: coal.


Animals have been helping, to be sure.  Sometimes they die without giving up all of their carbons.  Sometimes, when animals and other non-tree sludge dies, it gets trapped underground.  It becomes oil.


Picture the Earth 100,000 years ago.  Tons of formerly atmospheric carbon is underground as coal and oil.  Tons more is built into wood and other plant matter on the surface.  Other carbon is moving through the ecosystem: air to plant to animal to air.  Everything is, to quote a recent decade, groovy.  There's a sense of balance.  Sure the pendulum swings from one extreme to another, from too much carbon in the air to too little.  But there are plans in place, too much free oxygen and you get more animals and more active animals.  Forest fires release carbon into the air.  Too much carbon, and plants grow faster.  Animals become lethargic and die off.  The pendulum swings back.


But then a buncha' monkeys come to a startling conclusion: "fire good."  Homo erectus tames fire, becomes adept at using it, lighting it, carrying it around.  Trees start to fall; carbon fixed in wood is liberated back to the air.  The monkeys start to have other bright ideas.  Trees are felled to build things.  Forests are cleared to create cropland.  Logs are feed to the flames.  Sure, a lot of the wood stays intact, keeping carbon out of the air, but with the loss of each tree is a loss of carrying capacity.  That tree will no longer scrub carbon from the air.  Whole continents are cleared of forests.  Easter is deforested to roll old statues around.  Minorca builds the Spanish treasure fleets.  The Black Forest feeds German industry.  Haiti kills its trees and wrecks its whole ecology and thus its economy.


Sure, a lot of trees give way to other plants.  But crops don't fix carbon: they grow and then are eaten.  Crops are essentially carbon neutral.  Grasses and grains aren't the carbon sinks the old forests were.


Then the monkeys get another bright idea: dig the carbon out of the ground.  Light it on fire.  Release it back into the air.  "What inspires in us this madness, that our existence should be defined / by a light that we can't see."   The plants do their best, but by now they're outnumbered.  The trees are dying.  Their maritime allies, the algae and cyanobacteria and other oceanic plant has been poisoned; many by the carbon drilled from the ground and allowed to spill across the sea by clumsy monkeys.  "We torch the Earth until it bleeds, rain ashes from the skies, just to make a light no one can see."


So the carbon climbs again into the sky...

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PSGD

To be added to the neo-logisms page:

Public school girls' disease (PSGD): The sad pathology of our culture wherein young women are trained to hide their intelligence, creativity, and critical thinking skills for the illusion that boys will like them that way.  While many cases can be cured by exposure to higher education, too many bright minds are lost each year.  We need to act now to stop the spread of this disease.

And any young men reading this?  Smart girls are sexy.  Learn this now.

(and smart girls in lab coats?  Very sexy.)

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The Philosophical Journey pt.1

"A ship in the harbor is safe.  But that's not what ships were built for."

Religious faith, political ideology, artistic school, all these are safe harbors.  They protect from the elements: error, uncertainty, and a hurricane of questions.  Food is plentiful, there are warm drinks and warmer company.  But ships are not built to stay in harbor.  Ships are vehicles of exploration, of trade, and if necessary, of war.  A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships were built for.

The ship of our philosophy was meant to leave port.  To brave the stormy and restless seas.  It's not easy: the food is short, the work long, the rum is always gone.  At any moment we could founder and be lost without a trace.  A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships were built for.

So our ship of philosophy sets forth on the wine dark sea.  We jorney from port to port, dropping anchor.  We trade our goods: thoughts and ideas, questions and concepts.  Some ports become centers of trade, the destination of hundereds of ships.  Goods flow in and out.  Other ports are samll, but vital sources of rare jewels and precious stuffs.  But no matter how rich the port, how safe the harbor, the ship sails on.  A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships were built for.

From time to time, we are buffeted by storms, great gales that blow us from our course.  From time to time, we find ourselves in uncharted waters, espying new headlands.  Sometimes we even set out for these unknown quarters of the Earth, seeking new vistas and hoping to uncover new territory and perhaps even a wealth of new ideas.  But even here we do not tarry.  A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships were built for.

"Tonight we light the fires, we call our ships to port.  Tonight we walk on water, and tomorrow we'll be gone."

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On the Religious Faith and the Free Spirit

Uzzah spake, saying: "A ship in the harbour is safe from the storm.  But that is not what ships were built for."

'God'? What do you Mean by 'God?

The Christian says, “God exists, and he loves me.” The atheist says, “God does not exist.” The pantheist says, “all that is, is God.”

The philosopher says, “What do you mean by 'god'?” and “what do you mean by 'exists'?”

So what is 'God'?

I believe in unicorns.  They are magical, horse-like creatures possessing a single horn in the middle of their foreheads.  Their touch heals all disease, and they can only be tamed by the virtuous and the virginal.  The term 'unicorn' exists, it is well defined.  Presented with a phenomenon, I can instantly make the choice and say, “this is not a unicorn,” although I have never seen one.  Unicorns exist; they are conspicuous by their absence.

Professor von Meeces.

Sitting next to me right now is Professor von Meeces.   He loves meeces to pieces.   Professor von Meeces is a cat.   He is a phenomenon, a signifier as the semioticians say, that corresponds to the sign 'cat'.  He has pointy ears, a fuzzy tail, and dainty cat feet.  He enjoys wandering the neighborhood at night, ear scritchies, and taking extended tongue baths (which is his current activity, as my hands are otherwise engaged in typing).  He is white with grey splotches on his head, body, and tail.

But Professor von Meeces is not 'cat'.  He is a four-dimensional representation of the symbolic archetype 'cat'.  'Cat' is the intensional defenition; P vM is a member of the extension.  He is a member of the set of all cats: {..., Professor von Meeces, ...} whose sign is 'cat'.  'Cat' exists, because Professor von Meeces is one; he is a cat.   He is also bored, and leaving to find something fun to do.

'Justice' is a sign, and intensional definition.   As such, it must describe an exstensionally defined set.  There must be phenomena that are justice.   But as Sir Terry reminds us, we may grind the universe as finely as we may, and we will not find one particle, one molecule, one atom of justice.   So although the sign 'justice' exists, finding it is necessarily difficult.   We must decide from moment to moment if any given phenomenon is in the extensional defenition of 'justice'.

So what of God? Or perhaps, to say, what of 'God'?   God is a sign that points to phenomena, like 'unicorn', 'cat', or 'justice'.  But 'God' is tricky to define, perhaps trickier than 'justice', 'cat', or even 'unicorn'.

John of the epistles says that “God is love”.  So perhaps by the principle of transitive equality, we can sat that 'love is God'?  Upon further investigation, we find that people use 'god' to mean many different things, at different times.  So much is godlike, or perhaps indulging in an archaism, godly.  God is mercy, but also justice.  God is peace, but is also righteousness.   'God' is a semantic variable, it points not to a set of phenomena, to a set of signifiers, but to a different set of signs.  'God' means different things to different people at different times in different places.

And so the philosopher asks, “What do you mean by 'God'?”

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