On the Binary State

"There are two types of people in this world: Those who like Neil Diamond, and those who don't. My ex-wife loves him"

- Bob Wiley

It's interesting to me how we quickly divide up a population of people into one of two things.  And not just people, but things in general.  Awhile back I was having problems finding anything to watch on Netflix.  While I think Netflix is an overall great service, there have been a lot of times where I wonder what they must think of me.  I've given Citizen Kane five stars as well as The 40 Year-Old Virgin.  For other movies I would give more moderate rating.  While I enjoyed that romantic comedy with the reformed action star who smolders on screen, it wasn't something that I would feel the need to watch again.  Three stars.  The problem with this was that after awhile Netflix found that maybe I would enjoy more three star movies.  I don't seek out movies that are visual smooth jazz.  I want something that I can enjoy and not reach for my phone as something more entertaining.  So in order to stop Netflix from wasting my time I started rating everything on a scale two or four stars.  Three didn't exist anymore because it was worthless as far as making a recommendation.  Don't tell me about movies that I may walk away from saying "well I didn't hate it".  My time is becoming more and more precious.  Since I still want to enjoy movies with a finite amount of time to do so, I can only watch those things which a computer tells me that I'll love.  That has become my movie watching world; love it or hate it.  If you're not one thing then you must be the other thing.  The sad thing is though that seems to be the world in general.

When I was little I knew there were good guys and bad guys.  The bad guys were easy to spot because they looked bad.  Or they had names that made it obvious.  If you grew up with the name Skeletor or Dr. Mindbender then I'm guessing your career choices are really limited.  Plus people's expectations of you would already be colored.  What were the motivations of these "bad" guys?  It didn't matter because they were bad.  The good guys stood for everything right and true.  Even in history class we were taught about how the Nazis were bad (which they were, no doubt there) and the Allies were good.  If you go and read more than your eighth grade history book you find out that not everyone saw things so clearly.  Germany as a whole wasn't full of people bent on world domination and destruction of an entire people.  Sure there were people within that country and within that particular power group that felt it was their duty and right to exterminate whomever they saw beneath them.  We don't want that story though.  We want to know that we're the good guys and we defeated the bad guys.  It helped that they wore uniforms.  Oh you're one of the bad guys.  Here's your black uniform with skulls and lightning.  Most German soldiers were just people from Germany who felt compelled to fight for their country, much like our own people who have served.  To the enemy though our troops are the bad guys.  Most likely though there aren't any good guys or bad guys.  It's all just a bunch of guys (and gals) who are doing things that vary from good to bad.  Even that is probably up for debate.  A soldier or a police officer has to make decisions about that sort of thing in an instant and then live with the consequences, or maybe not if they made the wrong choice.  It's made much more difficult when they are forced to make these decisions so quickly that everything is boiled down to a black and white scenario.

Is everything really black and white?  We encourage people to play games where there is a definitive winner and an obvious loser.  We watch teams, who work together and overcome their differences in order to accomplish a common goal.  That goal is defeating another team, who was doing the same thing.  Only one can be considered a winner though.  The other teams, even if they are working well together, are now considered inferior because we can't allow for there to be something other than a winner or a loser.  Granted I'm not saying we go so far as to give everyone a trophy for simply showing up because that doesn't help either.  Still we're showing our children at a very early age that even if you give your best and work hard that you can still be considered a loser.  For some children that will create drive in which they decide to work even harder so that they can become the winner.  For other children they give up or accept their place in the world as someone who's best simply isn't good enough.  Is it possible to play a game for the enjoyment of it without having there be people divided up into two different camps?  Maybe it's just built into our brains that things are one thing or another.  Our very survival meant being better than the next guy.  While we're not really allowed to savagely murder each other for the sake of our own genes making it to the next round, we can certainly feed that primal urge in our brain by watching a couple teams play for relatively low stakes that feel very important at the time.  Have we not really evolved beyond needing that feeling?

Life itself may not even be as simple as we once though.  Sure when something is dead then it's dead, but now we've learned there is brain dead as well.  Your body could be alive, but there isn't anyone in there.  Are you still alive at that point?  We can barely begin to agree on when life starts or what on our planet is alive in the sense that makes us comfortable.  A virus may not really be alive if all it is is a set of genes that are using another life form to replicate itself.  Somewhere in the vastness of the universe something could look at us and think we're not really alive because we don't meet some lofty criteria that they've set out for themselves.  We don't even have to go into what happens when our physical body dies to have the issue being incredibly nuanced to the point of being vaguely unknowable.  The world is full of nuance.  Most things aren't clearly black or white.  There are shades of...I'm not even going to say it because I don't want some search engine to mistakenly identify my writing with that book/movie.

I think about art or food or food that looks like art.  Sometimes you just know what you like, even if you can't explain why.  This thing is pleasing to my palette (visual or tasty kind) so if asked I'll probably say I liked it, but to varying degrees.  If forced to choose between love or hate then a lot of things are going to get pitched over the side because I don't exactly want to say that I love it.  I never thought I'd say this, but sometimes I wish the world would appreciate ambivalence about most things rather than forcing us to choose between being with them or against them.  If asked about a complex issue one normally can't just say "I disagree" without at least explaining why.  And in doing so we tend to find out that while we may fundamentally disagree with someone or something, there may be a lot of area that we do agree with.  It could be that our brains haven't really caught up to the fact that there is more than two classifications for anything in the world.  Then again maybe it all comes down to if you like Neil Diamond or not.

On the Web of Life

I was watching a nature special the other day.  The thing I've noticed about nature specials is that they're really ever about two things.  The first is animals eating other animals in the struggle to survive.  The second is animals making baby animals so they can eat and make further babies.  So the purpose of life in the animal kingdom is really just to keep on living.  We as humans tend to look for meaning beyond simply where our next meal comes from.  In the end though we're bound by the same rules as all other lifeforms on the planet.  We must consume life to maintain our own.  Even a vegetarian has to eat something that was alive so that they may live.  It got me thinking though about life and the world as a whole.  As I've mentioned before, with energy it's impossible to destroy it, only transform it somehow.  What if all life is connected?  I don't mean in some vaguely spiritual way, although that could also be true, but rather in the sense that we're not individual lifeforms.  What if we're all just pieces of a greater life web?  If that were true then when a lion eats a gazelle it's simply moving part of the energy from one area to another.  Now I know that some could argue against this idea because not all life coexists peacefully and it would seem counter to us being a part of something large.  Look at our own bodies though.  There are cells that mutate or grown out of control that ultimately destroy other cells for their own survival.  If it happens within us then what's to say that we're not a part of something larger where the same thing is happen, only on a much grander scale?

This is where people start to look for a greater meaning to life since it seems like an almost pointless exercise to be struggling to maintain whatever energy we can grab for no other purpose than to hold onto it for a little while.  A beetle has the instinct to live and reproduce and that's its whole purpose in life.  Why though?  To what end does it do this?  The beetle exists only to exist.  What if that beetle exists because it must consume a plant; who's own existence is there to serve as food for the beetle, and in turn the beetle must eventually become food to something larger than itself.  This life web grows forever outward.  Given enough time we all become food for something else.  Our own purpose is to finally give up our own bodies so that something else can live.  It can seem bleak since all of our experiences and memories come to an end.  No matter how important we think we are, there will come a time when we simply don't exist as we do now.  And in a way that's a good thing.  If we are made up of energy that cannot be destroyed then what we are has to carry on somehow.

In the end it doesn't really address the overall question of what's the point of life?  Most life on this planet strive to exist for the sake of passing on their genes to the next generation in a seemingly endless cycle.  Maybe we as humans feel the need for there to be something greater behind it all.  That being alive for the sake of living just isn't enough.  If we are somehow a part of something greater then it's possible our purpose in life is more than we imagined.  We live and die like everything else because we're a part of something.  What that something is may be unknowable because we're talking about not just life on our planet, but possibly the entirety of the universe.  We may be the equivalent of a single cell in this overall life, but each one is important, otherwise it would have no reason to exist in the first place.  Then again maybe the idea of a grand life web is just another way of rationalizing all the dizzying randomness of life.  Our purpose here could potentially be nothing more than an innate need to continue living.  Life itself could only be a chance encounter of proteins that met in just the right environment.  Still we are alive and we are aware of it so maybe it doesn't matter if it was all random to begin with.  Maybe the first step to something greater is being aware that there is possibly something greater.

On Sharks

You know what the scary thing about sharks is?  It's not their size or speed.  It's not their rows of razor sharp teeth.  It's not even their black, soulless eyes.  It's the fact that they can't be reasoned with.  In a situation where you come up against a shark you can't talk your way out of it.  You can't trick the shark into not attacking.  It all comes down to whether or not it feels like you're food.  A shark is almost like a force of nature in that you couldn't stop it from doing what it's going to do anymore than you could convince a tornado to stop tearing through a trailer park.  Now don't get me wrong the teeth and idea of being eaten are all very frightening because we've spent so much time at the top of the food chain that there are very few things out there, besides ourselves, that are really a threat.  It's when we come up against something that doesn't care one way or another what we think, feel, or do that we really get that sense of dread.  It's a primal fear that we've held onto since man was living in a cave, hiding from things bigger than him.  Man is, for the most part, a rational being, who just happens to do a lot of irrational things from time to time.  We have serious problems with anything that completely disregards the rules of a rational world.

The thing is that in today's world we've started to come up against people who may as well be a shark when it comes to rational thought.  At least from our own perspective.  We can't even begin to understand how "those people" could think that way.  They seem determined to destroy us or at the very least damage our way of life.  I'm guessing from their side we're the ones who are alien in our beliefs.  So that fear comes sneaking back up and we're back in the cave all over again.  A lot of horror movies tap into that with the faceless juggernaut that won't stop killing everyone in its path.  Sure no one wants to be torn apart with a chainsaw, but it's the fact that the bad guy is going to kill you regardless of if you try and reason with them.  So many times in movies the victim will ask "Why are you doing this?"  Sometimes the bad guy will give some kind of cold or heartless answer designed for shock value, but more often than not the killer says nothing.  They kill because they're a killer.  There may be a back story of how they became what they are, but in the end it really doesn't matter.  We could understand what causes an earthquake to shake the ground.  That doesn't change the outcome one way or another.  The damage has been done.

So how do we deal with these fears?  Many of us are fortunate enough to not have to worry about being chased through the woods by a machete-wielding lunatic or coming face to face with a hungry shark.  Still it can be almost paralyzing to know that forces way beyond our control are at work with no regard to how it could slam through our little lives.  Some would argue that when faced with any danger, no matter the source, we're going to default to one of two reactions.  The fight or flight.  While I agree this is essentially true, there is a lot of nuance to these reactions.  Especially since we're just starting to grasp the fact that our bodies are aware of the danger and fear surrounding a situation before our minds have processed the whole situation.  Does that mean we're going to constantly be at war internally with our rational minds against the physical reaction our bodies have to threats?  If we believe that reason and logic aren't an option to be used to deal with something or someone who can't be reasoned with then is it our only option to respond without reason?  At that point do we stop being a human and turn into just another shark?

On the Beaten Path

As of right now mankind is at the top of the food chain. We have been for longer than anyone can remember. Most organisms on this planet have to adapt to their environment, but we've taken a different route and make the environment adapt to us. We use tools and technology to overcome our physical limitations when it comes to the world. An anteater developed a long snout and tongue in order to continue feeding on ants that built burrows that were tall and narrow. One could argue the easier or at least more direct method of dealing with this problem wouldn't have been to alter their physical appearance, but instead to simply knock down the anthills. Instead their method ensures that they can continue eating ants and the ants can continue building their hills. In a strange way it's almost like the path of least resistance. Really it's a long way around to come a short way back. I'm not saying that man doesn't come up with some ingenious ways to overcome problems, but our methods are often based on changing the situation to suit our needs. In a sense we've stopped evolving, at least on any quantifiable level. Sure our technology has gotten better, but we're no better capable of living in sub arctic temperatures than we were a thousand years ago. If the world's clean water literally dried up tomorrow we wouldn't be able to live in the desert to any degree better than those who live there now, which is focused more on survival than anything else.

Now I know a sudden and drastic change would likely limit any species ability to survive, at least in the short term. Still we can visibly observe how so many creatures on this planet have altered their very bodies in order to keep up with the changes in this world. Meanwhile we're roughly the same way we've been for thousands of years. We may live longer and be larger than those who came before us, but that's because we've made advances in medicine and generally have more food to eat. For the most part we don't have any incentive to evolve because we feel like we've got this place mastered. The world supposedly bends to our will so why should we change when things are obviously working so well for us as they are?

For a long time I used to wonder if reality was the same for me as it was for everyone else. Was the color orange I saw really the same color orange someone else saw? How would we ever know that we were seeing different things? Along with this there seemed to be a set way to do things. If you wanted to write a sentence in English you had to follow a certain structure. If you wanted to throw a free throw and not have it drop like a useless brick on the basketball court, you had to throw it in an established manner. If you wanted to earn money you had to follow the rules decided beforehand on what services or products were worth something, otherwise you wouldn't earn enough to rub two dimes together. Basically if you want to do really anything then you have to follow what those have proven to be successful in the past. Sticking with what's tested and true means that for the most part you know what your chances of success will be, at least to some varying degree.

Every so often someone wanders off the beaten path and tries something radically different. Sometimes this abrupt departure results in an expected failure, but there are those rare times when it works beyond all imagination. Without those people who are willing to stray from the pack we might never have the society we do today. I wonder if these offshoots are the way modern man evolves in a situation where evolution is almost unneeded. Galileo changed the way people perceived the world. Monet changed the way people perceived art. Stephen Hawking changed the way we perceived the universe. Each went counter to what was already established and by doing so took mankind beyond what they thought they knew to something more. Now those people made significant changes to our shared perception, but every day there are tiny little variations on the conventional, some of which are quickly discarded and others that become the new standard. It's not always easy to recognize when you should stick what works or step off the path.

On Living

Have you ever found yourself being introduced to someone and immediately asking them a question like "So what do you do for a living?" If you think about it, it's kind of a strange thing to ask someone. It's a great ice breaker and it can at least guide you towards something to talk about. But what are you really learning about that person by finding out how they go about making money? Sure if you come across a contract killer then it's probably saying a lot about their personality, but in the end for them it's just a job. Is it really all that different from someone who has decided to spend forty hours under florescent lights staring at a computer monitor or the guy who owns a restaurant? Then again, maybe in certain situations the job does a very good job of summarizing who that person is or at least who they are willing to be for money. Finding out what someone's does for work doesn't necessarily speak to who they are. If you really wanted to know about a person then you could ask them "So what do you do for life?"

Of course if you're anything like me and were asked that question I would have a hard time answering it. In fact I have a difficult time answering my friends when they ask me what I do for fun. Sometimes I wonder if our forms of entertainment are compromises as much as the jobs we tell ourselves that we need to take in the name of practicality. I watch television because I've always liked television. I read because I've always liked the different stories. Still, in a way they are both practical forms of entertainment given my situation, which itself isn't all that bad. Now I have no desire to scale K2 or sail around the world, but maybe I don't have the desire because it seems unrealistic and unlikely. First off, if I tried to climb K2 I would most likely die. I get winded climbing three flights of stairs at a mile high elevation. Add another 23,000 feet and my heart would probably explode from trying to force blood through my weakened body. I can't even imagine the person who would consider the whole prospect fun in any way.

Various people may ask you what your dream job would be. What would you do if there was nothing holding you back? The biggest thing holding us back is ourselves. It seems almost obvious when you think about. Sure in a lot of cases it could be money, geographic location, training, or family obligations that prevent us from dropping what we've settled for and going for what we want. To be honest some of those factors are there for a reason and in a way they hold us back from jumping off a cliff. On the flip side though I think it's very possible that we allow ourselves to be constrained by limitations. These could be self-imposed or put on us by others. Limitations could come in the form of expectations. For a lot of people there are set expectations that guide what they allow themselves to do or even think. I've talked about dreams and practicality before. Most people have to try and balance what they want and what they have to do. In some cases doing what's necessary overshadows everything. Still this may in fact be the only life we get and one has to question an entire existence spent doing things that don't make one happy. Maybe there is an afterlife where everything is sex and roses, but there is a good chance that this is it. So why not make the most of it before it's over?

Now I'm not saying that you can disregard everything except what makes you happy. The world just doesn't work that way. There are times when you have to put your head down and just get through it. For how long though? What's the point of working in a terrible job for thirty years, only to retire and die in your recliner a few months later? It reminds me of the horse from Animal Farm, trudging forward assuming that if they work hard eventually things will get better. Sometimes they do get better and the hard work is rewarded. More often than not though your only reward is being sent to the glue factory because there's nothing left to take.

I was thinking a bit about our society and how we move through it. From the ages of five to eighteen we're required to go to school and get an education. This education is designed to prepare us for either college for additional education or for entering the workforce. Let's say you go to college. The whole purpose there is to gather even more specialized knowledge. That knowledge is going to be essentially be used for one thing in today's world: to make money. That money will go into paying for our home and our food and whatever else we can think to spend it on. So is that basically saying that our entire education is built on the necessity of earning a wage? The five year old is being taught the alphabet so that eventually they can move onto math and from there understand that forty hours worth of work translates into X amount of money? Are our lives just a great big build up to an eventual paycheck? It makes our society seem like a half-realized idea.

We're a long way from doing something simply for the sake of doing it. I think part of the appeal of Star Trek is that they've managed to create a society that doesn't work because of money. Instead they work for the betterment of everyone. Now it's science fiction because it has aliens and space ships that travel faster than light, but I think the real fantasy is the world were mankind has figured out how move beyond where we are now and onto something greater. Here's a question to think about. Would you continue to do your job if they weren't paying you? Now assume for a second that you didn't actually need the money from your paycheck. Your home was already paid for. You and your family had enough food every day. Add to that you didn't have to live like a hermit and could enjoy life in much the same way you do now. Would you want to do the job you have now or would you go do something else? So when they ask that question about your dream job, that's how it should really be phrased. Is it something you'd do without pay because you love it? If that were the case then an answer to a question like "What do you do for a living?" would really have meaning.

On Knowing

The one thing about knowledge is that no matter how much you think you know, there is always something out there that you don't. About three years ago I was in a job where I felt like I was finally had it all figured out. There were few surprises and I had become something of an expert in my area. Sure there were things I didn't know, but I was at a point where I knew most everything I needed to in order to do my job effectively. It was very comforting to be in that position. At the same time though it felt like maybe I had peaked and there was nothing else for me learn, or at least nothing else I wanted to learn. It reminded me of what Phil said about God; "Maybe he's not omnipotent. He's just been around so long he knows everything." For some people when they get to that spot in their life or career they feel like they've arrived. It's what a lot of people are working towards. There is some sense that eventually you'll get to a point where your knowledge about a particular thing is complete. There is something known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which recognizes the fact that the more you learn about a subject, the less likely you are to consider yourself an expert because you have actual knowledge of how much you don't know.

In the technical world one of the last things you want is to have your knowledge plateau. The moment you stop learning new things is when you start becoming irrelevant. It may take a long time before anyone, including yourself, notices this fact, but by the time you do it may be too late to do anything about it because you'll spend so much effort trying to catch up. I guess if you think about it, the same is probably true for other areas outside the technical world. So once I reached the level of what felt like expert I started to look around for something else so that I could keep that eventuality of being out of touch away a little bit longer. In the past three years I returned to college and learned about a whole different area that I had only briefly touched on before. I wasn't exactly out of my element, but it had been nearly ten years since I was last in any kind of formal schooling. After that I had three different jobs, each one forcing me to admit that despite any knowledge or education that I have, I still knew next to nothing regarding the actual work involved. I am now the opposite of an expert.

It can be very frustrating not knowing something. It's even more frustrating to have forgotten something you once knew. Where does all our knowledge go? You know how they say you never really forget how to ride a bike? Your body just remembers because it was such a complex array of movements that your muscles retained the memory of it. So even if you haven't ridden a bicycle in a couple decades you'll still have the ability to hop on and peddle away, maybe a bit wobbly at first, but it would come back to you pretty quickly. It would take something drastic for you to lose that knowledge completely. If that's true for something like riding a bike then would that mean while we may forget something we learned a long time ago our body physically retains the knowledge somehow? If everything I've learned is somehow stored in my cells then is it possible for that knowledge to be passed along to the next generation? If eye color or height can be influenced by our parents then what's preventing our cellular knowledge from being given to our children? Or more importantly, what can we do to access that information? You may have heard the story about the experiment where a flatworm is sent through a maze until it knows its way. That worm is ground up and fed to another flatworm. This new flatworm is able to navigate the maze much easier, indicating that information may have some kind of physical component to it. Granted flatworms are a very simple organism compared to a person, but I have a feeling scientists are looking at the general idea that knowledge and experience is stored inside in ways we don't fully understand.

There is a somewhat scary aspect to what we learn though. Our bodies are fairly fragile when you think about it. While we can take a lot of punishment at times, often it takes only a single event or trauma that could change everything. People with head injuries have had to relearn everything over again, including how to walk. It seems to run contrary to the idea of muscle memory. The way I look at it though is imagine if all the information in your brain where a library and your brain had the index to where everything was stored. That index get damaged and the information doesn't necessarily go away, but you've lost the ability to efficiently access it. Your first kiss is out there somewhere, but you may never find it again. In a sense that type of injury could disconnect our ability to access muscle memory. The idea that something like that could happen makes our knowledge even more precious.

It's entirely possible that everything we've experienced has been recorded by our brain and stored somewhere. It's been said that we only use a fraction of our brain. This isn't entirely true though. We use all of our brain, but we don't all use it as efficiently as we could. Plus we don't fully comprehend how information is stored and retrieved or if there is a limit to our storage capacity for new information. The physical aspect of our bodies break down before we can really test the limits of what our brains could do given enough time. Some day though we may be able to access anything that we've experienced with total recall. If we are able to have that kind of clarity regarding the past, imagine what it would do for our future.

On Sickness

Is the world getting sicker? We're the most advanced that we've ever been when it comes to medical progression and yet there are times when it seems like we're no further along than we were a hundred years ago. That's not trying to dismiss the efforts and accomplishments of the medical field, but it's 2010 and our understanding of certain areas borders on being able to confidently say "I don't know." Awhile ago I talked about the fears we have of various diseases and epidemics that are out there. Some of those fears could be for good reason, but in a lot of cases those fears could stem from our misunderstanding of how things really work. There was a huge scare when it came to both bird flu and swine flu, which are nothing to sneeze at, but notice how the attention has moved somewhere else? Both of those strains of influenza are still out there. They weren't cured. So while they're still out there we go on about our day as though there weren't ever a problem. The real question about this is are we doing this to ourselves?

Are we as a species creating an environment that's more hostile than other generations have ever known? Take a person from a hundred years ago and put them into the modern world. I would bet within hours they would be sick and possibly dying. Their bodies would probably have some serious issues with the things flying around today. It reminds me of what they say to people when they travel to Mexico; "Don't drink the water." The locals there have built up an immunity to the bacteria in the water, but visitors get to experience some horrible symptoms. Most people who are visiting only need to experience it once and will never drink the water again. Because of that they will never built up a tolerance to what's in the water. The human body is really resilient when it comes to overcoming changes in the environment. It has to be otherwise it doesn't survive. The problem is that while we've been getting stronger so have the things that make us sick.

I remember as a kid when someone got sick they could go to the hospital or doctor's office and get a shot of antibiotics. Some people demanded those shots because they believed it was what helped them get over the cold. It didn't matter that with or without the shot they got over the cold in roughly the same amount of time. What no one realized until it was already too late, was that given enough time the thing that we were trying to eradicate was also building up an immunity to the treatment. It's a lot like trying to spray for cockroaches. Sure your spray may kill 99% of those living in the walls, but that 1% that survived has been exposed to what killed everyone else and lived to lay eggs about it. Eventually the cockroach and the influenza strain shrug off any kind of treatment. When that happens what do you do? In that past we make a stronger treatment and the cycle repeats itself.

One of the things I've wondered about lately is why do diseases and viruses attack their host to the point where it could potentially kill what it needs to survive? I suppose the same question could be asked about humans and what we do to the environment around us. Still some of these things have been around for millions of years so it could be argued that they're simply going with what works. On the other hand though think of the success rate these viruses could have if they weren't harmful to their hosts. Instead of infecting a host and killing them within weeks or months, it could alter its methods slightly and live within a host for the entirety of the host's lifetime. That added time could allow it more time to spread. Now I know that our body is programmed to fight off anything foreign so anything that enters our body probably has to be somewhat aggressive to survive for very long. There seems to be this constant struggle between the outside world and the world inside our bodies. It's anyone's guess who's going to win when it comes down to it.

The other thing I've noticed is that there seems to be a lot more allergies than before. Maybe it's just that they are being more widely reported than when I was younger. When I was a kid I remember maybe one or two kids who would have noticeable allergies. Now there are more and more children who have severe allergies, so much so that schools are taking action about it. Some schools won't serve anything with peanuts because they don't want to even take the risk of exposing a child to it. While I think that's good for the children with allergies, it makes me wonder about what's causing the severity of these reactions. For me peanuts are fairly benign and I grew up thinking they were delicious. I've been fortunate to have no known allergies. That's not to say that I'm not allergic to anything, but I simply haven't run into anything that's harmful to me in that way. How is it that something like a peanut, which is just another tasty food to me, is deadly poison to someone else? What is it about their body that's not only rejecting peanuts, but shutting down when exposed to them? The other big one is gluten, although it's not so much an allergy, but an intolerance. The first time I heard about someone being gluten intolerant was probably eight years ago when a friend of mine found that wheat products were giving her serious problems. I didn't even know it was possible to have problems with something as common as wheat. You go to any grocery store today and you can find at least one section or aisle dedicated to gluten free foods. It used to be the worst you'd hear about was someone who was lactose intolerant. Even those were a rare occurrence.

So why are these people having serious problems with common foods? Were they born this way because of some fluke of genetics? Everyone around them operates as normal, but they have been given a limitation? Now not everyone is born equal. There are people born color blind or a limited sense of taste. Those can be chalked up to genetic anomalies. As far as I know there isn't a huge increase in people being born with color blindness. Those being born with allergies seems to be on the rise though. Is this being caused by the environment or something else? How can it be that some people being born today are taking steps backwards when it comes to their ability to tolerate the outside world? The whole situation makes me think back to all those great medical advancements we're so proud of. People are living longer than ever before. Diseases that should have killed people are becoming treatable. People who even twenty years ago were unable to have children are being given opportunities to procreate. There are some religious zealots out there who would argue that by doing so we're going against nature. While I don't exactly agree with that sentiment, but it does bring up a good point. What if we as a species haven't caught up with ourselves? It could be our technology has surpassed our own evolutionary track to a point that we're starting to see the side effects in the form of allergies and sickness that cannot be treated.

Thirty years ago we cured Smallpox, which it turns out is the only infectious disease we've ever been able to fully eradicate. The number of lives that have been saved from that is probably incalculable. It's been over twenty years since there was a need for even routine vaccinations for Smallpox. In another thirty years it could be all but a memory. There is a lot of work being done to fight and hopefully stop some serious diseases such as Cancer or AIDS. We know more about them know than ever before, but how close are we to seeing a real cure? Every year they put so much work into trying to just stay in front of the common cold. It's like trying to hit a moving target that's building up an immunity to whatever you're trying to shoot at it. Will we ever have a disease-free world or will the fight just keep on going until both sides become unrecognizable?

On Second Thought

If you're anything like me then you've had moments of conflict.  Not conflict with someone or something, but within yourself.  If you're really like me then it may feel like you're constantly in conflict.  Have you ever noticed how often times what you want and what you need tend to be different things?  That has been a major theme in the story of my life.  I used to think it was a Gemini thing, but the more I've talked to people, the more it seems to be a pretty common thing for everyone in general.  We seem to be a somewhat contrary species, especially with ourselves.

I've mentioned before that in life it seems that everything has a cost associated with it.  I think that cost really comes into play when dealing with duality.  For instance I've always wanted a simpler life, possibly living in the country.  I used to visit my grandparents' farm and it seemed like a wonderful kind of life.  Away from all the people with nature all around.  However, when I was there I would always want the modern conveniences like cable television or a store that sold more than one kind of magazine.  That kind of simple life came at the cost of missing out on things I had become used to having.  I remember on one of my last visits there I woke up to the sound of Metallica in the distance.  It wasn't overly loud, but it was normally so quiet there that sound could really carry.  I went outside trying to identify where the sound could be coming from.  I finally found that it was drifting in from the farm across the street.  Someone was working in their barn and had the music playing so the barn was acting like a megaphone.  I sat there and listened to the next few songs, appreciating the irony of how I wanted to get away and as soon as something familiar showed up, I ran right towards it.  Having experienced both country and city life, I've found that I want the best of both worlds, which may not exist anywhere but in my head.

The same kind of thing happens when people go camping.  When I was a little kid my parents would take us camping in what I consider to be real camping.  We would pack tents and travel gear.  Plus my parents would dip into their stash of MREs, which I was so excited to eat.  My dad would drive for what seemed like forever until we found a spot.  Then we would setup tents and experience being out in the wild.  The food was different and how you prepared it wasn't like how you'd do it at home.  How you spent your day was nothing like how you'd normally spend your time.  It was such a drastic change from every day life.  At least that's how I remember it.  Go to any sporting goods store, hell just go to Wal-Mart and look at all the various things people can bring when going camping.  Packing for a camping trip can be more intensive than packing to go on vacation.  There are water filtration devices, gas grills, portable picnic tables, and other camp gadgets that make roughing it not so rough.  And we can't forget campers.  I know lots of people swear by them because once you go camping in a camper you don't want to sleep on the ground again.  I can understand that and I'm not saying one way or another is right.  Still it seems somewhat contrary to want to head out into nature and take everything with you.  It's almost as though you've just defeated the purpose.  But that's how people tend to be.  They want one thing, but only if that means they can have the other too.

In a lot of cases I think it comes down to the fact that people rarely know what they want.  Add to that we often don't know what to do with something once we have it because it may not live up to the expectation we've built up for it in our head.  Someone could say that they want to be in a relationship because they think it will make them happier than being alone.  Once they get into a relationship they think about how much simpler life was before they had another person to consider.  So they start thinking about maybe they want to be single again and the cycle starts itself all over.  The reality of the situation could be that what they need at the time is to be alone in the first place, but it runs contrary to what they want.

The whole thing got me wondering if it is possible truly believe in two conflicting ideas.  There seems to be a constant battle between our rational side and our emotional side.  In many cases the heart and the mind want two different things.  When asked about his peace sign on his helmet, Private Joker said "I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man", which in the context was both funny and horrible.  Unfortunately for us it tends to be the same when it comes to real life.

On Subroutine

Everyone has heard of the five stages of grief. It's normally associated with death, but it's really more to do with loss, death just happens to be one of the biggest losses we can experience. The thing about these stages is that they always happen in the same order. How long it takes to get through a stage my vary from person to person, but you will go through it before you can get to the next one. The only way to overcome the feeling of grief is to move through all five stages. An interesting thing about it is that in most cases you're almost powerless to prevent the reaction. You will experience denial followed by anger, even if the transition between the two is within moments of each other. The whole thing brings up a question about pre-configured behavior built into us. If the reaction to loss is a predictable pattern of behavior then could there be others that we don't know about? I've talked about control before. What if we're running through a series of predetermined subroutines?

When I was talking about smell I mentioned the idea that there were possibly built-in reactions to specific scents. Our reaction to them isn't based on personal preference, but rather something physiological at work. If we have a standard response to loss then logic would dictate that there would have to be standard responses to the opposite end of the spectrum. Granted not everyone reacts the exact same way in a given situation, however, maybe there is a mental road map that all people will have to follow in order to get to their destination.

Speaking of which, grief from loss seems to be something that's fairly well mapped out. We know how we will react, even if we'd rather not. It's just a matter of fact that it's going to happen so if you were being rational you could predict what was coming next. Or at least have a good idea of what to expect around the next corner. The thing is while we're in the middle of it one of the last things that we are is rational. It normally takes someone else outside the situation to recognize what's happening. We're typically riding the wave of emotion so our ability to predict anything has probably been compromised. In fact we tend to be fairly bad at predicting how we will react to a situation. Something like the death of a loved one may seem like something we will never get over, but more often than not we do recover. On the flip side we seem to convince ourselves that certain things will make us happy for longer periods than possible. I read an interesting article about the futility of happiness, which essentially says that your brain overestimates the duration of happiness from good things and underestimates its own ability to recover from bad things. Even in that regard though there is a certain amount of predictability in our inability to predict how we're going to react. If that makes any kind of sense.

Some people may not like the whole idea that things are somewhat predestined because that means our sense of control is a lot more limited than we'd probably want. One may try to fight against this behavior in some futile effort to show the universe that they aren't dictated by emotion. I would imagine sometimes they may feel like they're successful, but are they just prolonging the inevitable? It's almost like a child fighting against bed time. The outcome is going to be the same regardless of how much they fight it, still they can't go quietly. Some people never lose that mentality. It doesn't matter if the outcome is a forgone conclusion, they will fight against it until the very end. I'm sure some would see that as noble or respect their principles and maybe in certain situations they are. However, when it comes to our own nature, who or what are they fighting against?

If you've spent a significant amount of time with another person you may find yourself able to predict how they're going to behave in various situations. In some cases you may even have an idea of what they're going to say next. Basically you've been near them long enough to just know what comes next. As it was mentioned in the movie Groundhog Day, maybe God doesn't know everything, instead he's just been around so long that he can predict what's going to happen based on a few billion years of experience. It could be that some of that is because they are running along a predetermined track of behavior. Of course humans by their very nature are chaotic so really trying to predict exactly what one is going to do is a lot like trying to predict the weather. The slightest variation could have drastically different results. Still we understand how weather works and what should happen based on certain variables and the same is probably true with a person. How they get to the emotional destination may be a mystery, but the destination can be plotted. If that's true then why isn't there a manual on what we're going to do next?

On Smell

Of our five sense it's really smell that's makes or break things and yet it seems to be mostly underrated compared to something like sight. Scientists have shown that smell is closely associated with memory thanks to the olfactory bulb being being part of the limbic system. All it takes for some people is a whiff of some familiar smell to recall a specific memory in a way that can be more powerful than looking at a photograph. The whole thing makes me wonder if it's possible that certain smells have built in specific meanings to us.

Apparently it's been determined that the smell of death is universal. All species instinctively recognize that smell. This came from researchers discovering that cockroaches tended to avoid places that had other dead cockroaches because of the smell of death. So for them it was a kind of warning that the place might not be safe. Death smells like danger. It's kind of the same reason shit smells bad to us, because it's full of bacteria that is potentially harmful to us. So the smell is a sort of warning for us to avoid it. Same thing with the smell of death and putrefaction. For us it's a warning that there is danger because when the human body breaks down it becomes poison. Now in nature the smell of death may mean different things. To a lion or a vulture it means there is potentially food near by. For a zebra though it could serve as a warning that in that direction is danger.

The smell of death is a big one, but could it be possible there are other smells that are hardwired into our brains? If so, what purpose do they serve? I've known mothers who could pick their children out of dark room just by smell. I'm guessing that's something to do with a bond between mother and child that goes beyond just a physical thing, even though the child was technically a part of the mother at one point. I've heard that it extends to adopted children as well, meaning that it's not strictly limited to biological children. Something in our brain adjusts itself to recognize offspring, regardless of biology.

Ever notice that you could doing something and suddenly smell food and your stomach starts to rumble? Up until that point you weren't even aware that you were hungry. The moment that smell hits your nose you're body prepares itself for food, even if you're not actually going to eat because the smell is coming from the next cube over. It may seem obvious that the smell of cooked food makes us hungry, but why? Our brain recognizes the smell as something that seems appetizing. Is that based on past experience or is that regardless of our culinary history? Do vegetarians ever smell something cooking and their body reacts with hunger until they realize that it's stir fry cooked with chicken instead of tofu? Everyone has seen some situation where a person in a movie eats something, comments on how good it tastes, only to discovery that it's something normally thought of as unappetizing. Rocky Mountain Oysters for example. At that point our brain and our body are in conflict with each other because the smell makes us think of food, but thanks to our upbringing we may not think bull testicles are supposed to be eaten.

It also makes me wonder if it's possible to alter our perception of what a smell signifies. For instance what would happen if someone was being tortured while the room was filled with the smell of fresh baked cookies. Would that smell forever be associated with pain? Essentially what was wired to be a pleasant smell for most people would only serve as a reminder of something terrible. What factors dictate when a smell means to us?

We tend to pass along our history in our genes. Hair color, poor eyesight, or increased risk of cancer all can be passed to the next generation. Hopefully along the way the stronger genes win out over the weaker ones, but thanks to medical advancements we're bypassing that. I've talked about evolution before. My point though if those other traits could be passed down, is it possible for our history of smell to be sent down as well? Before we used fire to cook our food, no one would have any idea that the smell of cooking meat was a good thing. Eventually someone figured that out and it became common knowledge to everyone after that point. If that was the case then the smell of something would be part of our evolution.

Technically speaking a smell is actually made up of microscopic parts of whatever it is that smells. So when you're breathing in a bad smell, you're actually taking in things you'd probably want to avoid. On the flip side when you're smelling something delicious, you're ingesting parts of it before you take the first bite. I won't even get into the various smells associated with sex because that could be a topic by itself (as sex tends to be). Although it brings up the point that if smell is made up of small parts of the larger object, then tiny pieces of us are floating around. On some occasions we run into someone that smells like home, for lack of a better term. Chemically speaking the other person smells like the perfect match for us. That could mean there is more to the whole idea of soul mates, which could be on multiple levels that we don't fully understand and can't quantify through traditional means. Once again it just shows that there are so many things going on that even when you smell something, it could be more than just good or bad, but something much deeper.

On The Maker

This isn't to go into the various iterations of God, but rather the idea that there is something out there that created us, or at the very least influenced life. When I was young I believed in the Christian version of God because that's how I was raised. Then as I got older and more cynical I stopped believing in anything. Everything felt like chaos and there was no reason why anything happened, good or bad. The idea of God felt like a fairy tale told to children to keep them from having sex or doing anything worthwhile because it scared the old people. While I was in college I entertained the idea that aliens planted us here as a sort of experiment. It seemed as likely as some mythical man in the clouds who essentially created man out of nothing and woman from pieces left over. Lately I've been starting to wonder if there isn't something that could be beyond our understanding. Something that operates on a level that makes us seem insignificant, which if you think about how large the universe is, really isn't that hard. Most people have heard about the near mathematical certainty that life exists elsewhere in the universe. Just the sheer number of planets that are out there indicates that something somewhere is also alive and possibly asking the same questions we are.

I can imagine thousands of years ago there were events that couldn't be explained. It's human nature to question things and try to understand the world around us. So with the lack of definitive answers, ancient man came up with his own about how things were made. At the time it was impossible for them to grasp the idea that Earth and everything on it was just a speck in an endless ocean of space. Certain things must have seemed like magic. Magic is really just science we don't yet understand. Look at all the things today that we pass off as impossible or label as paranormal. In a thousand years we may have a better understanding of our reality. I'm sure there will always be questions or things that defy explanation. I think that's really the nature of things. So the concept of God was created to help explain the unexplainable. Who knows maybe there is something to those beliefs and something is out there. I just don't know that anyone has ever gotten it completely right, if they were even close in the first place.

If there is something all powerful out there then it's probably so incomprehensible to us that our brains may turn into jelly trying to understand what it is. Plus maybe it's not all powerful, but to us it might as well be. I've talked about our perception of time being a major limitation for us. Imagine if being omnipotent was really just able to see time in both directions. For us that would be god-like. Add to that an understanding of how reality could be shaped by those experiencing it and you'd have something so much more evolved than us we'd look like sea monkeys to it. We as a species like to believe we're so advanced and compared to everything else on this planet we may be. In the grand scheme of things we're pretty young and might as well be a teenager telling our parents how the world really works when we have no idea what's out there. For all we know there could have been whole civilizations that have risen and fallen a billion years before we crawled out of the mud. If that's the case were they "made" by the same thing that created us? Is that what God does, goes around randomly making new life and letting it do its own thing?

I'm not saying it's impossible for something to have created us, but imagine the power something like would have to have. Do you honestly believe that something like that would care about what we do on our little planet? Its motivations are beyond alien. It would be like us giving a crap about some microbes on an ant hill in Africa. What happens to them has very little impact on our daily lives. In fact most of the time we're not even fully aware that they're out there until something points it out to us. Plus there is the possibility that The Maker didn't really make us at all. Maybe instead it just gave us a little nudge and that was enough for us. If you think about it, what's more likely, that an ancient being created us as a fully formed human and didn't imbue us with more than a rudimentary understanding of the world around us. Or that through a subtle manipulation of events and circumstances it was able to ensure that life was able to spark on this planet, which by most standards should have been just another molten rock spinning in space. From there it was up to life to find a way to survive and even thrive. Ok both sound completely unlikely, but here we are so something happened. Maybe it was all just chance and the perfect confluence of events allowed life to exist.

Getting deeper into it all, what if there is more than one all powerful deity-like thing out there? There is the assumption that it's just one thing behind the curtain pulling the strings. What's to say that there couldn't be more, some of which are operating on different levels. Or even stranger, what if it's not a thing at all, but rather a series of things that operate in conjunction with each other to create a larger being? It could be that within this cloud there are several layers to it. Much like our own bodies there are so many pieces that operate independently of each other, but at the same time need each other to continue on. Those individual portions could be influencing reality in their own way, without the larger portion being aware.

Books and movies always try to bring the idea of God down to something we'd understand. God takes on a human form. God gets involved with the day to day of a single person. God loves skeeball. Whatever it is, it's basically anthropomorphizing something that defies our understanding. In reality it would probably be like us trying to talk to a starfish.

So who knows if there is something out there that moved reality in a certain way that it would be considered our maker. It could be that all this is just something that happened by chance on some random Tuesday a hundred billion years ago. It's the question that will keep us wondering about ourselves and where we come from and maybe it's a question without answers because we may never fully understand it.

On Evolution

The mosquito thing has gotten me thinking a bit about evolution in general. Now I believe that we evolved from something else, but there are a lot of questions that don't have easy answers. From my understanding we, along with every other species, are the most current version of what's come before. So how did we get here and where are we going?

The basic idea regarding evolution is that species adapt to their environment, either in a behavioral way or a physical one. It makes sense, until you start looking at specific examples. Take the giraffe for instance. It has a long neck so that it can reach leaves high on the tree. That's great for the giraffe, but why a long neck? Assuming the giraffe evolved from an antelope-like animal, why would they evolve into a gangly, easy to spot animal? How come it was the neck that changed? It could have just as easily been their digestive tract that changed, allowing them to eat a more varied selection of plants. Or they could have developed some other trait that allowed them to migrate away from their original location. Instead their necks became long and their legs grew to support the added structural changes. What was the determining factor for this?

That's not the only example. I could go into specifics all day, but it's more about why one animal evolved a certain way while another did something completely different. A tiger and a leopard are from the same genus of cats, however, they are drastically different looking and have varied behaviors. Ultimately they're both members of the cat family, they're just different species. One could wonder if at some point the leopard and the tiger were the same creature. If that's possible, then what caused the split so that one became an orange striped giant and the other a smaller spotted cat?

It's been theorized that evolution is caused by environmental factors. If it gets cold then a thicker coat of fur is grown. That seems like the logical process. What's dictating this logic though? Growing thicker fur is probably the simplest act that can be done, but why not move to warmer climates? Birds do it every year. Well some birds anyway. Rather than adapt to the environment, some species choose to relocate to where they're already suited. Granted a bird may have more choices when it comes to the ability to move from one place to another, still the same general concept should apply.

Essentially evolution is mutation. The mutation is an attempt to overcome something specific. If it works then the species will survive and its offspring will also have that mutation, at which point it becomes evolution. Not every mutation is beneficial though, which makes me wonder what genetic ideas were lost because in that time and place they didn't work. Maybe instead of growing thicker fur some creature increased its core temperature somehow, making it so that it wasn't affected by external cold as much, but in doing so it lost mobility, making it easier prey for predators. The mutation may have worked if the situation were slightly different. The peppered moth exists both in light and dark colors. During the industrial revolution the trees that they would rest on were blackened by soot, making it so that the darker colored moths had an advantage hiding from predators. This meant that more of the dark moths had a chance to reproduce, enough that after a few generations the majority of moths are dark now.

That process is simply natural selection at work. There is another cause of evolution that scientists have discovered that has nothing to do with adaptions to environment. Genetic drift produces completely random changes and seemingly has no direction. So it's entirely possible that the giraffe didn't evolve a long neck because of its environment, but instead it was a random mutation that just caught on because it was beneficial in that situation. I guess the question then becomes, what caused that random mutation to happen at the precise moment where it wouldn't cause more harm than good? Did it happen because a bunch of genes just happened to merge and change or was there something guiding that change? I suppose the same question can be asked about life on our planet. What caused life to suddenly occur? Was it bound to happen somewhere based on the theory of large numbers or was there some kind of force that intervened? That force could be called God or the Universe, but in the end it doesn't matter what we call it because if it exists and has the power to manipulate something like life, then we probably don't have any comprehension of what it truly is.

You have something like the shark, which has been using the same model and operating roughly the same way for hundreds of millions of years. Sure they've gotten smaller than the Megalodon for the simple reason that food supplies must have shrunk at some point making it so that a sixty foot shark wasn't going to last very long. Still a shark has been at the peak of evolution for a very long time, much longer than several other species, including humans. Obviously what they're doing works just fine and I guess the universe is going with "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude when it comes to sharks. Still if there is a thing as genetic drift, which generates random mutations, regardless of need, then shouldn't the shark be due for opposable thumbs or laser eyes?

In most cases evolution is a slow process that takes generations. Sometimes hundreds of generations before the change is permanent. Still one would have to imagine that sometimes it's not a slow process. It's a quick genetic leap to the next stage in evolution. We as humans can adapt to our environment, but we tend to adapt our environment to us. Instead of growing thicker fur we build a house with a furnace. Does that mean we're not allowing ourselves to the opportunity to evolve because we keep bypassing the need to adapt? Or is our evolution that we no longer need to physically overcome something, instead we mentally create an alternative? It makes me wonder what our next evolutionary step will be if we've removed the physical need to change.

This is Ponderous

How come the mosquito, who has been around for millions of years, hasn't evolved in a way that instead of injecting us with something itchy and annoying, they inject us with something delightful and pleasant? I would imagine if they did that they wouldn't get smooshed as fast as they do now.