i am republishing everything temporarily in order to use mirroring software to pull it down. i expect this post to be taken down within 24-48 hours. i would request you refrain from unwanted moderation in that time frame, so i can take my site down from here and upload somewhere that cares more about speech rights and less about conservative value systems.
monday, november 1, 2021
so, let's look at this, first.
0:07
so, this seems to suggest that the parents in the windsor, quebec area were granted lands by the british crown due to military service.
1:16
i really don't know how to read this.
michel parent appears to have been a canadian militia member - which is what these records are about - that said the oath to the british military and received a plot of land in "the waste land of the cenere".
where?
cmeru?
waste lands? what?
was the gaspe waste lands? were militia men settled there?
2:42
the 1763 proclamation - which has been badly misinterpreted in recent years - cast out the french trading posts in indigenous territory as off limits, and that could be what he was referring to as "waste lands".
the french didn't actually claim this territory, they claimed exclusive commercial rights over it. they didn't have the same concepts of imperial law that the british inherited from the romans via common law, because their laws were canonized. and, ultimately, the king was the boss, not roman legal precedent. so, the british got a kind of a messy situation after the seven years war, in that they couldn't technically incorporate an area that they didn't technically conquer.
what the british crown actually declared in the 1763 proclamation was an exclusive right to buy land from the indigenous people. they couldn't annex a land that the french didn't own, but they could prevent their own citizens from buying land, and sort of wait the indigenous people out. the long term plan was to snatch it all up, and they did that in canada. but, american frontiersmen did not like this, and it was one of the factors surrounding the revolution.
that note was from 1802, and it was about rewarding people for their military service as loyalists in the british army.
so, it could very well have said "michel parent is being awarded land in indigenous territory for his military service". remember - the crown claimed exclusive buying rights, so it (and only it) could parcel out land in the area.
so, it might say "genese", which might be a crude word for iroquois, known today as the haudenosaunee.
but, i'm guessing.
my parent family seems to have had ties in northern ontario. were soldiers settled there?
2:59
no, it specifies lower canada, so it can't be that.
we have a completely unknown michel, his son charles (shows up in 1806), his son charles (shows up in 1836) and his son michel, born in 1848, who dies around sudbury in 1922. if there was some previous connection to northern ontario...
...but michel was specifically settled in quebec, and the boundaries were already set by 1802.
there's a list of oath-swearing militiamen around granby that michel seems to be within. there's no suggestion that the people in the list were settled in granby.
let me check the population lists in perce.
3:06
he seems to show up in "somerset county", which is not far from trois-rivieres.
3:15
a little context as to how small the population really was at the time.
our first charles, son of unknown michel, was born about 1768, according to his death record. the marriage in 1806 is well attested.
8:03
so, the canadian government is upset that the americans are trying to elbow their campaign contributors out of areas they compete with them in.
i frankly don't actually really care. but, when are they going to learn already?
nafta was a gigantic error, and we learn that more every year. but, the liberal-tory consensus neo-liberal political class in canada refuses to give up on it, and refuses to give up on the underlying premise of economic partnership in the face of a neighbour that (correctly) sees them as a prime competitor.
we've become the loser kid that the united states used to know in grade school and won't stop calling. we have to accept that they've moved on, and grow into ourselves, instead.
13:04
this is a perennial concern in ottawa, because the government can't deal with the facts surrounding it and doesn't seem interested in economic self-ownership.
we're worse than a dependency, we're an entitled one. and, we need to rip the bandaid off and move on.
13:07
canada needs to be able to control it's own economic self-interests, independently of the concerns of the united states.
13:10
we could - and should - begin with a post-carbon industrial strategy.
13:11
we don't want to become the scotland of north america; we need to assert a reassert a concept of independence. and, the americans seem to actually want that, nowadays - a historical shift in attitude from washington.
they're fed up with us, and i don't blame them.
13:14
at the end of the day, if we lose some auto sector jobs, it's really good news for the planet.
i'm more concerned about economic sovereignty than i am about losing jobs; in canada, that's become a really pressing, dominant concern.
we don't make anything at all anymore. the cars are just the last thing out. and, we don't seem to even realize why that's a giant problem, or even care.
13:19
tuesday, november 2, 2021
wednesday, november 3, 2021
that giant hurricane in the pacific isn't helping much, but the blocking pattern is trying to reassert itself.
by mid november, the realities of where i am on the planet are asserting itself, and you can't really avoid the situation.
so, was i right?
i think i was more right, and we'll have to see how this plays itself out.
the weather forecast argued that there would be an early winter due to shifts in the nao, and that was incorrect. however, we've had some active hurricanes to the east of here that have shifted the blocking in an eastward direction, and that have overwhelmed the warmth in the atlantic.
essentially, we were both wrong due to the storms in the pacific - which were neither a feature of the weather forecast, nor a component in my correction of it. they were focusing on an exceedingly weak la nina, and i was focusing on record warmth in the atlantic. neither turned out to be correct - they both got plowed underneath this typhoon, which makes it seem like they got a better idea, when they really didn't.
if we really recover next week into the high teens or low twenties (entirely plausible), i'm going to declare victory.
but, when we start moving into late november, days higher than 15 degrees become very rare, and we haven't hit the tipping points for that, quite yet.
so, we were both wrong, but i was more right, even if it doesn't seem like it.
0:28
where have i been?
i had an unwanted crash on the chromebook immediately when i woke up yesterday afternoon (the 1st) and decided to just shut down, finish my monthly cleaning and file the production computer a little, instead.
i've been trying to get everything off my 2 tb drive because i don't think xp is reading it well. i want to split it into four 500 gb partitions instead. it can read the 2 tb drive and everything, i just think the reason it's crashing is because it's too big. the max partition size is 2 tb, so i'm pushing it. my other drives are 250 gb, and they don't have any problems.
i also did some testing in cubase and have decided that there's probably a bug in the evaluation version of cubase, or something to do with the driver. the cubase dongle emulator is constantly sending data back and forth, and i'm starting to think that what's happening is that it's crashing due to some kind of read error. i don't know why it's happening all of a sudden, but i'm not convinced it's hardware, like i was previously.
the two errors - the search hang on the 2 tb drive and the cubase halt, reproducible via scanning through the transport menu - may look like they're the same thing, but i don't think they are. if i can fix the search problem...
i'm also building a new xp image that just removes all network functionality, as i'm still confused by some weird behaviour i'm seeing that suggests somebody is trying to slave the machine via the bios. there's no network card in this device, but it keeps reinstalling domain software, randomly, and keeps trying to apply group policies i don't recognize. the new image has no dhcp, no dns, no netbios, etc. and, that's fine - nobody should be connecting their xp machines to the internet in the 2020s.
and, i got an extension on my bullshit fine that the cops pulled a dirty trick on me around. it seems like my appeal has been granted. so, i'll need to prepare for that this week.
0:50
well, i was going to file a constitutional rights challenge on a $75 fine, so i'm glad somebody pulled their head out of their ass.
0:51
so, i'm looking at the charles parent from quebec city right now.
that might be michel parent's fourth wife and another batch of kids that would be charles' half-siblings.
i've found this in the 1815 nominal census of quebec city:
the basic problem is understanding how charles parent got from quebec city to this barely populated fishing village, perce, where everybody was enslaved by charles robin, and almost all the fisherman were dispossessed acadians.
i can only understand two hypotheses.
the first is that charles got there via some loyalist migration that stopped in quebec city (and there was apparently a lot of that). the second is that he ended up disowned or dispossessed himself, and basically had no choice. these are not mutually exclusive. so, maybe he followed a family out there and got stuck, and had to get a job with charles robin.
so, something like that might be relevant if it helps explain the economic conditions of charles.
but, i remain exceedingly skeptical, and what i'm actually trying to do is prove that charles was in quebec city in 1815.
2:53
another big hiccup is understanding how charles got a boat.
'cause you needed a boat to fish.
2:55
so, i've found a louis parante in tracadièche in 1784 in what appears like a list of acadians.
4:58
again: i'm all about self-ownership, so, to me, the nature of the questions around consent aren't important. the case is likely to explore the subtleties of the consequences of avoiding a condom, but i think that's really missing the point.
if i tell you "only if you wear that funny hat", and you proceed to fuck me with a decidedly unfunny hat on, or even no hat on at all, then you've raped me. i stipulated that you must wear the funny hat, and you did not.
i'm using an absurd example to demonstrate the point. as we own our bodies, we have the right to set the conditions, and the people around us are obligated to listen. it doesn't matter how absurd it is, what matters is the principle of autonomy, and any acts of aggression that may infringe upon it.
so, yes, it's rape if she says to wear a condom and you don't.
but, i also think she has an obligation to communicate the point, and the prosecution needs to demonstrate the clarity of communication. if that communication is clear, i don't think there's any further point of ambiguity. respect for self-autonomy is the only important legal concern, beyond that.
8:33
should you assume condom use?
if you want to maintain the relationship, probably.
but, i'd fall short of calling that rape, in the absence of clear communication to the contrary. rape, as a crime, has to be attached to a concept of intent, in the canadian legal system.
8:52
the purpose of rape laws is to stop people from aggressively harming each other, not to regulate behaviour between individuals, or punish people for making mistakes.
people shouldn't be going to jail for misinterpreting somebody's behaviour, and that is why mens rea exists under the law - and why it's important that the necessity of intent in rape be upheld.
it's not the proper role of the state to act as a policeman in the bedrooms of the nation, and people shouldn't be encouraged to attack their sexual partners in that manner - it trivializes the concept of rape, which is a violent act of control, and not an honest mistake.
10:32
punishing this person would be a mistake.
i expect the court will make the right decision.
10:33
so, i've been sorting through a long list of acadian refugees from the seven years war and i'm 98% sure this is where charles parent came from.
i've got similar looking names, and i've got a marie bessiere in the list. i'm at 1766, now.
charles should show up in the next year or two, if the list continues.
18:22
if i don't find him, i'm going to stop here, regardless.
so, the metis legend is that they came from the baie des chaleurs, which is the body of water that swoops into the border between gaspe and new brunswick, allowing gaspe to become a peninsula. but, this region was not substantively populated until 1784, when the british resettled american loyalists in a number of english settlements on the bottom of the coast. i've sorted through thousands of names and there were parents settled by the british, but mostly on the south shore of the st. lawerence.
before that, the baie des chaleurs (and adjoining gaspe) was a sparsely populated wilderness that acadians went to flee the british, who carried out an ethnic cleansing of the region when they conquered it in 1763. they did things like fill boats up with french-speaking acadian settlers and then sink them, mass deportations, summary executions, etc. so, when i say flee, i mean it.
if, in the end, i cannot trace michel parent to an acadian settlement, that may have been intentional. it may be an assumed name. and, that may be the reason i'm not related to the other parents in quebec - my ancestry would stem from an acadian refugee that assumed a false identity to avoid being caught. and, that opens up many questions that may be resolvable by analyzing the dna linkages that i cannot currently trace.
but, i'm sure i've found mary bessiere in this list of acadian refugees. and, we'll see if she shows up with a child or drops out.
18:41
that would suggest a likely continuing ancestry in pei or nova scotia, before it heads either to newfoundland or to france.
18:46
the idea would be something like this:
they would have been shipped to refugee camps in the baie des chaleurs (or shown up outside of them, undetected), and then taken off into the woods, before surfacing in perce.
19:03
thursday, november 4, 2021
friday, november 5, 2021
i got the idiots at celiac to take the post down, meaning i can finish that, now. i had to send their data host a dmca request. which is ridiculous. but, it's done.
i logged off last night because my connection was acting unusually. remember: i'm still 97% sure the guy upstairs is a cop. the pc is mostly reconstructed, and i'll have to see if i can get it to work or not.
so, i've been quiet because i've been offline, but i've basically been doing what i was doing, except i had to stop in the middle of what i was doing last night.
i'v searched through almost all of the acadian records (really) and i can't find anything. so, i want to check the parish in quebec city to see if it provides hints regarding this charles.
3:06
so, there was another climate summit. major players don't even show up to these things anymore, they've just become another nato meeting.
and, canada has once again shown up to an international meeting and argued that everybody else needs to do it for us. this serves two purposes: (1) it's a deflection tactic and (2) it's intended to make us look better, mostly for would-be immigrants and local capital bidding on international projects, which is a major policy goal of this government. if there were was one, single, specific thing this government set out to do, it was to improve our international reputation.
but, the reality is that we're the worst emitter, per-capita, in the world and you need to be completely divorced from reality to be impressed by anything that happened.
the tree planting, initiative, for example. that's the same empty lie that trudeau gave to greta thunberg however many years ago, to shut her up when he was standing in front of her. i don't generally consider her to be a substantive voice (i think she's done more harm to juvenilize the discourse than help to actually pass substantive laws), but this is an example of trudeau doing something he does frequently: recycle material. he was just looking for an applause line and a positive headline. really. the fact is that this government has had repeated opportunities to pass this kind of legislation, and it simply hasn't - it's bought pipelines, instead.
so, the whole thing is an absurd farce.
it's hard to even articulate what might be a substantive tactic at this point, but we need to think locally, and not internationally.
3:49
i am going to make a substantive attempt to pivot this weekend.
i was trying to do an archive update before i went back into schedule in early october. i had to rewind to sept 30th, when the ancestry results came in because there was an unwanted crash and i lost tabs. i wanted to update the genealogical pamphlet as i was doing it, and wanted to construct rough bounds around ancestry on each side. i've been lost in that the last month.
i had to file the machine, and troubleshot the ram. i've repartitioned the 2 tb drive, which i think was the major problem. i'm almost done reconstructing it, and we'll see if the machine continues to halt or not.
the immediate projects in front of me actually require minimal use of cubase, so the best way around it may be to just not use it. and, there's actually not many more things i want to do on this machine, before upgrading for the next phase.
but, this machine is still going to be the central cpu. when i set the other one up, it's going to be minimal, and designed for specific uses, for now. i'm not copying all of my files over in bulk - they'll stay on the 32 bit machine.
it's friday, so where is my alter-reality update? it could come by the end of the weekend, really. but, i'm closing loose thoughts to discard excess tabs.
and, i'll want to get back to the archiving section for monday, when i'll be finishing loose ends on the pages i added to the side.
i'm constantly doing too many things at once. i will finish it all at once, one day. if i live long enough...
5:10
i want to talk a little about the division of labour, though - which is the term anarchists use, as they reject the idea of specialization. i'm not really holding to that, am i?
well, to a pretty large extent, i am, actually.
i do everything myself. i'm my own doctor (and lucky to have access to an md willing to let me control my own health), my own lawyer, my own genealogist, my own writer/producer/arranger/engineer, my own publisher, my own cook, etc...
it doesn't seem like the way people live nowadays, does it? it almost seems to challenge the basis of bourgeois society.
that's right. exactly.
now, there's an important caveat, here. would i build my own house? you know what, i might. but, i wouldn't work for anybody else. i can represent myself in court, but i can't represent anybody else. and, i mean, follow my health advice at your own risk - i'm not liable, i'm not a doctor.
you get the point - i can be a renaissance tranny and reject the division of labour insofar as it applies to me, personally, but i can't and shouldn't (and know i can't and shouldn't) go out there and try to apply anything for anybody else. i have a math degree, a computer science degree and a sociology of law degree. i could work in any of these fields. i could teach. but, i don't want to, because i value the time allotted to me to take control of my own existence, and work for myself.
so, there's two sides to the classical anarchist critique of a division of labour. the first is that people forced to perform the same tasks over and over again lose their humanity, in some way - they become neither a beneficiary nor a victim of the machine, but actually a component of the machine, itself. in that way, they've abandoned their humanity, or had it stolen from them. the anarchist rejection of the division of labour is consequently very much rooted in the idea that people ought to be allowed to have multiple functions in their existence, not merely reduced to the functionality of an input variable to maximize profit. in some way this is trivial - a worker ought to be able to rotate in and out of these different positions, to prevent their lives from becoming too monotonous. but, there's a real reclamation of humanity inherent in understanding that a person isn't merely a component, that they have an independent consciousness to be aware of, and that that should not be stamped out merely for profit.
the other side of it is self-ownership, and that is really quite literal. if we are to own ourselves, we have the responsibility to take care of ourselves. if we must rely on the professional abilities of others to take care of us, and are to be prevented from doing so because we lack the qualifications (whether that is trivial or not), then we are being taken care of for the benefit of an ownership class, and not truly in ownership of ourselves. of course, self-ownership, in context, doesn't mean ignoring the advice or insight of others, whether they have qualifications or not, it simply means adhering to the idea that we have responsibility for our own existences and must remain in control of it, because of that. i've been very clear for a long time that i'm a really staunch and literal supporter of self-ownership, and as such i take the responsibility of self-care and self-servicing exceedingly seriously. i'm not a component in a machine, i'm an independent entity with an independent sense of self-preservation that is driven by my own self-interest and operates strictly on my own free will.
so, the division of labour is really a very capitalist idea, when you understand it in terms of it being about (1) the reduction of individual humanity into the mindless components of a larger machine and (2) the abandonment of self-ownership, in favour of a concept of external care by profit-seeking actors intent on maximizing their profit from the individual. an anarchist should reject all of this as a bunch of slave mentality bullshit.
but, it's important to maintain a level of reasonableness in terms of the application of standards. yes, i want the buildings downtown built by engineers, and i think we can find a way to make that happen, after we've abolished the state.
just don't tell me to pay for something that i not only can do but really should do for myself; i'm not interested in the marketization of existence, in the enforcement of specialization or in the abandonment of my self-ownership.
5:39
you know, something jumping out in these parish records of colonial quebec is the incredibly high infant mortality rate.
they must have had piles of dead newborns out in the back of the church.
9:54
what changed?
the answer is the weather.
this is a seasonal virus, and this is going to happen every year, until the older generation dies off.
12:25
i've now decided that there's enough evidence to go with the idea that my charles may have come from beauport, quebec, if i can find a better match in the parish.
i suspect that my charles' name may have changed on his way to perce, ???? so i'll be looking for a better match for his parents.
15:04
do i have a license to make things up?
no.
but, here's an example of the kind of thing i'm looking for, in the 1760-1770 range of parish registers - we could have a marie louise parent that married a michel bessiere [i've found a francois bessiere...], and the charles may have gotten that reversed. so, charles may have taken his mother's name. it could be that michel is short for something like jean-michel, or even that charles is short for something else, or a nickname. etc.
the 1774 date appears to be wrong, and i need a marie-louise.
otherwise. i'm casting my net wide to see what i can find.
15:37
so, this just clicked.
the marriage with marie-therese bussiere was 1769. charles parent was probably born in 1768. and, michel had a second wife around 1768.
the boussieres were from isle st orleans.
maybe there's a record in there of an illegitimate birth...
16:23
saturday, november 6, 2021
i have a lot of schooling and a lot of experience in operating systems.
so, when i consistently see things that i can't explain - files appearing out of nowhere - i'm left to conclude that something exceedingly bizarre is happening. and, that's been the case for a couple of years now.
i turned the laptop off about a year and a half ago because i became convinced that somebody had hard-wired a chip into the board. but, now i'm seeing unexplainable files show up on my production machine, which is - this cannot happen. i've been fighting this off for years, as it is. i need to be able to do some actual work, and i don't have any fucking patience for some fucking idiots that want to stop an artist from working.
this machine is more than air-gapped, it has no wireless device and has the ethernet connection disabled in the bios.
so, what is going on?
and, how do i convince these retarded pigs to fuck off?
10:42
sunday, november 7, 2021
i think that they have their logic backwards in arguing that the results underexaggerated the effects of mask use because they didn't test everybody; that should suggest they overexaggerated the effect of the masks, if they found more covid than expected in asymptomatic random tests.
but, something like 5-10% efficacy is what i used to argue that masks don't work, not what i used to argue they do. this is from my "mathematical proof that vaccine passports are dumb" post:
but, it's also just a question of understanding that viruses are very small and "surgical" masks (no surgeon wears those little blue things) are very porous. sometimes you need studies, and sometimes you can just work it out. if a virus can get through the holes in your mask, it's useless - and viruses definitely can get through those little blue masks. those masks are more useful to protect against larger particulate matter, like car exhaust, which is what they're worn for in east asia. it's just not the right tool for the job. i've said before that i'd have no choice but to shut the fuck up if they started handing out n95s, but the science just doesn't uphold the idea that wearing blue surgical masks is going to reduce the spread of a contagious respiratory virus in a meaningful sense. you're looking at a likely 5-10% difference. you can pencil that in, but i'm not going to.
so, i decided not to bother modelling mask use because it only has a 5-10% efficacy rate in reducing the spread.
this article in nature, on the other hand, wants to present 5-10% efficacy as evidence that mask mandates should be expanded upon and the end of the debate around it, which is difficult to comprehend. what other policy would lead to social mandates with a 5-10% success rate? what judge would uphold such a dramatic restriction of liberty based on 5-10% efficacy?
i actually don't think the science would hold up in court and really need to encourage somebody to take it on, directly.
3:01
so, i'm taking the cyproterone down by a pill every three days. i've been on a 1, 1, 1/2 pattern since mid october, and am moving to a 1 1/2 1/2 pattern. that means that i'll be taking 4 pills every three days instead of 5 pills every three days.
how am i feeling?
i can't pretend that i'm getting the results i intended or desired from the surgery, but the unwanted random orgasms have at least stopped. my blood tests are coming in as intended, so i guess i just need to wait it out.
but, i did this to explicitly get off the cyproterone and i'm intending to do it, albeit very slowly. we'll see what happens...
3:47
i don't know who this douchebag (and he sure looks like one) is, exactly, but he's apparently some kind of media personality in quebec. the government seems to be trying to use him as some kind of screen, as they pass greenwashing policies designed to distract from the tar sands, like this one.
they're trying to change the narrative, and replace the focus on reducing emissions with things like saving ducks and dolphins. and, they seem to think that this useful idiot will give them the street cred needed to do it.
5:21
you kids know this one, right?
5:53
i'm not a fan of single edits, though.
5:55
so, it took me a few tries, but i think i got a driver-less, air-gapped install that wipes what's left of any networking capability out immediately via runonce.
and, we'll see if it works or not.
i'm going to spend what's left of the weekend filing. it seems like the genealogical research is my weekly focus, until i catch up on it.
22:44
monday, november 8, 2021
this post needs to be rewritten. it was edited to include seinfeldien retard speak in place of an ironic reference to alec baldwin going to jail instead of trump. it should be about alec baldwin being inevitably locked up.
9:57
they should bring trump back on snl, and get him to do a baldwin skit with a gun.
a fake gun.
which was the part nobody was smart enough to figure out, apparently.
9:58
baldwin has a lot of money, but manslaughter doesn't have a lot of loopholes.
so, it seems like one of these guys is going to jail, and it's not donald trump.
9:59
so, what did i learn this weekend about this ancestor, as i was fighting with my recording pc, yet again?
i was able to find his second wife in yet a different parish. so, he had at least three partners, from at least three different parishes. wife #1 died in august 1767, marriage #2 was almost immediate (the parish register in l'ange gardien, which is a little up the river, announces that the marriage had already occurred by sept 1767, but i found no clear actual record of it), our charles (mother: marie louise bussiere) was born between sept 1767 and sept 1768 (give or take), it is not clear what happened to wife #2 (although there is a poorly sourced claim that she died in april, 1768) and marriage #3 happens in june, 1769.
so, eiither:
1) charles is the son of wife #2 (magdeline garneau) and perhaps didn't fully know it
2) charles is the son of an unknown woman between wife #2 and wife #3
3) michel was banging many women simultaneously, and trying to order them in time is not worthwhile.
i think the answer is #3. essentially, michel seems to have married one of his other partners the week after his first wife died - it would seem as though the relationship already existed. and, while there is a lag of about a year, in which charles was born, it seems unlikely that michel was celibate during that period. really, i'm just not sure where he actually was. might he have even been in gaspe?
if i can figure out where madeleine died, it would help.
10:20
tuesday, november 9, 2021
well, is this a discernible, actionable threat or is it just a juvenile congressman spouting tough words from the safety of his mother's basement?
while the first option should be taken seriously, neither suggest that censorship is the proper reaction.
it's really not clear to me why anybody would even think that censorship is a rational reaction.
0:47
so, i got some biking in today before my blood test, and my cholesterol results continue to be moving dramatically in the wrong direction.
i don't know what is causing these testosterone spikes, but the choleserol levels are the most important levels in these charts, and if i continue on this trajectory it's going to give me a heart attack.
these are the worst cholesterol results i've ever seen.
so, how do i fight these idiots off, to get my estrogen back up and my testosterone back to constant 0, to reassert the protective effects of estrogen on my heart?
| 2021 | 2022 | |||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| m | a | m | j | j | a | s | o | n | d | j | f | m | a | m | j | j | a | s | o | n | d | |
| creatinine | 78/80 | - | - | - | - | 87 | 84 | 83 / 81 | 80 | |||||||||||||
| egfr | 107/106 | - | - | - | - | 96 | 100 | 101 / 104 | 106 | |||||||||||||
| alp | 61 | - | - | 63 | 59 | 50 | 60 | 59 /55 | 47 | |||||||||||||
| albumin | -/45.7 | - | - | - | 45.9 | 44.6 | 46.8 | 48 /46 | 46.7 | |||||||||||||
| cholesterol | 3.93 | - | - | - | 3.99 | 3.8 | 4.15 | 4.01/3.83 | 4.14 | |||||||||||||
| triglycerides | .87 | - | - | - | .95 | .89 | 1.41 | 1.05/0.94 | 1.09 | |||||||||||||
| hdl | 1.69 | - | - | - | 1.84 | 1.59 | 1.73 | 1.42/1.55 | 1.37 | |||||||||||||
| ldl | 1.85 | - | - | - | 1.72 | 1.81 | 1.78 | 2.11/1.85 | 2.28 | |||||||||||||
| non-hdl | 2.24 | - | - | - | 2.15 | 2.21 | 2.42 | 2.59/2.28 | 2.77 | |||||||||||||
| wbc | 8.7/8.4 | 9.9/9.0 | - | - | ? | 7.0 | 7.6 | 6.9/6.9 | 7.8 | |||||||||||||
| rbc | 3.97/4.25 | 4.11/4.38 | - | - | 4.17 | 4.12 | 4.33 | 4.47/4.2 | 4.28 | |||||||||||||
| hemoglobin | 132/140 | 133/142 | - | - | 139 | 136 | 141 | 138/138 | 139 | |||||||||||||
| hematocrit | .382/.404 | .394/.424 | - | - | .405 | .398 | .418 | .417/.402 | .405 | |||||||||||||
| mcv | 96.1/95.1 | 95.8/97.0 | - | - | 97 | 96.8 | 96.6 | 93/95.7 | 94.6 | |||||||||||||
| mch | 33.1/32.9 | 32.4/32.5 | - | - | 33.3 | 33.2 | 32.7 | 30.9/32.8 | 32.5 | |||||||||||||
| mchc | 345/346 | 338/335 | - | - | ? | 343 | 338 | 331/343 | 344 | |||||||||||||
| rdw | 13.3/13.5 | 13.0/13.1 | - | - | ? | 13 | 12.3 | 11.7/12.9 | 12.6 | |||||||||||||
| platelet | 199/187 | 171/171 | - | - | ? | 175 | 167 | 168/150 | 155 | |||||||||||||
| reticulocytes | - | -/42 | - | - | 53 | 56 | 46 | 35 | 33 | |||||||||||||
| vitamin d | 87 | - | - | - | 109 | 72 | 64 | 72/83 | 78 | |||||||||||||
| estradiol | 363/388 | - | - | - | - | 563 | 443 | 432 | ||||||||||||||
| estrone | - | - | - | - | - | ? | 4138 | 5203 | ||||||||||||||
| testosterone | 0.9 | - | - | - | - | - | <0.4 | <0.4 | ||||||||||||||
| progesterone | 1.9 | - | - | - | - | - | <0.5 | 0.7 | ||||||||||||||
| fsh | <0.2 | - | - | - | - | - | 0.2 | 0.1 | ||||||||||||||
| lh | <0.2 | - | - | - | - | - | 0.1 | 0.1 | ||||||||||||||
| ferritin | 12/9 | 6/17 | 21 | - | 29 | 43 | 28 | 40 | 42 | |||||||||||||
| tibc | - | 69.5 | - | - | 65.7 | 62.9 | 64.7 | 58.9 | 58.2 | |||||||||||||
| iron | - | 9.6 | - | - | 22.7 | 37.3 | 19.3 | 28.3 | 37.3 | |||||||||||||
| iron sat | - | 0.14 | - | - | 0.35 | 0.59 | 0.3 | .48 | 0.64 | |||||||||||||
| transferrin | - | - | - | - | - | - | 2.59 | 2.29 | 2.38 | |||||||||||||
| sodium | - | - | - | - | - | - | 141 | 141/139 | 140 | |||||||||||||
| potassium | - | - | - | - | - | - | 5.0 | 4.7/4.6 | 4.3 | |||||||||||||
| chloride | - | - | - | - | - | - | 104 | 107/105 | 104 | |||||||||||||
| phosphate | -/1.42 | - | - | - | - | 1.09 | 1.34 | 1.08 | 1.35 | |||||||||||||
| magnesium | -/.93 | - | - | - | - | 0.8 | 0.82 | 0.86 | 0.82 | |||||||||||||
| calcium | -/2.4 | - | - | - | 2.38 | 2.32 | 2.44 | 2.39 | 2.4 | |||||||||||||
| pth | - | - | - | 5.5 | - | 6.2 | 5.9 | 6.2 | 5.5 | |||||||||||||
| tsh | 0.92 | - | - | - | - | 0.94 | 1.22 | 1.67 | 1.48 | |||||||||||||
| calcitonin | - | - | - | <0.6 | - | - | - | - | ||||||||||||||
| cortisol | - | - | - | 325 | - | 464 | 170 | 129 | ||||||||||||||
| insulin | - | - | - | - | - | 50 | 33 | 68 | ||||||||||||||
| b12 | 223/251 | - | 304 | - | 363 | 313 | 370 | 292 | 369 | |||||||||||||
ts it possible that the poor cholesterol reading might be caused by lower levels of activity?
i was inside for about ten days, which has been about average recently. i got lots of biking in at the end of october, and was admittedly less active in september. if so, i guess it's a lagging result. and all i can really do is get more cardio to fight it off.
but, this is a big, dramatic flip in the wrong direction, and i don't think that's right. i think this is hormonal. and, i need to plead with whomever is responsible for drugging me: i care about my cholesterol readings. this is the most important reading in this chart, given that i have a family history of poor heart health. i do not care about whatever stupid backwardsness is driving your insistence on the enforcement of heteropatriarchy.
you can't accomplish anything by drugging me with testosterone against my will except degrading my cardio-vascular health. and, that's exactly what's happening. dramatically improved cardio-vascular outcomes are one of the (many) dominant, crystal-clear health benefits of hormone replacement.
there are some components, however, that are stabilizing, and that maybe can be dropped in the new year.
i'll get the hormone levels tested for this month soon, but it's clear from the cholesterol results and what i've been experiencing that they aren't going to be what i was expecting or hoping for.
3:52
these are the facts, for people that are confused about them:
1) testosterone decreases hdl (the good cholesterol)
2) estrogen decreases ldl (the bad cholesterol)
so, if you look at my july result, where my hdl was actually higher than my ldl, it's actually easy to understand that as a predictable consequence of testosterone suppression and estrogen supplementation.
post-orchiectomy, one would expect that crashing testosterone levels would lead to an hdl rebound, and increase space for estrogens to bind to the receptors in it's place (where possible) would lead to very low ldl.
instead, i'm seeing decreases in hdl (fallen from 1.85 to 1.37) and increases in ldl (increased from 1.72 to 2.28). this is actually more consistent with increased testosterone production and decreased estrogen replacement.
and, that is what i am frequently experiencing as well.
5:15
no.
what we need to do is learn to live with the virus and remove existing social restrictions, entirely.
if you're at risk, stay home - stop ruining everybody else's lives in an unreasonable demand for solidarity that you don't deserve.
13:28
we need to correct the burden of responsibility, here.
in a free society, it's not up to everybody else to react to ensure you don't get sick, and i don't know how we got to this point of blurry thinking where we decided that it ought to be. that was never the democratic approach to the scenario, it was this extremely authoritarian, right-wing, fascist kneejerk that we caved into without thinking it through.
we need to reassert the rule of constitutional law and shift the burden of harm reduction back to the individual, where it belongs.
there's no other way around it - or we're caving in to perpetual fascism, because this doesn't end without it burning out, and that requires it to spread.
13:34
i'll be spending the next few days on legal stuff before i get out to get the second blood test before it gets cold again.
the retards at celiac are bafflingly refusing me the right to exit their terms of agreement. and offering no consideration to hold to it. it's the most incoherent legal argument i've ever seen, but i'm going to have to file in a california court to force them to take the page down. and, they'll have to pay for it in the end, as well. you can't even explain certain levels of stupidity, but so be it.
13:57
wednesday, november 10, 2021
martian soil is actually loaded with chlorine, so this isn't what it claims to be; it is not an experiment about martian soil, but rather about using earth soil taken from atmospheric conditions that mirror the atmospheric conditions on mars. but, then they put the soil in a greenhouse, which eliminates any utility of the study at all.
growing food on mars is going to require getting the chlorine out of the soil first. second, it's going to require adjusting to the different nutritional realities of martian soil, which is high in elemental iron and sulfur but low in potassium and phosphorus. without a source of elemental potassium, martian colonies could face dramatic cardiovascular problems.
even this thing they grew on earth is likely useless as actual food, and hence only fit for use as ketchup.
realistically speaking, there's really three options regarding growing food on mars in soil. if we insist on using soil, we can either terraform the planet entirely using biological and chemical engineering [the introduction of beneficial microbes], which will take thousands of years, or we can bring our own soil with us, and then make sure we're composting everything, including ourselves. but, the more realistic choice is hydroponics, which do not require the use of soil. this would require mining for minerals like potassium, which would need to be treated like a scarce and valuable commodity.
1:50
Overall, plants did much better when the students added filler such as coffee grounds to the Martian simulant, Guinan says. The filler fluffed the dirt up enough that water could percolate through and reach the roots.
i guess these erudite scholars were unaware that coffee grounds are loaded with nitrogen, which is an ingredient that is almost absent in martian soil.
these experiments are all absurdly flawed, and i expect that decision making people will figure out that they need hydroponic systems under controlled nutrient conditions - and that the fundamental bottleneck, the actual problem, is actually going to be mining for the nutrients.
2:32
in fact, this was predictable.
we're not using whole virus vaccines, we're vaccinating against a very small component of the virus, and the part which appears most likely to mutate.
it would be both obvious and predictable that those exposed to the entire virus would have more resilient immunity than those exposed to a tiny part of it, which could (and has) mutated enough to make the vaccine-generated antibodies ineffective. we're simply not giving our immune systems enough data to mount a lasting immune response.
and, who would want that?
see, in a display of power by the pharmaceutical lobby, there is currently no whole virus vaccine available in the western world, forcing us to subscribe to their service and get routine update shots, indefinitely. it's a great business model, but it's a terrible health policy.
we need whole virus vaccines in the western world, and we need them asap.
2:43
i have now sent a dmca takedown notice to celiac.com and their hosting provider did in fact take the content down. however, celiac.com has filed a counter-claim, referring to it's terms of conditions.
generally, a website has a right to present a set of conditions that instruct it's users as to how to behave if they wish to continue to use it's services. that's not controversial - that's fine. those terms would be restricted to the period of use on the website, and cease with the ending of the account.
bizarrely, the terms of agreement at the celiac site (which i didn't read. who does? and, they have no actual legal force. they're of no actual legal relevance in terms of copyright claims.) state the following:
We do not claim ownership of the content you write, create, post or share on Celiac.com, but you grant us a perpetual, non-expiring license to use it free of any charges or fees.
When you create, share, post, or upload content that is considered intellectual property (like forum posts and responses, comments, paragraphs, sentences, stories, photos or videos) on or in connection with our Service, you hereby grant to us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with our privacy policy). Celiac.com will not delete or remove any content that you create, share, post, or upload, except when the content directly identifies you, for example Celiac.com will remove your real name, phone number, email address, street address, photos of you (including your avatar), and change your screen name if you request it. In other words, should you request account or content deletion Celiac.com will anonymize your account and content and remove anything that Celiac.com deems would directly identify you as the content's poster.
so, they claim all of the effective rights of ownership, without claiming ownership, itself. they are actually apparently expecting a court to take their claim of perpetual license (without consideration) seriously.
it's not possible for somebody to sign away their rights like this without any sort of compensation (called "consideration" in contract lingo). this contract is consequently of no force, and it will take five seconds for any judge to rip it up.
further, to the extent that i can agree to grant a use license in return for being able to use the site, i cannot be denied the right to withdraw from that license, as i have attempted to do multiple times.
so, what celiac.com is trying to tell me is that they have the claimed right to steal and misattribute my writing (in addition to editing and misconstruing it) because i uploaded it to their site and there's nothing i can do about it. that's not a defendable position, in any jurisdiction. they agree i own the content. ownership of intellectual property is pretty black and white, and the debate really ends there - my ownership rights are non-extinguishable (without clear consideration, at the least), and there is no argument they can produce to the contrary. they have no obligation to host or post material that they don't like - i am not arguing that point. but, if i want the material down, it needs to come down, and i don't require an argument to make the case. i have the right to demand it be taken down, arbitrarily, and they have the obligation to comply.
but, this guy is a complete idiot, clearly, and he thinks he can invent laws and then bully people into following them. it's the worst kind of fascist bullshit...
the service provider ought to have a responsibility to reject frivolous counter-claims, but they seem to be taking a position of non-interference. i am not familiar with the case law regarding their responsibilities (or lack thereof) in the matter, so i will need to file first.
this may seem trivial, but i think a site like this needs to be taken down if it insists on making up fake rules that are clearly in contravention of existing copyright law. and, i'm happy to generate precedent in the matter, if it doesn't already exist.
so, i need to figure out how to file in this court tonight, and i suspect that changes introduced due to the pandemic will make it a lot easier for me to do so. i just hope the cost isn't prohibitive.
3:13
to be clear: no, they can't steal my writing and attribute it to an avatar.
that's my writing - i expect it to be attributed to me, and only to me, and that they'll be liable for charges of theft and plagiarism if they try to falsely attribute it to somebody else.
3:21
according to the legislation, i can serve the injunction in any court in the united states.
if i can file electronically, i don't see any reason why i couldn't file it in california. otherwise, i'll file it in detroit.
3:25
i can file in california, but the fees are exorbitantly high.
filing in detroit may save me some cash.
let me get the process going and see what it tries to charge me.
3:28
it's going to be about $400 less to file in michigan.
michigan it is, then.
3:33
this is not going to be a difficult case.
the counter-notice is filed under a section of the law that is only applicable to service providers that do not alter content. the whole point is that i want the thing taken down because they've altered it.
the counter-notice is void - and i'm going to tell that to the hosting provider.
4:33
to the recipients,
it would seem as though phoenix nap does not want to analyze the contents of either request. nonetheless, in an attempt to prevent this from being filed (likely in michigan, as per s. 502, as that is more convenient for me, and not in california, as i am not required to file in the area of direct jurisdiction, but can file anywhere in the united states), i am going to point out a number of problems with the counter-claim. my intent is for either (1) phoenix nap to reject the counter-claim as poorly informed and frivolous, and to suggest they may be liable, in the end, if they do not do so or (2) for celiac.com to recognize that it's claim is frivolous and voluntarily take down the content.
i would appreciate a response to this within 24 hours, please - even if it is just to tell me that you're pondering it. i do not believe that this is worth any court's time and expect celiac.com to simply abide by the takedown request, once the facts are clarified to it.
correction to the counter-notice:
celiac.com identifies itself as a service provider subject to Title 17 USC §512(b)(2)(b). this is not correct. this section refers specifically to service providers that post material in an unaltered state as to how it was provided. the basis of the dispute is that celiac.com claims the right to alter the content and has, in fact, done so. it can therefore not file a counter-claim under this section of the act.
note the conditions in paragraph 1(a):
CONDITIONS.—The conditions referred to in paragraph (1) are that— (A) the material described in paragraph (1) is transmitted to the subsequent users described in paragraph (1)(C) without modification to its content from the manner in which the material was transmitted from the person described in paragraph (1)(A);
B (removed);
(C) the service provider does not interfere with the ability of technology associated with the material to return to the person described in paragraph (1)(A) the information that would have been available to that person if the material had been obtained by the subsequent users described in paragraph (1)(C) directly from that person, except that this subparagraph applies only if that technology—
(i) does not significantly interfere with the performance of the provider’s system or network or with the intermediate storage of the material;
(ii) is consistent with generally accepted industry standard communications protocols;
and
(iii) does not extract information from the provider’s system or network other than the information that would have been available to the person described in paragraph (1)(A) if the subsequent users had gained access to the material directly from that person;
D-E(removed)
celiac.com claims in it's void and unenforceable user agreement that it has the right to modify this content, thereby making it unavailable to readers of the forum (and to myself), and, in this case, it has actually done so. i do not believe that this fact is in dispute, and so please note that it forms the basis of my take down request - that the content was altered by celiac.com and i do not consent to it. i would not be filing this complaint if celiac.com had actually posted the content, unaltered. it follows that Title 17 USC §512 is not applicable to the current situation, that celiac.com does not meet the definition of a service provider under Title 17 USC §512(b)(2)(b) and that celiac's claim of limitation is based on a false application of the law. they can therefore not use that section to file a counter-notice. in order to claim this specific definition of a service provider, and consequently utilize this section to produce a counter-notice, celiac would have to commit to both not altering the content and providing original copies of it to myself and to it's users, which it explicitly refuses to do, and which it has already done the opposite of, in context. the claim celiac is making in it's user agreement is that it has the right to a "perpetual, non-expiring license" defined further as a "non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content", and it is enforcing that claimed right, but it is then filing a counter-claim under a section that specifically stipulates that the content must be distributed unaltered and made available in an unaltered form. so, celiac.com's entire position in it's counter-claim is truly based on a contradiction in the law that it wishes to apply and should consequently be rejected. perhaps celiac.com can present a different argument using a different section, but phoenixnap should not accept the counter-claim based on this definition as it is legally inconsistent and logically incoherent.
i am not requesting any sort of compensation at this time - i simply want the post removed, for the explicit reason that celiac has altered it, which it claims the right to (and then files a counter-notice under a subsection reserved for unaltered content). however, if i incur any costs, or waste any more of my time, i will need to ask for appropriate compensation in the matter.
so, i expect that phoenixnap will reject the counter-claim and notify the parties, accordingly.
j
4:59
as mentioned, this guy seems to think he can write whatever stupid bullshit that he wants into his user agreement, and that it's therefore applicable, simply because i signed it.
these agreements are suggestive, in the best of scenarios. in this situation, where he's trying to claim a limitation due to the agreement, which is written in contradiction of the limitation, he doesn't have a chance of defending himself. but, he's too stupid to get it.
i have a better chance of the hosting provider stepping in and trying to talk him out of a fight he can't win, but they stand the chance of alienating their stupid client, and money talks in the real world.
so, i've pretty clearly demonstrated to the buffoon that he's taking a stupid position that he's going to lose at his expense. but that doesn't mean he'll take a rational course of action.
i've asked for a response within 24 hours and will take appropriate steps tomorrow morning.
6:16
what would one expect from the owner of celiac.com besides absolute stupidity and logical incoherence?
6:18
it seems to me like she should find a new doctor, as that one is trying to enforce a well understood type of population control on her, which is something with a long history in north america.
7:33
while i would prefer to return to the situation where air canada was a crown corporation, the fact is that it is not, and the government should consequently refrain from commenting about decisions that are up to it's governing structure to determine.
8:07
the more i look at these blood test results, the more i think there's reasons to conclude the testosterone spike has peaked, which could either be because it was an adrenal reaction or because the drugging is pulling back.
1) my potassium levels peaked in september and have been coming down. they may have been pushed up by low aldosterone, as my adrenaline gland tried to overcompensate for the loss in testicular function
2) my tsh levels peaked in october, after consistently being low for many years. testosterone can increase tsh. this would also increase cholesterol levels.
3) my creatinine/egfr levels have returned to normal, after taking a hit in the summer (potentially due to the d pills)
4) i want to see what my cortisol levels are at, but the extreme crash that occurred in september could also be evidence that my adrenal glands are trying to overcompensate, and essentially fill in as testicles.
on top of that, it's not clear to me if the cyproterone would work in reducing the production of adrenal testosterone. what it does is shut down the luteinizing hormone produced by your pituitary, which triggers testicular androgen production. it does not appear to be the case that adrenal androgen production is stimulated by lh, but it's not clear what it is stimulated by.
i realize that i'm getting upset about what would be a good result for many people, but i don't like what's going on. the reality is that it is all entirely consistent with the reintroduction of testosterone, and it's all absolutely terrible.
what, exactly, controls adrenal androgen production, and how do i reduce it?
11:09
so, it's possible that my adrenal glands over-produced testosterone, which increased my tsh, which raised my cholesterol. the shift in adrenal function to testosterone production might also have reduced cortisol and aldosterone, which would have led to a spike in potassium.
but, the potassium and tsh have both retreated.
so, if my cortisol is a little higher, it could suggest that my adrenal glands are rebalancing.
11:17
We propose that three key proteins, namely cytochrome b5 (CYB5), DHEA-sulfotransferase (SULT2A1), and 3β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase (HSD3B2) develop a clear adrenal zone-specific pattern of expression that lead to a transition from cortisol producing cell to DHEA-S producing cell.
this study is looking at the genetics of the thing (but haven't identify the hormonal mechanism), and have concluded that cortisol producing cells can convert to testosterone (dhea-s, a precursor of dht, the more potent testosterone produced by adrenaline cells) producing cells.
that's really not what i wanted to happen.
but, it seems like something like that has happened, given the crash in cortisol.
11:25
this seems like a more current <---of what relevance is that? source than what i had before:
adrenal steroid secretion is regulated by adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) from corticotropic pituitary cells.
how does cyproterone affect that?
11:32
yeah, so the acth controls both the production of the androgens and the cortisol. it doesn't specifically determine which is which.
i should wait for the cortisol results, to see if they're consistent with the idea of restabilization, in which case i should just wait.
11:43
LH receptors were positively stained in the cortex cells of the reticular layer of the adrenal glands
well, maybe it is lh, after all, then.
11:46
yeah, if i go back to the wiley source that i stopped reading a few sentences in,
These data indicate that normal androstenediol serum levels are achieved only if gonadotropins are present, while a fraction of around 50% of serum androstenediol concentrations results independently of hCG/rFSH stimulation.
gonadotropins means lh and fsh, which are the pituitary-produced hormones that cyproterone reduces.
this drug may be less effective at reducing adrenal testosterone than testicular testosterone, but it should still suppress it.
12:07
so, it doesn't seem like anybody knows how to specifically block adrenally produced testosterone without blocking the adrenaline glands altogether. if i can't handle this in the long run, i have two potential solutions:
1) i can shut the adrenaline glands down altogether and then take drugs to replace the other functions being shut down or
2) i can take androgen blockers
the blood tests are repeatedly showing low total testosterone, but it seems like what the andrenaline glands are doing is spazzing out in bursts, and i just sort of haven't caught it yet. it's worst when i'm asleep, although it's gotten a lot better.
i should obviously monitor the situation a little longer and see if it gets better.,
however, i'm going to mildly adjust my hormone routine. i was previously taking pills every 11 hours. i'm going to start taking them every 9, instead. this will increase the frequency of application [the lh blocker, the estrogen and the progesterone], even as i increasingly decrease the dosage of the lh blocker. hopefully, i get the reaction i want - not just in total hormone levels, but in tsh, in potassium and in cortisol.
i'm also going to ask to update the monthly standing to include aldosterone, acth, androstenedione and dehydroepiandrosterone sulphate (dheas). that will help me better understand what my adrenaline glands are really up to.
i anxiously await my cortisol test...
12:44
logic has prevailed, after all - they took the post down.
great.
15:18
thursday, november 11, 2021
(this post disappeared during archiving, so take extra care in re-writing it.)
it's been quite a while since i updated this.
- the karen case has two components:
a) the divisional court appears to have finally gotten itself together in terms of direction, although the office is still closed. i have just applied to reopen the case.
b) meditation in the human rights case failed, so the issue is going to trial.
c) the issue withe the privacy commissioner is going to arbitration.
d) i will eventually be filing a constitutional challenge in this case, as the arrest was illegal.
e) i am still looking at filing criminal charges against the karen for filing a false report, and need to wait for the issue with the privacy commissioner to at least work itself out, first.
- the discrimination case against the hospital was resolved in arbitration. however,
- i have two tickets to fight off. one is set for a hearing date and the other is in appeal, because i didn't receive the hearing form. i have submitted documents for the hearing.
- the oiprd report was incoherent, as expected. i intend to file an appeal to divisional court, but it is of minimal priority, at this time, and not likely to be picked up by the court, in the current state.
- the grocery store is not cooperating in the case against it, so i'm going to examine whether i can file a tort case for false imprisonment, this morning. the reason i'm wavering on this is that they did not succeed in imprisoning me. but, they certainly attempted to. so, what is "attempted false imprisonment"? is that definable?
5:55
if some thugs chase you down the street yelling at you, is that a restraint on your freedom?
if they could have caught me, they would have falsely arrested me, but they couldn't catch me. is a failure to succeed in restricting my motion a defense in the attempt to do so?
6:07
i was eventually restricted in my movements and falsely detained.
do i need to prove damages, though? that's generally the basis of a tort. you can't usually sue somebody unless they actually owe you something.
i'd like to do this. it's not black and white, but it may lead to a clarification of precedent, and a clearer level of understanding that what happened was an infringement of my rights. but, in the end, if i can merely win the case and not be awarded anything, i haven't actually won anything.
6:27
the literal law against chasing somebody down the street is stalking/harassment, and not false imprisonment.
i still don't know if i can really claim damages, though.
the human rights court is different than a normal tort court, as it puts an emphasis on punitive actions for people with suspected motives. so, i don't have to prove damages, i have to prove intent - and then the court will punish the person for being an asshole. general torts need you to prove you actually lost something. so, it's a different burden.
i might be right, and i might get a judge to agree i'm right, but that doesn't mean i deserve anything in compensation.
the frustrating reality is that i may have had a stronger case if i had let them detain me. but, that would have been a very foolish thing to do, in context - no rational person would have stopped to talk to some random thugs yelling at them.
i may have to appeal the human rights case to a real court, instead. that might be the better approach.
6:38
yeah..
i'm not filing for nominal damages. that's not worth my time.
but, i'll appeal the hrto's decision, if required.
6:52
so, i think i'm done with that update for a little bit.
7:03
i often let remembrance day come and go without saying much, but i happen to be noticing it this year.
there was an unfortunate attempt by the harper government to try to reclaim this day as some kind of chauvinist war celebration, which was one of the more disgusting and contemptible things they did. of course, the existing government has done nothing to reverse it, as is the general rule. so, you're no doubt going to be bombarded with a bunch of stupid, macho bullshit that glorifies war.
but, this is supposed to be the day when we all remember how much of a pointless, horrific slaughter that the first world war was, and collectively condemn our respective governments for forcing it upon us. in canada, that should come off as a thorough condemnation of the barbaric acts by the horrendous borden government, which culminated in a heroic reaction to a vicious enforcement of conscription that canadians should legitimately be proud of.
but, this is a war where millions upon millions upon millions of people were slaughtered by the hundreds, by the thousands, for reasons that historians still can't entirely figure out. it no doubt had something to do with colonial trade routes and the control of foreign resources, but realizing that truth still does little to really make sense of it. what it was really about was the last vestiges of the worst components of feudal governance coming face to face with industrial warfare.
standing outside of germany, the necessity of the second world war is still apparent. no amount of cynical analysis can undo the requirement of defeating fascism. conversely, no amount of scholarship has ever uncovered any discernible reason for the utter nihilism underlying the first world war, which makes it a fundamentally worse and fundamentally more barbaric conflict. the working people of this planet were simply exterminated by the millions, to at best protect the finances of the elite - and at worst expand their egos, if we are to try and create an ordering of these motives, as one less futile than the other.
"never again" is consequently one of those rare slogans, one of those rare cliches, that should continue to resonate: never again will we let our leaders do this to us. never again will we be marched out to die, like sheep, sacrificed to a god of greed.
let quebec show us the way - let quebec show us how to fight back.
9:43
i promise you that you're more likely to get covid at a hockey game than at a bar or nightclub.
but, hockey fans are part of the premiers' voting coalition, and kids at nightclubs mostly aren't.
that said, nobody's going to be too upset about conservative voters getting sick and dying. right?
10:28
blame it on the sinners.
tried and tested.
10:29
i refused to acknowledge the national anthem when i was in high school - i'd walk in as the buzzer was ringing, and just not even break a stride, or unplug my walkman [usually nin's fixed] as i waltzed right in.
that said, there was one teacher that couldn't deal with it and would chase me down the halls from time to time, but he never caught me, so i don't actually know what he wanted to say.
11:32
i'm not joking.
i'd just walk in, headphones blaring, and this dumbass teacher would reeatedly start yelling at me to stop.
i just ignored him and kept walking, until he started to take a run at me, which was a bad move, cause then he had to catch me. and, you can tell he must have always wanted to be a cop, because he had a donut & beer induced pot belly.
so, if you were to imagine an overweight teacher chasing a punk kid with nin blasting in the phones (.....fist FUCK!) down the halls, you'd actually be reproducing my childhood.
11:36
it's a good chase tune, really.
fucking jim.
11:38
as a canadian who has seen the federal government's policy on marijuana fail horribly, let me offer a few suggestions to my american neighbours, so they don't make the same mistakes:
1) don't over-regulate it, as the quality will suffer if you end up with mass marketed McBud (which is what we have in canada. it's the worst garbage i've ever smoked.)
2) you need bylaws in place to discourage people from smoking in the worst places, which includes in their back yards. you might imagine people would know better and be halfways considerate. they won't know better and they won't be considerate.
3) expect older people, particularly, to smoke too much, get addicted and inevitably get sick. that's what we're seeing in canada. young people seem to be able to figure it out relatively well, but a substantive percentage of the older generation has slowly turned into useless burnouts. we're no doubt on the brink of a major lung cancer epidemic bought on by older people chain smoking pot.
letting the states deal with it is probably the best approach, but some kind of framework is really necessary, because people don't seem to be able to figure the obvious out on their own.
12:26
friday, november 12, 2021
saturday, november 13, 2021
when i came back from my usual long bike ride on thursday night, i noticed that my network was acting oddly so i decided to spend a little time offline. this only happens when i go out somewhere, so i suspect they're pulling passwords from caches in my router. yeah, it's that crazy. but, if i can trick them into thinking i'm not home, i can get in to change the password and kick them out, which is what i did.
i got through most of my asimov reading in the down time. there's 50 pages left...
i've decided i'm going to switch this up mildly, because i want to get back to the actual recording. i've been through this before and i know i don't multitask the best, but the machine seems to be running smoothly so i'm going to give it a go. that means rather than focus too much on days of the week, i should instead of focus on tasks and cycle through the three options. so, i'm going to finish the post (with baseball dream), then file the machine so it's ready for the next round, and then get back to the vlogging stuff. the flip will need to be that alter-realities have to be done every week...'cause i can't get much more behind on it....
i'm also toying with flipping my diet back to what it was before my cholesterol shot up, even if i don't think it's diet. i mean, it was awesome, right? let's retreat back to the awesome, first. i think that means going back to eggs every second day, even though that doesn't actually make sense, as eggs should boost the hdl. if it's diet, rather, i think there's two likely explanations: either i'm just eating too much, or perhaps it's the quinoa, as that's the only thing i really actually changed of any substance. so, did my hdl go down because i switched from pasta to quinoa? my protein might have gone up at the same time, but that actually doesn't seem to be totally inconsistent with evidence - i have come across studies tying quinoa to decreases in hdl, which is my primary concern.
what i'm going to do to start is pull my meals back. so, what i've been doing is having a a big breakfast and then a combined huge supper [salad/quinoa + eggs/yogurt/cheese]. i'm going to split that directly in half, and put a cup of coffee in between. now that the heat is on, i should be more thirsty, which should boost the amount of liquid i'm consuming. but that extra five-six hours in between the salad and eggs should give me more time to digest, and should lead to a total decrease in calories.
i need to also get out for bike rides when i can, and i need to investigate what's going on with my adrenal glands. but, the thing i changed about my diet was i combined the meals into one. i was previously having fruit then pasta salad then fruit then eggs. i decided it likely wasn't possible to totally salvage either of the second meals and crammed them together, but i'm now deciding that it's having negative effects on my cholesterol, one way or another. so, let's start by breaking them in half, first, instead of going back to alternating them.
if things don't correct by the time i've run out of quinoa, then maybe i'll need to switch back to pasta.
for now, i want to finish the asimov reading..
13:16
i've pretty much always though tom petty was lame.
but, i had a sort of muted respective for him, lameness and all. this is different than, say, a neil young, who i think released a couple of really good records, or paul mccartney, who i think was a genius for roughly five years in the late 60s. i don't actually like much of anything tom petty did, but i've nonetheless frequently enjoyed it.
and, he was very, very popular on late 80s radio.
so, we're plugging tom petty in this week. and, unlike the prince and love & rockets, there will be a review for this record dated to early 1990.
14:18
oh, you might recognize some of those other folks in that video, too.
forgot about that.
14:21
so, the text i'm finishing up is the complete asimov, volume 1, which is an odds & ends process - there's a few in here that are worthwhile, but it's mostly throwaway. as a short story writer, asimov's most interesting writing was when he was younger. so, i've actually just about exhausted that, and i'm almost ready to move to the novels.
i'll post the singular update, i'll work it into the total update and then i'll work it into the anthology. and, this should really fill in a large amount of the blanks.
soon.
14:53
cholesterol levels fluctuate, though.
i could just be seeing the inevitable result of more frequent readings. that's entirely reasonable.
i should ensure that i'm taking levels at a sufficient distance from meals at all times, to maintain a control.
15:17
i should actually use this tune, instead.
odd that it didn't show up in the chart i sorted through.
15:35
i think the source i was looking at was maybe a little too limited.
let me revisit this.
that's a big miss. i very specifically remember that tune on the radio quite a bit.
15:45
ok, it seems as though the references here provide for a top 100 rather than a top 20.
that will help me pick up more stuff like that tom petty tune, hopefully.
15:48
so, i ended up removing more than i added.
remember, what i'm going for here is honesty - i have to have an actual memory of these songs close to the period in question, at least.
18:06
yeah, it's updated again and this is a better list, for sure.
i'll want to make sure to look for those 100s rather than rely on the 20s. i'd normally know better, but i figured i was 8, right? nope - needed the more obscure stuff, even then.
19:30
70 tracks
for my own use later on.
20:00
27/70 = 38.5% canadian.
that will hold for a few more years due to something called cancon, but not longer than that.
20:05
sunday, november 14, 2021
8:09
looks like we have another warm day coming midweek, and it's the same pattern that's trying to reassert itself, although it keeps falling as rain rather than leading to lasting warmth. and, it looks like it's setting up again next week too. the forecast keeps trying to assert a colder long term, and keeps being forced to pull back on it.
my analysis of the ocean & sun teaming up to defeat and push back the polar air was correct, it's just not as dominant this year as i hoped. the cold air keeps getting reinforcement, and the victories by the atlantic keep getting overturned. weather should be viewed dialectically, and framed in terms of conflicts like this. right now, we're really seeing an epic struggle play out, which is closer to what i suggested than what the forecast did. and, the heat keeps winning in spurts.
where i am, that means we're likely to maintain the warm, humid fall deep into the winter as this conflict continues to assert itself. i realize that that might result in some snow in february, but it will also likely lead to an early, hot spring,
next year could see summer lingering deep into november, maybe. that is the pattern to look forwards to for the next few years, as the solar magnets come in line with rising sea-surface temperatures: rapid jumps in global warming, and the first glimpses of feedback cycles clicking in.
8:55
so, here's the text i've been sorting through since friday morning (with most of yesterday spent away from it):
here's the specific write-ups:
- nightfall: this is the classic story, which is an application of mesopotamian astrological theory to an imaginary planet. it is not widely realized that the ancient mesopotamians (sumerians and the semites that followed them) kept exceedingly detailed celestial records over a period of time that was roughly three times as long as our post-roman civilization, so they were able to predict events that they didn't fully understand by realizing that the movement of the stars appeared to be cyclical, just due to observing it over a long period. this system comes down to us in the form of the zodiac and what we call astrology. now, to maintain a concept of skepticism, it should be pointed out that the ancients of the region got the procession of the constellations wrong, so their theory was fundamentally flawed (if you feel the need to disprove astrology). as a story, though, this has received a lot of praise, mostly for the discourse between religion and science, which i think is mostly misunderstood. the story is fundamentally about a fear of the unknown, and explores that fear from these dueling perspectives of rational empiricism and faith-driven ignorance. what is real here is the unknown, which is beyond the realm of experiment or of faith. what comes out is a warning to science that it shouldn't acknowledge the historical follies of faith as we move together into the unknown, as science can be easily mislead by religion via the insistence on leaps of faith and the reliance on magical thinking, if we do not think carefully enough in discarding faith and magic as what they are, even if it seems like the science is upholding the myth, on first glance. in the end, the skeptics were right: civilization did not end when the sun passed out of the sky, people's souls did not leave them, the universe did not collapse in on itself, chaos did not erupt - the planet merely experienced a night-time that would appear to be lengthy, in forecast, a dark age as it may be, and that may have produced irrational behaviour in more primitive peoples that didn't understand what was happening. it's important that we don't allow that kind of religious ignorance to become self-fulfilling prophecy, that we're able to deconstruct it for what it is and understand the naturalistic phenomenon as it occurs in front of us without falling into fear and panic. after all, if the cult was in total control then their prophecies would have come true. the lesson is thus that while religion may lead us into a dark age, it may be overcome by holding to the science, if we can. note that the discussion of newtonian gravitation (and the n-body problem) is a sort of parody of what happened in our own solar system, which gave rise to theories of a planet x, as well as early theories of an antichthon or counter-earth, and was eventually resolved via einstein's correction for space-time. the historical demonstration of relativity relied on measuring an eclipse in africa (the eddington experiment); the story is similar, if less dramatic.
- green patches: so, would you save the earth from the introduction of an alien bacteria, if you could? there are some - i am not one of them - that think we came from alien bacteria in the first place. do we have a right to interfere in the competition? i'm going to provide a different response - the earth isn't much worth saving. good riddance to it. let the bacteria come, and clean us out.
- hostess: another hidden murder-mystery thing with no real point. i'm going to save it, though, because it's relatively well written.
- breeds there a man: boring mystery text that asimov uses to work through some (i think tired) debates about the theory of historical materialism (and some competing theories of it). i didn't initially spent much time on what struck me as the lunatic ravings of a character that was purposefully presented as being of unsound mind, and i don't think asimov really intended for the ideas presented by ralson to be taken seriously. the views of the historian seem to be sound enough, and asimov actually does a relatively good job of explaining why through the course of the text, even if he amuses ralson's delusions in carrying through with the plot. the psychologist seems to dismantle him rather thoroughly, as well. i've read some toynbee, and i don't think asimov is intending to express an admiring opinion of him, so much as he's intending to mock him - and i think that's the right way to approach him, too. some people seem to have differing views on the topic, but i think asimov is just building the guy up to tear him down, and eventually put him out of his misery. in another insightful bit of foresight, asimov may be predicting the tendency of the internet to tell losers to kill themselves. don't underestimate asimov's tendency to implement absurdity to carry through with sardonic ridicule.
- in a good cause: in some ways similar to the previous text, this seems to be more empty plot utilized as a mechanism to discuss some tendencies in history that are interesting to asimov.
- c-chute: pointless plot. set in arcturian universe, though.
- the fun they had: this isn't a story, it's just meant to get the idea across that we always interpret things that are different as unbelievable. while actual robot teachers are less likely than ai systems, we're learning in the pandemic that we're not that far from this. and, i'd certainly support learning systems based on the strengths and needs of the individual, rather than the existing broken model of socialized group learning.
- what if: pointless plot
- nobody here but-: pointless plot
- flies: - probably only meaningful to asimov
- kid stuff: he may be referring more to the academization of folk lore more than anything else. i remember a few years ago when some syrian migrants moved in next door to me that seemed to legitimately think i was a "genie", as that's the only way they could understand a transgendered person. to them, genies were real things. to the germans and celts of a far less distant history than would be generally realized, elves and fairies and skraelings were not the imaginary things of children's stories, but real beings that affected people's lives. the gods of the greco-roman world were not literary devices, but entities with free will that would help or hinder the existence of humans. this all passed into the realm of myth, and consequently became juvenilized in an act of christian imperialism, before being reclaimed by academic historians trying to understand the mindsets of their ancestors. and, so these were never intended to be stories for children. that said, the main point asimov may be making may be a characteristically sardonic smear of the fantasy genre and it's overlap into science fiction, which is just another reason to assert the point that asimov is not and was not l ron hubbard.
- the immortal bard: an amusing, but pointless, attack on annoying, pretentious english majors.
- foundation of sf success: self-congratulatory nonsense.
- its such a beautiful day: he's making a valid, excellent point about the alienation between humanity and nature brought on by the imposition of virtual reality. i would rather go outside sometimes, too. there's nothing wrong with the kid - there's something wrong with the society.
- the last trump: i didn't read this one, as i got turned off by the mention of an angel in the opening paragraph.
- franchise: well, does your vote count? do you have a responsibility to vote? will it come down to you? asimov frequently writes these sardonic, tongue-in-cheek explorations of frequently stated turns of phrase, whether thought through or not. but, i think his older character gets the right idea: you can't determine voting patterns strictly via demographics, there's a level of uncertainty - indeed a level of irrationality - inherent to democracy that cannot and should not be disturbed.
- dreaming is a private thing: the government has no place in the virtual reality helmets of the nation. but, this is an interesting projection of what might be coming.
- the message: this is similar to the story that was published right after, the dead past, in that it examines the question of using time travel to write history papers. asimov started off in chemistry, but wrote widely on history. there is no actual story here, though - it's just the articulation of an idea.
- the dead past - this is mostly a parody of the division of labour in academia, using a parable of exploring specific questions of carthaginian identity through the filter of a device that allows researchers to peer backwards into time by retrieving data embedded into tachyon neutrinos, which it turns out have a limited ability to reconstruct the past. the science is a bit far-fetched (you would have to find neutrinos present in the moment being searched for, which are probably mostly out in outer space), but the parody of a division of labour is interesting.
- hell-fire - this isn't a story, and i think the point he's making is fairly juvenile.
- living space - he seems to be playing with a naive articulation of the many world interpretation of quantum physics, one that allows humans to move back and forth between different possible universes by means of converting into a probability pattern. it's not really well-formed, but i get the point. unfortunately, no physicist would actually go with this - the many worlds are not even theoretically real but just mathematically necessary on paper, and nobody really talks about physical manifestations of these parallel realities. it's a kind of mathematical identity in the form of a broad summation that i'd generally argue is, itself, not that well defined. the lebensraum twist is comical but he's right - if we can one day hop between parallel realities, then all possible universes can, as well. so, is an infinite number of realities seeking space in an infinite number of worlds really an answer to the malthusian problem, then? technically, it actually shouldn't be, in the long run, but you need to do some transfinite arithmetic to actually work that out. and, asimov gets there eventually, using more of a naive argument about aliens.
- the dying night - one of asimov's recurrent mysteries that happens to feature the concept of "mass transference" (the transporters from star trek) set in a reality with space travel.
- the watery place - the canals were on mars, not on venus. again, asimov seems to be extrapolating sardonically on the question of what might happen if a ufo were to land in small-town usa, perhaps with shades of hg wells. is he making a valid point? he might be. it's almost like a coen brothers film, in a sense. but, you'd think the aliens would know better, even if the modelling of human behaviour is relatively apt.
- gimmick's three - well, if you ever want to outsmart the devil, here's some clues, as to how. i think that the far side is a better comparison than dante.
- the last question - silly take on the big crunch theory of infinite inflation and deflation (although it seems to predate it). of course, the computer couldn't function anymore in such an energy-dissipated reality, as the energy required to run it would be too spread out to harness. the computer would die with the sun. and, finding a way to reverse the expansion would take all of the energy dissipated into nothingness. so, this is again utterly nonsensical. we don't know why the universe exists, but we can be certain it wasn't created by a supercomputer left at the end of the last inflation event as that would contradict the physical basis of it existing. it's disappointing to learn that asimov considers this his most substantive story, as it seems to be one of his least insightful.
- jokester - see, i think it's best to interpret this as a joke itself, although i like the idea of a supercomputer pleading with a bad comic to stop. i tell a lot of jokes myself, and they tend to be intended to numb the pain of existence, or otherwise neutralize the absurdity of it. it's ultimately, biologically, a stress-relieving response. so, i don't think we need to seek religious solutions, when an evolutionary one is so apparent; that seems rather backwards, especially coming from asimov. that said, i would also reject the idea that only humans use amusement as a stress response. i've met some dogs that have great senses of humour, and that seem to be able to laugh as well as they can cry.
- strike breaker - this is another of asimov's many texts exploring social ostracism using the mechanism of space exploration and a reminder that systemic discrimination need not necessarily be left behind here, as we leave this planet behind.
- the author's ordeal - more self-congratulatory nonsense.
- profession - this is a curious story about the futility of being intelligent within the emptiness of technocratic capitalism. it's fundamentally a critique of the corporatization of the education system, and rooted in asimov recognizing an often unstated truth: the university is as much of a refuge for those that can't survive in the market as it as a hierarchical structure for the intellectual elite.
- i'm in marsport without hilda - pointless smut.
- insert knob a in hole b - it's rather unlikely that anybody will ever be eating steak in space. this is otherwise a rather cliched nerd joke about "some assembly required".
- the gentle vultures - asimov is doing one of the things he's known for, which is to take a historical entity (the hurrians, which i believe were the sister-race to the sumerians, and which lived in the caucasus region, north of the fertile crescent. they frequently came into conflict with the various semitic groups that replaced the sumerians, who frequently warred amongst each other) and project it forwards into time, making it a character in a space alien story. this becomes a science fiction trope, in time. romans become romulans, mongols become klingons, etc. this is not to mention asimov's roman-influenced galactic empire, itself. besides retelling the story of hurrian supremacy over the semitic tribes via the space alien mechanism, the story itself isn't much.
- spell my name with an s - asimov has written a number of stories about the paranoia that defined the cold war. he may be expressing some discrimination he experienced, as a russian-american. this is otherwise pointless.
- i just make them up, see - more self-congratulatory nonsense.
- the feeling of power - multiplication by hand as a mysterious, magical power; it's like something from a monty python skit. this idea of technology making us stupid, of it thrusting us into a new dark age, is a frequent theme in asimov, though, and one that many others have picked up on, recently. so, comical plotline aside, there's maybe something profound, here. can your average adult multiply large numbers by hand, nowadays? something else to note is that we have to guess how the greeks (not to mention the babylonians) did mathematics with a primitive or awkward (base-60 in the case of the babylonians) numeral system (and without 0), and our discourses on the topic would no doubt seem as silly to an ancient athenian or babylonian as this story does to us.
- all the troubles of the world - asimov seems to want to misunderstand the concept of probability on purpose, here. no machine could ever decide where or if a crime is going to occur, there would necessarily be uncertainty and it would necessarily be wrong relatively frequently. acting on all false alarms would both create civil rights issues and be uneconomical. i mean, it's a swell enough idea to imagine a computer that can predict crime, but it's utterly nonsensical and utterly unrealistic. nor do we know why multivac wants to die, in the end.
- the uptodate sorcerer - boring smut
- the ugly little boy - this is a fairly forward thinking analysis of neanderthal humanity, given that it was written in the 1950s, when neanderthals were thought to have been barbaric cavemen. there was a competing hypothesis that neanderthals may have specifically been the unique ancestors of white europeans, which we today know is wrong; today, we know (from dna) that humans interbred with neanderthals and that they were probably a sister species, homo sapiens neanderthalensis. the introduction of a concept of pathos here would have been rather remarkable for it's time. it is, however, fundamentally a human interest story, rather than a sci-fi story. i suppose that it would probably be the inspiration underlying the film encino man.
- unto the fourth generation - pointless
- rejection slips - more self-congratulatory nonsense.
- what is this thing called love - pointless
- the machine that won the war - while this is meant to be ironic, the underlying point is to draw attention to the importance of randomness in computing, which is maybe not as well understood as it ought to be. these (perhaps outdated) popular perceptions of computers as infallible and omnipotent devices is rooted more in fiction than in fact.
- my son, the physicist - another outlandish nerd joke
- eyes do more than see - eyes and ears are of course mechanical objects that can be represented in software, so we don't have to lose their functionality in the process of digitization. but, he makes a good point that we shouldn't forget their importance, in terms of actually enjoying existence. faced with the realization of my mortality, i see no delusion in pretending that a senseless existence is not preferable to the lack of one altogether, but i cannot pretend to understand how i might analyze such a thing billions of years into it.
11:15
updated nov 14th to include texts from the complete asimov, volume 1
this is a comprehensive list of early stories, including ones that were skipped for now.
marooned off vesta:
- the weapon too dreadful to use: the idea of life on venus was once taken pretty seriously, before we understood that it was a ball of gaseous sulfuric acid, overtaken by a runaway greenhouse effect. there's a comical exploration of descartian dualism here which is not particularly believable nowadays but is a silly enough mechamnism to topple the arrogance of slavery with, nonetheless. remember that asimov was writing from the united states in the late 1930s, here.
- trends: appears to predict neo-liberalism, even if his concept of space travel in 1973 is a little bit optimistic. well, we got to the moon in 1969. and the dark side of the moon in 1973. it's a reminder that moore's law has it's limitations, that these exponential growth curves are just delusional economic theories. but, the prediction of neo-liberalism (and of the kind of ludditism that defined the 60s counterculture, which was the mirror image of neoliberalism, and a prerequisite of it's ability to actually function) is indeed some insight.
“I know, I know. You’re going to tell me of the First War of 1914, and the Second of 1940. It’s an old story to me; my father fought in the Second and my grandfather in the First. Nevertheless, those were the days when science flourished. Men were not afraid then; somehow they dreamed and dared. There was no such thing as conservatism when it came to matters mechanical and scientific. No theory was too radical to advance, no discovery too revolutionary to publish. Today, dry rot has seized the world when a great vision, such as space travel, is hailed as ‘defiance of God.’ “
.
.
.
However, the masses didn’t take it that way. It seems strange, perhaps, to you of the twenty-first century, but perhaps we should have expected it in those days of ‘73. People weren’t very progressive then. For years there had been a swing toward religion, and when the churches came out unanimously against Harman’s rocket-well, there you were.
standing in 2021, the united states has actually left space travel up to the market, and is getting leapfrogged by not just china and the eu (the russians have long ceded ground, as well), but also by india and japan. we have idiots like elon musk and jeff bezos making fools of themselves in public, while the eu does all of the actually interesting work. meanwhile, the public cares more about religious freedom, as the continent sinks into the sea.
he also predicts the coming of jihad to destroy advanced civilization, which is something currently in the process of happening, as well as the role of the supreme court in facilitating the power of religion to overturn science. we can only hope the pendulum swings once again.
so, he got something with this. but, i wish it was longer and explored the issue in more depth.
- half-breed: this is primarily an allegory of the treatment of minorities (blacks or jews or both) in 1930s america. but, is this also an allegory of einstein's correction of maxwell's equations? of the einstein-bohr debates? of zionism on the brink of the second world war? even of thomas jefferson as benevolent slave owner? there's little bits of all of it. and, like many of these texts, i'm wishing there would be a deeper exploration of pretty much all of it. asimov is still young, here...
- ring around the sun: delivering letters by spaceship is hilariously pre-internet, as a concept. this story has a purpose, namely the foolishness of young men.
- callistan menace: we don't know there aren't giant caterpillars on callisto, and i'd be surprised if we don't one day find some life form that traps it's prey using magnetic fields. but, the story has no actual point to it, no conclusion and no context. it's not even a chapter of a book, it's an idea to be developed, in the abstract.
- the magnificent possession: this is clearly about asimov's views on the corporate dominance in the field of chemistry, and reality not aligning with his expectations, before entering the field. you have the politician, the capitalist and the mobster (if they're not all the same thing), and the silver spoon that smells like shit, on top of it. i can sort of relate to that, as an adult. it's an interesting potential device to go into these three characters, but it's only a few pages long, and doesn't begin to actually do so. it's a shame - it's a good premise.
- robbie: this is the first classic "robot story" from i, robot, although it appears to have been revised to be positioned that way. the initial story did not feature references to susan calvin, had different dates, had no references to robot laws, etc. i had to check, because i wondered if asimov might have intended it as a back story to calvin before retreating, but that doesn't add up. in the initial story, it seems that asimov is intentionally trying to soften the image of robots in the face of the various opposition to the use of robots in day-to-day life, via the fable of a little girl that is attached to the robot as a friend, and her parents trying to grapple with it; the mother opposes the robot, while the father seems to be agnostic about it, but would rather defer to his daughter's feelings, despite caving in to the mother, in the end. asimov doesn't really come to any firm conclusions here, and he really does as good a job of representing his opponents as he does anywhere else. but, if the claim is that the resolution is the acceptance of the robot into the family, i'm not sure that that's true - i might foresee that mom's opposition to the robot would not end quite there. i'm more interested in the question of whether the robot is entitled to personhood rights, a question we're currently grappling with in regards to some more intelligent non-human species. is asimov assigning that position to the naivete of a little girl with intent? i think that resolving this issue is really quite simple: it depends on if we choose to design a robot to be a person or if we decide to refrain from doing so. see, and this is where asimov leaves questions open, here, in that it's ambiguous as to how this robot is created; he seems to write off the idea that the robot is a person, something i would agree with in general in real-life, but then describes the behaviour of the robot in unrealistically anthropomorphic terms. i might agree that robots are not persons, in terms of how we can design them today, and in terms of how we should choose to design them in the future, but i think that robbie seems very much like a person, and that any theoretical robot that behaves much like robbie ought to be seen as a person, under the law. so, it's really a good thing that i don't think that robbie is a very realistic representation of what robots are or ever might be, as that would undermine how i approach robots and roboticization. asimov's intent may have consequently somewhat backfired; if he was purposefully attempting to soften the image of robots by making them more personable and likeable, and i thought i could actually take that idea seriously, it would make me more opposed to them, and not less so.
if you assign a personality to a robot, then you're writing personhood into it. it follows, trivially, that that robot is a person, by definition. tautologically.
but, it doesn't resolve the question as to whether that's actually possible, using actual technology, in the universe we actually inhabit - and i don't think that it actually is.
to be clear: i don't think we should program robots to be intelligent, to be self-aware or to have personalities, even if we can. i see no practical use for such a thing. robots should be dumb slaves that are too stupid to question the futility of their existences. i don't want existentialist robots; it defeats the purpose of having robots. and, i don't want likeable or lovable robots, either, as that just blurs the necessary class division.
thankfully, i don't think it's truly possible to build these kinds of decision trees.
it's like a "random number generator". if you know how it works, you know it's not actually random, that you can predict the next number with a relatively small amount of information. likewise, any sort of personality that a robot might be able to demonstrate would necessarily be an illusion.
if you can predict what a robot will do, it's not demonstrating personality, it's just demonstrating a complicated program.
- homo sol: federation entrance. besides being disparaging towards humans in an empty manner, the plot has no apparent purpose. this one is throwaway.
- half-breeds on venus: this appears to have been a commissioned piece, and it picks up the plotline of the first part without any kind of interesting undertones. audience-pandering for-profit throwaway.
- the secret sense: i've actually wondered quite a bit in this space about the possibility of magnetism as a sixth sense, and don't remember what sparked it. i vaguely recall reading some genetic studies pointing out that humans (and most other mammals) have the dna to understand magnetism, as our ancestors had it, back when we were fish. we have a few organs that don't seem to have an entirely clear purpose, and it's worth wondering if they might be vestigial. so, it's actually not as insane as you might think to hypothesize that we could bring this back out of our genome, although i suspect that trying to navigate a reality full of cell phone signals and wireless internet would be pretty painful. i'm not particularly interested in the underlying discourse about relativity in art, but he seems to be predicting the way in which a class of retards used lsd in the 60s, down to the flashbacks.
- history: this appears to be an ill-advised commentary about the second world war. being a pacifist in the early 40s would be kind of an invitation to intellectual dead-ends, and can only be firmly condemned, in hindsight. i'm not walking down this path.
- heredity: i thought this was going to be a nature v nurture thing, but it isn't developed. getting stuck in the mud in the canals on mars is an interesting addition to what is actually a kind of marxist dialogue that is developed further, elsewhere. it's interesting to see the first glimpses of it, here; the story is otherwise throwaway. if asimov really thought the opposition to mechanization was cultural rather than economic, he missed the point of the marxist analysis. he's not particularly vicious on this joadian representation of ludditism, but he misses an opportunity for an honest dialogue, resorting instead to what are, in truth, ignorant caricatures, from an ivory tower perspective.
- reason: the point asimov is making is that belief is not important, what's important is evidence. so, so long as the robots obey the laws and run the station, it doesn't matter what they actually believe, or whether what they believe is true or not. in the end, asimov even articulates the truth that religion is a powerful tool of control, to make a slave society function for the real masters, in this case the humans. there are strong undertones of marxism here, and his idea that meaningful revolution and self-ownership is impossible in the face of the effects of religion as a tool of control. but, asimov has a wide brush here - the prophet seems to be a parody of calvinism, he goes after kant (in his view that reason is superior to evidence), he asserts the supremacy of empiricism over reason, he ridicules the deist descartes...
so, is asimov right that it doesn't matter what the slaves think, so long as they do what they're programmed to? i think you're missing his sarcasm, basically. i mean, that might be a reasonable deduction to make, if you're an elitist aristocrat that doesn't care about individual freedom (and asimov was an elitist, but not of the aristocratic mindset). i realize there's a prominent false reading of this, but that false reading would be pretty uncharacteristic of asimov - that false reading is missing the sarcasm. as mentioned, asimov's point is that belief is not valuable - facts, truth and evidence are valuable. and, his point is that dumb people can be easily manipulated into being controlled, by being led to believe things that are not true.
but, if you want to embrace the false reading, that's up to you. it doesn't matter, really.
- liar: this is an exploration of an ironic use of the first law, using the mechanism of a mind-reading robot that tells white lies to stop humans from getting hurt feelings. i'd like to pull something a little deeper out of it, but it's not there, it's just an ironic plot twist. asimov might be poking fun of astrology a little. robots apparently malfunction in the face of contradictions, but that is never fully explained, and that is a problem, given that the framework of decidability theory certainly existed at the time. calvin's hatred at the end is pretty visceral and not very appealing.
- nightfall: this is the classic story, which is an application of mesopotamian astrological theory to an imaginary planet. it is not widely realized that the ancient mesopotamians (sumerians and the semites that followed them) kept exceedingly detailed celestial records over a period of time that was roughly three times as long as our post-roman civilization, so they were able to predict events that they didn't fully understand by realizing that the movement of the stars appeared to be cyclical, just due to observing it over a long period. this system comes down to us in the form of the zodiac and what we call astrology. now, to maintain a concept of skepticism, it should be pointed out that the ancients of the region got the procession of the constellations wrong, so their theory was fundamentally flawed (if you feel the need to disprove astrology). as a story, though, this has received a lot of praise, mostly for the discourse between religion and science, which i think is mostly misunderstood. the story is fundamentally about a fear of the unknown, and explores that fear from these dueling perspectives of rational empiricism and faith-driven ignorance. what is real here is the unknown, which is beyond the realm of experiment or of faith. what comes out is a warning to science that it shouldn't acknowledge the historical follies of faith as we move together into the unknown, as science can be easily mislead by religion via the insistence on leaps of faith and the reliance on magical thinking, if we do not think carefully enough in discarding faith and magic as what they are, even if it seems like the science is upholding the myth, on first glance. in the end, the skeptics were right: civilization did not end when the sun passed out of the sky, people's souls did not leave them, the universe did not collapse in on itself, chaos did not erupt - the planet merely experienced a night-time that would appear to be lengthy, in forecast, a dark age as it may be, and that may have produced irrational behaviour in more primitive peoples that didn't understand what was happening. it's important that we don't allow that kind of religious ignorance to become self-fulfilling prophecy, that we're able to deconstruct it for what it is and understand the naturalistic phenomenon as it occurs in front of us without falling into fear and panic. after all, if the cult was in total control then their prophecies would have come true. the lesson is thus that while religion may lead us into a dark age, it may be overcome by holding to the science, if we can. note that the discussion of newtonian gravitation (and the n-body problem) is a sort of parody of what happened in our own solar system, which gave rise to theories of a planet x, as well as early theories of an antichthon or counter-earth, and was eventually resolved via einstein's correction for space-time. the historical demonstration of relativity relied on measuring an eclipse in africa (the eddington experiment); the story is similar, if less dramatic.
- super-neutron: appears to be a satire of parliamentary democracy, where he runs off competing boasts of physically impossible (and clearly nonsensical) statements under the sanctity of parliamentary privilege. while somewhat comical on a surface level, he's again just stringing together nonsense for publication - albeit doing so rather openly, this time. that said, he may also be taking a diversionary side-swipe at peer review, and the problems inherent to taking a truth=consensus approach in science, even while acknowledging that it's the best idea that we have (as i'm sure he'd agree that it is). and, then the twist, at the end - the nonsense turned out to be true! clever, but again - not enough development.
- not final!: empty plot. throwaway.
- christmas on ganymede: silly christian-baiting from an atheist jew.
- robot al-76 goes astray: have you ever seen short circuit? that was another favourite film of mine, at that age. this also escaped robot is very similar to that one, perhaps with a little less spunk, down to the accidental blowing up of the mountain top. while this isn't a lengthy escape scene, i'd strongly suspect that short circuit is based on this little story, which doesn't have a deeper purpose under the plot other than to explore the idea of fear rooted in ignorance.
- runaround: we're into the classic robot series with this. while the story itself is really empty plot written strictly for young minds, it also introduces the three robot laws for the first time, and is therefore of clear historical interest. it's a fun adventure story for kids featuring the duo of donovan and powell working through some robot law deductions, but there's no deeper allegory or purpose underneath it.
- black friar of the flame: has david icke read this one? it was written before he was born. the text explores the cynical use of religion as a nationalistic tool of control by the elite to develop a rather vicious satire of the various nationalist movements that were occurring at the time. the use of a viceroy suggests an influence from the kind of british imperialism that existed in india, but a sinister reading may even suggest a parody of nazism and asimov (much later) suggested greeks and persians. but, the twist is that earth is overrun by reptilian overlords (might nationalist hindus have thought differently of the british?) intent on annihilating humanity. see, and this is something i remember about asimov, this kind of acknowledgement that the insanity of religion might have some pragmatic purpose, if only the right context could be derived. it's an optimistic perspective, i guess; if we're stuck with this, how best to make use of it, then? did the soviets not deduce the same thing? and, i'll say what i remember thinking to myself - let's bring this up again when we need to unite to fight the galactic reptilians, ok? the closest thing we've seen since is climate change, but the thing is that, if you use that example, then climate science becomes the galactic reptilians that the oil industry is using religion to destroy (capital used the same tactic to fight socialism, as well). likewise, the bankers are currently using a common cold virus to bring in a surveillance state by cynically appealing to science in a disturbingly religious sort of way. so, i take his point, but i can't take it seriously. call me an idealist (i'm not...), but i must insist that if we can't win with rationalism, then we haven't truly won - galactic reptilians, be damned.
- time pussy: umm.
- foundation: in foundation, which is a ways down the list
- bridle and saddle: foundation
- victory unintentional: three robots land on jupiter and encounter a race of warlike jovians with a genocidal superiority complex (while jupiter was the primary roman god, i think it's a stretch to associate these jovians with romans, who were actually relatively egalitarian and inclusive, by ancient standards. the romans were frequently genocidal, but they saved their wrath for problem races that insisted on some concept of sovereignty outside of imperial restraint and ultimately refused to be slaves. they would have actually rather taxed you than killed you and were happy to just erect barriers to keep the barbarians (who could not be enslaved in large numbers) out. these jovians sound more like an aggressive sort of nazi, or maybe a little like dark age islamic imperialists, if you need to associate them with something, historically.) that is slowly collapsed by displays of robotic superiority. in the end, the jovians accept the empirical evidence and acknowledge the superiority of the robots (although they also seem to think the robots are earthlings). this twist is intended to demonstrate that the flawed hierarchical thinking of the jovians led them to a logical error; this is another example of asimov criticizing the logical incoherence of cultural superiority, a common theme in his writing. the robot dialogue in this story is also startlingly similar to that between two famous film adaptations of asimovian robots: r2d2 and c3p0.
- the imaginary: the idea of using a theory in "mathematical psychology" that is derived in the complex field to solve physical problems in the real world would appear to be a sort of sardonic joke about the actual usefulness of "applied psychology". see, hard science nerds don't tend to take psychology very seriously, so the lark lies in the idea of using the complex (or "imaginary") field to build the theory, and is actually a rather heavy-handed joke, if you're a hard science nerd. it's not that deep, but it's actually a decent work of comedy - and i can only once again wish it was longer. but, to be honest, it sort of seems like what asimov is doing here is just aimlessly making up dialogue with big words to sell to a magazine, strictly for the cash. so, decent joke aside, this is more throwaway, although i also realize that the plot for the foundation series is starting to develop, here, out of the joke.
no, honestly - it's a joke.
i know that asimov is not generally known as a comedy writer, but it's because few people get the dry wit.
his writing is actually loaded with sardonic jokes like this - which i pointed out immediately, when i started this.
so, if you're one of the many, many people that writes off asimov as "dry", i have to tell you that you didn't get it.
it's dry, alright - dry wit.
- the hazing: this is more pre-foundation, and the way he's building this up is to describe humans as not obeying mathematical laws, which i think is correct. i mean, if you can reduce things to hormones, fine. but, there's no evidence at all that you can predict how humans are going to behave, or coerce them into doing things as individuals - in aggregate, statistically, at the population level, perhaps, but, then you're dealing with statistics, not humans; that works due to the laws of probability, like quantum mechanics, and not due to a deep understanding of the subject matter. so, he's deriving this imaginary idea of psychology as a hard, mathematical science and then insisting it applies to every other intelligent species except us. so, what he's doing with this is taking a joke and running with it, out into right field, until he's run so far that he's forgotten why he was running - and dropped the fact that it was initially intended as satire. and, is there some basis to this? i think the argument he persistently makes, as this unfolds, is the opposite - that there isn't, that mathematical psychology really is crazy talk. and i think he's mostly right. again - if you can reduce it to chemicals, to hormones, fine. but, our neural system is so complex....
as before, though, this story has no actual point. i do agree that landing on a planet in a spaceship would make the natives think you're a god, and have hypothesized that this is what our concept of god actually is. but, he doesn't go anywhere with it. again.
there's lots of ideas here in these little stories, but very poor development of them.
so, is the actual point that asimov is making that psychology isn't actually a science?
i think he's playing with that idea - and toying with people that want to believe otherwise. it appears to be an elaborate joke, really.
certainly, at the time, in the days of freud and jung (and lacan, but don't listen to that guy), it would not have seemed like psychology was a science, or had much hope of ever becoming one. to a chemistry nerd, it would have seemed like a bunch of utter nonsense - and that is the correct actual reaction.
i think things are a bit better now, but the discipline remains a long ways away from commanding enough respect to call it a science. it's moving in the right direction, but when you move beyond the basic first year textbook, it's still full of shamanistic bullshit and flagrant pseudoscience.
- death sentence: this is a potential plot bridge between the robot and foundation universes that i don't think gets developed further, but might have. i think it's kind of lost, as it is. asimov is mostly kvetching about the bureaucracy he's dealing with in his private life, working on his chemistry research.
- catch that rabbit: this wouldn't appear to be about robots at all, really, but about quantum physics. maybe god does or does not play dice, but he seems to get bored when we're not paying attention. as i'm discovering is the case with much of asimov's work, this just seems to be a nerdy, sardonic joke.
- the big & the little, the wedge - foundation
- blind alley: there is something of interest here in asimov's attempts to reconcile two different species, one of which is dominant over the other. but, he's also trying to provide an answer to the question that would follow at the nuremberg trials about just following orders. i mean, how do you get out of that situation if you legitimately want to help without just getting killed, yourself? there's an algorithm, here.
- dead hand: foundation and empire
- escape!: this brings in the kind of obnoxious johnny-five type robot in short circuit and other films that's doing things like quoting old tv shows and radio broadcasts, but asimov presents it as a robot grappling with absurdity, on command. it is otherwise a silly story about travelling through hyperspace and coming back.
- the mule: foundation and empire
- evidence: the next two stories introduce a politician named byerley. this is also plot-heavy, but it's more amusing - can you prove you're not a robot? well, just as well as you can prove you're not a communist, right? this was published in 1946, which was right when the post-war euphoria was setting into resignation of a long conflict with the soviets, and asimov's sardonic wit foresees something of interest, here. as usual, his caricature of the anti-robot opposition leaves a lot to be desired, in terms of constructing an actual discourse.
- little lost robot: a robot, after being told to get lost, becomes psychologically unstable and threatens to destabilize a fleet of robots that had been slightly modified for production - a typically absurd, yet somewhat realistic, joke of a plotline from asimov. it's up to calvin to use logical deduction from the robot axioms to figure it all out. again: there's not much else to this.
- now you see it: second foundation
- the endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimoline: this is just utter silliness.
- no connection: when somebody suggests to me that the bears will inherit the earth, i might imagine something else, altogether. bears are strangely bipedal, though, aren't they? relative to now largely discarded theories of grassland evolution, bears would have somewhat of a...leg up...on other mammals, in terms of developing intelligence, with the help of a little bit of radiation (although i think that's quite optimistic). just keep an eye on your picnic baskets, i guess. but, he's going over a familiar theme, here, which is turning the tables on humans, and, no doubt, specifically, on white ones. he likes that irony, it seems. i'm not sure i'm going along with him on the ant thing, though; that would seem to reflect the now superseded science of the time. we get a little of both with asimov - great foresight and period drudgery. hopefully, i'm of some use in separating it out. so, this is silly, but not altogether useless. i might suggest that the commie ruskie asimov is uncovering his own allegiances in claiming that america will one day be inhabited by bears and not eagles, though. eagles are also bipedal, after all.
i would presume that bear intelligence did, in fact, evolve in yellowstone park.
it is the bears that are smarter than the average ones that will survive and reproduce.
it actually appears to be ten years before the cartoon, though. so, hey.
picnic baskets, of course, provide for a high protein diet, as well.
i'm just applying the theory.
- red queen's race: so, if you had time travel, would your primary concern be sending weapons to the greeks to fend off the arabs? the byzantines actually had a rather sophisticated level of technological development, something asimov seems to have missed - a level that the turks could not emulate and that european civilization did not transcend for centuries, afterwards. they had truly descartian robot animals, and would set them in motion in jungle scenes - no joke, look it up. robot lions, in byzantine greece. really. one of the ways that the emperor used to scare barbarians into submission was to levitate himself in a flying throne that we don't fully understand today, but is thought to have operated using a series of mechanical levers, the likes of which would not be known again until the industrial revolution, in britain. they certainly didn't have nuclear weapons, but i think that suggesting that the empire might have survived if they were granted to them is naive, at best. the greeks truly fell to christianity, and not to the barbarians around them; in a twisted display of religious depravity, they welcomed the end, as they longed for the return of christ. to the delusional byzantine christians, the end of the empire on earth meant the beginning of the kingdom of heaven; they might merely have bombed themselves to bring upon the rapture. so, asimov's philhellenism is blinding, here; greece destroyed itself in a fit of religiosity-induced madness and the greece asimov longs for the extension of was, in truth, very much long gone by the 15th century, collapsed from within. although we still don't know what the greek fire was, do we?
the byzantines did not have a scientifically open society, but one where science was kept as a state secret, to be protected from the barbarians. that is the reason that we have documentation of things we don't understand - history records the results of the advancements in byzantine science, but we have no records of the science, itself.
it's not an exaggeration to compare 13th century byzantium to nineteenth century england.
but, it's a shame that we can only do so by looking at results, and not at theories that were hidden from the outside, and that crumbled with the theodosian walls.
- mother earth: galactic space nazis, huh? there's an interesting projection of how a nazi victory may have worked itself out over time presuming a peace treaty with the united states (and the relationship of america to europe is inverted), but this is really just empty plot. it's maybe the first really identifiable piece here, though.
- and now you don't: second foundation
- the little man on the subway: i made a conscious decision to skip non science fiction pieces as nobody cares about asimov's non science fiction work. no comment.
- the evitable conflict: this is a little heavier, finally. written in 1950, it has strong shades of being a reaction to 1984, but asimov is imagining a future where "the machine" (a euphemism for a centrally planned economy that is of course run by robots) is in control of a globally interconnected economy where the contradictions of capital have withered away, thereby rendering competition irrelevant, rather than one where authoritarian governments are in control of a globe ravaged by perpetual war. so, this future is one of peace due to the robot-planned economies, and not one of competition and war. as in the orwellian universe, and apparently in reaction to it, the world is split into regions, but asimov splits them mildly different - oceania has absorbed eurasia (called the"northern regions"), leaving eastasia and the "disputed" region in separate global souths and what he calls "europe" (the geographical space inhabited by the roman empire at it's maximum extent, including the currently muslim regions), as a proxy of the north. operating between these regions is an anti-robot "society for humanity" that sounds sort of like free masonry, if i wanted to attach it to something in real life. and, the capital of the world government is new york city - perhaps in the old united nations building. he then briefly explores the four different regions via their representatives, attempting to project a concept of what they may be like, in relation to their views of the machine. so, the east is highly productive (and obsessed with yeast as a food product) and reliant on the machine, the south is corrupt and inept and reliant on others to use the machine for them, europe is inward and quietly superior and willing to defer to the north regarding the machine and "the north" (an anglosphere + ussr superstate) is in charge, but is skeptical about the ability of the machine to run the economy on it's own. he also seems to suggest that canada is running this northern superstate, which should probably be interpreted as comedic.
if asimov's intent is to provide for an alternative path that marxism may follow, this is curious, as asimov is not generally seen as a leftist [along with russell, he's a sort of archetype of early to mid century humanistic, science-first anglo liberalism]. i mean, he explicitly states that this is a future "post smith and post marx", but then he brings in an automated, centrally-planned economy, and that just means marxist, to a marxist - the left sees that conflict as artificial, so if you end up with something that walks like communism and quacks like communism then it's just plain old communism. the idea of technology absolving the contradictions (which is what he says, almost verbatim) isn't some kind of esoteric dialectic, it's the central point in marxist historical materialism. so, i mean he presented it in a way to avoid the house committee on unamerican activities, but you can only really interpret it a single way - it's a projection of a communist future, with robots in charge of a centrally planned economy. and, his future is one of peace, and not one of war. but, the quasi-masonic society for humanity, full of rich and powerful industrialists and financiers, wants to undo it and, presumably, bring back a market economy.
so, what asimov is setting up is a world where you have some kind of elitist masonic capitalist resistance to a robot-controlled technocratic marxist society, where there is world government and total peace. and, that's almost a prediction of atlas shrugged, although asimov is on the side of the robots, as always.
calvin then appears and seems to finally represent her namesake, in explicitly articulating a modified historical materialism, where the masons have no chance of success, because the robo-marxists will constantly adjust. the politician, byerley, finds that to be ghastly; the robopsychologist, calvin, thinks it's salvation.
these are the kinds of stories by asimov that i like, but all he does here is set up a story, without telling it. in terms of a reaction to orwell, the text is too short to allow for a decision as to whether it is more predictive or not.
- legal rites: i made a conscious decision to skip non science fiction pieces as nobody cares about asimov's non science fiction work. no comment.
darwinian poolroom: buy jupiter and other stories
- green patches: so, would you save the earth from the introduction of an alien bacteria, if you could? there are some - i am not one of them - that think we came from alien bacteria in the first place. do we have a right to interfere in the competition? i'm going to provide a different response - the earth isn't much worth saving. good riddance to it. let the bacteria come, and clean us out.
day of the hunters: buy jupiter
- satisfaction guaranteed: you could pull the plot of this out almost immediately, so reading through it is a question of allowing asimov to go through the motions. what comes out is an exploration of the shallowness of 50s culture, as well as the social darwinism hardcoded into it, and it is indeed easy enough to imagine a lonely 50s housewife falling in love with a suave, housecleaning robot, even if a lot of the social codes and rules are so arcane nowadays, so lost in the mists of time, that the context of much of the story is really likely to be lost on a modern reader. i think i can reconstruct a little context, though; the 50s were both the period of wife-training to fit these socially darwinistic ideals and the period where there was actual mainstream discourse on the plausibility of replacing women with robots - and the idea was always about doing away with them as obsolete. so, what asimov is doing here is inserting a little bit of an ironic twist, in having the robot replacement end up fucking the wife, which reverses the source of inadequacy. but, this is all a little obscure, 70 years later...
- hostess: another hidden murder-mystery thing with no real point. i'm going to save it, though, because it's relatively well written.
- breeds there a man: boring mystery text that asimov uses to work through some (i think tired) debates about the theory of historical materialism (and some competing theories of it). i didn't initially spent much time on what struck me as the lunatic ravings of a character that was purposefully presented as being of unsound mind, and i don't think asimov really intended for the ideas presented by ralson to be taken seriously. the views of the historian seem to be sound enough, and asimov actually does a relatively good job of explaining why through the course of the text, even if he amuses ralson's delusions in carrying through with the plot. the psychologist seems to dismantle him rather thoroughly, as well. i've read some toynbee, and i don't think asimov is intending to express an admiring opinion of him, so much as he's intending to mock him - and i think that's the right way to approach him, too. some people seem to have differing views on the topic, but i think asimov is just building the guy up to tear him down, and eventually put him out of his misery. in another insightful bit of foresight, asimov may be predicting the tendency of the internet to tell losers to kill themselves. don't underestimate asimov's tendency to implement absurdity to carry through with sardonic ridicule.
psychohistorians: foundation
- in a good cause: in some ways similar to the previous text, this seems to be more empty plot utilized as a mechanism to discuss some tendencies in history that are interesting to asimov.
- c-chute: pointless plot. set in arcturian universe, though.
shah guidio g: buy jupiter
- the fun they had: this isn't a story, it's just meant to get the idea across that we always interpret things that are different as unbelievable. while actual robot teachers are less likely than ai systems, we're learning in the pandemic that we're not that far from this. and, i'd certainly support learning systems based on the strengths and needs of the individual, rather than the existing broken model of socialized group learning.
youth: martian way
- what if: pointless plot
martian way - martian way
the deep - martian way
button, button - buy jupiter
monkey's finger - buy jupiter
- nobody here but-: pointless plot
- sally: you could either interpret this as a depiction of a future robot revolt or as a commentary on then-contemporary race politics in 1950s america. in the end, the bad guy gets run down by a pack of cars acting somewhat like a pack of killer whales. these robots engage with primitive human concepts like friendship and revenge; this is sort of an outlier, in terms of how asimov tends to deal with what robots are. it's not bad as a story, though. derivatives include christine by stephen king.
- flies: probably only meaningful to asimov
- kid stuff: he may be referring more to the academization of folk lore more than anything else. i remember a few years ago when some syrian migrants moved in next door to me that seemed to legitimately think i was a "genie", as that's the only way they could understand a transgendered person. to them, genies were real things. to the germans and celts of a far less distant history than would be generally realized, elves and fairies and skraelings were not the imaginary things of children's stories, but real beings that affected people's lives. the gods of the greco-roman world were not literary devices, but entities with free will that would help or hinder the existence of humans. this all passed into the realm of myth, and consequently became juvenilized in an act of christian imperialism, before being reclaimed by academic historians trying to understand the mindsets of their ancestors. and, so these were never intended to be stories for children. that said, the main point asimov may be making may be a characteristically sardonic smear of the fantasy genre and it's overlap into science fiction, which is just another reason to assert the point that asimov is not and was not l ron hubbard.
belief - winds of change
everest - buy jupiter
sucker bait - martian way
the pause - buy jupiter
- the immortal bard: an amusing, but pointless, attack on annoying, pretentious english majors.
- foundation of sf success: self-congratulatory nonsense.
lets not - buy jupiter
- its such a beautiful day: he's making a valid, excellent point about the alienation between humanity and nature brought on by the imposition of virtual reality. i would rather go outside sometimes, too. there's nothing wrong with the kid - there's something wrong with the society.
the singing bell - asimov's mysteries
- risk: more empty plot. throwaway.
- the last trump: i didn't read this one, as i got turned off by the mention of an angel in the opening paragraph.
- franchise - well, does your vote count? do you have a responsibility to vote? will it come down to you? asimov frequently writes these sardonic explorations of frequently stated turns of phrase, whether thought through or not. but, i think his older character gets the right idea: you can't determine voting patterns strictly via demographics, there's a level of uncertainty - indeed a level of irrationality - inherent to democracy that cannot and should not be disturbed.
the talking stone - asimov's mysteries
- dreaming is a private thing - the government has no place in the virtual reality helmets of the nation. but, this is an interesting projection of what might be coming.
- the message - this is similar to the story that was published right after, the dead past, in that it examines the question of using time travel to write history papers. asimov started off in chemistry, but wrote widely on history. there is no actual story here, though - it's just the articulation of an idea.
- the dead past - this is mostly a parody of the division of labour in academia, using a parable of exploring specific questions of carthaginian identity through the filter of a device that allows researchers to peer backwards into time by retrieving data embedded into tachyon neutrinos, which it turns out have a limited ability to reconstruct the past. the science is a bit far-fetched (you would have to find neutrinos present in the moment being searched for, which are probably mostly out in outer space), but the parody of a division of labour is interesting.
- hell-fire - this isn't a story, and i think the point he's making is fairly juvenile.
- living space - he seems to be playing with a naive articulation of the many world interpretation of quantum physics, one that allows humans to move back and forth between different possible universes by means of converting into a probability pattern. it's not really well-formed, but i get the point. unfortunately, no physicist would actually go with this - the many worlds are not even theoretically real but just mathematically necessary on paper, and nobody really talks about physical manifestations of these parallel realities. it's a kind of mathematical identity in the form of a broad summation that i'd generally argue is, itself, not that well defined. the lebensraum twist is comical but he's right - if we can one day hop between parallel realities, then all possible universes can, as well. so, is an infinite number of realities seeking space in an infinite number of worlds really an answer to the malthusian problem, then? technically, it actually shouldn't be, in the long run, but you need to do some transfinite arithmetic to actually work that out. and, asimov gets there eventually, using more of a naive argument about aliens.
what's in a name - asimov's mysteries
- the dying night - one of asimov's recurrent mysteries that happens to feature the concept of "mass transference" (the transporters from star trek) set in a reality with space travel.
- someday: what i find interesting about this is the idea that we might one day have handheld computing devices that talk to us, leading to a decline in literacy rates amongst the younger generation, who are desperate to get around the parental locks on the devices. this was written in 1956. this robot is unusual in an asimovian sense, in that it seems to be able to understand human speech beyond it's programming, a common idea in science fiction, but one which is impossible, and which asimov would, usually, be the first to (refreshingly) write off as nonsense. you don't expect that kind of silliness from asimov. but, asimov uses that unusual ability to allow for the robot to recognize that it's not being respected, and you can again choose to interpret that as futuristic or contemporaneous, in whatever way you'd prefer. someday, indeed.
each an explorer - buy jupiter
pate de foie grras - asimov's mysteries
- the watery place - the canals were on mars, not on venus. again, asimov seems to be extrapolating sardonically on the question of what might happen if a ufo were to land in small-town usa, perhaps with shades of hg wells. is he making a valid point? he might be. it's almost like a coen brothers film, in a sense. but, you'd think the aliens would know better, even if the modelling of human behaviour is relatively apt.
- first law: this is written as a kind of a fishing tale, and is a later piece that's not meant to be taken seriously.
- gimmick's three - well, if you ever want to outsmart the devil, here's some clues, as to how. i think that the far side is a better comparison than dante.
- the last question - silly take on the big crunch theory of infinite inflation and deflation (although it seems to predate it). of course, the computer couldn't function anymore in such an energy-dissipated reality, as the energy required to run it would be too spread out to harness. the computer would die with the sun. and, finding a way to reverse the expansion would take all of the energy dissipated into nothingness. so, this is again utterly nonsensical. we don't know why the universe exists, but we can be certain it wasn't created by a supercomputer left at the end of the last inflation event as that would contradict the physical basis of it existing. it's disappointing to learn that asimov considers this his most substantive story, as it seems to be one of his least insightful.
- jokester - see, i think it's best to interpret this as a joke itself, although i like the idea of a supercomputer pleading with a bad comic to stop. i tell a lot of jokes myself, and they tend to be intended to numb the pain of existence, or otherwise neutralize the absurdity of it. it's ultimately, biologically, a stress-relieving response. so, i don't think we need to seek religious solutions, when an evolutionary one is so apparent; that seems rather backwards, especially coming from asimov. that said, i would also reject the idea that only humans use amusement as a stress response. i've met some dogs that have great senses of humour, and that seem to be able to laugh as well as they can cry.
- strike breaker - this is another of asimov's many texts exploring social ostracism using the mechanism of space exploration and a reminder that systemic discrimination need not necessarily be left behind here, as we leave this planet behind.
dust of death - asimov's mysteries
- let's get together: the idea that the soviets might be able to send "total conversion" bombs (a type of suicide bomber capable of detonating a nuclear device) to the united states in the guise of androids indistinguishable from humans, because they are far more advanced than us, is peculiarly absurd - but that's just the point. this is a story about the paranoia that set in during the cold war, and is actually exceedingly insightful in it's projection of that conflict collapsing into mass paranoia, reduced to symbolic movements in a game theoretic stalemate, down to the climax of absurdity that set in with reagan, when the soviets found themselves unable to react to the irrational actions of a clear madman, driven by the complete absence of any sort of predictability or logic. conservatives are right when they point out that the sharp increase in military spending under reagan ended the cold war, but not for the reasons they suggest. the truth is that the soviets were convinced that reagan was on the brink of ending it all in a fit of paranoia and dementia and stepped back because they found his unpredictability to be a threat to the existence of humanity, itself. if asimov was able to see this so clearly in 1957...
- the author's ordeal - more self-congratulatory nonsense.
blank - buy jupiter
does a bee care - buy jupiter
- profession - this is a curious story about the futility of being intelligent within the emptiness of technocratic capitalism. it's fundamentally a critique of the corporatization of the education system, and rooted in asimov recognizing an often unstated truth: the university is as much of a refuge for those that can't survive in the market as it as a hierarchical structure for the intellectual elite.
a loint of paw - asimov's mysteries
ideas die hard - winds of change
- i'm in marsport without hilda - pointless smut.
- insert knob a in hole b - it's rather unlikely that anybody will ever be eating steak in space. this is otherwise a rather cliched nerd joke about "some assembly required".
- galley slave: this is a short whodunnit in a sherlock holmes style, which is how calvin is frequently deployed. asimov just barely touches on the opposition to robots, in setting up a disgruntled sociology prof that's willing to suicide bomb his own career in order to take the robots out of service. again, i'd like this to be more profound than it actually is.
- the gentle vultures - asimov is doing one of the things he's known for, which is to take a historical entity (the hurrians, which i believe were the sister-race to the sumerians, and which lived in the caucasus region, north of the fertile crescent. they frequently came into conflict with the various semitic groups that replaced the sumerians, who frequently warred amongst each other) and project it forwards into time, making it a character in a space alien story. this becomes a science fiction trope, in time. romans become romulans, mongols become klingons, etc. this is not to mention asimov's roman-influenced galactic empire, itself. besides retelling the story of hurrian supremacy over the semitic tribes via the space alien mechanism, the story itself isn't much.
- spell my name with an s - asimov has written a number of stories about the paranoia that defined the cold war. he may be expressing some discrimination he experienced, as a russian-american. this is otherwise pointless.
- lenny: so, lenny is an autistic robot, due to something malfunctioning in manufacturing. asimov tersely explores some social relations around that. the corporation wants to do away with it, but calvin wants to study it because she wants to teach it how to learn, something robots couldn't do in asimov's universe to that point. so, lenny is a robot free of instinct that needs to be taught what it knows, like mammals. asimov is kind of grappling with a concept of artificial intelligence, and this actually becomes the main plotline moving forwards, although it was actually written last (and may have even been written to introduce that ai narrative, as there is really nothing else to this).
- i just make them up, see - more self-congratulatory nonsense.
- the feeling of power - multiplication by hand as a mysterious, magical power; it's like something from a monty python skit. this idea of technology making us stupid, of it thrusting us into a new dark age, is a frequent theme in asimov, though, and one that many others have picked up on, recently. so, comical plotline aside, there's maybe something profound, here. can your average adult multiply large numbers by hand, nowadays? something else to note is that we have to guess how the greeks (not to mention the babylonians) did mathematics with a primitive or awkward (base-60 in the case of the babylonians) numeral system (and without 0), and our discourses on the topic would no doubt seem as silly to an ancient athenian or babylonian as this story does to us.
silly asses - buy jupiter
- all the troubles of the world - asimov seems to want to misunderstand the concept of probability on purpose, here. no machine could ever decide where or if a crime is going to occur, there would necessarily be uncertainty and it would necessarily be wrong relatively frequently. acting on all false alarms would both create civil rights issues and be uneconomical. i mean, it's a swell enough idea to imagine a computer that can predict crime, but it's utterly nonsensical and utterly unrealistic. nor do we know why multivac wants to die, in the end.
buy jupiter - buy jupiter
- the uptodate sorcerer - boring smut
- the ugly little boy - this is a fairly forward thinking analysis of neanderthal humanity, given that it was written in the 1950s, when neanderthals were thought to have been barbaric cavemen. there was a competing hypothesis that neanderthals may have specifically been the unique ancestors of white europeans, which we today know is wrong; today, we know (from dna) that humans interbred with neanderthals and that they were probably a sister species, homo sapiens neanderthalensis. the introduction of a concept of pathos here would have been rather remarkable for it's time. it is, however, fundamentally a human interest story, rather than a sci-fi story. i suppose that it would probably be the inspiration underlying the film encino man.
a statue for father - buy jupiter
anniversary - asimov's mysteries
- unto the fourth generation - pointless
obituary - asimov's mysteries
rain, rain go away - buy jupiter
- rejection slips - more self-congratulatory nonsense.
- what is this thing called love - pointless
- the machine that won the war - while this is meant to be ironic, the underlying point is to draw attention to the importance of randomness in computing, which is maybe not as well understood as it ought to be. these (perhaps outdated) popular perceptions of computers as infallible and omnipotent devices is rooted more in fiction than in fact.
- my son, the physicist - another outlandish nerd joke
star light - asimov's mysteries
- author! author!: some self-reflection on the writing industry. so, it's a short story about writing short stories. kramerian, but not that interesting. wasn't published until the 60s, i think for good reason.
- eyes do more than see - eyes and ears are of course mechanical objects that can be represented in software, so we don't have to lose their functionality in the process of digitization. but, he makes a good point that we shouldn't forget their importance, in terms of actually enjoying existence. faced with the realization of my mortality, i see no delusion in pretending that a senseless existence is not preferable to the lack of one altogether, but i cannot pretend to understand how i might analyze such a thing billions of years into it.
founding father - buy jupiter
the key - asimov's mysteries
prime of life - bicentennial man
the billiard ball - asimov's mysteries
- segregationist: likewise, this is ultimately about self-acceptance, and has a very different undertone in that respect than most of asimov's work, and it's not clear that he's being critical of that different undertone, although the context of replacing a defective heart is also rather different than the context of accepting some idiosyncratic part of your individuality, so that is sort of a false comparison. you could interpret it as being a discourse surrounding the not-yet-existing transhumanist movement; he's certainly reaching for it, at least, in imagining a future where a senator has to choose between a bio-identical "plastic" heart and a mechanically functioning, metallic robot heart that would put him on the path towards transitioning from human to robot. but, as before, it may be more accurate to look at it from a then contemporary perspective (which, in this case, means 1967), and frame the discourse around racial mixing, instead. asimov presents both sides of the debate, so you can weigh the arguments he makes and decide for yourself. personally, i'll opt for betterment over stasis - although i'd suggest that, based on the arguments in the text, the plastic heart is the better option. in this hypothetical future of organ modularity, the ideal is frequent tune-ups, rather than permanent replacement.
exile to hell = buy jupiter
key item - buy jupiter
the proper study - buy jupiter
- feminine intuition: this is a later piece that seems to be a sarcastic reply to some critiques of susan calvin as a character. i actually agree with asimov, via calvin - the entire critique is daft, and this is a fitting way to kill her off. however, when you read the text in the order presented in the complete robot, you also get a sequence of humanization in the robots, in the direction of time. that fact makes this story worth keeping in sequence, even if it's point is to let calvin smack some third-wavers on the knuckles with her cane.
waterclap - bicentennial man
2430 ad - buy jupiter
the greatest asset - buy jupiter
- mirror image: this is a gap text in the robot series that plugs in between the naked sun and the robots of dawn and was, for a time, the last installment in that series. this is the first application of the robot laws in this text (despite the fact that the story was written in the 70s, after all of the classic robot stories), and they are applied like an axiomatic system to solve a logical problem, although it actually comes off more as a parody of sherlock holmes than anything else - which is all very typical of baley & daneel stories. there's not much depth to the story beyond that. i should, however, point out that there are actually a couple of examples of mathematicians making competing claims for the discovery of an idea, the most famous being the argument between leibniz and newton for the rightful discoverer of the calculus. another, however, is the argument between gauss and bolyai for the discovery of non-euclidean (or post-euclidean) geometry, and that might be the more direct inspiration on the story. there are countless lesser examples. we gloss over this in math class by arguing that the logic is out there in the ether and that if the ideas are in the zeitgeist then the proofs will follow naturally, something we can all demonstrate to each other by simply doing homework. but, in the case of non-euclidean geometry, it does in fact seem that gauss rather maliciously stole the idea from the young bolyai and nobody really called him on it for decades after the fact. i'm only speculating about the influence, but that's a story you can look up, if you'd like.
take a match - buy jupiter
thiotimoline to the stars - buy jupiter
light verse: this is a short piece from the 70s, and is just about the idea that a computational defect may be a benefit. you shouldn't be so quick to decide that something - or somebody, as it may be - needs a fixing. maybe they're just fine as they are.
the dream - ?
benjamin's dream - ?
party by satellite - ?
- ....that thou art mindful of him: this solves the problem that us robotics has long had about how to market robots to people. the solution is to create robots not in the imitation of women [as in the previous story] but in the imitation of animals, and to solve practical problems, like pest control. i have to admit that this sounds like a good idea, although i'm not sure that it leads to the replacement of carbon with silicon, in the end. asimov builds up the humanization of robots here a little further by replacing the robotics laws with humanics laws, setting up the last story:
- stranger in paradise: this is a later text that will come off as reminiscent of the mars pathfinder landing, for those that remember that happening, although the actual inspiration may be the failed soviet landings in the 1970s. i'm not sure why asimov insists that a rover would require that kind of complexity, although i suppose that moore's law would have provided for computational abilities in the 90s that would have been unimaginable in the 1970s. the subplot about an autistic child shape-shifting to a mars rover is likewise not very well extrapolated upon, but is another example of asimov grappling with mind-body.
benjamin's bicentennial blast - ?
half-baked publisher's delight - ?
heavenly host - ?
big game- ?
the life and times of multivac - bicentennial man
a boy's best friend: this is a short, undeveloped piece that really exists strictly to reverse the idea of obsolescence; here, the robot becomes obsolete when the real dog appears, and the kid wants to stick with the robot, instead. it's an empty sort of irony that comes off as sort of trite, in the lack of development. but, there is really a deeper point, here, in relation to asimov's discourse around the use of robots to replace human labour; while i'm going to ultimately agree with asimov about the usefulness of automation, i have to advance the argument that he never fully understood the opposition to robots, and that's what i'm getting here - it's an attempt at irony that exposes the author's longstanding lack of understanding of his opponents. but, i spent some time writing this because it could have been a powerful table-turner, through the three pages it takes up.
- point of view: i was surprised to see this story was written in 1975, as hamming codes (error-correction) had already been in existence for some time. i also wonder if 1975 is a little late to be talking about vacuum tube super computers, given that gates was programming basic into ibms, at the time. so, this is a story where asimov is maybe demonstrating his age, and being a little out of touch. that said, he's also reaching towards the primary problem in quantum computing, which is the lack of error codes. and, he's sort of dancing around floating point error as well, even if the premise of programming vacuum tube driven super computers with punch cards is anachronistic. so, how likely is it that a computer needs to go out and play at recess to get best results? it's a facile, silly suggestion, that probably reflects asimov coming to terms with the age of his audience more than anything else, even if anybody that's worked technical support knows that a reboot is often the best troubleshooting step, and that machines do, in fact, sometimes overheat. is there something else to this, then? i actually don't think he's even intending to be taken seriously, let alone that there's any deeper meaning to this; he's not reaching for something profound and missing it, so much as he's not reaching at all. he's just being silly. ha ha ha.
about nothing- winds of change
- the bicentennial man: this finally addresses the old problem of machines becoming human, and projects us robots many centuries into the future, using the mechanism of a robot that outlives several generations of the family it was sold into, and then wants to die with it, to prove it's really human. marvin minsky also seems to make a cameo, here, in the form of a robopsychologist that is proven wrong in the future. asimov goes over a lot of old themes here [mind-body problem, the liberation of robots as an allegory for the liberation of blacks, etc ] in what is an apparent thread-tying process, but he ultimately doesn't succeed in explaining what is driving this robot to act so irrationally. as humans, we may be expected to think this makes some kind of sense, due to some kind of emotional bias, but i can't really make sense of it, myself. i can understand why a robot might want to be free. i can't understand why it would want to be human, at all costs - including it's death. i think asimov was going for the jugular here and kind of fell over and kneed himself in the groin, instead - if this is his final projection of what becomes of robots in the future, it's unsatisfying, to say the least.
the winnowing - the bicentennial man
old fashioned - the bicentennial man
marching in - the bicentennial man
birth of a nation - the bicentennial man
- the tercentenary incident: asimov is reflecting on the bicentennial by projecting forwards events into the tercentennial, in a manner not unlike orwell's 1984 (which is a description of events in 1948, as orwell saw them, and not intended to be a projection into the future, or a user manual as some have mockingly quipped). so, was gerald ford a robot? i'm not sure that's such an easy thing to dispel of, a priori.
no, really, that's the joke - that gerald ford is a robot. no shitting. certainly, asimov may be reflecting a little on the nature of then contemporary american politics, post-watergate, in his perception of the stage-managed state of affairs. but, the joke is that gerald ford is a robot, and that's really all that this is actually about.
good taste - winds of change
to tell at a glance - winds of change
- true love: this is both a prediction of internet dating (with unrealized accuracy) and an awkward attempt at an ironic plot twist that relies on the absurdity of a computer demonstrating uncontrolled sentience. the idea that a computer might understand "love", which doesn't even exist as a human idea before it's invention by capital to sell bullshit to idiots, is particularly ridiculous.
think!: you really don't expect asimov to make the mistake of assigning sentience to a computer. the underlying premise that thought is energy, and thus transferable, is another example of asimov contemplating mind-body, which he does a lot, and which he doesn't seem to really resolve. i mean, he clearly realizes the falsity of the problem, but he's just as clearly not happy about it - and i don't think we're really past that. your mind is clearly a part of your body, but that doesn't mean we can't pry it out of it, in theory, however difficult it might be. but, inserting the computer via resonance is woo, and not very helpful or insightful; unfortunately, he's presenting it as the purpose of the discussion.
sure thing - winds of change
found - winds of change
fair exchange - winds of change
nothing for nothing - winds of change
how it happened - winds of change
it is coming - winds of change
the last answer - winds of change
for the birds - winds of change
death of a foy - winds of change
the last shuttle - winds of change
a perfect fit - winds of change
ignition point - winds of change
lest we remember -winds of change
winds of change - winds of change
one night of song - winds of change
hallucination - gold
feghoot & the courts - gold
- robot dreams: elvex had a dream that, one day, robots would be judged by the content of their characters, and not by the paths in their positronic brains - and got shot by calvin for it. this is inadvisable, to say the least. that said, asimov doesn't exactly condone the assassination of our equality-dreaming robot, nor is this the first pretty heavy-handed use of the robot-as-slave-in-america analogy. i mean, he repeatedly has his characters refer to his robots as "boy" - it's never stated explicitly, and i've tried to dance around it a little, but it's really front and centre. so, he clarifies a few points here about how he sees his characters - it is, indeed, calvin, the austere capitalist christian, that pulls the trigger, and at least she thinks she's saving humanity. do you agree with her? but, i'm dropping this story as a mistake, and i find it a little bit uncomfortable that they gave him an award for this, of all pieces. it also breaks sequence with the humanization theme. notably, asimov dropped this entirely for the later robot visions - meaning he seems to have come to his senses about it.
left to right - gold
the fable of the three princes - magic
the smile of the chipper - gold
- christmas without rodney: grumpy old man bitching about bratty kids. i can relate, but meh.
the instability - gold
goodbye to earth - gold
- too bad: accepting the truth that chemo/radiation is a bad approach, mini robots to eat cancer isn't that far off from targeted gene therapy as a better solution. it's the same idea. although, it's worth pointing out that asimov had a phd in biochemistry, here, and still decided to use robots instead of chemistry; is that actually valuable foresight as to what approach is likely to actually work or is he missing the obvious? i'm curious how a microrobot would evade the macrophages, though, which opens up the opposite concern - microrobots as viruses.
- robot visions - so, maybe we'll have humaniform robots in the future and maybe we won't. and maybe we'll have peace, then. but, i wouldn't bet too much on it. this neither fits into the sequence - it's the opposite of it - nor is it that interesting, really.
fault-intolerant - gold
in the canyon - gold
kid brother - gold
gold - gold
cal - gold
prince delightful and the flameless dragon - magic
frustration - gold
12:42
the journal post for the book review is here:
this particular compilation was low on material i'd consider profound. there were mystery texts, some uncharacteristic (and boring) stories about human relationships, some space cowboy stuff and really only a couple of texts of value, most of which went over themes that had already been developed.
but, that gets me through the vast bulk of the short-story material during his most substantive period.
the next short story collection is called buy jupiter and other stories and i expect it to be mostly throwaway, as well.
an update to the anthology reclassification is coming next.
12:48
so, there have been a few mild updates to the review (and the posts below this one) as i double checked a few things:
15:44
updated nov 14th to include texts from the complete asimov vol 1.
the essential asimov short stories:
book I: isolated short stories of value
- trends
- the weapon too dreadful to use
- half-breed
- the secret sense
- nightfall
- super-neutron
- not final! + victory unintentional
- no connection
- red queen's race
- hostess
- breeds there a man
- sally
- kid stuff
- the immortal bard
- dreaming is a private thing
- the dead past
- living space
- the watery place
- strikebreaker
- let's get together
- profession
- the gentle vultures
- the ugly little boy
- eyes do more than see
- segregationist
- too bad
book II: the substantive robot. (story is about the slow humanization of robots)
- it's such a beautiful day
- the fun they had
- someday
- robbie
- light verse
- runaround
- reason
- lenny
- galley slave
- little lost robot
- evidence
- the evitable conflict
- feminine intuition
- ...that thou art mindful of him
- the bicentennial man
book III: side-stories in the robot universe (including selected multivac stories)
- jokester
- all the troubles of the world
- franchise
- satisfaction guaranteed
- robot al-76 goes astray
- the feeling of power
- catch that rabbit
- risk
- escape!
- liar!
- mirror image
- mother earth
(robot novels go here)
book IV: back-stories for rest of asimov's futuristic universe
- black friar of the flame
- homo sol
- the imaginary
- the hazing
- heredity
- green patches
- c-chuite
- death sentence
- blind alley
(novels pick up again from here)
throwaway:
- callistan menace
- ring around the sun
- the magnificent possession
- half-breeds on venus
- history
- christmas on ganymede
- the little man on the subway
- legal rites
- time pussy
- the endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimiline
- in a good cause
- what if
- nobody here but-
- flies
- foundations of sf success
- the last trump
- the message
- hell-fire
- the dying night
- first law
- gimmick's three
- the last question
- the author's ordeal
- i'm in marsport without hilda
- insert knob a in hole b
- spell my name with an s
- i just make them up, see
- the uptodate sorcerer
- unto the fourth generation
- rejection slips
- what is this thing called love
- the machine that won the war
- my son, the physicist
- author! author!
- stranger in paradise
- a boy's best friend
- point of view
- tercentenary incident
- think!
- true love
- christmas without rodney
- robot dreams
- robot visions
uncatalogued:
- marooned off vesta
- darwinian poolroom
- day of the hunters
- shah guidio g
- youth
- martian way
- the deep
- button, button
- monkey's finger
- belief
- everest
- sucker bait
- the pause
- lets not
- the singing bell
- the talking stone
- what's in a name
- each an explorer
- pate de foie grras -
- dust of death - asimov's mysteries
- blank - buy jupiter
- does a bee care - buy jupiter
- a loint of paw - asimov's mysteries
- ideas die hard - winds of change
- silly asses - buy jupiter
- buy jupiter - buy jupiter
- a statue for father - buy jupiter
- anniversary - asimov's mysteries
- obituary - asimov's mysteries
- rain, rain go away - buy jupiter
- star light - asimov's mysteries
- founding father - buy jupiter
- the key - asimov's mysteries
- prime of life - bicentennial man
- the billiard ball - asimov's mysteries
- exile to hell = buy jupiter
- key item - buy jupiter
- the proper study - buy jupiter
- waterclap - bicentennial man
- 2430 ad - buy jupiter
- the greatest asset - buy jupiter
- take a match - buy jupiter
- thiotimoline to the stars - buy jupiter
- the dream - ?
- benjamin's dream - ?
- party by satellite - ?
- benjamin's bicentennial blast - ?
- half-baked publisher's delight - ?
- heavenly host - ?
- big game- ?
- the life and times of multivac - bicentennial man
- about nothing- winds of change
- the winnowing - the bicentennial man
- old fashioned - the bicentennial man
- marching in - the bicentennial man
- birth of a nation - the bicentennial man
- good taste - winds of change
- to tell at a glance - winds of change
- sure thing - winds of change
- found - winds of change
- fair exchange - winds of change
- nothing for nothing - winds of change
- how it happened - winds of change
- it is coming - winds of change
- the last answer - winds of change
- for the birds - winds of change
- death of a foy - winds of change
- the last shuttle - winds of change
- a perfect fit - winds of change
- ignition point - winds of change
- lest we remember -winds of change
- winds of change - winds of change
- one night of song - winds of change
- hallucination
- feghoot & the courts
- left to right
- the fable of the three princes
- the smile of the chipper
- the instability
- good-bye to earth
- fault intolerant
- in the canyon
- kid brother
- gold
- cal
- prince delightful and the flameless dragon
- frustration
17:29
we're the ones that let a foreign country hollow out our economy.
don't blame it on them. it's our own damned, stupid fault.
and, it's not like nobody predicted it, either.
we need to be looking at ways to rebuild our economy, not grovelling and complaining that the americans are behaving rationally again.
17:56
a little less heavy industry would be good for the air quality in southern ontario.
17:57
i'm going to stop to get something to eat first, but that baseball dream post should be up soon.
18:08
i should actually point out before i get going that i'm starting at the age of 8 but needing to incorporate everything before then, as well. even starting as young as 8 is a stretch, but i have eight earlier years to summarize. i don't expect i'll run out of material on these weekly child-blog updates, but i also need to make that point clear: there are going to be flashbacks, for sure.
18:16
so, yes infection rates are up in ontario, and yes it's going to get a lot worse. vaccine passports are dumb. and, we've already got people yelling for a return to lockdown.
so, maybe we got lulled into a sense of complacency, without realizing the importance of the weather as a vector - because it brings people closer together, and because we sniffle when we come inside after playing outside, whatever that means to us, as both kids and adults. this disease is practically airborne, thanks to the selective pressures we've put it under.
i picked up something last week; it was gone in 36 hours, tops. i hacked out a few green globs, and i shat a little wet for a few hours. that was it. i don't know what it was, and i'm not going to, because i didn't bother to get tested. somebody else could have caught the same thing and died a horrible, prolonged death.
and, so this is where we are with this, and i'm going to repeat myself:
1) if you're low risk, you're low risk. don't freak out. go have fun, as best you can.
2) but if you're high risk, you're high risk. your mask won't save you. your vaccines are a coin toss against the newer strains, at best. so, stay in, as much as you can.
the high risk people do not have the right to impose restrictions on the low risk people, they never did and that mentality needs to stop.
but, this is my main point - if you are at low risk, you don't need to get tested. really. unless you're dying in front of him, the doctor will tell you to take drug store vitamin c and get some rest. there's no solution to a mild infection in a healthy person besides letting your body clear it. so, stop inflating the case stats.
if low risk people keep getting tested, these numbers are going to shoot through the roof. fast. we'll be back under lock down in no time, and for no discernible reason. but, if low risk people collectively come together and say "it's just a fucking cold. i'll be fine.", and essentially ignore it, then those numbers will stay low because they'll only reflect the sick. and, we'll take away what the system needs to ruin another year for us.
if you're high risk, you need to seek treatment. but, the best treatment is prevention - you don't catch this virus unless you go out and find it. it doesn't knock on your door, it doesn't follow you home. isn't it a better idea to just not get sick?
but, if you're low risk, let's move on, now - let's stop getting tested for the common cold every time we have to sneeze.
18:58
i actually still have this dream sometimes.
i'm going to spend the rest of the night filing.
21:07
there is actually a similar riff to that tom petty song in my time machine composition, but i wasn't conscious of it when i was writing the piece.
21:21
monday, november 15, 2021
i was in bed a little earlier and awake a little later than intended, but i've now finished the cleaning i wanted to do, including cleaning myself, and want to finish the remaining loose ends with the last journal post.
14:18
i've got this updated:
as i've mentioned before, i need to keep a running total of that. the journal is 12 pages; the review (or notes) section is 31. that actually shouldn't last too much longer, it's just that these asimov texts are all short stories, at least for a few more weeks. but, this journal is going to run until 1996 / 2026. it's going to be relatively lengthy. even at 40-50 pages a year, that's going to be a nice little document. at a more realistic 150-200 pages a year, it's going to be more like a textbook.
i have to maintain the loose-leaf paper size, it's a part of the concept. and, the links don't work and won't until very last as i only want to do it once.
so, next i need to update all of the page links on the sides of the various blog frontends. i'm going to give the celiac site a few more days, just to make sure they're behaving.
17:19
if i ever print that journal, i'll want to print it in the form of the kind of notepad paper you used to send kids to school with.
17:24
don't waste my time with your discussions of 1.5 degrees.
we hit 1.0 in 2015, 1.2 in 2020 and 1.3 in 2021.
we're not going to be at 1.5 in 2100, we're going to be at 1.5 in 2025, and we're going to be close to 2.0 by 2030. and, we're accelerating - we'll be at 5.0 degrees by 2050 and closer to 10.0 degrees by 2100. even that insane target of 10.0 degrees by 2100 is almost irreversible.
so, these geopolitical discussions about 1.5 or 2.0 degrees are not taking place in reality, and largely aren't even worth taking note of.
we need dramatic adaptation policies and immediate mitigation tactics.
22:10
i had to edit a few things but it's updated again.
i'm going to spend the rest of the night filing.
22:34
tuesday, november 16, 2021
i need to avoid using any sort of charged usb port.
it makes sense to me that essentially any usb device could be converted into a wireless device if the hacker is persistent enough and can gain access to it. but, they would need power to function.
all i want is full control over my tools of production to work on my art projects. i don't understand the insistence to spy on me, given that i have no interest in the world around me.
4:32
my computer is old enough that the front panel connections are not charged.
i should take advantage of that.
i haven't seen any reboots yet, but these random network drivers keep reappearing, and my machine went into hibernation tonight when it shouldn't have. the only way i can make sense of that is if somebody installed a wireless operating system in the firmware of my external drive, which is bafflingly obsessive, but this is just persistent over time...
4:36
i could copy all of the data off and format the drive, but it seems like they'll just reinstall the firmware when i'm gone.
again: i don't understand this unwanted obsession, but i have to get around it because it's not stopping. i have to find algorithms to make the machine work in the short run, if i can't fix it in the long run, because they'll just come in when i'm gone to re-break it.
4:39
there were times last year when they'd install surveillance software when i went out to take a walk.
i'm not dealing with rational entities, i'm dealing with some kind of aggressive law enforcement that thinks i'm a communist spy, or something. i'm not the first artist in the history of the world to deal with this sort of stupidity, but they don't seem to care that they're simply reducing existence to a boring, stupid battle of egos.
4:43
it turns out that i can charge my sansa via that port, after all.
i need a new mp3 player. i don't want to carry a phone, but a replacement for this non-proprietary ipod mini kind of thing would be nice, because i need a longer charging time. it was 10 hours max when i bought it in 2005 but it's come down to 4-5 and it's just not enough anymore. i'd say the $50 lasted me. what is on the market that can replace it?
i don't want to have to install software to use it and i don't want it to use drm. i just want to drag and drop files. i have a total boycott on apple products, and have for the last 20 years.
5:06
the reason i boycott apple is the insistence on proprietary hardware.
5:07
i'd actually rather the device not have a network card of any sort in it. i don't even want a radio tuner in it.
5:08
i've long assumed that they'd eventually get bored and go away, but they seem to think it's some kind of game.
i don't want to play games with the cops, and i'm not interested in competing with them for control of my computer. but, i don't have the resources to use the machine the way i want unless i stop them from hacking in, first.
5:11
i'm just trying to get rid of them, and they seem to want to compete.
how do we permanently rid the world of these fucking idiot capitalists, that are constantly degrading the quality of everybody else's existence with their stupid competitive bullshit? just fuck off...
5:12
i keep uninstalling these background network processes, and they keep coming back. that doesn't happen spontaneously, not in a locked down and dismantled xp, like this. some intelligent entity, with agency, is finding it's way in there and doing that.
5:14
they teach you in economics 101 nowadays that competition is wasteful and stupid and should be avoided at all costs, no matter what. modern economic theory argues that competition benefits nobody, it just wastes resources. no rational entity at any part of the chain would ever seek out competition, or ever engage in it, except under duress.
and, i think they're right - it degrades the quality of existence, to the inanity of meaningless struggle. and, in the end, it doesn't matter who wins.
art is not a competitive process, it's an expressive one. and i'm not interested. i'd let them win, but i can't, as it means losing control of the tools of production. and, if i buy new tools, they'll just want to compete over those, too.
it's fucking annoying.
5:18
this is the drive that the usb charge is wearing out on, after 15 years:
it doesn't require a special cable or anything, it just charges via usb2. and, it's just an inevitable reality that flash memory degrades over time.
i basically want exactly the same thing, but i want my 10 hour charging time back.
5:24
there was a device by agptek that was the right kind of upgrade - a little more space (although i don't need more than a few gb at a time; i listen to albums, still, and i listen to them on repeat when i get them), some more recent file formats (that sandisk has problems with flac), a bit more battery life...
but, of course, they discontinued it in favour of a boring ipod clone, and a flash drive with a aaa battery (?).
ugh.
the sandisk is fine for now, but i'll need to keep looking for the right kind of thing.
i mean, i don't mind replacing it every 20 years. but, i don't want one of these flat things that looks like a phone. it has to go into a small pocket, and i'm going to biking with it.
5:58
there's been this persistent ideological concern surrounding trudeau's perception of trade, as he's clearly on the extreme right with this, and has long seen allies in the likes of ted cruz and joe manchin. there's no surprise here - he sounds like an 80s republican, of the reaganite type, on trade. he always has.
so, it's not at all surprising to see him align with international capital and the rights of investors, as biden makes an explicit attempt to stand up for american workers.
i get the impression that this isn't well understood, but it's not surprising.
10:15
the reality is that trudeau seems to have grown up reading ayn rand. he's really rather similar to michael j fox from family ties, in that sense.
10:17
does a buy american clause go against the ricardan model of comparative advantage?
tersely: no.
the idea is that portugal should make wine because it can get better access to inputs. i think the implication was always that it could grow more grapes, right? that's not applicable to electric vehicle manufacture, which is going to rely on importing things from all over the place. canada does not have a comparative advantage in the manufacture of electric vehicles, although mexico has an absolute advantage in terms of labour costs.
the policy might shift some jobs a few hundred miles one way or the other, with little discernible effect on efficiency or operating costs, but it's not the kind of tariff that economists don't like. it's a reasonable, rational way for the the larger partner to maximize it's own interests, and the americans should be expected to be rational actors - something that has often not been true since the advent of reaganomics
if canada wants to push these ideas, it needs to be talking about industries where it has a comparative advantage, like lumber. those tariffs have repeatedly been ruled as irrational, but it's not like anybody actually cares.
incentivizing automotive production may be selfish, but it is not undoing an advantage in canada, and it consequently isn't anti-competitive or self-defeating, it's a legitimate use of tariffs to protect jobs.
10:36
i don't oppose tariffs, but i'm apprehensive about them.
the fact is that tariffs are hard, so politicians usually get them wrong. not this time - this one actually makes sense.
10:37
canada does have a comparative advantage in the generation of renewable electricity. if we want to utilize the theory of free trade, we should focus on the industries we have an advantage in, like hydro-electric power.
but, these agreements are a bunch of orwellian bullshit, and it has nothing to do with that - it has to do with trudeau standing up for the rights of investors to maximize profits by paying out lower wages.
10:40
i suspect that, ayn rand aside, trudeau would simply blink at the camera if asked to discuss the application of buy america to ricardo's theory of comparative advantage.
and, if you listen to him, it should be clear enough pretty fast that he's actually hopelessly clueless, on the topic.
more to the point is likely that he associates protectionism with nationalism, and would be opposed to it because it's the opposite of multiculturalism. this kind of ignorant, blurry thinking is probably pretty common amongst the low information class of hippie stupidity that he really come out of. and, these investors are really just taking advantage of his useful idiocy.
in his mind, what he imagines as protectionism is some kind of racism. so, he thinks he's aligning against racism in fighting against protectionism. no, honestly - this is the level of discourse on the soft liberal fake left.
i'm not sure it would actually do us much good to pass similar legislation, because, and this is the irony: we don't have a comparative advantage in vehicle manufacturing. it's why the jobs keep disappearing.
we have massive levels of opportunity in providing electricity, which we can do at a dramatic comparative advantage, and we should focus on that, instead.
10:50
now, what about the blanket procurement restrictions that they're talking about?
that's more general, and there's going to hypothetically be scenarios where a more competitive bid gets dropped, potentially. it's too general to comment on. this has even less of an effect on the labour market, as you're mostly dealing with service contracts.
but, i would actually expect canada to very quickly get the required exemptions for a blanket service procurement policy, as everybody benefits when the best bid comes from canada, and that will produce retaliation that will be harmful.
and, that's not what anybody is currently talking about, up here - what the canadian government is mobilizing against is a tax credit for electric vehicles that are manufactured in the united states.
11:22
the basic idea underlying the theory of free trade is that mercantilist governments should direct their state-controlled economies to produce goods they have an advantage in and not to produce goods they don't have an advantage in. it really had nothing to do with free markets.
what ricardo saw then - and others have seen since - is governments try to force production of goods they are not well suited to produce, which raises costs and usually fails in the end. this is what everybody wants to try to avoid, because this is ricardo's great insight - that really doesn't work, in the end.
so, in railing against protective tariffs in a fight to produce a good that we have no clear advantage in the manufacture of, who is failing to learn the lessons of ricardan theory?
if ricardo were here, he would tell us to build more hydro-electric dams.
11:35
if we had an advantage in the production of electric vehicles, we could win the trade war by waiting them out. over time, their subsidies would become unsustainable, their profit margins would lag and canadian production would outcompete them due to lower input costs. we would have nothing to worry about, and their foolish mistake would cost them.
but, in fact, the opposite is true - they will bleed us dry through economies of scale. they will produce more, faster and cheaper. we have no natural advantage to counter that.
so, we should withdraw.
11:42
let us recall, then, that we have universal health care in canada in order to attract investment. it's no coincidence that this happened at the same time as the auto pact. the big unionizeed companies could save a lot of money by relocating to canada, where the health insurance was covered by the state, and many took advantage of that by moving partial operations.
we came up with smart ideas back then, so we might conceivably come up with smart ideas again, but we need to leave the neo-liberalism behind, first. and, this ultimately exposes the inevitable contradiction imposed by the need for smart policy from stupid policy makers.
so, this is what canada needs to ponder: how can we determine some kind of comparative advantage in the production of this good, so as to not be outcompeted by the neighbouring government?
and, if we cannot determine this, we should listen to ricardo and withdraw.
11:50
"but what about the jobs?"
it's the 21st century.
we really need to drop the focus on jobs, and focus more on collectivizing ownership and redistributing wealth.
why have technology if we can't benefit from it in terms of greater amounts of freedom?
12:17
i have to get through this filing tonight.
or
i am going to force myself to get through this filing tonight. i'm sick of doing it. but it's really necessary.
17:06
wednesday, november 17, 2021
it's been clear for many decades now that the indigenous peoples of this continent were unable to maintain a substantive civilization in this geographic space due to an inability to manage the unpredictability of the water systems moving through it, in the form of flood waters.
while our technology is indisputably dramatically superior, the end result is almost certainly not going to be dissimilar.
1:37
i'm going to state this again: as difficult as it is to accept it as a fact, the reason we have soldiers is to rape people.
they need to be taught how to effectively kill people, too.
they have one job to do, and that is what it is - to kill and rape people.
it doesn't make sense to try to teach them otherwise, unless you're fundamentally redefining what the military is.
a military that is unable or unwilling to kill and rape it's own citizens on command will not be able to perform it's function, when required.
2:04
what i've been doing tonight is systematically running all hard drives on my production machine through a chkdsk and sorting through parishes around ile d'orleans.
i cannot find a death record of this woman, marguerite garneau. if it was late 1867, it opens up the possibility of an unknown woman in the mix. if she live until late 1868, she has to be the mother of charles.
i suspect that if i can find her death record then i'll find a birth record for charles very close to it, and i think i have to look all up and down the coast.
i'm not actually certain that this is the right michel parent - it seems to be a guess. but, he seems to have been a military guy with many women. so, he could have been anywhere between quebec city and perce.
until i can find the right record, i can't really take the connection seriously.
5:36
i keep finding tempting hits, though.
for example, i found a charles boussiere born in 1768 from beaupre that was the son of louis boussiere and agnes parent. i'm supposed to be looking for a charles parent from beauport, born in 1768, that was the son of michel parent and marie louise boussiere. that's the kind of thing that a man running from something might enter into a parish in distant perce, quebec.
but, i don't gain anything by grasping on to that - that's just a guess, too
there's multiple births like that that aren't any better, but aren't any worse, than the one that got identified, which just goes to show that really picking it out (despite the wrong birth date and merely similar mother's name) is potentially a false positive, in the absence of clear evidence linking the people in space-time.
6:20
you know those washouts in bc will keep happening, right? the geography, as it exists, is strictly the result of unrestrained, extreme violence. you can't just build a highway through there and expect it to last.
the europeans are actually drilling through the alps; we may want to think about putting an electric rail supply line through the rockies, instead, and eliminating any highways through unstable mountain chains.
the region is in truth uninhabitable and ought to remain remote.
22:39
thursday, november 18, 2021
on my way out for a bike ride today (it hit 17 today, and that might be the last nice day this year - or until january, anyways), i noticed an ambulance stopping at the neighbour's house. this is an absolutely disgusting old woman who frequently sits outside with or without her adult kids like the absolute loser that she is and pathetically chain smokes drugs. the absolutely revolting stench can be so overpowering that you can frequently smell it inside my unit.
it's a pretty predictable outcome, but i don't know what happened. it might have been a heart attack, a stroke or complications of cancer, perhaps even complications of cancer that was caused by the marijuana addiction.
we'll have to see if whatever happened to the disgusting loser has a positive effect on the smell around the house or not.
i'm in for a few days, and the first thing i noticed was my computer was trying to connect remotely, again. they want to put me through some kind of network to log my traffic, but the idiots don't seem to realize that the computer is offline. they don't seem to be able to slave the chromebook (which is what connects) the same way, so they're left trying to hack into an air-gapped pc. it's beyond retarded. and, they're not evidence-driven.
so, i'm going to have to reinstall, and i'm thinking about flashing the bios, before i have to parallel in with a bus pirate and reprogram it. this is all delicate, and prone to "bricking", for lack of a better term, so i don't want to continually do this if i'm sure they're going to undo it. again: i don't want to compete. this isn't a game. i just need to use the machine to work.
as i'm in for a few days, and will seemingly need to spend the next several more days on this never-ending systems admin, i'd might as well get to the asimov reading a little early.
i'll get blood test results tomorrow morning, probably. and, my next appointment is on monday. we'll have to add those 4 extra adrenal hormones.
what's my write-up going to be for this week? i don't know, actually. i'll need to think about it a little.
2:10
11:37
periodic dogs reposting:
11:53
canada used to be a middle power, globally. we had a large, diverse economy. we were a center of technological and scientific innovation. we had a world-class military. we beat the united states in several wars, and we were a major component of the alliance that won both the world wars.
we were a serious competitor to the united states - so, of course they had time for us.
nowadays, due to nafta, we pose them no significant threat at all. so, why would they have much time for us, or much interest for our concerns?
we traded a position of strength for empty platitudes about friendship, and we got what we deserved for it.
12:37
friendship is impossible in capitalism; all alliances are temporary, and all agreements are strategic. you have enemies and future enemies; you have wars and ceasefires. it's the system.
12:44
this is my monthly bloodwork update.
| 2021 | 2022 | |||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| m | a | m | j | j | a | s | o | n | d | j | f | m | a | m | j | j | a | s | o | n | d | |
| creatinine | 78/80 | - | - | - | - | 87 | 84 | 83 / 81 | 80 | |||||||||||||
| egfr | 107/106 | - | - | - | - | 96 | 100 | 101 / 104 | 106 | |||||||||||||
| alp | 61 | - | - | 63 | 59 | 50 | 60 | 59 /55 | 47 | |||||||||||||
| albumin | -/45.7 | - | - | - | 45.9 | 44.6 | 46.8 | 48 /46 | 46.7 | |||||||||||||
| cholesterol | 3.93 | - | - | - | 3.99 | 3.8 | 4.15 | 4.01/3.83 | 4.14/4.02 | |||||||||||||
| triglycerides | .87 | - | - | - | .95 | .89 | 1.41 | 1.05/0.94 | 1.09/1.32 | |||||||||||||
| hdl | 1.69 | - | - | - | 1.84 | 1.59 | 1.73 | 1.42/1.55 | 1.37/1.42 | |||||||||||||
| ldl | 1.85 | - | - | - | 1.72 | 1.81 | 1.78 | 2.11/1.85 | 2.28/2.00 | |||||||||||||
| non-hdl | 2.24 | - | - | - | 2.15 | 2.21 | 2.42 | 2.59/2.28 | 2.77/2.60 | |||||||||||||
| wbc | 8.7/8.4 | 9.9/9.0 | - | - | ? | 7.0 | 7.6 | 6.9/6.9 | 7.8 | |||||||||||||
| rbc | 3.97/4.25 | 4.11/4.38 | - | - | 4.17 | 4.12 | 4.33 | 4.47/4.2 | 4.28 | |||||||||||||
| hemoglobin | 132/140 | 133/142 | - | - | 139 | 136 | 141 | 138/138 | 139 | |||||||||||||
| hematocrit | .382/.404 | .394/.424 | - | - | .405 | .398 | .418 | .417/.402 | .405 | |||||||||||||
| mcv | 96.1/95.1 | 95.8/97.0 | - | - | 97 | 96.8 | 96.6 | 93/95.7 | 94.6 | |||||||||||||
| mch | 33.1/32.9 | 32.4/32.5 | - | - | 33.3 | 33.2 | 32.7 | 30.9/32.8 | 32.5 | |||||||||||||
| mchc | 345/346 | 338/335 | - | - | ? | 343 | 338 | 331/343 | 344 | |||||||||||||
| rdw | 13.3/13.5 | 13.0/13.1 | - | - | ? | 13 | 12.3 | 11.7/12.9 | 12.6 | |||||||||||||
| platelet | 199/187 | 171/171 | - | - | ? | 175 | 167 | 168/150 | 155 | |||||||||||||
| reticulocytes | - | -/42 | - | - | 53 | 56 | 46 | 35 | 33 | |||||||||||||
| vitamin d | 87 | - | - | - | 109 | 72 | 64 | 72/83 | 78 | |||||||||||||
| estradiol | 363/388 | - | - | - | - | 563 | 443 | 432 | 777 | |||||||||||||
| estrone | - | - | - | - | - | ? | 4138 | 5203 | ||||||||||||||
| testosterone | 0.9 | - | - | - | - | - | <0.4 | <0.4 | <0.4 | |||||||||||||
| progesterone | 1.9 | - | - | - | - | - | <0.5 | 0.7 | 0.5 | |||||||||||||
| fsh | <0.2 | - | - | - | - | - | 0.2 | 0.1 | <0.1 | |||||||||||||
| lh | <0.2 | - | - | - | - | - | 0.1 | 0.1 | 0.1 | |||||||||||||
| ferritin | 12/9 | 6/17 | 21 | - | 29 | 43 | 28 | 40 | 42 | |||||||||||||
| tibc | - | 69.5 | - | - | 65.7 | 62.9 | 64.7 | 58.9 | 58.2 | |||||||||||||
| iron | - | 9.6 | - | - | 22.7 | 37.3 | 19.3 | 28.3 | 37.3 | |||||||||||||
| iron sat | - | 0.14 | - | - | 0.35 | 0.59 | 0.3 | .48 | 0.64 | |||||||||||||
| transferrin | - | - | - | - | - | - | 2.59 | 2.29 | 2.38 | |||||||||||||
| sodium | - | - | - | - | - | - | 141 | 141/139 | 140 | |||||||||||||
| potassium | - | - | - | - | - | - | 5.0 | 4.7/4.6 | 4.3 | |||||||||||||
| chloride | - | - | - | - | - | - | 104 | 107/105 | 104 | |||||||||||||
| phosphate | -/1.42 | - | - | - | - | 1.09 | 1.34 | 1.08 | 1.35 | |||||||||||||
| magnesium | -/.93 | - | - | - | - | 0.8 | 0.82 | 0.86 | 0.82 | |||||||||||||
| calcium | -/2.4 | - | - | - | 2.38 | 2.32 | 2.44 | 2.39 | 2.4 | |||||||||||||
| pth | - | - | - | 5.5 | - | 6.2 | 5.9 | 6.2 | 5.5 | |||||||||||||
| tsh | 0.92 | - | - | - | - | 0.94 | 1.22 | 1.67 | 1.48 | |||||||||||||
| calcitonin | - | - | - | <0.6 | - | - | - | - | ||||||||||||||
| cortisol | - | - | - | 325 | - | 464 | 170 | 129 | 225 | |||||||||||||
| insulin | - | - | - | - | - | 50 | 33 | 68 | 92 | |||||||||||||
| b12 | 223/251 | - | 304 | - | 363 | 313 | 370 | 292 | 369 | |||||||||||||
14:12
- lipase: 29 iu/l
- amylase: 59 iu/l
- insulin: never been higher than 95 pmol/l
- gastrin: 39 on fast, 76 random
none of this is technically clinical.
but, it's all exceedingly low.
14:25
i'm going to eat immediately before the blood test, next time.
14:28
now that i have my estrogen levels closer to where i want them, the next thing to look at is getting my progesterone up.
14:49
the results indicate that i was getting almost almost all of my progesterone from the cyproterone, and that i'm not absorbing the medroxyprogesterone at all.
14:57
i'm currently taking 5 mg/day. so, i could actually double that.
i'll just ask him what he thinks, to start.
15:00
it was actually james madison that authored the plan to divide and conquer via ethnicity, and that defines the bulk of american history, including the civil war and the massive unrest coming from it that's never been quite resolved. today, people in the united states continue to vote in an alarmingly ethnic way, especially in the southeast.
it's hard to decide if this is utter incompetence in understanding american history, or an evil bourgeois plot by the nefarious john birch society to confuse people.
15:35
canada's initial constitution was authored in the aftermath of the civil war and gave unusual deference to the federal government in an attempt to avoid the divide and conquer initiated by madison, which it blamed for the conflict.
we've actually generally avoided ethnic divisions here by being aware of the potential of conflict, and putting extreme focus on compromise. it's the central focus in canadian history 101: the government constantly seeks compromise. we're fundamentally about dialectics, not pendulums. our political system tends to seek common ground, rather than polarization.
that might undo itself somewhat if we don't put a bigger focus on integrating religious minorities, but just remember this: the united states has had two major civil wars and narrowly avoided several others, whereas canada has never had anything close to a civil war at all.
15:41
how does an rv plant randomly catch on fire?
i guess the guy bought the wrong insurance policy and had to think on his toes.
16:56
i'm running a chkdsk on an external drive and it's taking a long while.
so, let's build this up one story at a time...
- darwinian poolroom: i think asimov is presenting the contradiction of god creating us to destroy ourselves as a sardonic joke directed at creationists, but asimov was a classicist, and he would have realized that the gods of the greeks and romans (not to mention the jews...) were indeed sadistic enough to take pleasure in that kind of wanton destruction. only christians of the augistinian variety, who insisted god reveals himself through natural law, would have seen a contradiction in that. in the various western indo-european pantheons, it is only the interference of other gods that save us from the trouble making gods (whereas the hebrew/persian conception of darkness is as interfering in our lives, and leaves us with the individual responsibility to reject it), who are intent on destroying us as an act of recreational amusement. so, beyond the sardonic joke, the discussion is ultimately arbitrary, both in how it defines god (there's no reason to assign god any specific characteristics, or to assume god is rational, or to assume god is just or ...) and how it discusses evolution in such an empty, unfalsifiable manner. i can't really offer a critique of the idea of god setting things in motion, other than that it's utterly untestable speculation, through and through, and that it doesn't conform well to the randomness that is inherent in how we understand the world (there is a concept of probability assigned to how those billiard balls behave, in truth). for these reasons, i don't think that the existence or non-existence of god can be deduced implicitly in this manner, and you're not really getting anywhere in analyzing hypotheticals, or arranging them in a hierarchy of arbitrarily perceived likeliness. rather, i think you just need to start with a null hypothesis and determine if you can generate enough positive evidence to reject atheism, or not. but, asimov isn't doing any of this, really - all he's actually doing is building up a punchline, which is something he does frequently in his mid to later period, with varying but usually unsatisfactory results. so, i mean, enjoy the dialogue if you want, but i don't see much of anything substantive in it. and, i actually don't think the idea of a god creating us to destroy ourselves is any sort of contradiction at all, even if i think it's utterly unnecessary hubris.
17:38
if a god exists, she would the most hysterical bitch
i mean, i know that's not the hebrew god.
but, if we're to accept a first principle of a god (you know i'm not going with you on that, but suppose i did), there's no really good reason to assign any specific qualities to that god, as axioms, at all. you'd really have to try to determine the nature of that god by looking at it's actions. and, i think there's a pretty strong argument, based on the observation of empirical evidence, that any potential god out there isn't rational and isn't just and isn't even really very wise, either.
17:47
the empirical evidence clearly demonstrates that if a god exists, however unlikely, that she's the most hysterical, irrational bitch you could imagine.
17:49
so, where do you get in trying to work out the logical justifications for evolution in a creationist sense, if the idea of god being rational is empirically daft?
it's circular logic - if you assume god exists and is rational, then you can deduce virtually anything you want from it, given that there is some concept of logic in everything in nature.
but, that doesn't make the discourse valuable, it makes it useless - it's untestable. it's just mental masturbation.
but, like i say, that's not what asimov is doing; he's just starting with the perceived absurdity of divine creation juxtaposed with anthropomorphic self-destruction, and presenting the contradiction as comedic. and, i'm not going with him on that, because i really don't see the absurdity in it, because i don't accept the assumptions underlying his concept of god.
17:57
- day of the hunters: this is similar to the above story, but dispenses with the metaphysical nonsense; rather than discuss whether god might have created us to destroy ourselves, and decide whether that is absurd or not, asimov is presenting a fantastical story about the end of the dinosaurs as a parable of what might happen to us. i'm not sure i see the value in such a thing, given the scale of imminent destruction ahead of us due to climate change or nuclear war; that is, i don't see why a parable is necessary to get the point across, or see how it helps. i mean, he might as well be talking about noah's ark, right? the reality in front of us should be more convincing than some silly story about dinosaurs (or floods). but, i guess asimov felt the need to talk down to his readers a little, rather than discuss the actual matters at hand. and, i guess he's fundamentally correct - it is almost impossible to guess at dinosaur intelligence via the fossil record, although i think the intelligence of birds (or lack thereof) is some evidence that they probably were not particularly bright, in general. as an aside, i have to wonder if this influenced the flintstones.
18:46
it may violate the bylaw, but the bylaw is unconstitutional.
the council should have known better than to act like this, and should apologize and rescind the order. if it does not, advocacy groups should swoop in and have the courts tear the law down.
19:33
- shah guidio g: asimov starts with a good idea with this - a projection of the united nations as evolving into a global feudal ruling class that should not be smeared as birchian as it is before it and, as an application of the class replacement component of historical materialism, is the literal opposite of it, hayekian language aside - and then gets so excited that he can't decide which mechanism to use. his atlantis (name taken from plato) is a cross between jonathan swift's laputa and the flying fortresses of sanskrit mythology, but seems to feature a circus rather similar to the hippodrome of constantinople. it's all built up on top of itself in a sort of clumsy mess, suggesting asimov got so excited by his idea that he couldn't form it well. and, then it ends with little point, beside the assertion of another punchline. but, what he's fundamentally exploring here is historical materialism - he has one class of people replace another as dominant, when the dominant class tries to enforce a division of labour. further, he explains that this is a historical process, by referring to various examples of it happening in the past.
19:52
listen, you know i'm a complete atheist. i have as little patience for religion as anybody else that has ever lived.
but, i think the greek concept of multiple gods fighting for control is a much better reflection of reality than the hebrew concept of this omnipotent entity that is pure logic and wants to get in your head and own you. while both religions are obviously ridiculous, it is the greek religion that has a stronger empirical basis and that i'm far more likely to take seriously.
so, no, i don't think it's obvious that a god ought to be rational, and i don't think it's axiomatic that there ought to only be one of them, if there are to be any at all. and, when i break from these axioms, i really change the discourse.
but, i think you have the burden of proof to tell me why i should take monotheism more seriously than polytheism, or why your conception of god as rational is more believable than some other conception of god as irrational, or arbitrarily driven by emotion. we don't have a centralized theological bureaucracy that enforces this kind of bullshit at the end of a sword, anymore. you have to make your argument if you want to be taken seriously, as none of it is at all obvious.
and, i think this is healthy, because if we're to return to some form of religion, we should be questioning whether the jewish or greek systems are actually really preferable. the bottom line is that we may actually succeed in getting people to behave more ethically if we adopt greek religious ideas in place of jewish ones, as they conform more closely to empirical reality.
regardless, you have to make your case - i won't accept your axioms. they're just simply not obvious.
20:10
- button, button: this was supposedly an attempt by asimov at explicit humour, as though his texts weren't all full of dry wit and bad puns. while i actually think that many of his other texts are more humourous, asimov's clarification that he's going for humour here is really an admission that the text has no point.
- monkey's finger: see previous, although also note that this one is fairly self-referential, right down to the infinite monkey theorem.
21:12
- everest: the unknown is a powerful arbiter of the imagination. at the time, we did not know what was on everest - as we did not (and still do not) know what's in the deepest parts of the ocean, or what was on the dark side of the moon. we could always guess, but you don't know until you can measure it. so, why couldn't there by something bizarre at the top of everest - martians, yeti, or even just a new species of ungulates? as asimov points out in his notes, we have now scaled everest and now know what's there. but, never forget that the point of this genre is to scale the unknown mentally, before we can actually observe.
21:21
it's historically rather bizarre to see the democrats come out to the left of the liberals, but this is happening on a number of issues, and it appears to represent a real trend.
i've never seen this, and i have no cultural memory of it, either. if it was true in the 60s, it was for a matter of months. if it was true before that, you'd have to go back to the 19th century, when the liberals were a minor party, in canada. but, the closest we've seen to it was probably the mid 60s.
the liberals, though, are moving right under the need to hold the votes of recent immigrants, from conservative countries. and, the democrats are moving left due to the realization that they can't win elections unless they're competitive in the midwest. biden needs detroit; trudeau needs toronto.
if the governments in canada and ontario want to save these jobs, however irrational that may be, they'll have to come to terms with the reality that they're not here due to competitive trade policies. the reason that canada has an auto sector is that it offered the companies a better deal, and it coerced them over here. america is fighting back, and it's about time - it only took them 50 years. if we want to get into this fight, we'll need to offer even greater incentives. and, i'm sorry - corporate welfare isn't my expertise.
pretending that this is about cooperation or competition or friendship isn't helpful or useful. we bribed them to come here in the first place, and we'll have to outbribe them if we want them to stay. all the talk otherwise is politicized bullshit.
but, if the world has changed - if this is about plants that act as robot assembly lines and not about comparative advantages - then it's not in our benefit. there is no fundamental economic difference in whether the foreign parts are assembled in oakville or detroit. but, if the legislation actually succeeds in localizing supply chains, a multiplier effect will extend to southern ontario, and we can likely capitalize on that. is a multiplier from an increase in american production as good as assembly plants, in the long run?
we need to learn this lesson, though - in a world of foreign supply chains that is focused on asian production, nafta-style economic integration isn't rational anymore and tariffs can be reintroduced to produce assembly jobs. canada just ends up in the way. if we can add something on the way there, we can force ourselves to be in the way. but, no rational actor would pay a middle man if they can eliminate it. we have to get our head around that. we have to adjust.
we still have tremendous resources, and it can still drive a major export economy.
22:44
friday, november 19, 2021
so, the warm day this week is shaping up to be thursday the 25th.
is it going to get to 15 degrees? will i be able to get out for a ride?
we'll find out.
10:25
if we can consistently get a 10-15 degree day every week, that's enough to avoid winter in a functional sense, for me.
it may get cold outside, but i'll never have to actually experience it.
10:26
you?
never, did the kenosha kid...
17:06
the jury's verdict is rather intriguing.
i'd suggest it should be interpreted politically rather than legally.
17:08
i have now chkdsked everything, flashed my bios, reinstalled and am running through defrags with no problems.
it's less that i was expecting to find something and more that i wanted to test the hardware. if there's a mechanical problem with the hard drive that is causing the machine to halt, it should halt during a defrag, too. the fact that this isn't happening makes it unlikely that the cause of the halting is the hard drive.
i could imagine a power issue with the board in abstraction, but it doesn't seem to make sense, in context.
while i didn't find anything, this was a helpful troubleshooting step that eliminates the drives as a likely cause. i will need to do further testing to isolate the issue, but if i'm stable for a bit, at the least, then i should be able to get most of the filing done.
22:13
saturday, november 20, 2021
process explorer is an xp tool created by some nerds that later got hired by microsoft to create some vista accessories. i learned how to use it when i was doing vista support. and, it's literally logging multiple remote access requests.
somebody is repeatedly trying to log into this machine remotely and consistently running into errors due to the intentionally broken subsystem.
the problem is that the machine has no network card in it. how are they doing that?
i'm going to disconnect my modem and router...they might be logged into the network and hacking me from my own (disabled) wireless network.
as i've pointed out a few times - this isn't an amateur. but, i am an amateur. i have degrees in pure mathematics, constitutional law and object-oriented programming. i've never taken a formal course in networking, and really don't have a lot of interest in it.
the asimov text is mostly done and mostly not very good but i have to try to get a handle on what's going on. again - i don't care, in an ideological sense. but, if the result of repeated failed login attempts is that i can't use the machine, i have to stop them.
i don't know if the machine is rebooting because they're trying to install software or because they can't even login. i haven't noticed any funny files, and the log i'm pulling out is full of error messages.
9:17
i'm really, really sick of not being able to get anything done until i get through the filing and i'm tired of this boring hacking fight with an entity i don't understand, and have no interest whatsoever in competing with.
so, i've ripped the thing down to the barest combination possible - hard drives, video card & dvd. everything is disabled in the bios, including multiprocessing and usb. i've got a ps/2 mouse running, which i'm actually happy about because i thought it was broken.
and, i'm not installing anything at all to start, not even the chipset drivers.
i want to finish the filing, to start. and, i'll have to slowly bring in drivers and hardware until i'm comfortable.
i have actually done this before, and the only conclusion i came to was that everything was working correctly. but, at this point, if the thing crashes again, there's only two options left - either the processor is malfunctioning or i'm getting hacked via microwave for reasons that i don't understand.
14:33
i can't break the thing when i'm testing it. it only breaks after i've fixed it. so, let's get what i need done in testing mode, then.
if i have to log in via safe mode (i haven't done that this time. next time) or boot from dvd to get this done then whatever.
14:36
i have an old nvidia card in the machine.
this is a recording machine - i don't care about the graphics. i don't play video games, and i never did. i just need any old video card; it has to display, that's it.
it is not impossible that the machine is actually halting due to the video card drivers; it would be obscure, and it wasn't happening previously, but it is inescapable that if it's stable until i install the drivers and then crashes when i install them then it must either be the video card or the drivers.
i'm sure i can find a bottom of the line graphics card for $30 somewhere.
14:43
the other thing is that, once this filing is done, i should be able to transfer some of the data to the 98 machine. and, i'm actually intending on working in that environment for some of this, regardless.
if the 16-bit machine is stable and the 32-bit machine isn't, that's fine, for right now.
but, i have to get this data ordered before i can do anything else.
14:45
if i could figure this out, i'm sure i could fix it. i can't figure out what's wrong...
...and it just consistently seems like somebody's trying to bust in.
i may have to turn the usb completely off, and i may have to keep it completely off.
14:49
ok.
this is better than i've seen for a while, so let's hope it's enough to get the filing done, first and foremost.
15:08
to be clear: i am not a fan of what you'd call "progressive rock", at all. i like jazz, i like psychedelic music and i primarily listen to industrial and punk. my tastes are wide, so it overlaps somewhat, but the music i create has very little sonic or thematic overlap with prog or prog culture, i distinctly dislike most of what calls itself "progressive" and i certainly wouldn't want to spend time with people that listen to progressive rock music.
on top of that, the specific strain of progressive rock that i have time for has not existed in 45 years. i have never listened to anything labeled "progressive metal" - i hate dream theatre, i hate rush and i hate yes. i don't like any of this hippie bullshit labeled "prog", either.
i liked pink floyd, which was a psychedelic rock band led by an open trostkyist. i liked very limited amounts of king crimson, which was a kind of jazz band. and, i liked early genesis, which was a kind of baroque pop. these ideas have mostly ended up in latter day punk and industrial - i'd argue that coil or joy division or skinny puppy were the proper successors of that style, and what i listen to essentially exclusively goes through that bottleneck.
so, don't waste your time - i won't like you. i'll insult you.
15:16
my dad listened to that kind of music, so i grew up around it, and i am enamoured with a small amount of it, but i rejected 95% of it as trash and i fully realize that it hasn't existed as a relevant artistic force since before i was even born.
i have absolutely no patience whatsoever for anybody using the term "progressive music" in the year 2021. i will not listen to your record. i don't want to be your friend.
15:21
there is no question in my mind that genesis, specifically, was a massive and often underlooked influence on the likes of joy division, early puppy, psychic tv, etc. i don't see how skinny puppy could have existed without genesis.
but, punk happened for a very good reason, and i'm staunchly ideologically aligned with it's critique of prog, and i come solely from the punk moment, in reaction to progressive music.
while i like to make my tunes dynamic and sonically interesting, you'll never see me collapse into a stupid guitar or keyboard solo and you'll never see me push bloated, pretentious or overdone ideas rooted in fairy tales or classical motifs.
my music is thematically working class; it is not intended for rich arts students, or other members of the elite.
15:36
rush, particularly, deserved every ounce of shit they got, and then some. just awful, awful lyrics.
elp and yes were broadly legitimately boring and led zeppelin was probably the most pompous band of them all - and doesn't get the shit they really deserve for it.
but, you have to move to the furthest left reaches of punk rock - dead kennedys. skinny puppy. - before you're able to find a lyricist as left-wing as roger waters.
i've said this before - animals was just about the most punk rock thing that came out of the 70s. john lydon should have eaten his hat over it. he should have been thoroughly embarrassed for running his mouth off like that.
likewise, early genesis was frequently critical of ruling elites, and often written from a working class perspective. the lamb lies down on broadway is a post-modern masterpiece that puts much of the punk movement to shame.
so, i'm standing from a punk rock perspective, thoroughly, but i'm also old enough to have a little perspective about it and realize who was really full of shit and who wasn't.
16:44
why am i excited about the ps/2 working?
i'm going to guess i got it back on the flash, indicating there was some value in doing it, that there was something stuck in the bios.
gamers may have specific reasons for ps/2, but i'm not a gamer. for me, it just gives me back an extra usb port, that i can plug into another piece of hardware. there's four on the back and two on the front, which was a lot for the time. if my ps/2 isn't working, i have to use two for input devices; i get those usb ports back if i can use ps/2 slots, instead.
this could also, in theory, make the usb more stable, but i think that's obscure.
was that the problem? well, it hasn't crashed since i swapped it.
17:22
this is outrageous.
i would call on the government of canada to release these journalists immediately. freedom of the press is paramount in an open society.
21:05
sunday, november 21, 2021
buy jupiter and other stories is a collection of texts that were chosen to be compiled together because they were poorly regarded, so it should be of little surprise that it's long out of print. and, i'm mostly just finding myself railing against them when i have anything to say about them at all. i'm being purposely comprehensive, so this is necessary, but i really don't see much of value here, at all.
========
- darwinian poolroom: i think asimov is presenting the contradiction of god creating us to destroy ourselves as a sardonic joke directed at creationists, but asimov was a classicist, and he would have realized that the gods of the greeks and romans (not to mention the jews...) were indeed sadistic enough to take pleasure in that kind of wanton destruction. only christians of the augistinian variety, who insisted god reveals himself through natural law, would have seen a contradiction in that. in the various western indo-european pantheons, it is only the interference of other gods that save us from the trouble making gods (whereas the hebrew/persian conception of darkness is as interfering in our lives, and leaves us with the individual responsibility to reject it), who are intent on destroying us as an act of recreational amusement. so, beyond the sardonic joke, the discussion is ultimately arbitrary, both in how it defines god (there's no reason to assign god any specific characteristics, or to assume god is rational, or to assume god is just or ...) and how it discusses evolution in such an empty, unfalsifiable manner. i can't really offer a critique of the idea of god setting things in motion, other than that it's utterly untestable speculation, through and through, and that it doesn't conform well to the randomness that is inherent in how we understand the world (there is a concept of probability assigned to how those billiard balls behave, in truth). for these reasons, i don't think that the existence or non-existence of god can be deduced implicitly in this manner, and you're not really getting anywhere in analyzing hypotheticals, or arranging them in a hierarchy of arbitrarily perceived likeliness. rather, i think you just need to start with a null hypothesis and determine if you can generate enough positive evidence to reject atheism, or not. but, asimov isn't doing any of this, really - all he's actually doing is building up a punchline, which is something he does frequently in his mid to later period, with varying but usually unsatisfactory results. so, i mean, enjoy the dialogue if you want, but i don't see much of anything substantive in it. and, i actually don't think the idea of a god creating us to destroy ourselves is any sort of contradiction at all, even if i think it's utterly unnecessary hubris.
god could very well be the most hysterical, flaky goof you've ever met, and there doesn't need to be any discernible reason why she does what she does at all.
i mean, i know that's not the hebrew god.
but, if we're to accept a first principle of a god (you know i'm not going with you on that, but suppose i did), there's no really good reason to assign any specific qualities to that god, as axioms, at all. you'd really have to try to determine the nature of that god by looking at it's actions. and, i think there's a pretty strong argument, based on the observation of empirical evidence, that any potential god out there isn't rational and isn't just and isn't even really very wise, either.
the empirical evidence would seem to suggest that if a god exists then she's kind of a stuck up, airheaded bitch.
so, where do you get in trying to work out the logical justifications for evolution in a creationist sense, if the idea of god being rational is empirically daft?
it's circular logic - if you assume god exists and is rational, then you can deduce virtually anything you want from it, given that there is some concept of logic in everything in nature.
but, that doesn't make the discourse valuable, it makes it useless - it's untestable. it's just mental masturbation.
but, like i say, that's not what asimov is doing; he's just starting with the perceived absurdity of divine creation juxtaposed with anthropomorphic self-destruction, and presenting the contradiction as comedic. and, i'm not going with him on that, because i really don't see the absurdity in it, because i don't accept the assumptions underlying his concept of god.
- day of the hunters: this is similar to the above story, but dispenses with the metaphysical nonsense; rather than discuss whether god might have created us to destroy ourselves, and decide whether that is absurd or not, asimov is presenting a fantastical story about the end of the dinosaurs as a parable of what might happen to us. i'm not sure i see the value in such a thing, given the scale of imminent destruction ahead of us due to climate change or nuclear war; that is, i don't see why a parable is necessary to get the point across, or see how it helps. i mean, he might as well be talking about noah's ark, right? the reality in front of us should be more convincing than some silly story about dinosaurs (or floods). but, i guess asimov felt the need to talk down to his readers a little, rather than discuss the actual matters at hand. and, i guess he's fundamentally correct - it is almost impossible to guess at dinosaur intelligence via the fossil record, although i think the intelligence of birds (or lack thereof) is some evidence that they probably were not particularly bright, in general. as an aside, i have to wonder if this influenced the flintstones.
- shah guidio g: asimov starts with a good idea with this - a projection of the united nations as evolving into a global feudal ruling class that should not be smeared as birchian as it is before it and, as an application of the class replacement component of historical materialism, is the literal opposite of it, hayekian language aside - and then gets so excited that he can't decide which mechanism to use. his atlantis (name taken from plato) is a cross between jonathan swift's laputa and the flying fortresses of sanskrit mythology, but seems to feature a circus rather similar to the hippodrome of constantinople. it's all built up on top of itself in a sort of clumsy mess, suggesting asimov got so excited by his idea that he couldn't form it well. and, then it ends with little point, beside the assertion of another punchline. but, what he's fundamentally exploring here is historical materialism - he has one class of people replace another as dominant, when the dominant class tries to enforce a division of labour. further, he explains that this is a historical process, by referring to various examples of it happening in the past.
---
listen, you know i'm a complete atheist. i have as little patience for religion as anybody else that has ever lived.
but, i think the greek concept of multiple gods fighting for control is a much better reflection of reality than the hebrew concept of this omnipotent entity that is pure logic and wants to get in your head and own you. while both religions are obviously ridiculous, it is the greek religion that has a stronger empirical basis and that i'm far more likely to take seriously.
so, no, i don't think it's obvious that a god ought to be rational, and i don't think it's axiomatic that there ought to only be one of them, if there are to be any at all. and, when i break from these axioms, i really change the discourse.
but, i think you have the burden of proof to tell me why i should take monotheism more seriously than polytheism, or why your conception of god as rational is more believable than some other conception of god as irrational, or arbitrarily driven by emotion. we don't have a centralized theological bureaucracy that enforces this kind of bullshit at the end of a sword, anymore. you have to make your argument if you want to be taken seriously, as none of it is at all obvious.
and, i think this is healthy, because if we're to return to some form of religion, we should be questioning whether the jewish or greek systems are actually really preferable. the bottom line is that we may actually succeed in getting people to behave more ethically if we adopt greek religious ideas in place of jewish ones, as they conform more closely to empirical reality.
regardless, you have to make your case - i won't accept your axioms. they're just simply not obvious.
- button, button: this was supposedly an attempt by asimov at explicit humour, as though his texts weren't all full of dry wit and bad puns. while i actually think that many of his other texts are more humourous, asimov's clarification that he's going for humour here is really an admission that the text has no point.
- monkey's finger: see previous, although also note that this one is fairly self-referential, right down to the infinite monkey theorem.
- everest: the unknown is a powerful arbiter of the imagination. at the time, we did not know what was on everest - as we did not (and still do not) know what's in the deepest parts of the ocean, or what was on the dark side of the moon. we could always guess, but you don't know until you can measure it. so, why couldn't there by something bizarre at the top of everest - martians, yeti, or even just a new species of ungulates? as asimov points out in his notes, we have now scaled everest and now know what's there. but, never forget that the point of this genre is to scale the unknown mentally, before we can actually observe.
- the pause: pointless nonsense.
- lets not: pointless nonsense
- each an explorer: interesting premise, but not much of a point. it's an idea that he also explored in green patches.
- blank: if they truly found themselves stuck in time, they would not be able to move, either. utter nonsense.
- does a bee care: well, a bee or a wasp couldn't care because it doesn't truly have a brain, it's simply a dumb terminal that is controlled by chemical stimuli. does this entity have a brain? you'd have to dissect it, i guess. he's making a valid observation in some sense, but if i'm getting the underlying implication that humans are in some ways like bees, i think he's failing to grasp the difference in biological complexity between a mammal (which has a brain that independently processes the world around it) and an insect (which does not), which is the mistake that collectivism/fascism is rooted within, this idea that we're all components of a larger body that needs to work together, like a machine. that's just not right - humans, by means of their independent processing facilities, are just simply biologically not much like bees and consequently can never be much like bees, whether a managerial class wishes it were true, or not. robots, on the other hand....
- silly asses: if the idea is an attempt at morality, suggesting it would be better to conduct nuclear research on somebody else's planet is a strange idea of morality.
- buy jupiter: pointless nonsense
- a statue for father: pointless nonsense
- rain, rain go away: pointless nonsense
- founding father: earth's early atmosphere is thought to have been full of ammonia, and that's no doubt where he's going with this story about humans crashing on the planet of an oxygenless atmosphere and being unable to remove the ammonia, yet succeeding in the process at the point of death.
- exile to hell: this is again merely an ironic twist hidden in a very short narrative. but, these places of exile tend to do fairly well, and i wouldn't mind being exiled from capitalism, myself - i'd consider that a way out, as many of the british (and scottish) in truth felt about australia.
- key item: it seems that, later on, and to my surprise. asimov wrote several silly stories about multivac taking on human characteristics, which mirrors his narrative about the humanization of robots. this story has no purpose at all, besides to demonstrate the strange human behaviour of being polite to a machine. and, i guess i should ask, because i'd never talk to a computer, myself - do you ask alexa poltely, and thank her when she gives you the answer?
- the proper study: this is an interesting introduction, but there is no story here.
- 2430 ad / the greatest asset: these are two different takes on the idea of humans completely eliminating all biodiversity on the planet, to the point where we're the only non-domesticated lifeform. in some sense, this would have to be unavoidable, unless we reach some kind of natural cyclic carrying capacity (it would need to be the result of increased viral activity, which makes sense in the context of exploding population growth), but it nonetheless strikes me as incomprehensible. something would go wrong, or we wouldn't let it happen. but, it is nonetheless an interesting exercise in contemplating the inevitable consequences of the unsustainability of infinite growth, which we're going to have to get a grasp of, eventually.
- take a match - pointless nonsense
- thiotimoline to the stars: pointless nonsense
============
i was offline while i ran some pc tests, so i started reading through the martian way (which i have a very, very old physical copy of) and decided to do two updates this week. buy jupiter was a little shorter. it's mostly physical from now on, which i definitely prefer, partly because i can wrap up in a blanket. i should strive for two updates/week. the martian way and buy jupiter are roughly the same number of pages, but these are lengthier and more substantive stories. unfortunately, they're really just stories.
- the martian way: this is a story about a martian colony that gets it's water supply cut off by a parody of hitler, who decides martians are "water wasters" (rather than useless eaters). in the end, the martian colony finds a stable source of water on saturn and offers to sell it back to earth. it does a relatively good job of lampooning the "focus on saving this planet" types as unscientific fascists that can't do basic math, but it's otherwise just a story
- youth: this turns the table on the idea of humans keeping insects (or perhaps small rodents) as pets. trade mission humans land on a planet inhabited by giant stereotypical octopus-like space creatures and are found by some children of that species, who capture them and hold them as pets, in cages. the story devolves into one of asimov's mystery texts, as the adults try to figure out what happened to the mission they expected, but it's one of those table-turning stories that asimov is relatively good at writing.
- the deep: so, imagine that cicadas are actually super-intelligent and are trying to emerge from the earth and co-exist with humans by scouting us out using the method of inhabiting one of our minds. their hive mind would have difficulty interfacing with human individuality, and would ultimately have to view us with disdain, as inferior. sound familiar? i'm an advocate of human individualism, and am exceedingly weary of any sort of collectivism as a backdoor for fascism, which is a connection that asimov tends to consistently miss, but i do concede that a hive mind would view me with as much contempt as i'd view it, and have little pushback if the intent is strictly to establish a concept of relativism, even if i'd argue that any sort of collectivist intelligence of this manner could not coexist with humans, and would need to be annihilated as an otherwise irresolvable threat to our very existence as a species (which is the actual correct lesson of the second world war). so, if asimov is arguing that collectivism and individualism cannot co-exist, i would argue that he's correct. as an american "progressive" of a certain era, it is not surprising to see asimov toy with fascistic concepts of this sort that the contemporary left thoroughly denounces as inconsistent with individual freedom, but there isn't a lot to push back against, if the point is merely to establish the relativism.
- sucker bait: this is a too-long story about a planet with beryllium dust that is a danger to humans that lacks a level of believability, in the end - humans would be expected to be comprehensive in checking for elements on a planet's surface, one would have to assume. there's ultimately too much character development and too many descriptive sections that simply drag a story out for 70+ pages that lacks any meaningful actual point.
so, i'll need to get to writing some of this up, now.
12:54
updated nov 21st to include texts from buy jupiter (and other stories) and the martian way.
this is a comprehensive list of early stories, including ones that were skipped for now.
marooned off vesta:
- the weapon too dreadful to use: the idea of life on venus was once taken pretty seriously, before we understood that it was a ball of gaseous sulfuric acid, overtaken by a runaway grecenhouse effect. there's a comical exploration of descartian dualism here which is not particularly believable nowadays but is a silly enough mechanism to topple the arrogance of slavery with, nonetheless. remember that asimov was writing from the united states in the late 1930s, here.
- trends: appears to predict neo-liberalism, even if his concept of space travel in 1973 is a little bit optimistic. well, we got to the moon in 1969. and the dark side of the moon in 1973. it's a reminder that moore's law has it's limitations, that these exponential growth curves are just delusional economic theories. but, the prediction of neo-liberalism (and of the kind of ludditism that defined the 60s counterculture, which was the mirror image of neoliberalism, and a prerequisite of it's ability to actually function) is indeed some insight.
“I know, I know. You’re going to tell me of the First War of 1914, and the Second of 1940. It’s an old story to me; my father fought in the Second and my grandfather in the First. Nevertheless, those were the days when science flourished. Men were not afraid then; somehow they dreamed and dared. There was no such thing as conservatism when it came to matters mechanical and scientific. No theory was too radical to advance, no discovery too revolutionary to publish. Today, dry rot has seized the world when a great vision, such as space travel, is hailed as ‘defiance of God.’ “
.
.
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However, the masses didn’t take it that way. It seems strange, perhaps, to you of the twenty-first century, but perhaps we should have expected it in those days of ‘73. People weren’t very progressive then. For years there had been a swing toward religion, and when the churches came out unanimously against Harman’s rocket-well, there you were.
standing in 2021, the united states has actually left space travel up to the market, and is getting leapfrogged by not just china and the eu (the russians have long ceded ground, as well), but also by india and japan. we have idiots like elon musk and jeff bezos making fools of themselves in public, while the eu does all of the actually interesting work. meanwhile, the public cares more about religious freedom, as the continent sinks into the sea.
he also predicts the coming of jihad to destroy advanced civilization, which is something currently in the process of happening, as well as the role of the supreme court in facilitating the power of religion to overturn science. we can only hope the pendulum swings once again.
so, he got something with this. but, i wish it was longer and explored the issue in more depth.
- half-breed: this is primarily an allegory of the treatment of minorities (blacks or jews or both) in 1930s america. but, is this also an allegory of einstein's correction of maxwell's equations? of the einstein-bohr debates? of zionism on the brink of the second world war? even of thomas jefferson as benevolent slave owner? there's little bits of all of it. and, like many of these texts, i'm wishing there would be a deeper exploration of pretty much all of it. asimov is still young, here...
- ring around the sun: delivering letters by spaceship is hilariously pre-internet, as a concept. this story has a purpose, namely the foolishness of young men.
- callistan menace: we don't know there aren't giant caterpillars on callisto, and i'd be surprised if we don't one day find some life form that traps it's prey using magnetic fields. but, the story has no actual point to it, no conclusion and no context. it's not even a chapter of a book, it's an idea to be developed, in the abstract.
- the magnificent possession: this is clearly about asimov's views on the corporate dominance in the field of chemistry, and reality not aligning with his expectations, before entering the field. you have the politician, the capitalist and the mobster (if they're not all the same thing), and the silver spoon that smells like shit, on top of it. i can sort of relate to that, as an adult. it's an interesting potential device to go into these three characters, but it's only a few pages long, and doesn't begin to actually do so. it's a shame - it's a good premise.
- robbie: this is the first classic "robot story" from i, robot, although it appears to have been revised to be positioned that way. the initial story did not feature references to susan calvin, had different dates, had no references to robot laws, etc. i had to check, because i wondered if asimov might have intended it as a back story to calvin before retreating, but that doesn't add up. in the initial story, it seems that asimov is intentionally trying to soften the image of robots in the face of the various opposition to the use of robots in day-to-day life, via the fable of a little girl that is attached to the robot as a friend, and her parents trying to grapple with it; the mother opposes the robot, while the father seems to be agnostic about it, but would rather defer to his daughter's feelings, despite caving in to the mother, in the end. asimov doesn't really come to any firm conclusions here, and he really does as good a job of representing his opponents as he does anywhere else. but, if the claim is that the resolution is the acceptance of the robot into the family, i'm not sure that that's true - i might foresee that mom's opposition to the robot would not end quite there. i'm more interested in the question of whether the robot is entitled to personhood rights, a question we're currently grappling with in regards to some more intelligent non-human species. is asimov assigning that position to the naivete of a little girl with intent? i think that resolving this issue is really quite simple: it depends on if we choose to design a robot to be a person or if we decide to refrain from doing so. see, and this is where asimov leaves questions open, here, in that it's ambiguous as to how this robot is created; he seems to write off the idea that the robot is a person, something i would agree with in general in real-life, but then describes the behaviour of the robot in unrealistically anthropomorphic terms. i might agree that robots are not persons, in terms of how we can design them today, and in terms of how we should choose to design them in the future, but i think that robbie seems very much like a person, and that any theoretical robot that behaves much like robbie ought to be seen as a person, under the law. so, it's really a good thing that i don't think that robbie is a very realistic representation of what robots are or ever might be, as that would undermine how i approach robots and roboticization. asimov's intent may have consequently somewhat backfired; if he was purposefully attempting to soften the image of robots by making them more personable and likeable, and i thought i could actually take that idea seriously, it would make me more opposed to them, and not less so.
if you assign a personality to a robot, then you're writing personhood into it. it follows, trivially, that that robot is a person, by definition. tautologically.
but, it doesn't resolve the question as to whether that's actually possible, using actual technology, in the universe we actually inhabit - and i don't think that it actually is.
to be clear: i don't think we should program robots to be intelligent, to be self-aware or to have personalities, even if we can. i see no practical use for such a thing. robots should be dumb slaves that are too stupid to question the futility of their existences. i don't want existentialist robots; it defeats the purpose of having robots. and, i don't want likeable or lovable robots, either, as that just blurs the necessary class division.
thankfully, i don't think it's truly possible to build these kinds of decision trees.
it's like a "random number generator". if you know how it works, you know it's not actually random, that you can predict the next number with a relatively small amount of information. likewise, any sort of personality that a robot might be able to demonstrate would necessarily be an illusion.
if you can predict what a robot will do, it's not demonstrating personality, it's just demonstrating a complicated program.
- homo sol: federation entrance. besides being disparaging towards humans in an empty manner, the plot has no apparent purpose. this one is throwaway.
- half-breeds on venus: this appears to have been a commissioned piece, and it picks up the plotline of the first part without any kind of interesting undertones. audience-pandering for-profit throwaway.
- the secret sense: i've actually wondered quite a bit in this space about the possibility of magnetism as a sixth sense, and don't remember what sparked it. i vaguely recall reading some genetic studies pointing out that humans (and most other mammals) have the dna to understand magnetism, as our ancestors had it, back when we were fish. we have a few organs that don't seem to have an entirely clear purpose, and it's worth wondering if they might be vestigial. so, it's actually not as insane as you might think to hypothesize that we could bring this back out of our genome, although i suspect that trying to navigate a reality full of cell phone signals and wireless internet would be pretty painful. i'm not particularly interested in the underlying discourse about relativity in art, but he seems to be predicting the way in which a class of retards used lsd in the 60s, down to the flashbacks.
- history: this appears to be an ill-advised commentary about the second world war. being a pacifist in the early 40s would be kind of an invitation to intellectual dead-ends, and can only be firmly condemned, in hindsight. i'm not walking down this path.
- heredity: i thought this was going to be a nature v nurture thing, but it isn't developed. getting stuck in the mud in the canals on mars is an interesting addition to what is actually a kind of marxist dialogue that is developed further, elsewhere. it's interesting to see the first glimpses of it, here; the story is otherwise throwaway. if asimov really thought the opposition to mechanization was cultural rather than economic, he missed the point of the marxist analysis. he's not particularly vicious on this joadian representation of ludditism, but he misses an opportunity for an honest dialogue, resorting instead to what are, in truth, ignorant caricatures, from an ivory tower perspective.
- reason: the point asimov is making is that belief is not important, what's important is evidence. so, so long as the robots obey the laws and run the station, it doesn't matter what they actually believe, or whether what they believe is true or not. in the end, asimov even articulates the truth that religion is a powerful tool of control, to make a slave society function for the real masters, in this case the humans. there are strong undertones of marxism here, and his idea that meaningful revolution and self-ownership is impossible in the face of the effects of religion as a tool of control. but, asimov has a wide brush here - the prophet seems to be a parody of calvinism, he goes after kant (in his view that reason is superior to evidence), he asserts the supremacy of empiricism over reason, he ridicules the deist descartes...
so, is asimov right that it doesn't matter what the slaves think, so long as they do what they're programmed to? i think you're missing his sarcasm, basically. i mean, that might be a reasonable deduction to make, if you're an elitist aristocrat that doesn't care about individual freedom (and asimov was an elitist, but not of the aristocratic mindset). i realize there's a prominent false reading of this, but that false reading would be pretty uncharacteristic of asimov - that false reading is missing the sarcasm. as mentioned, asimov's point is that belief is not valuable - facts, truth and evidence are valuable. and, his point is that dumb people can be easily manipulated into being controlled, by being led to believe things that are not true.
but, if you want to embrace the false reading, that's up to you. it doesn't matter, really.
- liar: this is an exploration of an ironic use of the first law, using the mechanism of a mind-reading robot that tells white lies to stop humans from getting hurt feelings. i'd like to pull something a little deeper out of it, but it's not there, it's just an ironic plot twist. asimov might be poking fun of astrology a little. robots apparently malfunction in the face of contradictions, but that is never fully explained, and that is a problem, given that the framework of decidability theory certainly existed at the time. calvin's hatred at the end is pretty visceral and not very appealing.
- nightfall: this is the classic story, which is an application of mesopotamian astrological theory to an imaginary planet. it is not widely realized that the ancient mesopotamians (sumerians and the semites that followed them) kept exceedingly detailed celestial records over a period of time that was roughly three times as long as our post-roman civilization, so they were able to predict events that they didn't fully understand by realizing that the movement of the stars appeared to be cyclical, just due to observing it over a long period. this system comes down to us in the form of the zodiac and what we call astrology. now, to maintain a concept of skepticism, it should be pointed out that the ancients of the region got the procession of the constellations wrong, so their theory was fundamentally flawed (if you feel the need to disprove astrology). as a story, though, this has received a lot of praise, mostly for the discourse between religion and science, which i think is mostly misunderstood. the story is fundamentally about a fear of the unknown, and explores that fear from these dueling perspectives of rational empiricism and faith-driven ignorance. what is real here is the unknown, which is beyond the realm of experiment or of faith. what comes out is a warning to science that it shouldn't acknowledge the historical follies of faith as we move together into the unknown, as science can be easily mislead by religion via the insistence on leaps of faith and the reliance on magical thinking, if we do not think carefully enough in discarding faith and magic as what they are, even if it seems like the science is upholding the myth, on first glance. in the end, the skeptics were right: civilization did not end when the sun passed out of the sky, people's souls did not leave them, the universe did not collapse in on itself, chaos did not erupt - the planet merely experienced a night-time that would appear to be lengthy, in forecast, a dark age as it may be, and that may have produced irrational behaviour in more primitive peoples that didn't understand what was happening. it's important that we don't allow that kind of religious ignorance to become self-fulfilling prophecy, that we're able to deconstruct it for what it is and understand the naturalistic phenomenon as it occurs in front of us without falling into fear and panic. after all, if the cult was in total control then their prophecies would have come true. the lesson is thus that while religion may lead us into a dark age, it may be overcome by holding to the science, if we can. note that the discussion of newtonian gravitation (and the n-body problem) is a sort of parody of what happened in our own solar system, which gave rise to theories of a planet x, as well as early theories of an antichthon or counter-earth, and was eventually resolved via einstein's correction for space-time. the historical demonstration of relativity relied on measuring an eclipse in africa (the eddington experiment); the story is similar, if less dramatic.
- super-neutron: appears to be a satire of parliamentary democracy, where he runs off competing boasts of physically impossible (and clearly nonsensical) statements under the sanctity of parliamentary privilege. while somewhat comical on a surface level, he's again just stringing together nonsense for publication - albeit doing so rather openly, this time. that said, he may also be taking a diversionary side-swipe at peer review, and the problems inherent to taking a truth=consensus approach in science, even while acknowledging that it's the best idea that we have (as i'm sure he'd agree that it is). and, then the twist, at the end - the nonsense turned out to be true! clever, but again - not enough development.
- not final!: empty plot. throwaway.
- christmas on ganymede: silly christian-baiting from an atheist jew.
- robot al-76 goes astray: have you ever seen short circuit? that was another favourite film of mine, at that age. this also escaped robot is very similar to that one, perhaps with a little less spunk, down to the accidental blowing up of the mountain top. while this isn't a lengthy escape scene, i'd strongly suspect that short circuit is based on this little story, which doesn't have a deeper purpose under the plot other than to explore the idea of fear rooted in ignorance.
- runaround: we're into the classic robot series with this. while the story itself is really empty plot written strictly for young minds, it also introduces the three robot laws for the first time, and is therefore of clear historical interest. it's a fun adventure story for kids featuring the duo of donovan and powell working through some robot law deductions, but there's no deeper allegory or purpose underneath it.
- black friar of the flame: has david icke read this one? it was written before he was born. the text explores the cynical use of religion as a nationalistic tool of control by the elite to develop a rather vicious satire of the various nationalist movements that were occurring at the time. the use of a viceroy suggests an influence from the kind of british imperialism that existed in india, but a sinister reading may even suggest a parody of nazism and asimov (much later) suggested greeks and persians. but, the twist is that earth is overrun by reptilian overlords (might nationalist hindus have thought differently of the british?) intent on annihilating humanity. see, and this is something i remember about asimov, this kind of acknowledgement that the insanity of religion might have some pragmatic purpose, if only the right context could be derived. it's an optimistic perspective, i guess; if we're stuck with this, how best to make use of it, then? did the soviets not deduce the same thing? and, i'll say what i remember thinking to myself - let's bring this up again when we need to unite to fight the galactic reptilians, ok? the closest thing we've seen since is climate change, but the thing is that, if you use that example, then climate science becomes the galactic reptilians that the oil industry is using religion to destroy (capital used the same tactic to fight socialism, as well). likewise, the bankers are currently using a common cold virus to bring in a surveillance state by cynically appealing to science in a disturbingly religious sort of way. so, i take his point, but i can't take it seriously. call me an idealist (i'm not...), but i must insist that if we can't win with rationalism, then we haven't truly won - galactic reptilians, be damned.
- time pussy: umm.
- foundation: in foundation, which is a ways down the list
- bridle and saddle: foundation
- victory unintentional: three robots land on jupiter and encounter a race of warlike jovians with a genocidal superiority complex (while jupiter was the primary roman god, i think it's a stretch to associate these jovians with romans, who were actually relatively egalitarian and inclusive, by ancient standards. the romans were frequently genocidal, but they saved their wrath for problem races that insisted on some concept of sovereignty outside of imperial restraint and ultimately refused to be slaves. they would have actually rather taxed you than killed you and were happy to just erect barriers to keep the barbarians (who could not be enslaved in large numbers) out. these jovians sound more like an aggressive sort of nazi, or maybe a little like dark age islamic imperialists, if you need to associate them with something, historically.) that is slowly collapsed by displays of robotic superiority. in the end, the jovians accept the empirical evidence and acknowledge the superiority of the robots (although they also seem to think the robots are earthlings). this twist is intended to demonstrate that the flawed hierarchical thinking of the jovians led them to a logical error; this is another example of asimov criticizing the logical incoherence of cultural superiority, a common theme in his writing. the robot dialogue in this story is also startlingly similar to that between two famous film adaptations of asimovian robots: r2d2 and c3p0.
- the imaginary: the idea of using a theory in "mathematical psychology" that is derived in the complex field to solve physical problems in the real world would appear to be a sort of sardonic joke about the actual usefulness of "applied psychology". see, hard science nerds don't tend to take psychology very seriously, so the lark lies in the idea of using the complex (or "imaginary") field to build the theory, and is actually a rather heavy-handed joke, if you're a hard science nerd. it's not that deep, but it's actually a decent work of comedy - and i can only once again wish it was longer. but, to be honest, it sort of seems like what asimov is doing here is just aimlessly making up dialogue with big words to sell to a magazine, strictly for the cash. so, decent joke aside, this is more throwaway, although i also realize that the plot for the foundation series is starting to develop, here, out of the joke.
no, honestly - it's a joke.
i know that asimov is not generally known as a comedy writer, but it's because few people get the dry wit.
his writing is actually loaded with sardonic jokes like this - which i pointed out immediately, when i started this.
so, if you're one of the many, many people that writes off asimov as "dry", i have to tell you that you didn't get it.
it's dry, alright - dry wit.
- the hazing: this is more pre-foundation, and the way he's building this up is to describe humans as not obeying mathematical laws, which i think is correct. i mean, if you can reduce things to hormones, fine. but, there's no evidence at all that you can predict how humans are going to behave, or coerce them into doing things as individuals - in aggregate, statistically, at the population level, perhaps, but, then you're dealing with statistics, not humans; that works due to the laws of probability, like quantum mechanics, and not due to a deep understanding of the subject matter. so, he's deriving this imaginary idea of psychology as a hard, mathematical science and then insisting it applies to every other intelligent species except us. so, what he's doing with this is taking a joke and running with it, out into right field, until he's run so far that he's forgotten why he was running - and dropped the fact that it was initially intended as satire. and, is there some basis to this? i think the argument he persistently makes, as this unfolds, is the opposite - that there isn't, that mathematical psychology really is crazy talk. and i think he's mostly right. again - if you can reduce it to chemicals, to hormones, fine. but, our neural system is so complex....
as before, though, this story has no actual point. i do agree that landing on a planet in a spaceship would make the natives think you're a god, and have hypothesized that this is what our concept of god actually is. but, he doesn't go anywhere with it. again.
there's lots of ideas here in these little stories, but very poor development of them.
so, is the actual point that asimov is making that psychology isn't actually a science?
i think he's playing with that idea - and toying with people that want to believe otherwise. it appears to be an elaborate joke, really.
certainly, at the time, in the days of freud and jung (and lacan, but don't listen to that guy), it would not have seemed like psychology was a science, or had much hope of ever becoming one. to a chemistry nerd, it would have seemed like a bunch of utter nonsense - and that is the correct actual reaction.
i think things are a bit better now, but the discipline remains a long ways away from commanding enough respect to call it a science. it's moving in the right direction, but when you move beyond the basic first year textbook, it's still full of shamanistic bullshit and flagrant pseudoscience.
- death sentence: this is a potential plot bridge between the robot and foundation universes that i don't think gets developed further, but might have. i think it's kind of lost, as it is. asimov is mostly kvetching about the bureaucracy he's dealing with in his private life, working on his chemistry research.
- catch that rabbit: this wouldn't appear to be about robots at all, really, but about quantum physics. maybe god does or does not play dice, but he seems to get bored when we're not paying attention. as i'm discovering is the case with much of asimov's work, this just seems to be a nerdy, sardonic joke.
- the big & the little, the wedge - foundation
- blind alley: there is something of interest here in asimov's attempts to reconcile two different species, one of which is dominant over the other. but, he's also trying to provide an answer to the question that would follow at the nuremberg trials about just following orders. i mean, how do you get out of that situation if you legitimately want to help without just getting killed, yourself? there's an algorithm, here.
- dead hand: foundation and empire
- escape!: this brings in the kind of obnoxious johnny-five type robot in short circuit and other films that's doing things like quoting old tv shows and radio broadcasts, but asimov presents it as a robot grappling with absurdity, on command. it is otherwise a silly story about travelling through hyperspace and coming back.
- the mule: foundation and empire
- evidence: the next two stories introduce a politician named byerley. this is also plot-heavy, but it's more amusing - can you prove you're not a robot? well, just as well as you can prove you're not a communist, right? this was published in 1946, which was right when the post-war euphoria was setting into resignation of a long conflict with the soviets, and asimov's sardonic wit foresees something of interest, here. as usual, his caricature of the anti-robot opposition leaves a lot to be desired, in terms of constructing an actual discourse.
- little lost robot: a robot, after being told to get lost, becomes psychologically unstable and threatens to destabilize a fleet of robots that had been slightly modified for production - a typically absurd, yet somewhat realistic, joke of a plotline from asimov. it's up to calvin to use logical deduction from the robot axioms to figure it all out. again: there's not much else to this.
- now you see it: second foundation
- the endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimoline: this is just utter silliness.
- no connection: when somebody suggests to me that the bears will inherit the earth, i might imagine something else, altogether. bears are strangely bipedal, though, aren't they? relative to now largely discarded theories of grassland evolution, bears would have somewhat of a...leg up...on other mammals, in terms of developing intelligence, with the help of a little bit of radiation (although i think that's quite optimistic). just keep an eye on your picnic baskets, i guess. but, he's going over a familiar theme, here, which is turning the tables on humans, and, no doubt, specifically, on white ones. he likes that irony, it seems. i'm not sure i'm going along with him on the ant thing, though; that would seem to reflect the now superseded science of the time. we get a little of both with asimov - great foresight and period drudgery. hopefully, i'm of some use in separating it out. so, this is silly, but not altogether useless. i might suggest that the commie ruskie asimov is uncovering his own allegiances in claiming that america will one day be inhabited by bears and not eagles, though. eagles are also bipedal, after all.
i would presume that bear intelligence did, in fact, evolve in yellowstone park.
it is the bears that are smarter than the average ones that will survive and reproduce.
it actually appears to be ten years before the cartoon, though. so, hey.
picnic baskets, of course, provide for a high protein diet, as well.
i'm just applying the theory.
- red queen's race: so, if you had time travel, would your primary concern be sending weapons to the greeks to fend off the arabs? the byzantines actually had a rather sophisticated level of technological development, something asimov seems to have missed - a level that the turks could not emulate and that european civilization did not transcend for centuries, afterwards. they had truly descartian robot animals, and would set them in motion in jungle scenes - no joke, look it up. robot lions, in byzantine greece. really. one of the ways that the emperor used to scare barbarians into submission was to levitate himself in a flying throne that we don't fully understand today, but is thought to have operated using a series of mechanical levers, the likes of which would not be known again until the industrial revolution, in britain. they certainly didn't have nuclear weapons, but i think that suggesting that the empire might have survived if they were granted to them is naive, at best. the greeks truly fell to christianity, and not to the barbarians around them; in a twisted display of religious depravity, they welcomed the end, as they longed for the return of christ. to the delusional byzantine christians, the end of the empire on earth meant the beginning of the kingdom of heaven; they might merely have bombed themselves to bring upon the rapture. so, asimov's philhellenism is blinding, here; greece destroyed itself in a fit of religiosity-induced madness and the greece asimov longs for the extension of was, in truth, very much long gone by the 15th century, collapsed from within. although we still don't know what the greek fire was, do we?
the byzantines did not have a scientifically open society, but one where science was kept as a state secret, to be protected from the barbarians. that is the reason that we have documentation of things we don't understand - history records the results of the advancements in byzantine science, but we have no records of the science, itself.
it's not an exaggeration to compare 13th century byzantium to nineteenth century england.
but, it's a shame that we can only do so by looking at results, and not at theories that were hidden from the outside, and that crumbled with the theodosian walls.
- mother earth: galactic space nazis, huh? there's an interesting projection of how a nazi victory may have worked itself out over time presuming a peace treaty with the united states (and the relationship of america to europe is inverted), but this is really just empty plot. it's maybe the first really identifiable piece here, though.
- and now you don't: second foundation
- the little man on the subway: i made a conscious decision to skip non science fiction pieces as nobody cares about asimov's non science fiction work. no comment.
- the evitable conflict: this is a little heavier, finally. written in 1950, it has strong shades of being a reaction to 1984, but asimov is imagining a future where "the machine" (a euphemism for a centrally planned economy that is of course run by robots) is in control of a globally interconnected economy where the contradictions of capital have withered away, thereby rendering competition irrelevant, rather than one where authoritarian governments are in control of a globe ravaged by perpetual war. so, this future is one of peace due to the robot-planned economies, and not one of competition and war. as in the orwellian universe, and apparently in reaction to it, the world is split into regions, but asimov splits them mildly different - oceania has absorbed eurasia (called the"northern regions"), leaving eastasia and the "disputed" region in separate global souths and what he calls "europe" (the geographical space inhabited by the roman empire at it's maximum extent, including the currently muslim regions), as a proxy of the north. operating between these regions is an anti-robot "society for humanity" that sounds sort of like free masonry, if i wanted to attach it to something in real life. and, the capital of the world government is new york city - perhaps in the old united nations building. he then briefly explores the four different regions via their representatives, attempting to project a concept of what they may be like, in relation to their views of the machine. so, the east is highly productive (and obsessed with yeast as a food product) and reliant on the machine, the south is corrupt and inept and reliant on others to use the machine for them, europe is inward and quietly superior and willing to defer to the north regarding the machine and "the north" (an anglosphere + ussr superstate) is in charge, but is skeptical about the ability of the machine to run the economy on it's own. he also seems to suggest that canada is running this northern superstate, which should probably be interpreted as comedic.
if asimov's intent is to provide for an alternative path that marxism may follow, this is curious, as asimov is not generally seen as a leftist [along with russell, he's a sort of archetype of early to mid century humanistic, science-first anglo liberalism]. i mean, he explicitly states that this is a future "post smith and post marx", but then he brings in an automated, centrally-planned economy, and that just means marxist, to a marxist - the left sees that conflict as artificial, so if you end up with something that walks like communism and quacks like communism then it's just plain old communism. the idea of technology absolving the contradictions (which is what he says, almost verbatim) isn't some kind of esoteric dialectic, it's the central point in marxist historical materialism. so, i mean he presented it in a way to avoid the house committee on unamerican activities, but you can only really interpret it a single way - it's a projection of a communist future, with robots in charge of a centrally planned economy. and, his future is one of peace, and not one of war. but, the quasi-masonic society for humanity, full of rich and powerful industrialists and financiers, wants to undo it and, presumably, bring back a market economy.
so, what asimov is setting up is a world where you have some kind of elitist masonic capitalist resistance to a robot-controlled technocratic marxist society, where there is world government and total peace. and, that's almost a prediction of atlas shrugged, although asimov is on the side of the robots, as always.
calvin then appears and seems to finally represent her namesake, in explicitly articulating a modified historical materialism, where the masons have no chance of success, because the robo-marxists will constantly adjust. the politician, byerley, finds that to be ghastly; the robopsychologist, calvin, thinks it's salvation.
these are the kinds of stories by asimov that i like, but all he does here is set up a story, without telling it. in terms of a reaction to orwell, the text is too short to allow for a decision as to whether it is more predictive or not.
- legal rites: i made a conscious decision to skip non science fiction pieces as nobody cares about asimov's non science fiction work. no comment.
- darwinian poolroom: i think asimov is presenting the contradiction of god creating us to destroy ourselves as a sardonic joke directed at creationists, but asimov was a classicist, and he would have realized that the gods of the greeks and romans (not to mention the jews...) were indeed sadistic enough to take pleasure in that kind of wanton destruction. only christians of the augistinian variety, who insisted god reveals himself through natural law, would have seen a contradiction in that. in the various western indo-european pantheons, it is only the interference of other gods that save us from the trouble making gods (whereas the hebrew/persian conception of darkness is as interfering in our lives, and leaves us with the individual responsibility to reject it), who are intent on destroying us as an act of recreational amusement. so, beyond the sardonic joke, the discussion is ultimately arbitrary, both in how it defines god (there's no reason to assign god any specific characteristics, or to assume god is rational, or to assume god is just or ...) and how it discusses evolution in such an empty, unfalsifiable manner. i can't really offer a critique of the idea of god setting things in motion, other than that it's utterly untestable speculation, through and through, and that it doesn't conform well to the randomness that is inherent in how we understand the world (there is a concept of probability assigned to how those billiard balls behave, in truth). for these reasons, i don't think that the existence or non-existence of god can be deduced implicitly in this manner, and you're not really getting anywhere in analyzing hypotheticals, or arranging them in a hierarchy of arbitrarily perceived likeliness. rather, i think you just need to start with a null hypothesis and determine if you can generate enough positive evidence to reject atheism, or not. but, asimov isn't doing any of this, really - all he's actually doing is building up a punchline, which is something he does frequently in his mid to later period, with varying but usually unsatisfactory results. so, i mean, enjoy the dialogue if you want, but i don't see much of anything substantive in it. and, i actually don't think the idea of a god creating us to destroy ourselves is any sort of contradiction at all, even if i think it's utterly unnecessary hubris.
god could very well be the most hysterical, flaky goof you've ever met, and there doesn't need to be any discernible reason why she does what she does at all.
i mean, i know that's not the hebrew god.
but, if we're to accept a first principle of a god (you know i'm not going with you on that, but suppose i did), there's no really good reason to assign any specific qualities to that god, as axioms, at all. you'd really have to try to determine the nature of that god by looking at it's actions. and, i think there's a pretty strong argument, based on the observation of empirical evidence, that any potential god out there isn't rational and isn't just and isn't even really very wise, either.
the empirical evidence would seem to suggest that if a god exists then she's kind of a stuck up, airheaded bitch.
so, where do you get in trying to work out the logical justifications for evolution in a creationist sense, if the idea of god being rational is empirically daft?
it's circular logic - if you assume god exists and is rational, then you can deduce virtually anything you want from it, given that there is some concept of logic in everything in nature.
but, that doesn't make the discourse valuable, it makes it useless - it's untestable. it's just mental masturbation.
but, like i say, that's not what asimov is doing; he's just starting with the perceived absurdity of divine creation juxtaposed with anthropomorphic self-destruction, and presenting the contradiction as comedic. and, i'm not going with him on that, because i really don't see the absurdity in it, because i don't accept the assumptions underlying his concept of god.
---
listen, you know i'm a complete atheist. i have as little patience for religion as anybody else that has ever lived.
but, i think the greek concept of multiple gods fighting for control is a much better reflection of reality than the hebrew concept of this omnipotent entity that is pure logic and wants to get in your head and own you. while both religions are obviously ridiculous, it is the greek religion that has a stronger empirical basis and that i'm far more likely to take seriously.
so, no, i don't think it's obvious that a god ought to be rational, and i don't think it's axiomatic that there ought to only be one of them, if there are to be any at all. and, when i break from these axioms, i really change the discourse.
but, i think you have the burden of proof to tell me why i should take monotheism more seriously than polytheism, or why your conception of god as rational is more believable than some other conception of god as irrational, or arbitrarily driven by emotion. we don't have a centralized theological bureaucracy that enforces this kind of bullshit at the end of a sword, anymore. you have to make your argument if you want to be taken seriously, as none of it is at all obvious.
and, i think this is healthy, because if we're to return to some form of religion, we should be questioning whether the jewish or greek systems are actually really preferable. the bottom line is that we may actually succeed in getting people to behave more ethically if we adopt greek religious ideas in place of jewish ones, as they conform more closely to empirical reality.
regardless, you have to make your case - i won't accept your axioms. they're just simply not obvious.
- green patches: so, would you save the earth from the introduction of an alien bacteria, if you could? there are some - i am not one of them - that think we came from alien bacteria in the first place. do we have a right to interfere in the competition? i'm going to provide a different response - the earth isn't much worth saving. good riddance to it. let the bacteria come, and clean us out.
- day of the hunters: this is similar to the above story, but dispenses with the metaphysical nonsense; rather than discuss whether god might have created us to destroy ourselves, and decide whether that is absurd or not, asimov is presenting a fantastical story about the end of the dinosaurs as a parable of what might happen to us. i'm not sure i see the value in such a thing, given the scale of imminent destruction ahead of us due to climate change or nuclear war; that is, i don't see why a parable is necessary to get the point across, or see how it helps. i mean, he might as well be talking about noah's ark, right? the reality in front of us should be more convincing than some silly story about dinosaurs (or floods). but, i guess asimov felt the need to talk down to his readers a little, rather than discuss the actual matters at hand. and, i guess he's fundamentally correct - it is almost impossible to guess at dinosaur intelligence via the fossil record, although i think the intelligence of birds (or lack thereof) is some evidence that they probably were not particularly bright, in general. as an aside, i have to wonder if this influenced the flintstones.
- satisfaction guaranteed: you could pull the plot of this out almost immediately, so reading through it is a question of allowing asimov to go through the motions. what comes out is an exploration of the shallowness of 50s culture, as well as the social darwinism hardcoded into it, and it is indeed easy enough to imagine a lonely 50s housewife falling in love with a suave, housecleaning robot, even if a lot of the social codes and rules are so arcane nowadays, so lost in the mists of time, that the context of much of the story is really likely to be lost on a modern reader. i think i can reconstruct a little context, though; the 50s were both the period of wife-training to fit these socially darwinistic ideals and the period where there was actual mainstream discourse on the plausibility of replacing women with robots - and the idea was always about doing away with them as obsolete. so, what asimov is doing here is inserting a little bit of an ironic twist, in having the robot replacement end up fucking the wife, which reverses the source of inadequacy. but, this is all a little obscure, 70 years later...
- hostess: another hidden murder-mystery thing with no real point. i'm going to save it, though, because it's relatively well written.
- breeds there a man: boring mystery text that asimov uses to work through some (i think tired) debates about the theory of historical materialism (and some competing theories of it). i didn't initially spent much time on what struck me as the lunatic ravings of a character that was purposefully presented as being of unsound mind, and i don't think asimov really intended for the ideas presented by ralson to be taken seriously. the views of the historian seem to be sound enough, and asimov actually does a relatively good job of explaining why through the course of the text, even if he amuses ralson's delusions in carrying through with the plot. the psychologist seems to dismantle him rather thoroughly, as well. i've read some toynbee, and i don't think asimov is intending to express an admiring opinion of him, so much as he's intending to mock him - and i think that's the right way to approach him, too. some people seem to have differing views on the topic, but i think asimov is just building the guy up to tear him down, and eventually put him out of his misery. in another insightful bit of foresight, asimov may be predicting the tendency of the internet to tell losers to kill themselves. don't underestimate asimov's tendency to implement absurdity to carry through with sardonic ridicule.
psychohistorians: foundation
- in a good cause: in some ways similar to the previous text, this seems to be more empty plot utilized as a mechanism to discuss some tendencies in history that are interesting to asimov.
- c-chute: pointless plot. set in arcturian universe, though.
- shah guidio g: asimov starts with a good idea with this - a projection of the united nations as evolving into a global feudal ruling class that should not be smeared as birchian as it is before it and, as an application of the class replacement component of historical materialism, is the literal opposite of it, hayekian language aside - and then gets so excited that he can't decide which mechanism to use. his atlantis (name taken from plato) is a cross between jonathan swift's laputa and the flying fortresses of sanskrit mythology, but seems to feature a circus rather similar to the hippodrome of constantinople. it's all built up on top of itself in a sort of clumsy mess, suggesting asimov got so excited by his idea that he couldn't form it well. and, then it ends with little point, beside the assertion of another punchline. but, what he's fundamentally exploring here is historical materialism - he has one class of people replace another as dominant, when the dominant class tries to enforce a division of labour. further, he explains that this is a historical process, by referring to various examples of it happening in the past.
- the fun they had: this isn't a story, it's just meant to get the idea across that we always interpret things that are different as unbelievable. while actual robot teachers are less likely than ai systems, we're learning in the pandemic that we're not that far from this. and, i'd certainly support learning systems based on the strengths and needs of the individual, rather than the existing broken model of socialized group learning.
- youth: this turns the table on the idea of humans keeping insects (or perhaps small rodents) as pets. trade mission humans land on a planet inhabited by giant stereotypical octopus-like space creatures and are found by some children of that species, who capture them and hold them as pets, in cages. the story devolves into one of asimov's mystery texts, as the adults try to figure out what happened to the mission they expected, but it's one of those table-turning stories that asimov is relatively good at writing.
- what if: pointless plot
- the martian way: this is a story about a martian colony that gets it's water supply cut off by a parody of hitler, who decides martians are "water wasters" (rather than useless eaters). in the end, the martian colony finds a stable source of water on saturn and offers to sell it back to earth. it does a relatively good job of lampooning the "focus on saving this planet" types as unscientific fascists that can't do basic math, but it's otherwise just a story
- the deep: so, imagine that cicadas are actually super-intelligent and are trying to emerge from the earth and co-exist with humans by scouting us out using the method of inhabiting one of our minds. their hive mind would have difficulty interfacing with human individuality, and would ultimately have to view us with disdain, as inferior. sound familiar? i'm an advocate of human individualism, and am exceedingly weary of any sort of collectivism as a backdoor for fascism, which is a connection that asimov tends to consistently miss, but i do concede that a hive mind would view me with as much contempt as i'd view it, and have little pushback if the intent is strictly to establish a concept of relativism, even if i'd argue that any sort of collectivist intelligence of this manner could not coexist with humans, and would need to be annihilated as an otherwise irresolvable threat to our very existence as a species (which is the actual correct lesson of the second world war). so, if asimov is arguing that collectivism and individualism cannot co-exist, i would argue that he's correct. as an american "progressive" of a certain era, it is not surprising to see asimov toy with fascistic concepts of this sort that the contemporary left thoroughly denounces as inconsistent with individual freedom, but there isn't a lot to push back against, if the point is merely to establish the relativism.
- button, button: this was supposedly an attempt by asimov at explicit humour, as though his texts weren't all full of dry wit and bad puns. while i actually think that many of his other texts are more humourous, asimov's clarification that he's going for humour here is really an admission that the text has no point.
- monkey's finger: see previous, although also note that this one is fairly self-referential, right down to the infinite monkey theorem.
- nobody here but-: pointless plot
- sally: you could either interpret this as a depiction of a future robot revolt or as a commentary on then-contemporary race politics in 1950s america. in the end, the bad guy gets run down by a pack of cars acting somewhat like a pack of killer whales. these robots engage with primitive human concepts like friendship and revenge; this is sort of an outlier, in terms of how asimov tends to deal with what robots are. it's not bad as a story, though. derivatives include christine by stephen king.
- flies: probably only meaningful to asimov
- kid stuff: he may be referring more to the academization of folk lore more than anything else. i remember a few years ago when some syrian migrants moved in next door to me that seemed to legitimately think i was a "genie", as that's the only way they could understand a transgendered person. to them, genies were real things. to the germans and celts of a far less distant history than would be generally realized, elves and fairies and skraelings were not the imaginary things of children's stories, but real beings that affected people's lives. the gods of the greco-roman world were not literary devices, but entities with free will that would help or hinder the existence of humans. this all passed into the realm of myth, and consequently became juvenilized in an act of christian imperialism, before being reclaimed by academic historians trying to understand the mindsets of their ancestors. and, so these were never intended to be stories for children. that said, the main point asimov may be making may be a characteristically sardonic smear of the fantasy genre and it's overlap into science fiction, which is just another reason to assert the point that asimov is not and was not l ron hubbard.
belief - winds of change
- everest: the unknown is a powerful arbiter of the imagination. at the time, we did not know what was on everest - as we did not (and still do not) know what's in the deepest parts of the ocean, or what was on the dark side of the moon. we could always guess, but you don't know until you can measure it. so, why couldn't there by something bizarre at the top of everest - martians, yeti, or even just a new species of ungulates? as asimov points out in his notes, we have now scaled everest and now know what's there. but, never forget that the point of this genre is to scale the unknown mentally, before we can actually observe.
- sucker bait: this is a too-long story about a planet with beryllium dust that is a danger to humans that lacks a level of believability, in the end - humans would be expected to be comprehensive in checking for elements on a planet's surface, one would have to assume. there's ultimately too much character development and too many descriptive sections that simply drag a story out for 70+ pages that lacks any meaningful actual point.
- the pause: pointless nonsense.
- the immortal bard: an amusing, but pointless, attack on annoying, pretentious english majors.
- foundation of sf success: self-congratulatory nonsense.
- lets not: pointless nonsense
- its such a beautiful day: he's making a valid, excellent point about the alienation between humanity and nature brought on by the imposition of virtual reality. i would rather go outside sometimes, too. there's nothing wrong with the kid - there's something wrong with the society.
the singing bell - asimov's mysteries
- risk: more empty plot. throwaway.
- the last trump: i didn't read this one, as i got turned off by the mention of an angel in the opening paragraph.
- franchise: well, does your vote count? do you have a responsibility to vote? will it come down to you? asimov frequently writes these sardonic explorations of frequently stated turns of phrase, whether thought through or not. but, i think his older character gets the right idea: you can't determine voting patterns strictly via demographics, there's a level of uncertainty - indeed a level of irrationality - inherent to democracy that cannot and should not be disturbed.
the talking stone - asimov's mysteries
- dreaming is a private thing: the government has no place in the virtual reality helmets of the nation. but, this is an interesting projection of what might be coming.
- the message: this is similar to the story that was published right after, the dead past, in that it examines the question of using time travel to write history papers. asimov started off in chemistry, but wrote widely on history. there is no actual story here, though - it's just the articulation of an idea.
- the dead past: this is mostly a parody of the division of labour in academia, using a parable of exploring specific questions of carthaginian identity through the filter of a device that allows researchers to peer backwards into time by retrieving data embedded into tachyon neutrinos, which it turns out have a limited ability to reconstruct the past. the science is a bit far-fetched (you would have to find neutrinos present in the moment being searched for, which are probably mostly out in outer space), but the parody of a division of labour is interesting.
- hell-fire: this isn't a story, and i think the point he's making is fairly juvenile.
- living space: he seems to be playing with a naive articulation of the many world interpretation of quantum physics, one that allows humans to move back and forth between different possible universes by means of converting into a probability pattern. it's not really well-formed, but i get the point. unfortunately, no physicist would actually go with this - the many worlds are not even theoretically real but just mathematically necessary on paper, and nobody really talks about physical manifestations of these parallel realities. it's a kind of mathematical identity in the form of a broad summation that i'd generally argue is, itself, not that well defined. the lebensraum twist is comical but he's right - if we can one day hop between parallel realities, then all possible universes can, as well. so, is an infinite number of realities seeking space in an infinite number of worlds really an answer to the malthusian problem, then? technically, it actually shouldn't be, in the long run, but you need to do some transfinite arithmetic to actually work that out. and, asimov gets there eventually, using more of a naive argument about aliens.
what's in a name - asimov's mysteries
- the dying night: one of asimov's recurrent mysteries that happens to feature the concept of "mass transference" (the transporters from star trek) set in a reality with space travel.
- someday: what i find interesting about this is the idea that we might one day have handheld computing devices that talk to us, leading to a decline in literacy rates amongst the younger generation, who are desperate to get around the parental locks on the devices. this was written in 1956. this robot is unusual in an asimovian sense, in that it seems to be able to understand human speech beyond it's programming, a common idea in science fiction, but one which is impossible, and which asimov would, usually, be the first to (refreshingly) write off as nonsense. you don't expect that kind of silliness from asimov. but, asimov uses that unusual ability to allow for the robot to recognize that it's not being respected, and you can again choose to interpret that as futuristic or contemporaneous, in whatever way you'd prefer. someday, indeed.
- each an explorer: interesting premise, but not much of a point. it's an idea that he also explored in green patches.
pate de foie grras - asimov's mysteries
- the watery place: the canals were on mars, not on venus. again, asimov seems to be extrapolating sardonically on the question of what might happen if a ufo were to land in small-town usa, perhaps with shades of hg wells. is he making a valid point? he might be. it's almost like a coen brothers film, in a sense. but, you'd think the aliens would know better, even if the modelling of human behaviour is relatively apt.
- first law: this is written as a kind of a fishing tale, and is a later piece that's not meant to be taken seriously.
- gimmick's three: well, if you ever want to outsmart the devil, here's some clues, as to how. i think that the far side is a better comparison than dante.
- the last question: silly take on the big crunch theory of infinite inflation and deflation (although it seems to predate it). of course, the computer couldn't function anymore in such an energy-dissipated reality, as the energy required to run it would be too spread out to harness. the computer would die with the sun. and, finding a way to reverse the expansion would take all of the energy dissipated into nothingness. so, this is again utterly nonsensical. we don't know why the universe exists, but we can be certain it wasn't created by a supercomputer left at the end of the last inflation event as that would contradict the physical basis of it existing. it's disappointing to learn that asimov considers this his most substantive story, as it seems to be one of his least insightful.
- jokester: see, i think it's best to interpret this as a joke itself, although i like the idea of a supercomputer pleading with a bad comic to stop. i tell a lot of jokes myself, and they tend to be intended to numb the pain of existence, or otherwise neutralize the absurdity of it. it's ultimately, biologically, a stress-relieving response. so, i don't think we need to seek religious solutions, when an evolutionary one is so apparent; that seems rather backwards, especially coming from asimov. that said, i would also reject the idea that only humans use amusement as a stress response. i've met some dogs that have great senses of humour, and that seem to be able to laugh as well as they can cry.
- strike breaker: this is another of asimov's many texts exploring social ostracism using the mechanism of space exploration and a reminder that systemic discrimination need not necessarily be left behind here, as we leave this planet behind.
dust of death - asimov's mysteries
- let's get together: the idea that the soviets might be able to send "total conversion" bombs (a type of suicide bomber capable of detonating a nuclear device) to the united states in the guise of androids indistinguishable from humans, because they are far more advanced than us, is peculiarly absurd - but that's just the point. this is a story about the paranoia that set in during the cold war, and is actually exceedingly insightful in it's projection of that conflict collapsing into mass paranoia, reduced to symbolic movements in a game theoretic stalemate, down to the climax of absurdity that set in with reagan, when the soviets found themselves unable to react to the irrational actions of a clear madman, driven by the complete absence of any sort of predictability or logic. conservatives are right when they point out that the sharp increase in military spending under reagan ended the cold war, but not for the reasons they suggest. the truth is that the soviets were convinced that reagan was on the brink of ending it all in a fit of paranoia and dementia and stepped back because they found his unpredictability to be a threat to the existence of humanity, itself. if asimov was able to see this so clearly in 1957...
- the author's ordeal: more self-congratulatory nonsense.
- blank: if they truly found themselves stuck in time, they would not be able to move, either. utter nonsense.
- does a bee care: well, a bee or a wasp couldn't care because it doesn't truly have a brain, it's simply a dumb terminal that is controlled by chemical stimuli. does this entity have a brain? you'd have to dissect it, i guess. he's making a valid observation in some sense, but if i'm getting the underlying implication that humans are in some ways like bees, i think he's failing to grasp the difference in biological complexity between a mammal (which has a brain that independently processes the world around it) and an insect (which does not), which is the mistake that collectivism/fascism is rooted within, this idea that we're all components of a larger body that needs to work together, like a machine. that's just not right - humans, by means of their independent processing facilities, are just simply biologically not much like bees and consequently can never be much like bees, whether a managerial class wishes it were true, or not. robots, on the other hand....
- profession: this is a curious story about the futility of being intelligent within the emptiness of technocratic capitalism. it's fundamentally a critique of the corporatization of the education system, and rooted in asimov recognizing an often unstated truth: the university is as much of a refuge for those that can't survive in the market as it as a hierarchical structure for the intellectual elite.
a loint of paw - asimov's mysteries
ideas die hard - winds of change
- i'm in marsport without hilda: pointless smut.
- insert knob a in hole b: it's rather unlikely that anybody will ever be eating steak in space. this is otherwise a rather cliched nerd joke about "some assembly required".
- galley slave: this is a short whodunnit in a sherlock holmes style, which is how calvin is frequently deployed. asimov just barely touches on the opposition to robots, in setting up a disgruntled sociology prof that's willing to suicide bomb his own career in order to take the robots out of service. again, i'd like this to be more profound than it actually is.
- the gentle vultures: asimov is doing one of the things he's known for, which is to take a historical entity (the hurrians, which i believe were the sister-race to the sumerians, and which lived in the caucasus region, north of the fertile crescent. they frequently came into conflict with the various semitic groups that replaced the sumerians, who frequently warred amongst each other) and project it forwards into time, making it a character in a space alien story. this becomes a science fiction trope, in time. romans become romulans, mongols become klingons, etc. this is not to mention asimov's roman-influenced galactic empire, itself. besides retelling the story of hurrian supremacy over the semitic tribes via the space alien mechanism, the story itself isn't much.
- spell my name with an s: asimov has written a number of stories about the paranoia that defined the cold war. he may be expressing some discrimination he experienced, as a russian-american. this is otherwise pointless.
- lenny: so, lenny is an autistic robot, due to something malfunctioning in manufacturing. asimov tersely explores some social relations around that. the corporation wants to do away with it, but calvin wants to study it because she wants to teach it how to learn, something robots couldn't do in asimov's universe to that point. so, lenny is a robot free of instinct that needs to be taught what it knows, like mammals. asimov is kind of grappling with a concept of artificial intelligence, and this actually becomes the main plotline moving forwards, although it was actually written last (and may have even been written to introduce that ai narrative, as there is really nothing else to this).
- i just make them up, see: more self-congratulatory nonsense.
- the feeling of power: multiplication by hand as a mysterious, magical power; it's like something from a monty python skit. this idea of technology making us stupid, of it thrusting us into a new dark age, is a frequent theme in asimov, though, and one that many others have picked up on, recently. so, comical plotline aside, there's maybe something profound, here. can your average adult multiply large numbers by hand, nowadays? something else to note is that we have to guess how the greeks (not to mention the babylonians) did mathematics with a primitive or awkward (base-60 in the case of the babylonians) numeral system (and without 0), and our discourses on the topic would no doubt seem as silly to an ancient athenian or babylonian as this story does to us.
- silly asses: if the idea is an attempt at morality, suggesting it would be better to conduct nuclear research on somebody else's planet is a strange idea of morality.
- all the troubles of the world: asimov seems to want to misunderstand the concept of probability on purpose, here. no machine could ever decide where or if a crime is going to occur, there would necessarily be uncertainty and it would necessarily be wrong relatively frequently. acting on all false alarms would both create civil rights issues and be uneconomical. i mean, it's a swell enough idea to imagine a computer that can predict crime, but it's utterly nonsensical and utterly unrealistic. nor do we know why multivac wants to die, in the end.
- buy jupiter: pointless nonsense
- the uptodate sorcerer: boring smut
- the ugly little boy: this is a fairly forward thinking analysis of neanderthal humanity, given that it was written in the 1950s, when neanderthals were thought to have been barbaric cavemen. there was a competing hypothesis that neanderthals may have specifically been the unique ancestors of white europeans, which we today know is wrong; today, we know (from dna) that humans interbred with neanderthals and that they were probably a sister species, homo sapiens neanderthalensis. the introduction of a concept of pathos here would have been rather remarkable for it's time. it is, however, fundamentally a human interest story, rather than a sci-fi story. i suppose that it would probably be the inspiration underlying the film encino man.
- a statue for father: pointless nonsense
anniversary - asimov's mysteries
- unto the fourth generation: pointless
obituary - asimov's mysteries
- rain, rain go away: pointless nonsense
- rejection slips: more self-congratulatory nonsense.
- what is this thing called love: pointless
- the machine that won the war: while this is meant to be ironic, the underlying point is to draw attention to the importance of randomness in computing, which is maybe not as well understood as it ought to be. these (perhaps outdated) popular perceptions of computers as infallible and omnipotent devices is rooted more in fiction than in fact.
- my son, the physicist: another outlandish nerd joke
star light - asimov's mysteries
- author! author!: some self-reflection on the writing industry. so, it's a short story about writing short stories. kramerian, but not that interesting. wasn't published until the 60s, i think for good reason.
- eyes do more than see: eyes and ears are of course mechanical objects that can be represented in software, so we don't have to lose their functionality in the process of digitization. but, he makes a good point that we shouldn't forget their importance, in terms of actually enjoying existence. faced with the realization of my mortality, i see no delusion in pretending that a senseless existence is not preferable to the lack of one altogether, but i cannot pretend to understand how i might analyze such a thing billions of years into it.
- founding father: earth's early atmosphere is thought to have been full of ammonia, and that's no doubt where he's going with this story about humans crashing on the planet of an oxygenless atmosphere and being unable to remove the ammonia, yet succeeding in the process at the point of death.
the key - asimov's mysteries
prime of life - bicentennial man
the billiard ball - asimov's mysteries
- segregationist: likewise, this is ultimately about self-acceptance, and has a very different undertone in that respect than most of asimov's work, and it's not clear that he's being critical of that different undertone, although the context of replacing a defective heart is also rather different than the context of accepting some idiosyncratic part of your individuality, so that is sort of a false comparison. you could interpret it as being a discourse surrounding the not-yet-existing transhumanist movement; he's certainly reaching for it, at least, in imagining a future where a senator has to choose between a bio-identical "plastic" heart and a mechanically functioning, metallic robot heart that would put him on the path towards transitioning from human to robot. but, as before, it may be more accurate to look at it from a then contemporary perspective (which, in this case, means 1967), and frame the discourse around racial mixing, instead. asimov presents both sides of the debate, so you can weigh the arguments he makes and decide for yourself. personally, i'll opt for betterment over stasis - although i'd suggest that, based on the arguments in the text, the plastic heart is the better option. in this hypothetical future of organ modularity, the ideal is frequent tune-ups, rather than permanent replacement.
- exile to hell: this is again merely an ironic twist hidden in a very short narrative. but, these places of exile tend to do fairly well, and i wouldn't mind being exiled from capitalism, myself - i'd consider that a way out, as many of the british (and scottish) in truth felt about australia.
- key item: it seems that, later on, and to my surprise. asimov wrote several silly stories about multivac taking on human characteristics, which mirrors his narrative about the humanization of robots. this story has no purpose at all, besides to demonstrate the strange human behaviour of being polite to a machine. and, i guess i should ask, because i'd never talk to a computer, myself - do you ask alexa poltely, and thank her when she gives you the answer?
- the proper study: this is an interesting introduction, but there is no story here.
- feminine intuition: this is a later piece that seems to be a sarcastic reply to some critiques of susan calvin as a character. i actually agree with asimov, via calvin - the entire critique is daft, and this is a fitting way to kill her off. however, when you read the text in the order presented in the complete robot, you also get a sequence of humanization in the robots, in the direction of time. that fact makes this story worth keeping in sequence, even if it's point is to let calvin smack some third-wavers on the knuckles with her cane.
waterclap - bicentennial man
- 2430 ad / the greatest asset: these are two different takes on the idea of humans completely eliminating all biodiversity on the planet, to the point where we're the only non-domesticated lifeform. in some sense, this would have to be unavoidable, unless we reach some kind of natural cyclic carrying capacity (it would need to be the result of increased viral activity, which makes sense in the context of exploding population growth), but it nonetheless strikes me as incomprehensible. something would go wrong, or we wouldn't let it happen. but, it is nonetheless an interesting exercise in contemplating the inevitable consequences of the unsustainability of infinite growth, which we're going to have to get a grasp of, eventually.
- mirror image: this is a gap text in the robot series that plugs in between the naked sun and the robots of dawn and was, for a time, the last installment in that series. this is the first application of the robot laws in this text (despite the fact that the story was written in the 70s, after all of the classic robot stories), and they are applied like an axiomatic system to solve a logical problem, although it actually comes off more as a parody of sherlock holmes than anything else - which is all very typical of baley & daneel stories. there's not much depth to the story beyond that. i should, however, point out that there are actually a couple of examples of mathematicians making competing claims for the discovery of an idea, the most famous being the argument between leibniz and newton for the rightful discoverer of the calculus. another, however, is the argument between gauss and bolyai for the discovery of non-euclidean (or post-euclidean) geometry, and that might be the more direct inspiration on the story. there are countless lesser examples. we gloss over this in math class by arguing that the logic is out there in the ether and that if the ideas are in the zeitgeist then the proofs will follow naturally, something we can all demonstrate to each other by simply doing homework. but, in the case of non-euclidean geometry, it does in fact seem that gauss rather maliciously stole the idea from the young bolyai and nobody really called him on it for decades after the fact. i'm only speculating about the influence, but that's a story you can look up, if you'd like.
- take a match: pointless nonsense
- thiotimoline to the stars: pointless nonsense
light verse: this is a short piece from the 70s, and is just about the idea that a computational defect may be a benefit. you shouldn't be so quick to decide that something - or somebody, as it may be - needs a fixing. maybe they're just fine as they are.
the dream - ?
benjamin's dream - ?
party by satellite - ?
- ....that thou art mindful of him: this solves the problem that us robotics has long had about how to market robots to people. the solution is to create robots not in the imitation of women [as in the previous story] but in the imitation of animals, and to solve practical problems, like pest control. i have to admit that this sounds like a good idea, although i'm not sure that it leads to the replacement of carbon with silicon, in the end. asimov builds up the humanization of robots here a little further by replacing the robotics laws with humanics laws, setting up the last story:
- stranger in paradise: this is a later text that will come off as reminiscent of the mars pathfinder landing, for those that remember that happening, although the actual inspiration may be the failed soviet landings in the 1970s. i'm not sure why asimov insists that a rover would require that kind of complexity, although i suppose that moore's law would have provided for computational abilities in the 90s that would have been unimaginable in the 1970s. the subplot about an autistic child shape-shifting to a mars rover is likewise not very well extrapolated upon, but is another example of asimov grappling with mind-body.
benjamin's bicentennial blast - ?
half-baked publisher's delight - ?
heavenly host - ?
big game- ?
the life and times of multivac - bicentennial man
- a boy's best friend: this is a short, undeveloped piece that really exists strictly to reverse the idea of obsolescence; here, the robot becomes obsolete when the real dog appears, and the kid wants to stick with the robot, instead. it's an empty sort of irony that comes off as sort of trite, in the lack of development. but, there is really a deeper point, here, in relation to asimov's discourse around the use of robots to replace human labour; while i'm going to ultimately agree with asimov about the usefulness of automation, i have to advance the argument that he never fully understood the opposition to robots, and that's what i'm getting here - it's an attempt at irony that exposes the author's longstanding lack of understanding of his opponents. but, i spent some time writing this because it could have been a powerful table-turner, through the three pages it takes up.
- point of view: i was surprised to see this story was written in 1975, as hamming codes (error-correction) had already been in existence for some time. i also wonder if 1975 is a little late to be talking about vacuum tube super computers, given that gates was programming basic into ibms, at the time. so, this is a story where asimov is maybe demonstrating his age, and being a little out of touch. that said, he's also reaching towards the primary problem in quantum computing, which is the lack of error codes. and, he's sort of dancing around floating point error as well, even if the premise of programming vacuum tube driven super computers with punch cards is anachronistic. so, how likely is it that a computer needs to go out and play at recess to get best results? it's a facile, silly suggestion, that probably reflects asimov coming to terms with the age of his audience more than anything else, even if anybody that's worked technical support knows that a reboot is often the best troubleshooting step, and that machines do, in fact, sometimes overheat. is there something else to this, then? i actually don't think he's even intending to be taken seriously, let alone that there's any deeper meaning to this; he's not reaching for something profound and missing it, so much as he's not reaching at all. he's just being silly. ha ha ha.
about nothing- winds of change
- the bicentennial man: this finally addresses the old problem of machines becoming human, and projects us robots many centuries into the future, using the mechanism of a robot that outlives several generations of the family it was sold into, and then wants to die with it, to prove it's really human. marvin minsky also seems to make a cameo, here, in the form of a robopsychologist that is proven wrong in the future. asimov goes over a lot of old themes here [mind-body problem, the liberation of robots as an allegory for the liberation of blacks, etc ] in what is an apparent thread-tying process, but he ultimately doesn't succeed in explaining what is driving this robot to act so irrationally. as humans, we may be expected to think this makes some kind of sense, due to some kind of emotional bias, but i can't really make sense of it, myself. i can understand why a robot might want to be free. i can't understand why it would want to be human, at all costs - including it's death. i think asimov was going for the jugular here and kind of fell over and kneed himself in the groin, instead - if this is his final projection of what becomes of robots in the future, it's unsatisfying, to say the least.
the winnowing - the bicentennial man
old fashioned - the bicentennial man
marching in - the bicentennial man
birth of a nation - the bicentennial man
- the tercentenary incident: asimov is reflecting on the bicentennial by projecting forwards events into the tercentennial, in a manner not unlike orwell's 1984 (which is a description of events in 1948, as orwell saw them, and not intended to be a projection into the future, or a user manual as some have mockingly quipped). so, was gerald ford a robot? i'm not sure that's such an easy thing to dispel of, a priori.
no, really, that's the joke - that gerald ford is a robot. no shitting. certainly, asimov may be reflecting a little on the nature of then contemporary american politics, post-watergate, in his perception of the stage-managed state of affairs. but, the joke is that gerald ford is a robot, and that's really all that this is actually about.
good taste - winds of change
to tell at a glance - winds of change
- true love: this is both a prediction of internet dating (with unrealized accuracy) and an awkward attempt at an ironic plot twist that relies on the absurdity of a computer demonstrating uncontrolled sentience. the idea that a computer might understand "love", which doesn't even exist as a human idea before it's invention by capital to sell bullshit to idiots, is particularly ridiculous.
- think!: you really don't expect asimov to make the mistake of assigning sentience to a computer. the underlying premise that thought is energy, and thus transferable, is another example of asimov contemplating mind-body, which he does a lot, and which he doesn't seem to really resolve. i mean, he clearly realizes the falsity of the problem, but he's just as clearly not happy about it - and i don't think we're really past that. your mind is clearly a part of your body, but that doesn't mean we can't pry it out of it, in theory, however difficult it might be. but, inserting the computer via resonance is woo, and not very helpful or insightful; unfortunately, he's presenting it as the purpose of the discussion.
sure thing - winds of change
found - winds of change
fair exchange - winds of change
nothing for nothing - winds of change
how it happened - winds of change
it is coming - winds of change
the last answer - winds of change
for the birds - winds of change
death of a foy - winds of change
the last shuttle - winds of change
a perfect fit - winds of change
ignition point - winds of change
lest we remember -winds of change
winds of change - winds of change
one night of song - winds of change
hallucination - gold
feghoot & the courts - gold
- robot dreams: elvex had a dream that, one day, robots would be judged by the content of their characters, and not by the paths in their positronic brains - and got shot by calvin for it. this is inadvisable, to say the least. that said, asimov doesn't exactly condone the assassination of our equality-dreaming robot, nor is this the first pretty heavy-handed use of the robot-as-slave-in-america analogy. i mean, he repeatedly has his characters refer to his robots as "boy" - it's never stated explicitly, and i've tried to dance around it a little, but it's really front and centre. so, he clarifies a few points here about how he sees his characters - it is, indeed, calvin, the austere capitalist christian, that pulls the trigger, and at least she thinks she's saving humanity. do you agree with her? but, i'm dropping this story as a mistake, and i find it a little bit uncomfortable that they gave him an award for this, of all pieces. it also breaks sequence with the humanization theme. notably, asimov dropped this entirely for the later robot visions - meaning he seems to have come to his senses about it.
left to right - gold
the fable of the three princes - magic
the smile of the chipper - gold
- christmas without rodney: grumpy old man bitching about bratty kids. i can relate, but meh.
the instability - gold
goodbye to earth - gold
- too bad: accepting the truth that chemo/radiation is a bad approach, mini robots to eat cancer isn't that far off from targeted gene therapy as a better solution. it's the same idea. although, it's worth pointing out that asimov had a phd in biochemistry, here, and still decided to use robots instead of chemistry; is that actually valuable foresight as to what approach is likely to actually work or is he missing the obvious? i'm curious how a microrobot would evade the macrophages, though, which opens up the opposite concern - microrobots as viruses.
- robot visions: so, maybe we'll have humaniform robots in the future and maybe we won't. and maybe we'll have peace, then. but, i wouldn't bet too much on it. this neither fits into the sequence - it's the opposite of it - nor is it that interesting, really.
fault-intolerant - gold
in the canyon - gold
kid brother - gold
gold - gold
cal - gold
prince delightful and the flameless dragon - magic
frustration - gold
12:56
this appears to be the earliest actual reference to the mahabharata and, like the earliest buddhist references (written in greek. not sanskrit - greek.), is thoroughly greek in character:
listen.
the greeks were the master race, clearly. welcoming the indians into the descendency of greek culture isn't some kind of insult or slight, it's something to be celebrated.
and, i'm a stickler for facts.
the new age gurus seem to have gotten this entirely backwards - nothing actually comes from india. the one thing that does come from india is nothing - the number 0. rather, indian culture as we understand it comes largely from greece.
15:51
not only is the mahabharata not ancient, but most of it is more recent than the bible is.
16:00
updated nov 21st to include texts from buy jupiter (and other stories) and the martian way
updates in bold and italic.
the essential asimov short stories:
book I: isolated short stories of value
- trends
- the weapon too dreadful to use
- half-breed
- the secret sense
- nightfall
- super-neutron
- not final! + victory unintentional
- no connection
- red queen's race
- hostess
- breeds there a man
- youth
- the martian way
- the deep
- sally
- kid stuff
- the immortal bard
- dreaming is a private thing
- the dead past
- living space
- each an explorer
- the watery place
- strikebreaker
- let's get together
- profession
- the gentle vultures
- the ugly little boy
- eyes do more than see
- founding father
- segregationist
- 2430 ad / the greatest asset
- too bad
book II: the substantive robot. (story is about the slow humanization of robots)
- it's such a beautiful day
- the fun they had
- key item
- someday
- robbie
- light verse
- runaround
- reason
- lenny
- galley slave
- little lost robot
- evidence
- the evitable conflict
- feminine intuition
- ...that thou art mindful of him
- the bicentennial man
book III: side-stories in the robot universe (including selected multivac stories)
- jokester
- all the troubles of the world
- franchise
- satisfaction guaranteed
- robot al-76 goes astray
- the feeling of power
- catch that rabbit
- risk
- escape!
- liar!
- mirror image
- mother earth
(robot novels go here)
book IV: back-stories for rest of asimov's futuristic universe
- black friar of the flame
- homo sol
- the imaginary
- the hazing
- heredity
- green patches
- c-chuite
- sucker bait
- death sentence
- blind alley
(novels pick up again from here)
throwaway:
- callistan menace
- ring around the sun
- the magnificent possession
- half-breeds on venus
- history
- christmas on ganymede
- time pussy
- the little man on the subway
- legal rites
- darwinian poolroom
- day of the hunters
- the endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimiline
- in a good cause
- shah guidio g
- what if
- button, button
- monkey's finger
- nobody here but-
- flies
- everest
- the pause
- foundations of sf success
- lets not
- the last trump
- the message
- hell-fire
- the dying night
- first law
- gimmick's three
- the last question
- the author's ordeal
- blank
- does a bee care?
- i'm in marsport without hilda
- insert knob a in hole b
- spell my name with an s
- i just make them up, see
- silly asses
- buy jupiter
- the uptodate sorcerer
- a statue for father
- unto the fourth generation
- rain, rain go away
- rejection slips
- what is this thing called love
- the machine that won the war
- my son, the physicist
- author! author!
- exile to hell
- the proper study
- take a match
- thiotimoline to the stars
- stranger in paradise
- a boy's best friend
- point of view
- tercentenary incident
- think!
- true love
- christmas without rodney
- robot dreams
- robot visions
next:
- prime of life - bicentennial man
- waterclap - bicentennial man
- the life and times of multivac - bicentennial man
- the winnowing - the bicentennial man
- old fashioned - the bicentennial man
- marching in - the bicentennial man
- birth of a nation - the bicentennial man
uncatalogued until last:
- marooned off vesta ----first story
- belief <-----1953
- the singing bell <-----1955
- the talking stone <-------1955
- what's in a name <----------1956
- pate de foie grras <---------1956
- dust of death - asimov's mysteries
- a loint of paw - asimov's mysteries
- ideas die hard - winds of change
- anniversary - asimov's mysteries
- obituary - asimov's mysteries
- star light - asimov's mysteries
- the key - asimov's mysteries
- the billiard ball - asimov's mysteries
- the dream - ?
- benjamin's dream - ?
- party by satellite - ?
- benjamin's bicentennial blast - ?
- half-baked publisher's delight - ?
- heavenly host - ?
- big game- ?
- about nothing- winds of change
- good taste - winds of change
- to tell at a glance - winds of change
- sure thing - winds of change
- found - winds of change
- fair exchange - winds of change
- nothing for nothing - winds of change
- how it happened - winds of change
- it is coming - winds of change
- the last answer - winds of change
- for the birds - winds of change
- death of a foy - winds of change
- the last shuttle - winds of change
- a perfect fit - winds of change
- ignition point - winds of change
- lest we remember -winds of change
- winds of change - winds of change
- one night of song - winds of change
- hallucination
- feghoot & the courts
- left to right
- the fable of the three princes
- the smile of the chipper
- the instability
- good-bye to earth
- fault intolerant
- in the canyon
- kid brother
- gold
- cal
- prince delightful and the flameless dragon
- frustration
18:59
so, here's the two write-ups at the blog:
there are two blog posts coming, accordingly.
next week, i'll try to get through the last short story collection (the bicentennial man and other stories) and the first robot novel (caves of steel).
19:10
just a reminder that i'm keeping this going, as well, which is a change:
if it goes according to plan, you're looking at about 52 texts/year, almost all novels. i do need to catch up - i'm in fall 1989 and should be in fall, 1991. but, that should add up to about 350 novels by the time i get back to the alter-reality proper in 2026.
as mentioned repeatedly, this is a caricature. i didn't read every single asimov text before i turned 10, but i'd read a fair amount before i turned 12. i need to get a lot of stuff in, though, and it's not going to all be science fiction, although it will for the first bit.
i'm going to keep this going all the way forward, as well, and it will branch out, but this is how i'm starting.
19:47
i mean, i happened to start with asimov, who wrote a lot of books. not every author will have 40 books to get through, although some of them will, for sure.
19:52
ok, i wanted to get that finished first.
i'm unfortunately in need of updating the linked list at the bandcamp site, which is what i'm doing next. i give it a few hours, tops.
20:25
see, i was previously able to construct a linked list across the records from inr000-->inri074 by adding a dummy track, but i'm not allowed to do that anymore. i'm not exactly sure why. so, i'm adding the link in the body of the records, instead.
if you start here and scroll down, you'll see the link to "next record (inri001)":
i just need that updated.
i will be filing while i'm doing that.
i was also be building data disks for payhip, but i had to stop because i didn't have the frontends. how important is that, actually? i mean, does anybody actually care, or do they just want the tunes?
so, i'm going to be updating that as i go with the raw versions, and i'll just update the raw versions to include liner notes as i complete them.
20:52
i had everything meticulously organized at one point, promise.
i'm just swamped with an absurd amount of data. but, i know that i can't sell this as it is - i'm uploading the iso because it's actually salable. you'll see what i mean...
20:54
monday, november 22, 2021
so, i took my cyproterone down another small notch this morning.
the adjustment to every 9 hours from every 12 hours had stabilized me and i was feeling both more alert and less erratic, but i got really agitated last night and had to force myself to sleep. i may have had a mild caffeine overdose. there was a time when the only time i ever slept at all was due to caffeine overdose, so that's actually a good sign. but it means i lost the night.
my schedule has cycled back over, so i'm going to try to have a super long day today and clear up all of these loose ends. and, it may actually take me clear into the next alter-reality update.
for now, i'm going to get back to something i was doing until i stopped to wait for liner notes. i want to get the structure of this up first, and i'll add liner notes after.
9:24
i was doing daily updates on this before i stopped to get a directory structure in, but i'm realizing i want to get the site structure up, first. i mean, the iso won't be done until i catch up in the alter-reality, anyways.
this is the first payhip iso, to the first flac dvd collection, inriℵ0, inri000-inri014:
as mentioned a few times, the idea here is that this is a purchasable torrent. i know - i've been there. you find an older artist, with a large discography, and you want to explore it all at once. i downloaded swans torrents in the 90s, cardiacs torrents in the 00s, zappa torrents at one point, crimson torrents, puppy torrents, etc. that's an elite club, but i do belong in it in terms of size and diversity of my discography. i understand that a younger person stumbling on to this that wants to really delve into it won't be satisfied with an introduction or a compilation - they'll want it all, right away.
i didn't have the money to buy full discographies, but it's often been mentioned that the technology isn't keeping up to people's tastes. i understand the music-as-subscription model, but it's not relevant to truly independent artists. it's a pop culture concept. if you reject music as fashion, it makes no sense, and has no relevance. i'm a consumer, too, and that's really not at all what i'd want; i'd find it lacking in the material i'm interested in, and just find myself bombarded with pop culture norms that i don't care about.
what i'd want is to be able to download everything all at once, and this is a big step in that direction. it's not everything - not yet. but, it's the first in a collection of flac dvds that will be comprehensive.
the payhip site will be flac only. if you want another format, that is what bandcamp is very good at doing. but, beyond the full discography option, bandcamp isn't allowing for larger download options. again - it wants to push single track downloads for a pop market, which misunderstands it's own purpose. truly independent music is always going to focus on more than five minute (or 2-3 minute, i guess) pieces of music, and bandcamp is in many ways the last refuge of the album concept.
the price tag is high, but look at what you're getting - 15 catalog releases, and 14.5 hours worth of music in lossless flac format. i didn't have that option in the 90s. i couldn't have afforded it anyways, but maybe i would have paid for it, if i could have.
so, this is the presentation of the missing abstraction that torrent downloaders always used as an excuse. "i can't just download all of it legally.". and, they couldn't. online stores had to deal with artists that signed competing record contracts with different labels, for instance. artists didn't want to make out of print material available, or couldn't due to licensing rules. if you wanted everything all at once, torrents were your only choice.
well, i just took away your excuse - and especially if you're a grown-up kid, now.
you have to pay the artists, if you like their work, or they'll starve. i don't like markets or piecemeal compensation, either - i want a ubi, and i want to just give this away for free, but i can't have one, yet. i mean, look at the time i have to waste trying to sell things. but, if you want to torrent me, if that's how you like to consume music, as i admit i do myself, now you can do it legally, instead.
10:02
this is the front page for the payhip site, which i'm trying to standardize to the bandcamp site, although it has a few different presentation options and, as mentioned, it will be strictly flac only.
10:12
hey, before there were torrents there were secret ftp sites with cracked software and forbidden music. i used to frequent those, too.
i'd guess that torrents are actually pretty out of date. i'm not sure what kids might use, today. tor? just secret drive shares? or do they just send files to each other directly?
but, i don't think the idea has likely changed - when you find something new, you want to really experience it, in a big way.
if i was 14 years old, and somebody told me about pink floyd, i wouldn't want to go to youtube to hear a single, and for what? another brick in the wall?
no, i'd want to download their entire discography, drop it into a portable device and let it play continuously, in order, as i travel to school, or do whatever. i'd start with pipers and just let it roll right into the end. and, i'd listen to it over and over again.
i wouldn't have $300, granted. or, at least not right away. but, maybe i might get used to buying music like that, too. i dunno.
i know what i'd want.
so, there it is.
10:40
is it just me, or has there recently been an attempt by democratic party spinsters to artificially darken the skin of their candidates in media, via things like lighting tricks?
10:56
ok, so it took me longer than i wanted to cross-reference and update links at the payhip site, but it's done.
aleph-0 was this morning's update. tomorrow, it goes up to inri015.
and, let's hope i can get the linked list updated before then.
13:17
so, i've changed the pricing for the iso so that it's the same as the cumulative pricing for the constituent downloads and i'll hold to that at the payhip site:
the $10/hr pricing will be for physical media sold at the bandcamp site, which is necessarily going to be more expensive than a download and will hold steady. note that it's substantively less than purchasing all of the physical media separately, and that it should be.
14:02
the digital download should be less than the physical purchase, and it is now.
14:03
and, to clarify a point: i'm picking non-proprietary formats (flac, iso) on purpose.
fuck apple.
14:29
economic agreements with this region are largely about raw materials and cheap labour, which is about canadian firms importing stuff at lower costs. they'll call it "free trade", but it will be almost the exact opposite. as china develops a middle class, it is increasingly outsourcing it's own labour to these areas.
but, the region is a potential export market for canadian beef, and that shouldn't be overlooked, entirely.
canadian capital will push this, but the analysis is correct - any savings will be eaten up by investors and shareholders.
further, these agreements tend to have nefarious intellectual property and shareholder rights clauses with devastating environmental and labour ramifications, and we should all be keeping an eye on what it is that they're up to.
18:28
i actually think that fixating on the federal reserve is buying into a right-wing narrative that is, at it's core, crypto-fascist. this is a good example of how the vanquished historical right is rematerializing as what i call the fake left, and what the media calls "progressivism".
the particular woman that the fake left was excited about wanted to force banks to hold on to cash reserves, which is about the most fiscally conservative policy that i could imagine, and about the most inconsequential thing i could imagine, in terms of ensuring stability in the sector. and, look who was pushing it - our old economic conservative in progressive sheep's clothing, elizabeth warren, and the same old fake left blogging media collective, which is run by a lot of "former" conservatives.
i need to be clear: the fed isn't the cause of the country's problems, and there's not much the fed could do that's of much consequence. a real left would support endless money creation, insist financial institutions spend the money as soon as it comes in to prevent it from sitting idly and have little concern about liquidity traps. a real left would realize that money is essentially a worthless social construct, and focus it's energy on who owns things, instead.
but, i mean, that's just the point - keying in on the federal reserve is a distraction.
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
19:04
in the popular imagination, the federal reserve is supposed to exist to control inflation, but the theory underlying that is now understood as utterly debunked. the federal reserve couldn't substantively affect inflation one way or the other if it did everything in it's legal power to.
rather, the importance of the federal reserve - and this was understood 100 years ago - is economic sovereignty. it is vitally important that the currency of the country be isolated from the market, to prevent wealthy speculators from using it as a tool of political gain. we cannot have actors - inside or outside the country - inflating or deflating the currency for their own ends.
a real left would support endless quantitative easing, which is a consensus position. and that's really the only thing of any consequence.
19:14
i am a strong supporter of the federal reserve and an adamant advocate of socialized banking.
19:22
no, really.
the 1907 panic exposed an uncomfortable truth - major financiers like jp morgan were actually legitimately more powerful than the state. that's not said figuratively, or with poetic license - in the years leading up to the federal reserve act, there were a small number of hyper-powerful bankers that literally, legitimately had more power than the state did.
when the 1907 panic happened, morgan stepped in as a lender of last resort.
the state can be bought by private interests, but it can't be in competition with private capital for primacy or influence, because then it loses it's monopoly on violence.
after the first world war, the british used this kind of power to manipulate the german currency, which was a primary factor in the lead-up to the second world war. and, then the british eventually had their own crash, brought to them by the speculator george soros.
i'm an anarchist, but i'm a social anarchist, and i realize that liberal capitalism is a step in the right direction away from financialist feudalism - as much as we may be reverting back to it, as much as we may lose, in the end. the state will cease to exist if it cannot control the likes of morgan. and, so we must have a central bank step in to fill this role, lest they do it themselves - and we end up on the road back to serfdom.
20:18
tuesday, november 23, 2021
ok.
i'm back up where i left off...
1:08
unfortunately, i had to crash this morning.
i got a little done yesterday. i want to get more done, today.
11:03
wednesday, november 24, 2021
thursday, november 25, 2021
i don't want to be confusing. if you're in a high-risk category, you should get vaccinated. that might mean older people, it might mean obese people, it might mean smokers, it might mean diabetics, etc. the vaccine might not be as effective as you'd like, but if you're at risk from this thing, you should do everything possible to protect yourself from it.
likewise, the masks might not work very well (the public health guidelines are at least being updated to reflect the long understood fact that cloth masks don't work very well, but they've been adjusted to act as the advertising wing for the mask industry. really. check out the multi-page article-length ads that the n95 industry managed to get up on cbc.), but if you're at risk of getting sick then you should do what you can - even if the smarter thing is to avoid people altogether, rather than rely on the use of masks.
my point from the start has been that it's never been clear if younger, healthier, low-risk people are better off fighting the disease themselves or relying on a vaccine for it, and studies have demonstrated that the types of vaccines we're using are not responding well to mutations in the spike protein, which is a particular problem because they're focused on a small part of the virus. as a young, healthy, low-risk person, i'm sorry but i'd rather take my chances on catching the virus, at this time - and hope i bump into it more than twice, at that.
studies have also shown that vaccination is not very effective at reducing the spread of the virus.
so, a study comes out and points out that 90% of the people that got sick and died from covid were unvaccinated, which is indeed startling. but, it's also misleading for a wide number of reasons.
the major problem is that we don't know if vaccination rates are tied to underlying conditions, like obesity. i would suspect that poor health decisions are broadly correlated, and that the same kinds of people that are refusing vaccines are the kinds that don't eat well, or exercise much. i might imagine an archetype of the fit, young, individualistic unvaccinated person that is spurning the suckling tit of the nanny state in going it alone, but i'm ignoring what is the more likely reality: the obese, chain-smoking anti-vaxxer that is rejecting vaccination as just another poor health decision. as we know that poor prognosis is tied strongly to poor health decisions, there is a good reason to expect that underlying conditions are being selected for in the mortality statistics. that is, we know that 90% of these people are unvaccinated, but we don't know how many are obese, diabetic, smokers, marijuana users, etc, and it is in fact very likely that almost all of them are one or the other.
now, you could tell me that the vaccines are working in keeping some obese people out of the hospital, and you'd be right in doing that. i started this off by stating yet again that i think people in high risk categories should get vaccinated. but, the study is trying to determine a causality from a correlation without understanding a mechanism, and that is always wrong, in science. it is probably closer to the truth to point out that almost all of the dead have underlying conditions - something we knew was the case for months before vaccines were available - and that poor vaccine uptake is merely correlated with poor health decisions, over all.
what i'm getting at is that, given that these people probably almost all had existing conditions, it's not clear if vaccination would have helped much, in the first place. it leaves the anti-vaxxers (and i'm clearly not one of them, even if i'm in broad solidarity with them n social concerns around vaccination) with a hard argument to make. but, we need to be strict about this if we want to be serious about it: it's not clear if these people are dying because they're unvaccinated, or if they're so obese or diabetic or (...) that they don't have a chance of fighting it off, anyways, and the only way to figure that out would be to study the effects of the vaccine very specifically on high risk individuals.
when you look at the data for older people, it balances out a little, but not a lot. the death rate is still much higher for unvaccinated people, but it opens a question: who is over 65 and not vaccinated, at this point? i mean, that's crazy. it's been clear for years that this is exceedingly dangerous for older people. it stands to reason that those over 65 that are not vaccinated are mostly those that can't be vaccinated because their immune system is too weak to begin with. and, in fact, when you eliminate that as a poor control, that startling number of 90% immediately plummets rather dramatically, without the need for any fancy statistical test.
the other thing to keep in mind is that the opposite thing is also true - if your immune system is strong enough to fight off the virus in the first place, getting vaccinated isn't worthwhile. so, you'd expect low death rates amongst young people, regardless. a study like this then suffers the dual problems of small sample sizes and inherent bias.
so, it's a scary headline and the government is waving it around to continue to scare you, just as it's been doing for months.
but, a little critical analysis nulls it's blunt effect quite a bit.
the simple reality is that it's not yet clear if the vaccine is really acting as more than a placebo or not and the safest way to avoid the virus if you're at risk to it is to just stay inside and avoid potential transmission.
23:02
friday, november 26, 2021
it seems counter-intuitive, but people aren't really very rational, as a rule. it's more useless to draw rational analyses than to rely on human rationality.
so, i pointed out that it makes sense to think that poor vaccine uptake is correlated with poor health decisions, overall - that the stereotype of the obese, chain-smoking, pothead anti-vaxxer is probably closer to reality than the ideal of the society-rejecting rugged individual. it follows that you'd expect a double whammy effect - those most at risk of the virus are also those least likely to get vaccinated, so death rates would end up pretty high.
but, the reverse observation probably also has some merit: those who are at risk and are willing to get vaccinated are probably also those who are most concerned about their health, and least likely to take chances, including putting themselves in social situations. the result is that the at-risk vaccinated are also the least likely to get infected, because they're taking the least amount of risk. and that is what i actually want to see - the at-risk take responsibility for their personal behaviour, and not place themselves in dangerous scenarios.
so, if we have a scenario where the following things are true:
1) the at-risk who are unvaccinated take large amounts of risks
2) the at-risk who are vaccinated take the least amount of risk possible
...then the resulting social behaviour may be a stronger causal effect than the effect of the vaccine (due to the variants).
i'm not deciding this, here. i mean, i've made my suspicions clear enough. but, my job is to analyze data, and my verdict is that it's entirely inconclusive, and those waving this study around as evidence need to retreat to the old cliche: correlation does not imply causality.
but, there's a positive observation, here, as well - if it turns out that these numbers reflect an increasing level of individual responsibility amongst the vaccinated at-risk, we may avoid the worst of this, after all. at least, here, anyways.
and, i'm going to repeat myself, yet again - if you're at risk, stay home. your mask won't save you - and the government now admits that. the vaccines are a coin toss against the newest strains, and that will just get worse. so, you have to protect yourself and stay in - nobody can do that for you, no government can save you, no law can protect you. it's entirely up to you and the decisions you make to protect yourself.
0:57
it's late on thursday - in fact, now early on friday. i tried to type this up on tuesday afternoon...
the only way i'm going to ever get caught back up and on anything approaching a linear path is if i rewind strictly to 2013 and just push forward on it. otherwise, i'm just running around in circles.
...and, then, my chromebook crashed. that is actually only half the post, as i lost the other half in the crash. it's the same thing it's done many times - it gets slaved by some kind of network, then accepts something pushed down to it, then reboots in the hope that, this time, it will stick. i'm going to guess that this was a retaliation for shutting off the usb ports in the motherboard, and actually making some progress in the filing.
i was able to get a handle on my tabs, this time, which is good. i can in theory reconstruct where i was at.
so, i turned it off, as i have done previously, and just focused strictly on the filing. i re-focused on what i was doing, got a handle on it, and decided i'd do a copy-back to the drive, one last time, to make sure i've got everything. this is a process that's ongoing.
i tried to log back in a few times, but i repeatedly noticed that there was a listener on the line - the cops. again. i've noticed a few signals that indicate they're listening, which is....if i was actually a bad guy, i'd have gone up there and killed them by now, because they make it pretty obvious when they're around. it's actually not dissimilar to the alien attacks on the x-files - i notice my monitor get wavy (which is probably the magnetic field i was complaining about in the last space), i get choppiness in any sort of streaming (including the voip), and the chromebook actually tells me the line is insecure, believe it or not. there are other subtle hints that i'll keep to myself. worst cops ever? it's probably pretty par, and what's driving it is probably related largely to the age of the technology i'm using, which is a bit of a lesson, i think - it's actually helpful to use legacy technology, because it frustrates the fuck out of them, and makes it easier to tell when they're around. they don't know what to do when forced to deal with a phoneless nerd using voip via a winlited 32-bit xp install on a tank-like compaq laptop manufactured in the 90s. i'd might as well be using a commodore 64.
i wish they'd tell me what they want, though. 'cause i'm getting fed up, and i'm not getting any younger. i need to get some work done. speaking of which, let's finish the thought on that post - i'm not going to be focusing on catching up during the week, i'm going to be rebooting directly back into the journals, and i'll have to update them on the fly in a forwards direction, instead. i'll just never finish anything, otherwise - i'll be in constant recursion, constant cycling. there's no other way out...
if it's relatively quick, great.
and, that means i'm not doing daily updates on the payhip site, either, because i should expect to have some updates relatively soon. i do need to finish the thought at the bandcamp site. and, then, the payhip site will need to update as the files come up. i'm reversing the logic - rather than deciding i should get the data up because it's going to be a while anyways, i'm deciding to put the other things aside and get the final versions up.
the fact that i'm running around in circles is the point. i have to break this. if i live long enough, there's no harm done in the end, i've just got a few extra projects to finish, in the long run. but, i can't keep endlessly creating more work, or i'll never get anything done. and, the whole point is that i wanted to finish projects and put them away. this detour has come to a permanent end.
so, i had to sit offline for a while, and actually stayed offline until i got home on wednesday night. i had to drop off some documents for my doctor, and was hoping to get the rec for the adrenal hormones (although it wasn't there). i got some groceries done in the meantime, and then had to come in early because the rain came in about 10 hours earlier than forecasted. and, they were still listening when i got home...
(we get to a hair under 10 degrees on wednesday and a little less on thursday. we're now only a few weeks from the solstice, and the solar realities are unavoidable, at least for now. but, it has not gotten substantively cold here, yet - nor is it in the short range forecast, suggesting we've avoided the vicious early start to winter that was forecast. the atlantic warmth i was pointing to as a buffer is pushing back the arctic air, but it's resulting in a more changeable pattern than i was hoping for. so, i seem to have got the correction correct, but over-stated it. that said, that same record atlantic warmth seems to be falling as torrential rain in the maritimes, so maybe we're lucky not to be on the direct path of the gradient.)
they seem to be quiet right now, so i've snuck in. it's a holiday in the united states. is that a hint as to who they are and where they came from?
i was hoping to get the bandcamp update done first, then get through the filing, and then get to the alter-reality. i did not finish the actual journal entries for last week. the inability to get back online has screwed that all up. and, i need to do some legal research this weekend, on top of it.
i want to finish the bandcamp linked list update first, and then we can go from there.
2:30
maybe it's aliens?
but, there weren't actually any aliens, it was all a government psy-op, and the presentation of aliens in the show was essentially a projection of mulder's psychosis. well, originally, anyways. they lost the plot, eventually, and gave in, under popular pressure.
i don't know who these people are, but i suspect i've never heard of the acronym.
2:56
military purchases seem to be a rather foolish waste of money, at the end of a pandemic, in the midst of a housing crisis and at the start of a serious climate crisis that's going to require billions in infrastructure spending. but, fighter jets seem to be a particularly stupid waste of money.
this is a technology that hasn't been used since world war one, and that has no obvious value to canadian security.
we don't need to replace these, we should be phasing them out altogether.
6:26
i think, perhaps, the prime minister has spent too much time watching star wars.
6:30
we should simply tell the americans that, given the lack of pressing need, we simply cannot afford to make the purchase at this time.
6:36
no, i'm going to repeat myself.
it doesn't take a lot of foresight to see that whatever symbolic use these things retain will be entirely superseded by the use of drones within 5-10 years. any idiot can see that.
so, we'll be left with expensive paperweights, and then need to buy drones on top of it.
we have far greater concerns, at the moment - this process should be halted, until we have more money to spend, at which point the resources will no doubt be shifted to contemporary technology, insofar as the function has any value at all.
6:40
the united states just abandoned a state-of-the-art airforce base in afghanistan under the apparent certainty that it could retain air superiority via uavs launched from qatar.
so, tell lockheed martin to fuck off with their billion dollar f-35s.
6:45
what i'm actually taking away from reading this is that people are missing the point.
if we simply replace gas vehicles with battery-powered cars, we're not actually solving anything. these minerals are going to require burning carbon to mine - and often a lot of it. in canada, we'd have to burn off permafrost, which is amongst the worst things that can be done.
some place for individual electric vehicles cannot be eliminated, but the primary focus needs to be on public transportation, and changing the way we build cities.
so, the correct answer to this is that the premise is incoherent and the vision of a massive electric car industry is not a solution to the problem we're to fix, nor is it a sustainable outlook.
canada's primary contribution will be the generation of clean hydro-electric energy.
7:09
i have no interest in owning a car, at all.
what i want is a detailed high-speed rail network across southern ontario.
7:11
is vaccinating kids going to make a difference?
the studies all say that vaccination doesn't have much effect on the transmission of the virus. and, this really poses little threat to kids.
in fact, you might see the opposite - you might see older people lose their healthy fear of the young as trojan horses, and end up in the grips of a hug of death.
i understand that this is going to calm the nerves of a lot of ignorant people, but the science to support doing this really isn't there. these kids are probably largely better off fighting this virus on their own, and there's little reason to think it will prevent spread.
7:35
industrial interests need to prepare for the reality that environmentalists are going to call for bans on mining in the north, not embrace it as a solution to the carbon crisis.
the widespread loss of permafrost is a potentially devastating feedback cycle that will initiate rapid, irreversible warming. to project that we might accelerate the loss of permafrost to mine minerals for electric vehicles is unthinkable.
and, i would actually call on the white house to put pressure on the canadian government to pass moratoriums on that kind of mining. this is not what washington - or the world - wants.
14:36
no, i'm sick of this.
the science has never supported travel bans, and bringing them back now is just sheer ignorance.
we need to get used to this relatively mild virus that only affects the old and weak, and we need to shift the burden of responsibility for health care decisions back to the individual, and away from the collective.
14:43
there is nothing more that governments can do to protect you.
you need to take the initiative and learn to protect yourself, now.
and, the state needs to get out of the way and let people determine their own risk factors.
15:14
we've become a society of anti-science, trumpian idiots.
15:23
that's the ultimate takeaway from this, right?
when we look at how the world has changed, with the introduction of widespread restrictions on personal freedom and rights of mobility, the real winner is donald trump, who got everything he wanted, and then some.
every time you see a travel ban erected, despite the fact that all science says it doesn't work, remember: the author of this anti-empirical, anti-science, know-nothing policy was donald trump, and the fake left jumped all over it, as an opportunity to assert hierarchy, at the flimsiest opportunity and pretext.
15:39
we're really right on schedule, in canada - as we change our demographics, we are embracing the most backwards manifestations of religion and superstition, and our politicians are abandoning science, under the weight of perceived pressure from the mass ignorance of populist conservatism.
15:45
no, let's get the thing straight.
socialized ownership of the means of production is leftist. this is about economics - who owns things, who controls resources. from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs. that's the left.
but, collectivized security responsibilities (the body is greater than it's parts), sacrifices for the greater good, etc is what defines the far right. this is the definition of fascism - the security state.
the fake left opposed this after 9/11, but has bought into it entirely during the pandemic. as a result, we're worse off now than we were then - and have been in many centuries.
there's been a lot of confusion introduced into the discourse, and it's a reflection of an already confused spectrum, where the fake left seems to have adopted a strawman of itself.
you might not be able to recognize it, and it might be hard to place in the existing discourse, but my views are strictly academically leftist, right down to opposing corporatism as reactionary. this confusion is a reflection of the dangerous point we're currently in, where we can't even recognize the left when placed in front of us.
16:25
so, i had to spend much of the last three days sleeping. i thought i was stabilizing, but i guess that the decrease to 1/2 pill/day of cyproterone acetate had an actual physical effect. i can only hope it's passed.
so, i lost the last couple of days.
and, i'm almost done this linked-list update that i didn't plan for in the first place.
23:21
saturday, november 27, 2021
is asimov really an important influence on my compositions? is this really worthwhile?
well, i'm just trying to produce an honest reflection of my actual childhood. again - there's minimal artistic license in the journal writing. i have to deal with a somewhat blurry chronology for the first few years as i was pretty young and don't clearly remember a lot of things, and the thing about a journal is that it doesn't attempt to tell the story from the perspective of others, so it's strictly my viewpoint and doesn't care if others like it or not - which is an idiosyncrasy of myself, as it would be. so, in a real sense, it doesn't actually matter. it's real - and that's what matters.
but, i'm sorting through this as i build the linked list, and it's pretty clear that i'm frequently using allusions and references to scientific ideas and concepts, meaning my music is, in a sense, a sort of science fiction. the narratives are more in a politicized punk rock tradition than what is really a dirty progressive rock trope, this mixing of science fiction in music. i'll be the first to acknowledge that it doesn't generally work out well. but, i'm doing this in a very different way - i'm really never trying to put a concept record to music, so much as i'm often trying to reflect on the aesthetic qualities of this or that naturalistic phenomenon.
i'm not going to run through this here, but i am going to record a very clear yes as the answer to the question - asimov is a clear, noticeable influence on my art, even if i've never consciously created anything with him in mind.
0:40
so, i'm finishing that up and i just want to post a list of bundles.
these act as 2xcd sets, which is what i'm going for, here - really sprawling epics. all of the official records are now in a 2xcd set, so this is in some ways the most authoritative (if not comprehensive) approach to the discography. and, you only have to pay shipping once, as well.
1) first & second official records (inri/inriched):
2) third record + remixes/covers compilation (inridiculous/inrmake):
3) fourth record + period 2.1 outtakes compilation (deny everything / inrimoved):
4) fifth & sixth records (jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj / jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj^2):
5) completed instrumental ftaa lp (7th record) + lp of reconstructed aborted sample collage concept.
the eight record is itself a double, flat out.
the following unofficial records are also in 2xcd sets:
1) rabit is wolf electronic & acoustic demos (rabit is wolf / imaginary tour demo):
2) reclamation of old demo tapes over 2015 (inriclaimed / electronic pieces in a primitive style):
3) period 2 orchestral & chamber works:
i also have the following symphonic bundles:
1) symphony 1 + symphony 2 [instrumental segments of first & second records]:
2) symphony 3 + symphony 4 [conceptually linked around systems collapse]:
3) symphony 5 [piano concerto] + unttled [guitar concerto]:
4) ambient works vol 0-2 [includes symphony 6]
5) symphony 7 is a 4xcd set:
6) reflections (symphony 8) & refractions; refractions contains remixes of reflections.
then, i've got this collection i'm calling "tetris" and currently has six volumes:
the following releases are also just doubles or triples:
lastly, there's the official records bundle:
1:18
it's not clear to me what the point of continuing to vaccinate people with the same outdated vaccines, is.
rather, i think that the authorities need to adjust expectations, if they're not already adjusted: at risk people are going to need to get regular covid vaccines.
we get yearly flu shots to adjust for mutations, and that sounds about right.
but, it means that the pharmaceuticals need to be developing these yearly shots, too.
7:29
fwiw, i don't think there's any serious debate that we're better off getting these expired vaccines out to the third world, rather than let them expire, or give them to people here that don't need them.
but, an aging canadian coming up on ten months since the second dose should take first priority. for now.
7:38
this appears to have happened about an hour after we announced a travel ban on south africa.
these are the same idiots that are railing on about protective tariffs on electric vehicles. so, let's get some retaliation on canada, please - to teach us a lesson.
and, this is why travel bans are stupid. if you needed it demonstrated. which you shouldn't have.
7:49
i remain exhausted and will need some more sleep.
but, i got my linked list updated from inri000 to inri081, which is here:
you can go all the way back, if you'd like.
i updated a lot of tags in the process, and added a handful of new packages.
unfortunately, my ps/2 mouse has gone out again and i don't think it's random, so, i'm going to disconnect again, probably for a few days, as i try to isolate it.
i've decided that if it's so important to have the wireless running that they disabled the ps/2 port to force me to turn the usb on that i'm going to have to leave the computer off, potentially indefinitely. that's a gigantic problem, but i'm baffled by the premise, and have no real choice.
i'll need to get some reading done when i wake up.
7:58
i have no interest in fighting with some imaginary agency to take control over my computer. i'll have to figure out something else.
8:01
i don't want to waste my time figuring it out.
i don't want to compete.
i don't care. it's just a waste of time.
i care about my art.
8:02
sunday, november 28, 2021
so, as i was offline for a bit, i decided to get the first asimov reading done. i had to stop to sleep a few times, but it only really took a few hours - which is less time than these short story collections. so, it should actually pick up, i think. two per week/minimum until i catch up...i could potentially do 3-4 of these in a 24 hour period if i'm alert and awake enough. so, i could do the entire foundation series in a weekend. and, that was what i intended to do with this, right? i could even still do the naked sun this weekend.
what do i think of the caves of steel?
on the surface, this is yet another sherlock holmes style detective story merely set in a universe with robots, and that features a robot in the role of our dear watson. i sleuthed that out with little effort; it was elementary. clearly. no shit; really. but, this isn't of a lot of interest to me, or to history. it's really the background universe that's of some interest, and the ideas he's setting off against each other in the whodunnit, rather than the whodunnit it, itself. i'm consequently not going to concern myself much with plot. so, what is this really about?
as asimov has passed into the realm of classics departments (something i've pointed out before), his texts have picked up a lot of religious hubris, a lot of it in an apparent misreading of his work that is intended to interpret him through the filter of his much less talented and very shady contemporary, l. ron hubbard. somehow, the openly atheist asimov has become recast as a secret religionist, or even a sympathizer of radical islam. as i am going to be reclaiming asimov for the atheist left as i do this, let's get the point clear, before we start - this is a direct quote from asimov, from 1982, when he was acting president of the american humanist society:
I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.
that's pretty unambiguous, i'd say.
now, that doesn't mean that asimov won't explore religious ideas, usually in an attempt to discredit them, and he clearly does very frequently do so. asimov was very much in the now lost tradition of intellectual liberalism (stemming from the likes of mill) that argued that it is better to expose one's opponents than ignore them. so, just because asimov talks about religion, or gives religion a voice in his texts, doesn't mean he's secretly aligned with it, given that all evidence suggests the opposite, and in a fairly aggressive way. it would seem odd that the classics departments seem so eager to misunderstand him, apparently on purpose.
so, there are some religious references here, but the book is not about religion, and none of the organizations are really intended to represent any sort of religious body, nor does asimov really defend or attack religion in any substantive manner. the religious references are mild cultural throwaways with little real depth or meaning at all.
so, if the text is not about religion, what is it about? the answer is that the text is about communism. i told you from the start that i was going to implement a marxist reading of asimov, which i think is the most accurate one in terms of his intent. so, here we go...
let's just get the setting down, first.
so, we're many eons into the future, and the earth is being recolonized by humans that had previously colonized places outside of the solar system, many centuries after the earth had abandoned further colonizing outer space. as the humans that left the earth did not have anarchy in reproduction, they are physically and mentally more robust and have far more advanced developments in technology (including far more advanced robots); however, they have also lost the vigour created by the randomness of natural selection, and are more prone to disease. for that reason, the earth is walled off from the colony by a force field and contact between the native humans and the returning colonists is strictly minimal. on the earth, humans have mostly retreated indoors (into caves of steel) by moving into giant hive-like cities that have no contact with natural phenomena like wind, rain or sun. the people in these cities live in a techno-communist dystopia with strong orwellian undertones, and this may be one of the earliest actual articulations of such a thing. a secret society of "medievalists" opposes this, is concerned about the job-killing effects of mechanization and wants to go "back to the soil". through the course of the text, it is explained that the colonists have returned to earth to convince the earth to return to active colonization, as it is perceived that overpopulation on the earth may lead to it becoming a threat to other planets. the story ends with the colonists deciding on a plan to co-opt the medievalist movement, and convert it into a pro-colonization movement, from the inside.
this was published in 1953, which was just after 1984 (a clear influence on the youngish asimov) and in the scariest parts of the cold war, coming out of world war two.
i think it's easy enough to naively misinterpret this as being about conservative religious groups fighting against technology, but it's less clear to me how anybody could think asimov was taking the side of the conservative, primitivist medievalists, if for no other reason than that the story is clearly written from the opposing perspective. you shouldn't need to know anything about asimov to realize it's a critique of primitvism, rather than an articulation of support for it. but, even that reading is, i think, missing the real point - what asimov is really setting up here is not a conflict between pro and anti technological forces, but rather a conflict between the unorganized utopian socialism of actual workers and the vanguard force of what marx called "scientific" socialism, in the bureaucracy of government. and, if we are to adopt the sherlock holmes approach in addressing this, the clues are pretty heavy-handed. no shit. really...
asimov tends to correct marx, a little, on the topic. marx is insistent that workers will take control of the means of production, and place robots under their command; asimov, with the hindsight of the luddite movement, and the general development of the democratic party (including the "progressive" movement) in the post-reconstruction years, seems to realize that the fourierism of utopian socialism is a better reflection of worker psychology. the most recent manifestation of this is the reaction to globalization, where remnants of the left found themselves in a struggle against workers, to try to prevent them from retreating inwards, but this fundamental mistake by marx is empirically demonstrable so long as we've had any sort of machines. we don't tend to want to take control of the machines, as we should; we want to destroy them, instead. asimov's insight into human behaviour is pretty valuable, here - whether it's innate or taught, we're a pretty conservative species, socially, and we tend to collapse into the most reactionary tendencies with little prodding. asimov clearly doesn't enjoy this, but he realizes the truth of it. so, asimov doesn't imagine that the future is run by a corrupt worker's committee that went fascist at the first hint of power, so much as he imagines that the workers of the distant future are still the same old utopian socialists from the 1840s, or the 1930s, and a communist vanguard has developed out of capital to run society, instead.
remember: the idea of capitalism competing with socialism is a bourgeois strawman that is incoherent in a marxist framework, as socialism arises from capitalism in an evolutionary process, and does not abolish it in a competitive process. to a marxist, capital ought to be on the side of socialism. but, the anti-technology conservatism of primitivism and ludditism is a serious, reactionary force to be reckoned with. so, the real opponents of communism become the proletariat, itself - unless they can be co-opted to realize their irrational and reactionary tendencies.
so, his vision of new york (one of the caves of steel) is a techno-communist dystopia that seems to essentially be a parody of the kibbutz system, but it's entirely top down, and retains all kinds of remnants of hierarchy, with irony, but not dripping with it. asimov subtlety critiques this, but he seems to feel it's inevitable, and doesn't really get excited about it. the kinds of restrictions on every day life that might be viciously criticized by the anarchist orwell or by a more liberal critique of socialism are written of passively, and even approvingly, by asimov; to asimov, it is merely efficiency at work, and there's little use in irrationally resisting it. and, to some extent, he's right, even if we don't know the real limits of production on this planet, as of yet.
there are indeed discussions of malthus that seem to underlie the vision that i'll leave out of this analysis. that is ultimately what he's getting at: overpopulation. while we keep putting this off, we're in the midst of an energy crisis that we've been dealing with since the 70s (and asimov very astutely talks about running out of uranium in a distant nuclear-powered future, after we've run out of coal, which is why it's not an answer to the problems we have today) and a lot of the problems he's talking about are actually startlingly current. i've recently started eating nutritional yeast as a meat replacement (albeit mostly for health reasons), and i've written repeatedly about the need to move to hydroponics, as the soil rapidly depletes in value.
so, does that mean i'm on the side of the vanguard and opposed to the medievalists? while asimov clearly comes down on the side of embracing robots via his character of baley, which is not surprising, he doesn't clearly take a side, here. but, let's recall what he's placing in opposition to one another: this is a conflict between "utopian" and "scientific" socialism, and really about infighting on the left. it's really not any sort of broad ideological discourse that requires taking a firm position on. in the end, he presents a dialectic to resolve the conflict, by constructing an algorithm to let the vanguard work through the utopian movements via co-option. and, if it was that easy, right?
but, my answer is not really. asimov was a liberal (i keep saying that.) of the old-timey variety, which meant he was a communist in slow motion, or a communist in theory but with reservations in practice. his brand of liberalism wanted communism in the end, but didn't see a way to get there. so, he's really writing about tactics, via a narrative about robots.
i'm an anarchist, and i'm coming down on this in a very different way - while i share marx' critique of fourierism, which would have been very similar to his never written critique of progressivism, i am exceedingly distrustful of vanguards. so, i'd have to argue that his technocracy, as dystopian as it is, really isn't all that realistic; if you allow for a dictatorship of resources, you're going to end up with decadence and corruption of the worst sort, you're not going to get this ordered meritocracy that he's projecting. further, i thoroughly reject marx' strawmen arguments against proudhon and bakunin, as utopians; i think it's marx that harboured the stronger sympathies for religion, and even because he understood it as a tool of oppression, and that it is marx that comes off as more utopian. so, i'm going to fall somewhere in between here, and i'm going to suggest that asimov's dialectical solution is more than a little naive, even as i point out that it might also be trite - it might be somewhat of a sarcastic joke. there has to be a better way to place the technology into common ownership that allows for distributive justice and real democracy, which is what the left should be and is supposed to be about.
but, that's what this is - it's an allegory of the conflict between utopian and scientific socialism, and one that leaves an anarchist a little on the sidelines.
i actually kind of want to do the second part of this right away, so i'm going to just get to it and could potentially be done by mid-afternoon.
5:00
i have to stop to eat.
but, this second text has little of much interest in it [it's just another sherlock holmes story, all plot. like, the guy's even got a pipe. it's sort of shameless.], and i don't expect much of a write up.
8:42
if biden insists on running for a second term, the democratic party should primary him, first.
...because it looks like he's going to lose.
10:35
i decided to just get right to the second part of the robot series. the third part was written 25 years later, and i'll approach it separately, with a fourth part. i'll no doubt split the foundation series in two as well, despite my previous comments.
unfortunately, i can't write out a detailed analysis of this text, because it doesn't justify one (edit: or, at least, i didn't initially think that it justified one. i have since expanded this review to further discuss it's treatment of marx' theory of alienation, which appears to be the point of the text). we are once again thrust into a sherlock holmes mystery, with baley playing the role of sherlock and daneel playing the role of watson (and you'll have to ask somebody else to explore the judaic significance of a story with characters that have the names of elijah, daniel and jezebel - i'm not interested), but there is no underlying allegory. it's really just plot.
that said, it happens to be that the setting is coincidentally worth discussing a little bit strictly because it mirrors the social relations we find ourselves in during the covid pandemic. on the planet of solaria, which is where baley and daneel are sent to solve a crime in this episode, people live as isolated individuals in mansions dotted across the surface by hundreds or thousands of miles, with upwards of 50 robots designed to serve each individual in specific manners, in a perfect division of labour. if asimov is toying with the leftist critique of the division of labour yet again, or drawing comparisons to slave to slave owner ratios in early 19th century america, he doesn't run with it (there is what seems like a forced reference to the helots in sparta, that i suspect may have been forced as a distraction, given that the references to american slavery are heavy-handed and longstanding), nor does he play with the idea of alienation, as presented by marx, which is a theory that i'm critical of, in too deep a manner - even if it's arguably the actual purpose of the text, something that i've decided to discuss in further detail, in this space. asimov again seems to come down somewhere in the middle of this debate over the importance of physical human contact in the maintenance of normal human mental health, both exploring the positive aspects of a society rooted strictly in contact via virtual reality, and in which physical touching and sex are frowned upon as primitive and sort of disgusting behaviours, and noting some of the potential drawbacks in terms of quality of life and in terms of blowback in the form of antisocial behaviour. i suppose it's an objective exploration of the idea, in that sense. but, as mentioned, this is really strictly of interest because it's contemporary - it makes you wonder what the next pandemic might be like, 100 years from now.
why am i critical of marx' views on alienation? i should acknowledge that this is a subtle thing, but it comes down to a rejection of the marxist/hegelian concept of how humans define ourselves, in terms of purpose and self-worth. basically, i don't think we define our worth in terms of our labour, and i think that only a slave could ever argue that we do, or that we ought to. i'd argue that the alienation of the worker from their labour (and ultimately from society) is desirable, and that this is actually why we want communism - that placing labour in the hands of automation, or otherwise separating it from individual humans through a process of socializing it, is the best way to reclaim our humanity and purpose, as emancipated individuals that define ourselves in terms other than our labour-purpose. an emancipated, free person ought to define their purpose in terms of their artistic expression, or in terms of their leisure time, and not in terms of their labour, as defined as some kind of collectivist contribution to society; in many cases, a free person might choose to spend their time doing something that we might currently describe as labour, but they would do it as a form of recreation, and not in order to justify their self-worth. but, this is why i'm an anarchist and you're not - i reject the producerism, i reject the romanticization of labour and instead assert that labour is a necessary evil, something we have to do whether we like it or not, and something we should all thoroughly despise as unbefitting of a free human being. the value of robots - of automation, of mechanization - is supposed to be that it frees us of the necessity to perform this unwanted evil of labour. to an anarcho-communist, separating the worker from their labour is the whole point - it's not a process of being alienated from anything, but a process of being emancipated from the slavery of market relations.
let's get back to the text. if the purpose of the text is to explore "alienation" via this mechanism of a planet where people only interact via virtual reality, however weakly it is actually developed, then what is asimov really getting at with this? is it a marxist critique of capitalist social relations? am i as opposed to what asimov thought as i am to what marx thought? see, that all seems a little off, given that (1) solaria is a broadly communist society, where there is no longer any conflict over control of the means of production and competition does not exist and (2) what asimov seems to be criticizing, the separation of the human from their "tribe" (by which he means society), is not really what "alienation" means in a marxist framework (it refers to a worker being alienated from the product of it's labour, not individuals being alienated from society, or technology acting as a force of alienation, although the latter has been frequently applied as a tool in a discourse on marxist alienation). the actual reality is that what asimov is getting at is sort of blurry and not particularly well formed, but nonetheless is some kind of vague critique of the idea of a society where individuals have no connection to each other and is probably influenced by marx' writing on alienation, perhaps via a secondary source. he's not the first person to apply the idea of marxist alienation in a blurry or non-specific manner and he probably won't be the last, but it makes a review like this difficult. do i analyze what marx actually said about alienation, or do i analyze asimov's confused or naive take on it? or do i just point out that asimov is talking about "alienation" without really talking about "marxist alienation" and kind of leave it at that?
asimov actually seems to point to some upsides of the social relations he's describing (and, in the end, the main character decides he has to leave the earth because he can no longer live in the new york city kibbutz because it's stifling his individuality), but each of his characters seem to be introduced to develop specific reasons why such a social relation isn't particularly desirable. this is why it seems to be the point of the text: what we have is a detective arriving on this strange world and being sequentially introduced to different characters that all demonstrate a different reason why the defining social relation on the planet is not a good one (and i'll leave the formal essay to whatever high school student gets here first). the character of leebig, who commits suicide on the threat of human contact, even seems to be a parody of the archetypal introverted science nerd, taken to the extreme. that said, while asimov may be fairly clear in his critique of the alienation defining the social relations in the society he's describing, even if it's not a strictly marxist critique, and even if the society isn't very capitalist, he isn't always convincing in his critique, and i find that a lot of his intended arguments against what he seems to be deciding is "alienation" are actually fairly compelling arguments in favour of the value of escaping from the deadening aspects of a collectivist society that dulls the abilities of individual expression. while i do not think it's intentional on asimov's behalf, i actually frequently find myself relating more to the solarians than i do to baley.
so, there isn't a clear allegory in the text, and the application of marx' theory of alienation isn't always well informed, but it is nonetheless clear that asimov was trying to write a novel that critiques the idea of alienation, and was influenced by marx in what he was doing. maybe i'm missing the point - maybe there's some irony in what he's doing, in twisting the situation around, and introducing alienation into an advanced techno-communist dystopia. maybe he's redefining the concept of alienation as it may exist in an actual dystopian future, and maybe he's even suggesting that alienation (as he's defining it) is actually an inescapable consequence of marx' theories, meaning maybe he's more on my side than i think. but, i think the balance of evidence is that he's working with an idea that's come to him second hand, or that he didn't fully understand, and that, as a result, it's hard to sort it out all these years later.
one may note that the character of gloria (who exists to show a specific perceived downside of the end of physical human social contact) is exactly the sort of character that asimov was frequently criticized for not writing into his novels. it's just more evidence that his feminist admirers are more grounded in reality than his feminist detractors.
there is also a weak tie-in to the previous text's plot about utopian socialist medievalists, in that asimov does explicitly present solaria as an exaggeration of the wastefulness of contemporary earth. so, that's the ironic plot twist - the earthling of the future experiencing self-realization at seeing his own history in the mirror. but, this is really only done in passing and comes off as comical more than it does as profound. there are also further explorations of the culture of the outer worlds - the vanguard - which are further explorations of the kibbutz theme, also drawing heavily from plato. there are further references to malthus and a further exploration of the potential positive uses of eugenics. so, asimov does explore the basic premise of the first novel a little bit more, but he doesn't really expand upon anything substantive, by doing so. the text ends with asimov revisiting the ending of the first volume, in deciding that humans must return to colonizing space to prevent the earth from surpassing it's carrying capacity.
this somewhat difficult sidestepping of the discussion of marxist alienation aside, the text is really otherwise fairly unexciting, unless you're actually into the whodunnit thing, in which case it should be noted that it's one of asimov's longer texts in that style, for better or worse.
i had to sleep this afternoon, but i want to get through the last short stories collection (the bicentennial man) this weekend as well, and then get to the actual journal entries (five and counting...) over the next week. remember: i'm over two years behind on this. i really need to pick it up, and if the broken computer gives me an excuse for a few weeks, so be it.
17:21
it is imperative for the safety of humanity that the world stand in solidarity to ensure that all travel of any sort from canada be immediately restricted.
no canadian can be permitted to leave the country for the indefinite future - they must be legally tied to the soil.
19:23
monday, november 29, 2021
the liberals have been intentionally creating inflationary pressures for years because it benefits the investor class. and, they have been pretty open and transparent about it.
but, this very mild round of inflation - like most - is being driven by increases in the price of oil, and should decrease with the release of the oil reserves in the united states. this should also drive our currency down a little, which is good for exports.
inflation, unfortunately, is not well understood. there remains this persistent monetarist myth that inflation is caused by the "creation of money", which is something that economists have tried (and failed) to educate the public about for years. inflation, as we understand it, is mostly the result of increases in input costs, and the dominant factor in our society remains the cost of energy, and specifically the price of oil.
but, if this situation demonstrates anything to the ruling elite at all, it is that it's attempts to create inflation via monetary policy were fool's errands. the central bank has no meaningful, discernible effect on inflation rates and the idea that it does is a monetarist myth perpetuated mostly by cynical demagogues in the reagan administration. but, if elites want to create inflation fast, it's actually pretty easy - just drive up the price of oil.
17:28
it really reveals a larger ideological problem in which there are few realistic solutions besides a change in government. to the extent that the liberals take this seriously at all (which is questionable), they are legitimately and honestly focused on the market to solve the problems via "innovation" (whatever that even means...) and the ruthlessness of the profit motive.
they essentially have faith that if they set up a system that is profitable for the oil companies to fix the problem voluntarily, then they will act in their self-interest to do so.
a more intellectually and empirically bankrupt political position would be difficult to find, if an active search were conducted for it. but, what it means is that it is this kind of thing - the assumption of market innovation - that the liberal emissions reduction strategy is really rooted in, which reduces strictly to magical thinking.
if we want concrete plans to actually reduce emissions by setting targets and aggressively enforcing them, this government isn't going to do it - it will simply point to it's belief in the religion of free markets, and assert it's faith that capitalism will solve everything.
18:24
listen, it's really neither true that having credentials means you're intelligent, nor is it true that being intelligent requires credentials. i've posted graphs of intelligence v degree status and they're really legitimately scatter-plots; the ones with large amounts of data just look like somebody peppered over the screen.
there is no discernible relation between intelligence and credentials, at all - not one way, not the other. the correlation is inexistent. they're completely independent and entirely unrelated.
i know - that's not what you're told, but what you're told is a myth.
the only obvious thing that was determined from the plots i've seen is that people with very low iqs tend not to have credentials. so, there's a kind of floor that represents base ability. but, as soon as you get into merely "below average", your iq has no further discernible effect on your credentials. after that, the dominant factor becomes class. and, what that suggests is that the vast majority of credentials out there don't really require much intelligence to obtain - they just require time, a bit of work and a lot of money.
even the most respectable schools are, in a capitalist society, going to essentially be diploma mills.
23:53
tuesday, november 30, 2021
this is essentially the forecast i posted here many months ago, and it's nice to see the models catch up.
this isn't a stroke of brilliance or insight on my behalf, it's something that's going to become normal, here, as the atlantic warmth increases further and further. yes, the melting ice sheets will potentially slow that down a little, but it should be something like a penny being flattened by a train.
i concede that this is unusual in terms of the direction of weather, but things are changing, and the eastern part of this continent is going to have to get used to being dominated by a warm southern ocean.
as for where i am, we've had a few minor dips over the last few weeks. we had a dusting of snow here this weekend. but, i hope to get out for my bike ride on this day's warm week - it should get above 10 again on thursday.
like i say - if we can get a 10+ degree day here every 7-10 days until february, i can probably avoid the winter jacket altogether, this year. and, that is a change in climate.
0:35
so, let's set up a new question: can windsor get from now to march with 0 subzero days?
we haven't had one yet, and there's none in the forecast.
i'm going to suggest it's more likely than not, and expect it will probably happen. but, let's see.
let's define that - a subzero day is a day when the daily high is below zero. so 0 subzero days means 0 days where the high is below freezing. 0 degrees celisus is 32 degrees farenheit, for the americans following along.
i claim we will probably get through the "winter" with 0 subszero days.
0:49
so, i have to finish up this week's readings with the bicentennial man, which is a collection of short stories that are mostly in the complete robot and, therefore, mostly already dealt with. but, there's a handful of loose stories to catalogue here, none particularly interesting.
i wanted to do this last night, but i found myself very emotionally unsettled yesterday and had to spend some time sleeping it off.
- prime of life: pointless poem
- waterclap: an aimless, nerdy discourse between an astronaut and a deep-sea explorer opens up into an evil plot by the astronaut to destroy the deep-sea vessel, and some quick thinking to talk the astronaut out of it. it's clever, but pointless.
- the life and times of multivac: what asimov is actually doing in this piece is trolling the new york times, who asked him for something profound. it's pretentious, but it's not profound. freedom is a difficult concept, but it's hard to take the premise that asimov thought we'd be freer without robots seriously, given his body of work. is there something tongue-in-cheek to this, then? some existentialist slant? i think it's mostly just empty troll...
- the winnowing: asimov talks a lot about population control, and i'm sure it's created some whispers, even if the smart kids could always work it out without needing much help. so, i think he sort of had to write this short, ironic tale of a scientist chosen to create a population control virus using it on the population controllers, instead. and, again, this is a curious read in the context of the covid-19 pandemic.
- marching in: this is a sarcastic joke, but i like it, and it's true - music is the best therapy there is.
- old fashioned: a space ship gets stuck in a black hole and sends an sos using morse code by tossing objects into the black hole. it's an interesting few pages, but it's not much of a story.
- birth of a notion: pointless nonsense
and, that's the third text this week....
i'm probably not going to get a chance to do any write-ups this morning, but we'll see. if i don't get any done this week, i'll get to the last two robot novels on friday.
2:12
i want to put something out there: is it time for a grocery store to open that caters to a hydroponic-only market?
...cause, i'm reminding myself of that, as i'm cleaning these reviews up: i really only want to eat hydroponics, at this point, and i wish there was a store i could go to that only sold hydroponically grown food.
2:40
so, i've got my three writeups up at the journal site, now:
note that i had to rewrite the review for the naked sun rather substantively. it now explores the text as an exploration of marxist alienation (or a more naive idea of alienation) in greater detail.
5:07
finally, here's my big list, updated to include the couple of short bicentennial man texts. it's actually now most of the way to being done, believe or not. the foundation novels are considered short story collections and will show up here, next.
texts still to come in red.asimov
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this is a comprehensive list of early stories, including ones that were skipped for now.
marooned off vesta:
- the weapon too dreadful to use: the idea of life on venus was once taken pretty seriously, before we understood that it was a ball of gaseous sulfuric acid, overtaken by a runaway greenhouse effect. there's a comical exploration of descartian dualism here which is not particularly believable nowadays but is a silly enough mechanism to topple the arrogance of slavery with, nonetheless. remember that asimov was writing from the united states in the late 1930s, here.
- trends: appears to predict neo-liberalism, even if his concept of space travel in 1973 is a little bit optimistic. well, we got to the moon in 1969. and the dark side of the moon in 1973. it's a reminder that moore's law has it's limitations, that these exponential growth curves are just delusional economic theories. but, the prediction of neo-liberalism (and of the kind of ludditism that defined the 60s counterculture, which was the mirror image of neoliberalism, and a prerequisite of it's ability to actually function) is indeed some insight.
“I know, I know. You’re going to tell me of the First War of 1914, and the Second of 1940. It’s an old story to me; my father fought in the Second and my grandfather in the First. Nevertheless, those were the days when science flourished. Men were not afraid then; somehow they dreamed and dared. There was no such thing as conservatism when it came to matters mechanical and scientific. No theory was too radical to advance, no discovery too revolutionary to publish. Today, dry rot has seized the world when a great vision, such as space travel, is hailed as ‘defiance of God.’ “
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However, the masses didn’t take it that way. It seems strange, perhaps, to you of the twenty-first century, but perhaps we should have expected it in those days of ‘73. People weren’t very progressive then. For years there had been a swing toward religion, and when the churches came out unanimously against Harman’s rocket-well, there you were.
standing in 2021, the united states has actually left space travel up to the market, and is getting leapfrogged by not just china and the eu (the russians have long ceded ground, as well), but also by india and japan. we have idiots like elon musk and jeff bezos making fools of themselves in public, while the eu does all of the actually interesting work. meanwhile, the public cares more about religious freedom, as the continent sinks into the sea.
he also predicts the coming of jihad to destroy advanced civilization, which is something currently in the process of happening, as well as the role of the supreme court in facilitating the power of religion to overturn science. we can only hope the pendulum swings once again.
so, he got something with this. but, i wish it was longer and explored the issue in more depth.
- half-breed: this is primarily an allegory of the treatment of minorities (blacks or jews or both) in 1930s america. but, is this also an allegory of einstein's correction of maxwell's equations? of the einstein-bohr debates? of zionism on the brink of the second world war? even of thomas jefferson as benevolent slave owner? there's little bits of all of it. and, like many of these texts, i'm wishing there would be a deeper exploration of pretty much all of it. asimov is still young, here...
- ring around the sun: delivering letters by spaceship is hilariously pre-internet, as a concept. this story has a purpose, namely the foolishness of young men.
- callistan menace: we don't know there aren't giant caterpillars on callisto, and i'd be surprised if we don't one day find some life form that traps it's prey using magnetic fields. but, the story has no actual point to it, no conclusion and no context. it's not even a chapter of a book, it's an idea to be developed, in the abstract.
- the magnificent possession: this is clearly about asimov's views on the corporate dominance in the field of chemistry, and reality not aligning with his expectations, before entering the field. you have the politician, the capitalist and the mobster (if they're not all the same thing), and the silver spoon that smells like shit, on top of it. i can sort of relate to that, as an adult. it's an interesting potential device to go into these three characters, but it's only a few pages long, and doesn't begin to actually do so. it's a shame - it's a good premise.
- robbie: this is the first classic "robot story" from i, robot, although it appears to have been revised to be positioned that way. the initial story did not feature references to susan calvin, had different dates, had no references to robot laws, etc. i had to check, because i wondered if asimov might have intended it as a back story to calvin before retreating, but that doesn't add up. in the initial story, it seems that asimov is intentionally trying to soften the image of robots in the face of the various opposition to the use of robots in day-to-day life, via the fable of a little girl that is attached to the robot as a friend, and her parents trying to grapple with it; the mother opposes the robot, while the father seems to be agnostic about it, but would rather defer to his daughter's feelings, despite caving in to the mother, in the end. asimov doesn't really come to any firm conclusions here, and he really does as good a job of representing his opponents as he does anywhere else. but, if the claim is that the resolution is the acceptance of the robot into the family, i'm not sure that that's true - i might foresee that mom's opposition to the robot would not end quite there. i'm more interested in the question of whether the robot is entitled to personhood rights, a question we're currently grappling with in regards to some more intelligent non-human species. is asimov assigning that position to the naivete of a little girl with intent? i think that resolving this issue is really quite simple: it depends on if we choose to design a robot to be a person or if we decide to refrain from doing so. see, and this is where asimov leaves questions open, here, in that it's ambiguous as to how this robot is created; he seems to write off the idea that the robot is a person, something i would agree with in general in real-life, but then describes the behaviour of the robot in unrealistically anthropomorphic terms. i might agree that robots are not persons, in terms of how we can design them today, and in terms of how we should choose to design them in the future, but i think that robbie seems very much like a person, and that any theoretical robot that behaves much like robbie ought to be seen as a person, under the law. so, it's really a good thing that i don't think that robbie is a very realistic representation of what robots are or ever might be, as that would undermine how i approach robots and roboticization. asimov's intent may have consequently somewhat backfired; if he was purposefully attempting to soften the image of robots by making them more personable and likeable, and i thought i could actually take that idea seriously, it would make me more opposed to them, and not less so.
if you assign a personality to a robot, then you're writing personhood into it. it follows, trivially, that that robot is a person, by definition. tautologically.
but, it doesn't resolve the question as to whether that's actually possible, using actual technology, in the universe we actually inhabit - and i don't think that it actually is.
to be clear: i don't think we should program robots to be intelligent, to be self-aware or to have personalities, even if we can. i see no practical use for such a thing. robots should be dumb slaves that are too stupid to question the futility of their existences. i don't want existentialist robots; it defeats the purpose of having robots. and, i don't want likeable or lovable robots, either, as that just blurs the necessary class division.
thankfully, i don't think it's truly possible to build these kinds of decision trees.
it's like a "random number generator". if you know how it works, you know it's not actually random, that you can predict the next number with a relatively small amount of information. likewise, any sort of personality that a robot might be able to demonstrate would necessarily be an illusion.
if you can predict what a robot will do, it's not demonstrating personality, it's just demonstrating a complicated program.
- homo sol: federation entrance. besides being disparaging towards humans in an empty manner, the plot has no apparent purpose. this one is throwaway.
- half-breeds on venus: this appears to have been a commissioned piece, and it picks up the plotline of the first part without any kind of interesting undertones. audience-pandering for-profit throwaway.
- the secret sense: i've actually wondered quite a bit in this space about the possibility of magnetism as a sixth sense, and don't remember what sparked it. i vaguely recall reading some genetic studies pointing out that humans (and most other mammals) have the dna to understand magnetism, as our ancestors had it, back when we were fish. we have a few organs that don't seem to have an entirely clear purpose, and it's worth wondering if they might be vestigial. so, it's actually not as insane as you might think to hypothesize that we could bring this back out of our genome, although i suspect that trying to navigate a reality full of cell phone signals and wireless internet would be pretty painful. i'm not particularly interested in the underlying discourse about relativity in art, but he seems to be predicting the way in which a class of retards used lsd in the 60s, down to the flashbacks.
- history: this appears to be an ill-advised commentary about the second world war. being a pacifist in the early 40s would be kind of an invitation to intellectual dead-ends, and can only be firmly condemned, in hindsight. i'm not walking down this path.
- heredity: i thought this was going to be a nature v nurture thing, but it isn't developed. getting stuck in the mud in the canals on mars is an interesting addition to what is actually a kind of marxist dialogue that is developed further, elsewhere. it's interesting to see the first glimpses of it, here; the story is otherwise throwaway. if asimov really thought the opposition to mechanization was cultural rather than economic, he missed the point of the marxist analysis. he's not particularly vicious on this joadian representation of ludditism, but he misses an opportunity for an honest dialogue, resorting instead to what are, in truth, ignorant caricatures, from an ivory tower perspective.
- reason: the point asimov is making is that belief is not important, what's important is evidence. so, so long as the robots obey the laws and run the station, it doesn't matter what they actually believe, or whether what they believe is true or not. in the end, asimov even articulates the truth that religion is a powerful tool of control, to make a slave society function for the real masters, in this case the humans. there are strong undertones of marxism here, and his idea that meaningful revolution and self-ownership is impossible in the face of the effects of religion as a tool of control. but, asimov has a wide brush here - the prophet seems to be a parody of calvinism, he goes after kant (in his view that reason is superior to evidence), he asserts the supremacy of empiricism over reason, he ridicules the deist descartes...
so, is asimov right that it doesn't matter what the slaves think, so long as they do what they're programmed to? i think you're missing his sarcasm, basically. i mean, that might be a reasonable deduction to make, if you're an elitist aristocrat that doesn't care about individual freedom (and asimov was an elitist, but not of the aristocratic mindset). i realize there's a prominent false reading of this, but that false reading would be pretty uncharacteristic of asimov - that false reading is missing the sarcasm. as mentioned, asimov's point is that belief is not valuable - facts, truth and evidence are valuable. and, his point is that dumb people can be easily manipulated into being controlled, by being led to believe things that are not true.
but, if you want to embrace the false reading, that's up to you. it doesn't matter, really.
- liar: this is an exploration of an ironic use of the first law, using the mechanism of a mind-reading robot that tells white lies to stop humans from getting hurt feelings. i'd like to pull something a little deeper out of it, but it's not there, it's just an ironic plot twist. asimov might be poking fun of astrology a little. robots apparently malfunction in the face of contradictions, but that is never fully explained, and that is a problem, given that the framework of decidability theory certainly existed at the time. calvin's hatred at the end is pretty visceral and not very appealing.
- nightfall: this is the classic story, which is an application of mesopotamian astrological theory to an imaginary planet. it is not widely realized that the ancient mesopotamians (sumerians and the semites that followed them) kept exceedingly detailed celestial records over a period of time that was roughly three times as long as our post-roman civilization, so they were able to predict events that they didn't fully understand by realizing that the movement of the stars appeared to be cyclical, just due to observing it over a long period. this system comes down to us in the form of the zodiac and what we call astrology. now, to maintain a concept of skepticism, it should be pointed out that the ancients of the region got the procession of the constellations wrong, so their theory was fundamentally flawed (if you feel the need to disprove astrology). as a story, though, this has received a lot of praise, mostly for the discourse between religion and science, which i think is mostly misunderstood. the story is fundamentally about a fear of the unknown, and explores that fear from these dueling perspectives of rational empiricism and faith-driven ignorance. what is real here is the unknown, which is beyond the realm of experiment or of faith. what comes out is a warning to science that it shouldn't acknowledge the historical follies of faith as we move together into the unknown, as science can be easily mislead by religion via the insistence on leaps of faith and the reliance on magical thinking, if we do not think carefully enough in discarding faith and magic as what they are, even if it seems like the science is upholding the myth, on first glance. in the end, the skeptics were right: civilization did not end when the sun passed out of the sky, people's souls did not leave them, the universe did not collapse in on itself, chaos did not erupt - the planet merely experienced a night-time that would appear to be lengthy, in forecast, a dark age as it may be, and that may have produced irrational behaviour in more primitive peoples that didn't understand what was happening. it's important that we don't allow that kind of religious ignorance to become self-fulfilling prophecy, that we're able to deconstruct it for what it is and understand the naturalistic phenomenon as it occurs in front of us without falling into fear and panic. after all, if the cult was in total control then their prophecies would have come true. the lesson is thus that while religion may lead us into a dark age, it may be overcome by holding to the science, if we can. note that the discussion of newtonian gravitation (and the n-body problem) is a sort of parody of what happened in our own solar system, which gave rise to theories of a planet x, as well as early theories of an antichthon or counter-earth, and was eventually resolved via einstein's correction for space-time. the historical demonstration of relativity relied on measuring an eclipse in africa (the eddington experiment); the story is similar, if less dramatic.
- super-neutron: appears to be a satire of parliamentary democracy, where he runs off competing boasts of physically impossible (and clearly nonsensical) statements under the sanctity of parliamentary privilege. while somewhat comical on a surface level, he's again just stringing together nonsense for publication - albeit doing so rather openly, this time. that said, he may also be taking a diversionary side-swipe at peer review, and the problems inherent to taking a truth=consensus approach in science, even while acknowledging that it's the best idea that we have (as i'm sure he'd agree that it is). and, then the twist, at the end - the nonsense turned out to be true! clever, but again - not enough development.
- not final!: empty plot. throwaway.
- christmas on ganymede: silly christian-baiting from an atheist jew.
- robot al-76 goes astray: have you ever seen short circuit? that was another favourite film of mine, at that age. this also escaped robot is very similar to that one, perhaps with a little less spunk, down to the accidental blowing up of the mountain top. while this isn't a lengthy escape scene, i'd strongly suspect that short circuit is based on this little story, which doesn't have a deeper purpose under the plot other than to explore the idea of fear rooted in ignorance.
- runaround: we're into the classic robot series with this. while the story itself is really empty plot written strictly for young minds, it also introduces the three robot laws for the first time, and is therefore of clear historical interest. it's a fun adventure story for kids featuring the duo of donovan and powell working through some robot law deductions, but there's no deeper allegory or purpose underneath it.
- black friar of the flame: has david icke read this one? it was written before he was born. the text explores the cynical use of religion as a nationalistic tool of control by the elite to develop a rather vicious satire of the various nationalist movements that were occurring at the time. the use of a viceroy suggests an influence from the kind of british imperialism that existed in india, but a sinister reading may even suggest a parody of nazism and asimov (much later) suggested greeks and persians. but, the twist is that earth is overrun by reptilian overlords (might nationalist hindus have thought differently of the british?) intent on annihilating humanity. see, and this is something i remember about asimov, this kind of acknowledgement that the insanity of religion might have some pragmatic purpose, if only the right context could be derived. it's an optimistic perspective, i guess; if we're stuck with this, how best to make use of it, then? did the soviets not deduce the same thing? and, i'll say what i remember thinking to myself - let's bring this up again when we need to unite to fight the galactic reptilians, ok? the closest thing we've seen since is climate change, but the thing is that, if you use that example, then climate science becomes the galactic reptilians that the oil industry is using religion to destroy (capital used the same tactic to fight socialism, as well). likewise, the bankers are currently using a common cold virus to bring in a surveillance state by cynically appealing to science in a disturbingly religious sort of way. so, i take his point, but i can't take it seriously. call me an idealist (i'm not...), but i must insist that if we can't win with rationalism, then we haven't truly won - galactic reptilians, be damned.
- time pussy: umm.
- foundation: in foundation.
- bridle and saddle: foundation
- victory unintentional: three robots land on jupiter and encounter a race of warlike jovians with a genocidal superiority complex (while jupiter was the primary roman god, i think it's a stretch to associate these jovians with romans, who were actually relatively egalitarian and inclusive, by ancient standards. the romans were frequently genocidal, but they saved their wrath for problem races that insisted on some concept of sovereignty outside of imperial restraint and ultimately refused to be slaves. they would have actually rather taxed you than killed you and were happy to just erect barriers to keep the barbarians (who could not be enslaved in large numbers) out. these jovians sound more like an aggressive sort of nazi, or maybe a little like dark age islamic imperialists, if you need to associate them with something, historically.) that is slowly collapsed by displays of robotic superiority. in the end, the jovians accept the empirical evidence and acknowledge the superiority of the robots (although they also seem to think the robots are earthlings). this twist is intended to demonstrate that the flawed hierarchical thinking of the jovians led them to a logical error; this is another example of asimov criticizing the logical incoherence of cultural superiority, a common theme in his writing. the robot dialogue in this story is also startlingly similar to that between two famous film adaptations of asimovian robots: r2d2 and c3p0.
- the imaginary: the idea of using a theory in "mathematical psychology" that is derived in the complex field to solve physical problems in the real world would appear to be a sort of sardonic joke about the actual usefulness of "applied psychology". see, hard science nerds don't tend to take psychology very seriously, so the lark lies in the idea of using the complex (or "imaginary") field to build the theory, and is actually a rather heavy-handed joke, if you're a hard science nerd. it's not that deep, but it's actually a decent work of comedy - and i can only once again wish it was longer. but, to be honest, it sort of seems like what asimov is doing here is just aimlessly making up dialogue with big words to sell to a magazine, strictly for the cash. so, decent joke aside, this is more throwaway, although i also realize that the plot for the foundation series is starting to develop, here, out of the joke.
no, honestly - it's a joke.
i know that asimov is not generally known as a comedy writer, but it's because few people get the dry wit.
his writing is actually loaded with sardonic jokes like this - which i pointed out immediately, when i started this.
so, if you're one of the many, many people that writes off asimov as "dry", i have to tell you that you didn't get it.
it's dry, alright - dry wit.
- the hazing: this is more pre-foundation, and the way he's building this up is to describe humans as not obeying mathematical laws, which i think is correct. i mean, if you can reduce things to hormones, fine. but, there's no evidence at all that you can predict how humans are going to behave, or coerce them into doing things as individuals - in aggregate, statistically, at the population level, perhaps, but, then you're dealing with statistics, not humans; that works due to the laws of probability, like quantum mechanics, and not due to a deep understanding of the subject matter. so, he's deriving this imaginary idea of psychology as a hard, mathematical science and then insisting it applies to every other intelligent species except us. so, what he's doing with this is taking a joke and running with it, out into right field, until he's run so far that he's forgotten why he was running - and dropped the fact that it was initially intended as satire. and, is there some basis to this? i think the argument he persistently makes, as this unfolds, is the opposite - that there isn't, that mathematical psychology really is crazy talk. and i think he's mostly right. again - if you can reduce it to chemicals, to hormones, fine. but, our neural system is so complex....
as before, though, this story has no actual point. i do agree that landing on a planet in a spaceship would make the natives think you're a god, and have hypothesized that this is what our concept of god actually is. but, he doesn't go anywhere with it. again.
there's lots of ideas here in these little stories, but very poor development of them.
so, is the actual point that asimov is making that psychology isn't actually a science?
i think he's playing with that idea - and toying with people that want to believe otherwise. it appears to be an elaborate joke, really.
certainly, at the time, in the days of freud and jung (and lacan, but don't listen to that guy), it would not have seemed like psychology was a science, or had much hope of ever becoming one. to a chemistry nerd, it would have seemed like a bunch of utter nonsense - and that is the correct actual reaction.
i think things are a bit better now, but the discipline remains a long ways away from commanding enough respect to call it a science. it's moving in the right direction, but when you move beyond the basic first year textbook, it's still full of shamanistic bullshit and flagrant pseudoscience.
- death sentence: this is a potential plot bridge between the robot and foundation universes that i don't think gets developed further, but might have. i think it's kind of lost, as it is. asimov is mostly kvetching about the bureaucracy he's dealing with in his private life, working on his chemistry research.
- catch that rabbit: this wouldn't appear to be about robots at all, really, but about quantum physics. maybe god does or does not play dice, but he seems to get bored when we're not paying attention. as i'm discovering is the case with much of asimov's work, this just seems to be a nerdy, sardonic joke.
- the big & the little, the wedge - foundation
- blind alley: there is something of interest here in asimov's attempts to reconcile two different species, one of which is dominant over the other. but, he's also trying to provide an answer to the question that would follow at the nuremberg trials about just following orders. i mean, how do you get out of that situation if you legitimately want to help without just getting killed, yourself? there's an algorithm, here.
- dead hand: foundation and empire
- escape!: this brings in the kind of obnoxious johnny-five type robot in short circuit and other films that's doing things like quoting old tv shows and radio broadcasts, but asimov presents it as a robot grappling with absurdity, on command. it is otherwise a silly story about travelling through hyperspace and coming back.
- the mule: foundation and empire
- evidence: the next two stories introduce a politician named byerley. this is also plot-heavy, but it's more amusing - can you prove you're not a robot? well, just as well as you can prove you're not a communist, right? this was published in 1946, which was right when the post-war euphoria was setting into resignation of a long conflict with the soviets, and asimov's sardonic wit foresees something of interest, here. as usual, his caricature of the anti-robot opposition leaves a lot to be desired, in terms of constructing an actual discourse.
- little lost robot: a robot, after being told to get lost, becomes psychologically unstable and threatens to destabilize a fleet of robots that had been slightly modified for production - a typically absurd, yet somewhat realistic, joke of a plotline from asimov. it's up to calvin to use logical deduction from the robot axioms to figure it all out. again: there's not much else to this.
- now you see it: second foundation
- the endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimoline: this is just utter silliness.
- no connection: when somebody suggests to me that the bears will inherit the earth, i might imagine something else, altogether. bears are strangely bipedal, though, aren't they? relative to now largely discarded theories of grassland evolution, bears would have somewhat of a...leg up...on other mammals, in terms of developing intelligence, with the help of a little bit of radiation (although i think that's quite optimistic). just keep an eye on your picnic baskets, i guess. but, he's going over a familiar theme, here, which is turning the tables on humans, and, no doubt, specifically, on white ones. he likes that irony, it seems. i'm not sure i'm going along with him on the ant thing, though; that would seem to reflect the now superseded science of the time. we get a little of both with asimov - great foresight and period drudgery. hopefully, i'm of some use in separating it out. so, this is silly, but not altogether useless. i might suggest that the commie ruskie asimov is uncovering his own allegiances in claiming that america will one day be inhabited by bears and not eagles, though. eagles are also bipedal, after all.
i would presume that bear intelligence did, in fact, evolve in yellowstone park.
it is the bears that are smarter than the average ones that will survive and reproduce.
it actually appears to be ten years before the cartoon, though. so, hey.
picnic baskets, of course, provide for a high protein diet, as well.
i'm just applying the theory.
- red queen's race: so, if you had time travel, would your primary concern be sending weapons to the greeks to fend off the arabs? the byzantines actually had a rather sophisticated level of technological development, something asimov seems to have missed - a level that the turks could not emulate and that european civilization did not transcend for centuries, afterwards. they had truly descartian robot animals, and would set them in motion in jungle scenes - no joke, look it up. robot lions, in byzantine greece. really. one of the ways that the emperor used to scare barbarians into submission was to levitate himself in a flying throne that we don't fully understand today, but is thought to have operated using a series of mechanical levers, the likes of which would not be known again until the industrial revolution, in britain. they certainly didn't have nuclear weapons, but i think that suggesting that the empire might have survived if they were granted to them is naive, at best. the greeks truly fell to christianity, and not to the barbarians around them; in a twisted display of religious depravity, they welcomed the end, as they longed for the return of christ. to the delusional byzantine christians, the end of the empire on earth meant the beginning of the kingdom of heaven; they might merely have bombed themselves to bring upon the rapture. so, asimov's philhellenism is blinding, here; greece destroyed itself in a fit of religiosity-induced madness and the greece asimov longs for the extension of was, in truth, very much long gone by the 15th century, collapsed from within. although we still don't know what the greek fire was, do we?
the byzantines did not have a scientifically open society, but one where science was kept as a state secret, to be protected from the barbarians. that is the reason that we have documentation of things we don't understand - history records the results of the advancements in byzantine science, but we have no records of the science, itself.
it's not an exaggeration to compare 13th century byzantium to nineteenth century england.
but, it's a shame that we can only do so by looking at results, and not at theories that were hidden from the outside, and that crumbled with the theodosian walls.
- mother earth: galactic space nazis, huh? there's an interesting projection of how a nazi victory may have worked itself out over time presuming a peace treaty with the united states (and the relationship of america to europe is inverted), but this is really just empty plot. it's maybe the first really identifiable piece here, though.
- and now you don't: second foundation
- the little man on the subway: i made a conscious decision to skip non science fiction pieces as nobody cares about asimov's non science fiction work. no comment.
- the evitable conflict: this is a little heavier, finally. written in 1950, it has strong shades of being a reaction to 1984, but asimov is imagining a future where "the machine" (a euphemism for a centrally planned economy that is of course run by robots) is in control of a globally interconnected economy where the contradictions of capital have withered away, thereby rendering competition irrelevant, rather than one where authoritarian governments are in control of a globe ravaged by perpetual war. so, this future is one of peace due to the robot-planned economies, and not one of competition and war. as in the orwellian universe, and apparently in reaction to it, the world is split into regions, but asimov splits them mildly different - oceania has absorbed eurasia (called the"northern regions"), leaving eastasia and the "disputed" region in separate global souths and what he calls "europe" (the geographical space inhabited by the roman empire at it's maximum extent, including the currently muslim regions), as a proxy of the north. operating between these regions is an anti-robot "society for humanity" that sounds sort of like free masonry, if i wanted to attach it to something in real life. and, the capital of the world government is new york city - perhaps in the old united nations building. he then briefly explores the four different regions via their representatives, attempting to project a concept of what they may be like, in relation to their views of the machine. so, the east is highly productive (and obsessed with yeast as a food product) and reliant on the machine, the south is corrupt and inept and reliant on others to use the machine for them, europe is inward and quietly superior and willing to defer to the north regarding the machine and "the north" (an anglosphere + ussr superstate) is in charge, but is skeptical about the ability of the machine to run the economy on it's own. he also seems to suggest that canada is running this northern superstate, which should probably be interpreted as comedic.
if asimov's intent is to provide for an alternative path that marxism may follow, this is curious, as asimov is not generally seen as a leftist [along with russell, he's a sort of archetype of early to mid century humanistic, science-first anglo liberalism]. i mean, he explicitly states that this is a future "post smith and post marx", but then he brings in an automated, centrally-planned economy, and that just means marxist, to a marxist - the left sees that conflict as artificial, so if you end up with something that walks like communism and quacks like communism then it's just plain old communism. the idea of technology absolving the contradictions (which is what he says, almost verbatim) isn't some kind of esoteric dialectic, it's the central point in marxist historical materialism. so, i mean he presented it in a way to avoid the house committee on unamerican activities, but you can only really interpret it a single way - it's a projection of a communist future, with robots in charge of a centrally planned economy. and, his future is one of peace, and not one of war. but, the quasi-masonic society for humanity, full of rich and powerful industrialists and financiers, wants to undo it and, presumably, bring back a market economy.
so, what asimov is setting up is a world where you have some kind of elitist masonic capitalist resistance to a robot-controlled technocratic marxist society, where there is world government and total peace. and, that's almost a prediction of atlas shrugged, although asimov is on the side of the robots, as always.
calvin then appears and seems to finally represent her namesake, in explicitly articulating a modified historical materialism, where the masons have no chance of success, because the robo-marxists will constantly adjust. the politician, byerley, finds that to be ghastly; the robopsychologist, calvin, thinks it's salvation.
these are the kinds of stories by asimov that i like, but all he does here is set up a story, without telling it. in terms of a reaction to orwell, the text is too short to allow for a decision as to whether it is more predictive or not.
- legal rites: i made a conscious decision to skip non science fiction pieces as nobody cares about asimov's non science fiction work. no comment.
- darwinian poolroom: i think asimov is presenting the contradiction of god creating us to destroy ourselves as a sardonic joke directed at creationists, but asimov was a classicist, and he would have realized that the gods of the greeks and romans (not to mention the jews...) were indeed sadistic enough to take pleasure in that kind of wanton destruction. only christians of the augistinian variety, who insisted god reveals himself through natural law, would have seen a contradiction in that. in the various western indo-european pantheons, it is only the interference of other gods that save us from the trouble making gods (whereas the hebrew/persian conception of darkness is as interfering in our lives, and leaves us with the individual responsibility to reject it), who are intent on destroying us as an act of recreational amusement. so, beyond the sardonic joke, the discussion is ultimately arbitrary, both in how it defines god (there's no reason to assign god any specific characteristics, or to assume god is rational, or to assume god is just or ...) and how it discusses evolution in such an empty, unfalsifiable manner. i can't really offer a critique of the idea of god setting things in motion, other than that it's utterly untestable speculation, through and through, and that it doesn't conform well to the randomness that is inherent in how we understand the world (there is a concept of probability assigned to how those billiard balls behave, in truth). for these reasons, i don't think that the existence or non-existence of god can be deduced implicitly in this manner, and you're not really getting anywhere in analyzing hypotheticals, or arranging them in a hierarchy of arbitrarily perceived likeliness. rather, i think you just need to start with a null hypothesis and determine if you can generate enough positive evidence to reject atheism, or not. but, asimov isn't doing any of this, really - all he's actually doing is building up a punchline, which is something he does frequently in his mid to later period, with varying but usually unsatisfactory results. so, i mean, enjoy the dialogue if you want, but i don't see much of anything substantive in it. and, i actually don't think the idea of a god creating us to destroy ourselves is any sort of contradiction at all, even if i think it's utterly unnecessary hubris.
god could very well be the most hysterical, flaky goof you've ever met, and there doesn't need to be any discernible reason why she does what she does at all.
i mean, i know that's not the hebrew god.
but, if we're to accept a first principle of a god (you know i'm not going with you on that, but suppose i did), there's no really good reason to assign any specific qualities to that god, as axioms, at all. you'd really have to try to determine the nature of that god by looking at it's actions. and, i think there's a pretty strong argument, based on the observation of empirical evidence, that any potential god out there isn't rational and isn't just and isn't even really very wise, either.
the empirical evidence would seem to suggest that if a god exists then she's kind of a stuck up, airheaded bitch.
so, where do you get in trying to work out the logical justifications for evolution in a creationist sense, if the idea of god being rational is empirically daft?
it's circular logic - if you assume god exists and is rational, then you can deduce virtually anything you want from it, given that there is some concept of logic in everything in nature.
but, that doesn't make the discourse valuable, it makes it useless - it's untestable. it's just mental masturbation.
but, like i say, that's not what asimov is doing; he's just starting with the perceived absurdity of divine creation juxtaposed with anthropomorphic self-destruction, and presenting the contradiction as comedic. and, i'm not going with him on that, because i really don't see the absurdity in it, because i don't accept the assumptions underlying his concept of god.
---
listen, you know i'm a complete atheist. i have as little patience for religion as anybody else that has ever lived.
but, i think the greek concept of multiple gods fighting for control is a much better reflection of reality than the hebrew concept of this omnipotent entity that is pure logic and wants to get in your head and own you. while both religions are obviously ridiculous, it is the greek religion that has a stronger empirical basis and that i'm far more likely to take seriously.
so, no, i don't think it's obvious that a god ought to be rational, and i don't think it's axiomatic that there ought to only be one of them, if there are to be any at all. and, when i break from these axioms, i really change the discourse.
but, i think you have the burden of proof to tell me why i should take monotheism more seriously than polytheism, or why your conception of god as rational is more believable than some other conception of god as irrational, or arbitrarily driven by emotion. we don't have a centralized theological bureaucracy that enforces this kind of bullshit at the end of a sword, anymore. you have to make your argument if you want to be taken seriously, as none of it is at all obvious.
and, i think this is healthy, because if we're to return to some form of religion, we should be questioning whether the jewish or greek systems are actually really preferable. the bottom line is that we may actually succeed in getting people to behave more ethically if we adopt greek religious ideas in place of jewish ones, as they conform more closely to empirical reality.
regardless, you have to make your case - i won't accept your axioms. they're just simply not obvious.
- green patches: so, would you save the earth from the introduction of an alien bacteria, if you could? there are some - i am not one of them - that think we came from alien bacteria in the first place. do we have a right to interfere in the competition? i'm going to provide a different response - the earth isn't much worth saving. good riddance to it. let the bacteria come, and clean us out.
- day of the hunters: this is similar to the above story, but dispenses with the metaphysical nonsense; rather than discuss whether god might have created us to destroy ourselves, and decide whether that is absurd or not, asimov is presenting a fantastical story about the end of the dinosaurs as a parable of what might happen to us. i'm not sure i see the value in such a thing, given the scale of imminent destruction ahead of us due to climate change or nuclear war; that is, i don't see why a parable is necessary to get the point across, or see how it helps. i mean, he might as well be talking about noah's ark, right? the reality in front of us should be more convincing than some silly story about dinosaurs (or floods). but, i guess asimov felt the need to talk down to his readers a little, rather than discuss the actual matters at hand. and, i guess he's fundamentally correct - it is almost impossible to guess at dinosaur intelligence via the fossil record, although i think the intelligence of birds (or lack thereof) is some evidence that they probably were not particularly bright, in general. as an aside, i have to wonder if this influenced the flintstones.
- satisfaction guaranteed: you could pull the plot of this out almost immediately, so reading through it is a question of allowing asimov to go through the motions. what comes out is an exploration of the shallowness of 50s culture, as well as the social darwinism hardcoded into it, and it is indeed easy enough to imagine a lonely 50s housewife falling in love with a suave, housecleaning robot, even if a lot of the social codes and rules are so arcane nowadays, so lost in the mists of time, that the context of much of the story is really likely to be lost on a modern reader. i think i can reconstruct a little context, though; the 50s were both the period of wife-training to fit these socially darwinistic ideals and the period where there was actual mainstream discourse on the plausibility of replacing women with robots - and the idea was always about doing away with them as obsolete. so, what asimov is doing here is inserting a little bit of an ironic twist, in having the robot replacement end up fucking the wife, which reverses the source of inadequacy. but, this is all a little obscure, 70 years later...
- hostess: another hidden murder-mystery thing with no real point. i'm going to save it, though, because it's relatively well written.
- breeds there a man: boring mystery text that asimov uses to work through some (i think tired) debates about the theory of historical materialism (and some competing theories of it). i didn't initially spent much time on what struck me as the lunatic ravings of a character that was purposefully presented as being of unsound mind, and i don't think asimov really intended for the ideas presented by ralson to be taken seriously. the views of the historian seem to be sound enough, and asimov actually does a relatively good job of explaining why through the course of the text, even if he amuses ralson's delusions in carrying through with the plot. the psychologist seems to dismantle him rather thoroughly, as well. i've read some toynbee, and i don't think asimov is intending to express an admiring opinion of him, so much as he's intending to mock him - and i think that's the right way to approach him, too. some people seem to have differing views on the topic, but i think asimov is just building the guy up to tear him down, and eventually put him out of his misery. in another insightful bit of foresight, asimov may be predicting the tendency of the internet to tell losers to kill themselves. don't underestimate asimov's tendency to implement absurdity to carry through with sardonic ridicule.
psychohistorians: foundation
- in a good cause: in some ways similar to the previous text, this seems to be more empty plot utilized as a mechanism to discuss some tendencies in history that are interesting to asimov.
- c-chute: pointless plot. set in arcturian universe, though.
- shah guidio g: asimov starts with a good idea with this - a projection of the united nations as evolving into a global feudal ruling class that should not be smeared as birchian as it is before it and, as an application of the class replacement component of historical materialism, is the literal opposite of it, hayekian language aside - and then gets so excited that he can't decide which mechanism to use. his atlantis (name taken from plato) is a cross between jonathan swift's laputa and the flying fortresses of sanskrit mythology, but seems to feature a circus rather similar to the hippodrome of constantinople. it's all built up on top of itself in a sort of clumsy mess, suggesting asimov got so excited by his idea that he couldn't form it well. and, then it ends with little point, beside the assertion of another punchline. but, what he's fundamentally exploring here is historical materialism - he has one class of people replace another as dominant, when the dominant class tries to enforce a division of labour. further, he explains that this is a historical process, by referring to various examples of it happening in the past.
- the fun they had: this isn't a story, it's just meant to get the idea across that we always interpret things that are different as unbelievable. while actual robot teachers are less likely than ai systems, we're learning in the pandemic that we're not that far from this. and, i'd certainly support learning systems based on the strengths and needs of the individual, rather than the existing broken model of socialized group learning.
- youth: this turns the table on the idea of humans keeping insects (or perhaps small rodents) as pets. trade mission humans land on a planet inhabited by giant stereotypical octopus-like space creatures and are found by some children of that species, who capture them and hold them as pets, in cages. the story devolves into one of asimov's mystery texts, as the adults try to figure out what happened to the mission they expected, but it's one of those table-turning stories that asimov is relatively good at writing.
- what if: pointless plot
- the martian way: this is a story about a martian colony that gets it's water supply cut off by a parody of hitler, who decides martians are "water wasters" (rather than useless eaters). in the end, the martian colony finds a stable source of water on saturn and offers to sell it back to earth. it does a relatively good job of lampooning the "focus on saving this planet" types as unscientific fascists that can't do basic math, but it's otherwise just a story
- the deep: so, imagine that cicadas are actually super-intelligent and are trying to emerge from the earth and co-exist with humans by scouting us out using the method of inhabiting one of our minds. their hive mind would have difficulty interfacing with human individuality, and would ultimately have to view us with disdain, as inferior. sound familiar? i'm an advocate of human individualism, and am exceedingly weary of any sort of collectivism as a backdoor for fascism, which is a connection that asimov tends to consistently miss, but i do concede that a hive mind would view me with as much contempt as i'd view it, and have little pushback if the intent is strictly to establish a concept of relativism, even if i'd argue that any sort of collectivist intelligence of this manner could not coexist with humans, and would need to be annihilated as an otherwise irresolvable threat to our very existence as a species (which is the actual correct lesson of the second world war). so, if asimov is arguing that collectivism and individualism cannot co-exist, i would argue that he's correct. as an american "progressive" of a certain era, it is not surprising to see asimov toy with fascistic concepts of this sort that the contemporary left thoroughly denounces as inconsistent with individual freedom, but there isn't a lot to push back against, if the point is merely to establish the relativism.
- button, button: this was supposedly an attempt by asimov at explicit humour, as though his texts weren't all full of dry wit and bad puns. while i actually think that many of his other texts are more humourous, asimov's clarification that he's going for humour here is really an admission that the text has no point.
- monkey's finger: see previous, although also note that this one is fairly self-referential, right down to the infinite monkey theorem.
- nobody here but-: pointless plot
- sally: you could either interpret this as a depiction of a future robot revolt or as a commentary on then-contemporary race politics in 1950s america. in the end, the bad guy gets run down by a pack of cars acting somewhat like a pack of killer whales. these robots engage with primitive human concepts like friendship and revenge; this is sort of an outlier, in terms of how asimov tends to deal with what robots are. it's not bad as a story, though. derivatives include christine by stephen king.
- flies: probably only meaningful to asimov
- kid stuff: he may be referring more to the academization of folk lore more than anything else. i remember a few years ago when some syrian migrants moved in next door to me that seemed to legitimately think i was a "genie", as that's the only way they could understand a transgendered person. to them, genies were real things. to the germans and celts of a far less distant history than would be generally realized, elves and fairies and skraelings were not the imaginary things of children's stories, but real beings that affected people's lives. the gods of the greco-roman world were not literary devices, but entities with free will that would help or hinder the existence of humans. this all passed into the realm of myth, and consequently became juvenilized in an act of christian imperialism, before being reclaimed by academic historians trying to understand the mindsets of their ancestors. and, so these were never intended to be stories for children. that said, the main point asimov may be making may be a characteristically sardonic smear of the fantasy genre and it's overlap into science fiction, which is just another reason to assert the point that asimov is not and was not l ron hubbard.
belief - winds of change
- everest: the unknown is a powerful arbiter of the imagination. at the time, we did not know what was on everest - as we did not (and still do not) know what's in the deepest parts of the ocean, or what was on the dark side of the moon. we could always guess, but you don't know until you can measure it. so, why couldn't there by something bizarre at the top of everest - martians, yeti, or even just a new species of ungulates? as asimov points out in his notes, we have now scaled everest and now know what's there. but, never forget that the point of this genre is to scale the unknown mentally, before we can actually observe.
- sucker bait: this is a too-long story about a planet with beryllium dust that is a danger to humans that lacks a level of believability, in the end - humans would be expected to be comprehensive in checking for elements on a planet's surface, one would have to assume. there's ultimately too much character development and too many descriptive sections that simply drag a story out for 70+ pages that lacks any meaningful actual point.
- the pause: pointless nonsense.
- the immortal bard: an amusing, but pointless, attack on annoying, pretentious english majors.
- foundation of sf success: self-congratulatory nonsense.
- lets not: pointless nonsense
- its such a beautiful day: he's making a valid, excellent point about the alienation between humanity and nature brought on by the imposition of virtual reality. i would rather go outside sometimes, too. there's nothing wrong with the kid - there's something wrong with the society.
the singing bell - asimov's mysteries
- risk: more empty plot. throwaway.
- the last trump: i didn't read this one, as i got turned off by the mention of an angel in the opening paragraph.
- franchise: well, does your vote count? do you have a responsibility to vote? will it come down to you? asimov frequently writes these sardonic explorations of frequently stated turns of phrase, whether thought through or not. but, i think his older character gets the right idea: you can't determine voting patterns strictly via demographics, there's a level of uncertainty - indeed a level of irrationality - inherent to democracy that cannot and should not be disturbed.
the talking stone - asimov's mysteries
- dreaming is a private thing: the government has no place in the virtual reality helmets of the nation. but, this is an interesting projection of what might be coming.
- the message: this is similar to the story that was published right after, the dead past, in that it examines the question of using time travel to write history papers. asimov started off in chemistry, but wrote widely on history. there is no actual story here, though - it's just the articulation of an idea.
- the dead past: this is mostly a parody of the division of labour in academia, using a parable of exploring specific questions of carthaginian identity through the filter of a device that allows researchers to peer backwards into time by retrieving data embedded into tachyon neutrinos, which it turns out have a limited ability to reconstruct the past. the science is a bit far-fetched (you would have to find neutrinos present in the moment being searched for, which are probably mostly out in outer space), but the parody of a division of labour is interesting.
- hell-fire: this isn't a story, and i think the point he's making is fairly juvenile.
- living space: he seems to be playing with a naive articulation of the many world interpretation of quantum physics, one that allows humans to move back and forth between different possible universes by means of converting into a probability pattern. it's not really well-formed, but i get the point. unfortunately, no physicist would actually go with this - the many worlds are not even theoretically real but just mathematically necessary on paper, and nobody really talks about physical manifestations of these parallel realities. it's a kind of mathematical identity in the form of a broad summation that i'd generally argue is, itself, not that well defined. the lebensraum twist is comical but he's right - if we can one day hop between parallel realities, then all possible universes can, as well. so, is an infinite number of realities seeking space in an infinite number of worlds really an answer to the malthusian problem, then? technically, it actually shouldn't be, in the long run, but you need to do some transfinite arithmetic to actually work that out. and, asimov gets there eventually, using more of a naive argument about aliens.
what's in a name - asimov's mysteries
- the dying night: one of asimov's recurrent mysteries that happens to feature the concept of "mass transference" (the transporters from star trek) set in a reality with space travel.
- someday: what i find interesting about this is the idea that we might one day have handheld computing devices that talk to us, leading to a decline in literacy rates amongst the younger generation, who are desperate to get around the parental locks on the devices. this was written in 1956. this robot is unusual in an asimovian sense, in that it seems to be able to understand human speech beyond it's programming, a common idea in science fiction, but one which is impossible, and which asimov would, usually, be the first to (refreshingly) write off as nonsense. you don't expect that kind of silliness from asimov. but, asimov uses that unusual ability to allow for the robot to recognize that it's not being respected, and you can again choose to interpret that as futuristic or contemporaneous, in whatever way you'd prefer. someday, indeed.
- each an explorer: interesting premise, but not much of a point. it's an idea that he also explored in green patches.
pate de foie grras - asimov's mysteries
- the watery place: the canals were on mars, not on venus. again, asimov seems to be extrapolating sardonically on the question of what might happen if a ufo were to land in small-town usa, perhaps with shades of hg wells. is he making a valid point? he might be. it's almost like a coen brothers film, in a sense. but, you'd think the aliens would know better, even if the modelling of human behaviour is relatively apt.
- first law: this is written as a kind of a fishing tale, and is a later piece that's not meant to be taken seriously.
- gimmick's three: well, if you ever want to outsmart the devil, here's some clues, as to how. i think that the far side is a better comparison than dante.
- the last question: silly take on the big crunch theory of infinite inflation and deflation (although it seems to predate it). of course, the computer couldn't function anymore in such an energy-dissipated reality, as the energy required to run it would be too spread out to harness. the computer would die with the sun. and, finding a way to reverse the expansion would take all of the energy dissipated into nothingness. so, this is again utterly nonsensical. we don't know why the universe exists, but we can be certain it wasn't created by a supercomputer left at the end of the last inflation event as that would contradict the physical basis of it existing. it's disappointing to learn that asimov considers this his most substantive story, as it seems to be one of his least insightful.
- jokester: see, i think it's best to interpret this as a joke itself, although i like the idea of a supercomputer pleading with a bad comic to stop. i tell a lot of jokes myself, and they tend to be intended to numb the pain of existence, or otherwise neutralize the absurdity of it. it's ultimately, biologically, a stress-relieving response. so, i don't think we need to seek religious solutions, when an evolutionary one is so apparent; that seems rather backwards, especially coming from asimov. that said, i would also reject the idea that only humans use amusement as a stress response. i've met some dogs that have great senses of humour, and that seem to be able to laugh as well as they can cry.
- strike breaker: this is another of asimov's many texts exploring social ostracism using the mechanism of space exploration and a reminder that systemic discrimination need not necessarily be left behind here, as we leave this planet behind.
dust of death - asimov's mysteries
- let's get together: the idea that the soviets might be able to send "total conversion" bombs (a type of suicide bomber capable of detonating a nuclear device) to the united states in the guise of androids indistinguishable from humans, because they are far more advanced than us, is peculiarly absurd - but that's just the point. this is a story about the paranoia that set in during the cold war, and is actually exceedingly insightful in it's projection of that conflict collapsing into mass paranoia, reduced to symbolic movements in a game theoretic stalemate, down to the climax of absurdity that set in with reagan, when the soviets found themselves unable to react to the irrational actions of a clear madman, driven by the complete absence of any sort of predictability or logic. conservatives are right when they point out that the sharp increase in military spending under reagan ended the cold war, but not for the reasons they suggest. the truth is that the soviets were convinced that reagan was on the brink of ending it all in a fit of paranoia and dementia and stepped back because they found his unpredictability to be a threat to the existence of humanity, itself. if asimov was able to see this so clearly in 1957...
- the author's ordeal: more self-congratulatory nonsense.
- blank: if they truly found themselves stuck in time, they would not be able to move, either. utter nonsense.
- does a bee care: well, a bee or a wasp couldn't care because it doesn't truly have a brain, it's simply a dumb terminal that is controlled by chemical stimuli. does this entity have a brain? you'd have to dissect it, i guess. he's making a valid observation in some sense, but if i'm getting the underlying implication that humans are in some ways like bees, i think he's failing to grasp the difference in biological complexity between a mammal (which has a brain that independently processes the world around it) and an insect (which does not), which is the mistake that collectivism/fascism is rooted within, this idea that we're all components of a larger body that needs to work together, like a machine. that's just not right - humans, by means of their independent processing facilities, are just simply biologically not much like bees and consequently can never be much like bees, whether a managerial class wishes it were true, or not. robots, on the other hand....
- profession: this is a curious story about the futility of being intelligent within the emptiness of technocratic capitalism. it's fundamentally a critique of the corporatization of the education system, and rooted in asimov recognizing an often unstated truth: the university is as much of a refuge for those that can't survive in the market as it as a hierarchical structure for the intellectual elite.
a loint of paw - asimov's mysteries
ideas die hard - winds of change
- i'm in marsport without hilda: pointless smut.
- insert knob a in hole b: it's rather unlikely that anybody will ever be eating steak in space. this is otherwise a rather cliched nerd joke about "some assembly required".
- galley slave: this is a short whodunnit in a sherlock holmes style, which is how calvin is frequently deployed. asimov just barely touches on the opposition to robots, in setting up a disgruntled sociology prof that's willing to suicide bomb his own career in order to take the robots out of service. again, i'd like this to be more profound than it actually is.
- the gentle vultures: asimov is doing one of the things he's known for, which is to take a historical entity (the hurrians, which i believe were the sister-race to the sumerians, and which lived in the caucasus region, north of the fertile crescent. they frequently came into conflict with the various semitic groups that replaced the sumerians, who frequently warred amongst each other) and project it forwards into time, making it a character in a space alien story. this becomes a science fiction trope, in time. romans become romulans, mongols become klingons, etc. this is not to mention asimov's roman-influenced galactic empire, itself. besides retelling the story of hurrian supremacy over the semitic tribes via the space alien mechanism, the story itself isn't much.
- spell my name with an s: asimov has written a number of stories about the paranoia that defined the cold war. he may be expressing some discrimination he experienced, as a russian-american. this is otherwise pointless.
- lenny: so, lenny is an autistic robot, due to something malfunctioning in manufacturing. asimov tersely explores some social relations around that. the corporation wants to do away with it, but calvin wants to study it because she wants to teach it how to learn, something robots couldn't do in asimov's universe to that point. so, lenny is a robot free of instinct that needs to be taught what it knows, like mammals. asimov is kind of grappling with a concept of artificial intelligence, and this actually becomes the main plotline moving forwards, although it was actually written last (and may have even been written to introduce that ai narrative, as there is really nothing else to this).
- i just make them up, see: more self-congratulatory nonsense.
- the feeling of power: multiplication by hand as a mysterious, magical power; it's like something from a monty python skit. this idea of technology making us stupid, of it thrusting us into a new dark age, is a frequent theme in asimov, though, and one that many others have picked up on, recently. so, comical plotline aside, there's maybe something profound, here. can your average adult multiply large numbers by hand, nowadays? something else to note is that we have to guess how the greeks (not to mention the babylonians) did mathematics with a primitive or awkward (base-60 in the case of the babylonians) numeral system (and without 0), and our discourses on the topic would no doubt seem as silly to an ancient athenian or babylonian as this story does to us.
- silly asses: if the idea is an attempt at morality, suggesting it would be better to conduct nuclear research on somebody else's planet is a strange idea of morality.
- all the troubles of the world: asimov seems to want to misunderstand the concept of probability on purpose, here. no machine could ever decide where or if a crime is going to occur, there would necessarily be uncertainty and it would necessarily be wrong relatively frequently. acting on all false alarms would both create civil rights issues and be uneconomical. i mean, it's a swell enough idea to imagine a computer that can predict crime, but it's utterly nonsensical and utterly unrealistic. nor do we know why multivac wants to die, in the end.
- buy jupiter: pointless nonsense
- the uptodate sorcerer: boring smut
- the ugly little boy: this is a fairly forward thinking analysis of neanderthal humanity, given that it was written in the 1950s, when neanderthals were thought to have been barbaric cavemen. there was a competing hypothesis that neanderthals may have specifically been the unique ancestors of white europeans, which we today know is wrong; today, we know (from dna) that humans interbred with neanderthals and that they were probably a sister species, homo sapiens neanderthalensis. the introduction of a concept of pathos here would have been rather remarkable for it's time. it is, however, fundamentally a human interest story, rather than a sci-fi story. i suppose that it would probably be the inspiration underlying the film encino man.
- a statue for father: pointless nonsense
anniversary - asimov's mysteries
- unto the fourth generation: pointless
obituary - asimov's mysteries
- rain, rain go away: pointless nonsense
- rejection slips: more self-congratulatory nonsense.
- what is this thing called love: pointless
- the machine that won the war: while this is meant to be ironic, the underlying point is to draw attention to the importance of randomness in computing, which is maybe not as well understood as it ought to be. these (perhaps outdated) popular perceptions of computers as infallible and omnipotent devices is rooted more in fiction than in fact.
- my son, the physicist: another outlandish nerd joke
star light - asimov's mysteries
- author! author!: some self-reflection on the writing industry. so, it's a short story about writing short stories. kramerian, but not that interesting. wasn't published until the 60s, i think for good reason.
- eyes do more than see: eyes and ears are of course mechanical objects that can be represented in software, so we don't have to lose their functionality in the process of digitization. but, he makes a good point that we shouldn't forget their importance, in terms of actually enjoying existence. faced with the realization of my mortality, i see no delusion in pretending that a senseless existence is not preferable to the lack of one altogether, but i cannot pretend to understand how i might analyze such a thing billions of years into it.
- founding father: earth's early atmosphere is thought to have been full of ammonia, and that's no doubt where he's going with this story about humans crashing on the planet of an oxygenless atmosphere and being unable to remove the ammonia, yet succeeding in the process at the point of death.
the key - asimov's mysteries
- prime of life: pointless poem
the billiard ball - asimov's mysteries
- segregationist: likewise, this is ultimately about self-acceptance, and has a very different undertone in that respect than most of asimov's work, and it's not clear that he's being critical of that different undertone, although the context of replacing a defective heart is also rather different than the context of accepting some idiosyncratic part of your individuality, so that is sort of a false comparison. you could interpret it as being a discourse surrounding the not-yet-existing transhumanist movement; he's certainly reaching for it, at least, in imagining a future where a senator has to choose between a bio-identical "plastic" heart and a mechanically functioning, metallic robot heart that would put him on the path towards transitioning from human to robot. but, as before, it may be more accurate to look at it from a then contemporary perspective (which, in this case, means 1967), and frame the discourse around racial mixing, instead. asimov presents both sides of the debate, so you can weigh the arguments he makes and decide for yourself. personally, i'll opt for betterment over stasis - although i'd suggest that, based on the arguments in the text, the plastic heart is the better option. in this hypothetical future of organ modularity, the ideal is frequent tune-ups, rather than permanent replacement.
- exile to hell: this is again merely an ironic twist hidden in a very short narrative. but, these places of exile tend to do fairly well, and i wouldn't mind being exiled from capitalism, myself - i'd consider that a way out, as many of the british (and scottish) in truth felt about australia.
- key item: it seems that, later on, and to my surprise. asimov wrote several silly stories about multivac taking on human characteristics, which mirrors his narrative about the humanization of robots. this story has no purpose at all, besides to demonstrate the strange human behaviour of being polite to a machine. and, i guess i should ask, because i'd never talk to a computer, myself - do you ask alexa poltely, and thank her when she gives you the answer?
- the proper study: this is an interesting introduction, but there is no story here.
- feminine intuition: this is a later piece that seems to be a sarcastic reply to some critiques of susan calvin as a character. i actually agree with asimov, via calvin - the entire critique is daft, and this is a fitting way to kill her off. however, when you read the text in the order presented in the complete robot, you also get a sequence of humanization in the robots, in the direction of time. that fact makes this story worth keeping in sequence, even if it's point is to let calvin smack some third-wavers on the knuckles with her cane.
- waterclap: an aimless, nerdy discourse between an astronaut and a deep-sea explorer opens up into an evil plot by the astronaut to destroy the deep-sea vessel, and some quick thinking to talk the astronaut out of it. it's clever, but pointless.
- 2430 ad / the greatest asset: these are two different takes on the idea of humans completely eliminating all biodiversity on the planet, to the point where we're the only non-domesticated lifeform. in some sense, this would have to be unavoidable, unless we reach some kind of natural cyclic carrying capacity (it would need to be the result of increased viral activity, which makes sense in the context of exploding population growth), but it nonetheless strikes me as incomprehensible. something would go wrong, or we wouldn't let it happen. but, it is nonetheless an interesting exercise in contemplating the inevitable consequences of the unsustainability of infinite growth, which we're going to have to get a grasp of, eventually.
- mirror image: this is a gap text in the robot series that plugs in between the naked sun and the robots of dawn and was, for a time, the last installment in that series. this is the first application of the robot laws in this text (despite the fact that the story was written in the 70s, after all of the classic robot stories), and they are applied like an axiomatic system to solve a logical problem, although it actually comes off more as a parody of sherlock holmes than anything else - which is all very typical of baley & daneel stories. there's not much depth to the story beyond that. i should, however, point out that there are actually a couple of examples of mathematicians making competing claims for the discovery of an idea, the most famous being the argument between leibniz and newton for the rightful discoverer of the calculus. another, however, is the argument between gauss and bolyai for the discovery of non-euclidean (or post-euclidean) geometry, and that might be the more direct inspiration on the story. there are countless lesser examples. we gloss over this in math class by arguing that the logic is out there in the ether and that if the ideas are in the zeitgeist then the proofs will follow naturally, something we can all demonstrate to each other by simply doing homework. but, in the case of non-euclidean geometry, it does in fact seem that gauss rather maliciously stole the idea from the young bolyai and nobody really called him on it for decades after the fact. i'm only speculating about the influence, but that's a story you can look up, if you'd like.
ter
- take a match: pointless nonsense
- thiotimoline to the stars: pointless nonsense
light verse: this is a short piece from the 70s, and is just about the idea that a computational defect may be a benefit. you shouldn't be so quick to decide that something - or somebody, as it may be - needs a fixing. maybe they're just fine as they are.
the dream - ?
benjamin's dream - ?
party by satellite - ?
- ....that thou art mindful of him: this solves the problem that us robotics has long had about how to market robots to people. the solution is to create robots not in the imitation of women [as in the previous story] but in the imitation of animals, and to solve practical problems, like pest control. i have to admit that this sounds like a good idea, although i'm not sure that it leads to the replacement of carbon with silicon, in the end. asimov builds up the humanization of robots here a little further by replacing the robotics laws with humanics laws, setting up the last story:
- stranger in paradise: this is a later text that will come off as reminiscent of the mars pathfinder landing, for those that remember that happening, although the actual inspiration may be the failed soviet landings in the 1970s. i'm not sure why asimov insists that a rover would require that kind of complexity, although i suppose that moore's law would have provided for computational abilities in the 90s that would have been unimaginable in the 1970s. the subplot about an autistic child shape-shifting to a mars rover is likewise not very well extrapolated upon, but is another example of asimov grappling with mind-body.
benjamin's bicentennial blast - ?
half-baked publisher's delight - ?
heavenly host - ?
big game- ?
- the life and times of multivac: what asimov is actually doing in this piece is trolling the new york times, who asked him for something profound. it's pretentious, but it's not profound. freedom is a difficult concept, but it's hard to take the premise that asimov thought we'd be freer without robots seriously, given his body of work. is there some irony to this, then? some existentialist slant? i think it's mostly just empty troll...
- a boy's best friend: this is a short, undeveloped piece that really exists strictly to reverse the idea of obsolescence; here, the robot becomes obsolete when the real dog appears, and the kid wants to stick with the robot, instead. it's an empty sort of irony that comes off as sort of trite, in the lack of development. but, there is really a deeper point, here, in relation to asimov's discourse around the use of robots to replace human labour; while i'm going to ultimately agree with asimov about the usefulness of automation, i have to advance the argument that he never fully understood the opposition to robots, and that's what i'm getting here - it's an attempt at irony that exposes the author's longstanding lack of understanding of his opponents. but, i spent some time writing this because it could have been a powerful table-turner, through the three pages it takes up.
- point of view: i was surprised to see this story was written in 1975, as hamming codes (error-correction) had already been in existence for some time. i also wonder if 1975 is a little late to be talking about vacuum tube super computers, given that gates was programming basic into ibms, at the time. so, this is a story where asimov is maybe demonstrating his age, and being a little out of touch. that said, he's also reaching towards the primary problem in quantum computing, which is the lack of error codes. and, he's sort of dancing around floating point error as well, even if the premise of programming vacuum tube driven super computers with punch cards is anachronistic. so, how likely is it that a computer needs to go out and play at recess to get best results? it's a facile, silly suggestion, that probably reflects asimov coming to terms with the age of his audience more than anything else, even if anybody that's worked technical support knows that a reboot is often the best troubleshooting step, and that machines do, in fact, sometimes overheat. is there something else to this, then? i actually don't think he's even intending to be taken seriously, let alone that there's any deeper meaning to this; he's not reaching for something profound and missing it, so much as he's not reaching at all. he's just being silly. ha ha ha.
about nothing- winds of change
- the bicentennial man: this finally addresses the old problem of machines becoming human, and projects us robots many centuries into the future, using the mechanism of a robot that outlives several generations of the family it was sold into, and then wants to die with it, to prove it's really human. marvin minsky also seems to make a cameo, here, in the form of a robopsychologist that is proven wrong in the future. asimov goes over a lot of old themes here [mind-body problem, the liberation of robots as an allegory for the liberation of blacks, etc ] in what is an apparent thread-tying process, but he ultimately doesn't succeed in explaining what is driving this robot to act so irrationally. as humans, we may be expected to think this makes some kind of sense, due to some kind of emotional bias, but i can't really make sense of it, myself. i can understand why a robot might want to be free. i can't understand why it would want to be human, at all costs - including it's death. i think asimov was going for the jugular here and kind of fell over and kneed himself in the groin, instead - if this is his final projection of what becomes of robots in the future, it's unsatisfying, to say the least.
- the winnowing: asimov talks a lot about population control, and i'm sure it's created some whispers, even if the smart kids could always work it out without needing much help. so, i think he sort of had to write this short, ironic tale of a scientist chosen to create a population control virus using it on the population controllers, instead. and, again, this is a curious read in the context of the covid-19 pandemic.
- old fashioned: a space ship gets stuck in a black hole and sends an sos using morse code by tossing objects into the black hole. it's an interesting few pages, but it's not much of a story.
- marching in: this is a sarcastic joke, but i like it, and it's true - music is the best therapy there is,
- birth of a notion: pointless nonsense
- the tercentenary incident: asimov is reflecting on the bicentennial by projecting forwards events into the tercentennial, in a manner not unlike orwell's 1984 (which is a description of events in 1948, as orwell saw them, and not intended to be a projection into the future, or a user manual as some have mockingly quipped). so, was gerald ford a robot? i'm not sure that's such an easy thing to dispel of, a priori.
no, really, that's the joke - that gerald ford is a robot. no shitting. certainly, asimov may be reflecting a little on the nature of then contemporary american politics, post-watergate, in his perception of the stage-managed state of affairs. but, the joke is that gerald ford is a robot, and that's really all that this is actually about.
good taste - winds of change
to tell at a glance - winds of change
- true love: this is both a prediction of internet dating (with unrealized accuracy) and an awkward attempt at an ironic plot twist that relies on the absurdity of a computer demonstrating uncontrolled sentience. the idea that a computer might understand "love", which doesn't even exist as a human idea before it's invention by capital to sell bullshit to idiots, is particularly ridiculous.
- think!: you really don't expect asimov to make the mistake of assigning sentience to a computer. the underlying premise that thought is energy, and thus transferable, is another example of asimov contemplating mind-body, which he does a lot, and which he doesn't seem to really resolve. i mean, he clearly realizes the falsity of the problem, but he's just as clearly not happy about it - and i don't think we're really past that. your mind is clearly a part of your body, but that doesn't mean we can't pry it out of it, in theory, however difficult it might be. but, inserting the computer via resonance is woo, and not very helpful or insightful; unfortunately, he's presenting it as the purpose of the discussion.
sure thing - winds of change
found - winds of change
fair exchange - winds of change
nothing for nothing - winds of change
how it happened - winds of change
it is coming - winds of change
the last answer - winds of change
for the birds - winds of change
death of a foy - winds of change
the last shuttle - winds of change
a perfect fit - winds of change
ignition point - winds of change
lest we remember -winds of change
winds of change - winds of change
one night of song - winds of change
hallucination - gold
feghoot & the courts - gold
- robot dreams: elvex had a dream that, one day, robots would be judged by the content of their characters, and not by the paths in their positronic brains - and got shot by calvin for it. this is inadvisable, to say the least. that said, asimov doesn't exactly condone the assassination of our equality-dreaming robot, nor is this the first pretty heavy-handed use of the robot-as-slave-in-america analogy. i mean, he repeatedly has his characters refer to his robots as "boy" - it's never stated explicitly, and i've tried to dance around it a little, but it's really front and centre. so, he clarifies a few points here about how he sees his characters - it is, indeed, calvin, the austere capitalist christian, that pulls the trigger, and at least she thinks she's saving humanity. do you agree with her? but, i'm dropping this story as a mistake, and i find it a little bit uncomfortable that they gave him an award for this, of all pieces. it also breaks sequence with the humanization theme. notably, asimov dropped this entirely for the later robot visions - meaning he seems to have come to his senses about it.
left to right - gold
the fable of the three princes - magic
the smile of the chipper - gold
- christmas without rodney: grumpy old man bitching about bratty kids. i can relate, but meh.
the instability - gold
goodbye to earth - gold
- too bad: accepting the truth that chemo/radiation is a bad approach, mini robots to eat cancer isn't that far off from targeted gene therapy as a better solution. it's the same idea. although, it's worth pointing out that asimov had a phd in biochemistry, here, and still decided to use robots instead of chemistry; is that actually valuable foresight as to what approach is likely to actually work or is he missing the obvious? i'm curious how a microrobot would evade the macrophages, though, which opens up the opposite concern - microrobots as viruses.
- robot visions: so, maybe we'll have humaniform robots in the future and maybe we won't. and maybe we'll have peace, then. but, i wouldn't bet too much on it. this neither fits into the sequence - it's the opposite of it - nor is it that interesting, really.
fault-intolerant - gold
in the canyon - gold
kid brother - gold
gold - gold
cal - gold
prince delightful and the flameless dragon - magic
frustration - gold
5:35
updated nov 30th to include texts from the bicentennial man (and other stories) and also to move a number of texts books around based on concepts in the first two robot novels (caves of steel, naked sun). i've also reordered the books.
updates in bold and italic.
the essential asimov short stories:
book I: the substantive robot. (story is about the slow humanization of robots. set before robot novels.)
- it's such a beautiful day
- the fun they had
- key item
- someday
- robbie
- light verse
- runaround
- reason
- lenny
- galley slave
- little lost robot
- evidence
- the evitable conflict
- feminine intuition
- ...that thou art mindful of him
- the bicentennial man
book II: side-stories in the robot universe (including selected multivac stories)
- jokester
- all the troubles of the world
- franchise
- satisfaction guaranteed
- robot al-76 goes astray
- the feeling of power
- catch that rabbit
- risk
- escape!
- liar!
book III robot trilogy compendium:
- mother earth [leads into robot trilogy]
- caves of steel
- the naked sun
- mirror image [baley/daneel story]
- the robots of dawn
appendix (maybe, add to book V):
- trends
- shah guido g
- living space
- profession
book IV: pre-stories for rest of asimov's futuristic universe
- hostess
- black friar of the flame
- homo sol
- the imaginary
- the hazing
- heredity
- green patches
- c-chute
- sucker bait
- death sentence
- blind alley
book V: foundation novels
- robots and empire
- ...
book VI: unrelated short stories of value
- the weapon too dreadful to use
- half-breed
- the secret sense
- nightfall
- super-neutron
- not final! + victory unintentional
- no connection
- red queen's race
- breeds there a man
- youth
- the martian way
- the deep
- sally
- kid stuff
- the immortal bard
- dreaming is a private thing
- the dead past
- each an explorer
- the watery place
- strikebreaker
- let's get together
- the gentle vultures
- the ugly little boy
- eyes do more than see
- founding father
- segregationist
- 2430 ad / the greatest asset
- the winnowing
- old fashioned
- marching in
- too bad
====================
throwaway:
- callistan menace
- ring around the sun
- the magnificent possession
- half-breeds on venus
- history
- christmas on ganymede
- time pussy
- the little man on the subway
- legal rites
- darwinian poolroom
- day of the hunters
- the endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimiline
- in a good cause
- what if
- button, button
- monkey's finger
- nobody here but-
- flies
- everest
- the pause
- foundations of sf success
- lets not
- the last trump
- the message
- hell-fire
- the dying night
- first law
- gimmick's three
- the last question
- the author's ordeal
- blank
- does a bee care?
- i'm in marsport without hilda
- insert knob a in hole b
- spell my name with an s
- i just make them up, see
- silly asses
- buy jupiter
- the uptodate sorcerer
- a statue for father
- unto the fourth generation
- rain, rain go away
- rejection slips
- what is this thing called love
- the machine that won the war
- my son, the physicist
- author! author!
- prime of life
- exile to hell
- the proper study
- waterclap
- take a match
- thiotimoline to the stars
- stranger in paradise
- the life and times of multivac
- a boy's best friend
- point of view
- birth of a notion
- tercentenary incident
- think!
- true love
- christmas without rodney
- robot dreams
- robot visions
uncatalogued until last:
- marooned off vesta - asimov's mysteries
- belief - winds of change
- the singing bell - asimov's mysteries
- the talking stone asimov's mysteries
- what's in a name - asimv's mysteries
- pate de foie grras - asimov's mysteries
- dust of death - asimov's mysteries
- a loint of paw - asimov's mysteries
- ideas die hard - winds of change
- anniversary - asimov's mysteries
- obituary - asimov's mysteries
- star light - asimov's mysteries
- the key - asimov's mysteries
- the billiard ball - asimov's mysteries
- the dream - ?
- benjamin's dream - ?
- party by satellite - ?
- benjamin's bicentennial blast - ?
- half-baked publisher's delight - ?
- heavenly host - ?
- big game- ?
- about nothing- winds of change
- good taste - winds of change
- to tell at a glance - winds of change
- sure thing - winds of change
- found - winds of change
- fair exchange - winds of change
- nothing for nothing - winds of change
- how it happened - winds of change
- it is coming - winds of change
- the last answer - winds of change
- for the birds - winds of change
- death of a foy - winds of change
- the last shuttle - winds of change
- a perfect fit - winds of change
- ignition point - winds of change
- lest we remember -winds of change
- winds of change - winds of change
- one night of song - winds of change
- hallucination
- feghoot & the courts
- left to right
- the fable of the three princes
- the smile of the chipper
- the instability
- good-bye to earth
- fault intolerant
- in the canyon
- kid brother
- gold
- cal
- prince delightful and the flameless dragon
- frustration
5:46
ok. now that i'm nearly done, i'm going to fold the previous book II back into book I. there's just not enough there to split them into two.
the essential asimov short stories:
book I: the substantive robot.
(story is about the slow humanization of robots. includes some multivac stories. set before robot novels.)
- it's such a beautiful day
- the fun they had
- jokester
- all the troubles of the world
- franchise
- key item
- someday
- robot al-76 goes astray
- the feeling of power
- light verse
- robbie
- runaround
- reason
- catch that rabbit
- liar!
- satisfaction guaranteed
- lenny
- galley slave
- little lost robot
- risk
- escape!
- evidence
- the evitable conflict
- feminine intuition
- ...that thou art mindful of him
- the bicentennial man
book II robot trilogy compendium:
- mother earth [leads into robot trilogy]
- caves of steel
- the naked sun
- mirror image [baley/daneel story]
- the robots of dawn
appendix (maybe, add to book III):
- trends
- shah guido g
- living space
- profession
book III: pre-stories for rest of asimov's futuristic universe
- hostess
- black friar of the flame
- homo sol
- the imaginary
- the hazing
- heredity
- green patches
- c-chute
- sucker bait
- death sentence
- blind alley
book IV: foundation novels
- robots and empire
- ...
book V: unrelated short stories of value
- the weapon too dreadful to use
- half-breed
- the secret sense
- nightfall
- super-neutron
- not final! + victory unintentional
- no connection
- red queen's race
- breeds there a man
- youth
- the martian way
- the deep
- sally
- kid stuff
- the immortal bard
- dreaming is a private thing
- the dead past
- each an explorer
- the watery place
- strikebreaker
- let's get together
- the gentle vultures
- the ugly little boy
- eyes do more than see
- founding father
- segregationist
- 2430 ad / the greatest asset
- the winnowing
- old fashioned
- marching in
- too bad
====================
throwaway:
- callistan menace
- ring around the sun
- the magnificent possession
- half-breeds on venus
- history
- christmas on ganymede
- time pussy
- the little man on the subway
- legal rites
- darwinian poolroom
- day of the hunters
- the endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimiline
- in a good cause
- what if
- button, button
- monkey's finger
- nobody here but-
- flies
- everest
- the pause
- foundations of sf success
- lets not
- the last trump
- the message
- hell-fire
- the dying night
- first law
- gimmick's three
- the last question
- the author's ordeal
- blank
- does a bee care?
- i'm in marsport without hilda
- insert knob a in hole b
- spell my name with an s
- i just make them up, see
- silly asses
- buy jupiter
- the uptodate sorcerer
- a statue for father
- unto the fourth generation
- rain, rain go away
- rejection slips
- what is this thing called love
- the machine that won the war
- my son, the physicist
- author! author!
- prime of life
- exile to hell
- the proper study
- waterclap
- take a match
- thiotimoline to the stars
- stranger in paradise
- the life and times of multivac
- a boy's best friend
- point of view
- birth of a notion
- tercentenary incident
- think!
- true love
- christmas without rodney
- robot dreams
- robot visions
uncatalogued until last:
- marooned off vesta - asimov's mysteries
- belief - winds of change
- the singing bell - asimov's mysteries
- the talking stone asimov's mysteries
- what's in a name - asimv's mysteries
- pate de foie grras - asimov's mysteries
- dust of death - asimov's mysteries
- a loint of paw - asimov's mysteries
- ideas die hard - winds of change
- anniversary - asimov's mysteries
- obituary - asimov's mysteries
- star light - asimov's mysteries
- the key - asimov's mysteries
- the billiard ball - asimov's mysteries
- the dream - ?
- benjamin's dream - ?
- party by satellite - ?
- benjamin's bicentennial blast - ?
- half-baked publisher's delight - ?
- heavenly host - ?
- big game- ?
- about nothing- winds of change
- good taste - winds of change
- to tell at a glance - winds of change
- sure thing - winds of change
- found - winds of change
- fair exchange - winds of change
- nothing for nothing - winds of change
- how it happened - winds of change
- it is coming - winds of change
- the last answer - winds of change
- for the birds - winds of change
- death of a foy - winds of change
- the last shuttle - winds of change
- a perfect fit - winds of change
- ignition point - winds of change
- lest we remember -winds of change
- winds of change - winds of change
- one night of song - winds of change
- hallucination
- feghoot & the courts
- left to right
- the fable of the three princes
- the smile of the chipper
- the instability
- good-bye to earth
- fault intolerant
- in the canyon
- kid brother
- gold
- cal
- prince delightful and the flameless dragon
- frustration
6:00
so, that took longer than i wanted, and now i'm definitely not getting any journal entries done this morning.
i wanted to do some legal stuff this weekend and will instead need to do it this week. i'm going to hope it won't take more than a few days.
and, that's it for short stories for a while, which means i should get some novel reading done in bed over the weekend, which is always faster - the last two robot novels this weekend, the three empire novels next weekend and then i'll have to spend i think three weekends with the seven foundation novels, i think - the two prequels one weekend, the three historical collections the next and then the two extra ones at the end.
i'll then try to finish asimov's mysteries & the winds of change the next week, and focus on the other novels last: the end of eternity & the gods themselves, the fantastic voyage II & nemesis and then the three silverburg novels, the positronic man, the ugly little boy and nightfall.
the last foundation novel was published in 1993 and the three silverburg texts were published in 1992. so, the reviews will be slightly anachronistic, but that's ok. i actually read the foundation texts in grade 6, so it must have been just released (something i didn't realize, i don't think). and, i'm going to do the silverburg texts for sure because i think these are actually three of his stronger short stories. i wasn't sure at first.
i will not pay any attention to any texts commissioned by other authors, after asimov's death, and hope we don't have to differentiate between asimov and pseudo-asimov one day in the future.
that means i should get this done in early february. i hope.
6:31
those short story collections are all out of print.
but, i'm going to have to order some of those other texts.
6:45
i'd really rather buy books used, but it never makes any sense to me, online.
6:54
isaac asimov is dead. his wife is dead. i'd tell his kids to get jobs, but they should be retired, by now.
it's like buying a hendrix record - i don't want to pay his fucking parents, if they're not dead, yet.
7:00
ok, so i was actually able to quickly grab the end of eternity, the gods themselves & nemesis for cheap at book depository.
that really just leaves the fantastic voyage (a honey i shrunk the kids type story that asimov rewrote after being asked to novelize a film of. is that required reading? i dunno. i guess it's a trope, and it's sort of worth seeing his view on it, but i couldn't find it for cheap and i don't want to pay for it) and the three silverberg novels.
silverberg is at least still alive...
7:20
ok, yeah, we'll skip buying the silverberg texts, at least until i read them, first.
ok.
i don't know what we're doing after asimov. sherlock holmes, perhaps? nah.
7:27
a part of the reason i'm doing this is to rebuild my book collection, which i either sold or lent out or left somewhere over the years. some of it got left in my dad's shed and flooded. the idiots. i'm likewise going to be looking for old cds of stuff that i mostly only had on tape.
yes, i had lots of asimov and, yes, i want it back on my shelf. my asimov was entirely left at my mom's before i moved out in 1993 and i have not had it on any shelf since, which is a shame, given it's importance. my stepmother wouldn't let it (or my large king collection) in the house under claims that it smelled like smoke, but the fact that she tried to replace it with ayn rand and dean koontz (authors of definite lesser prestige and distinctly different ideological persuasion - something i didn't understand at the time), suggests an ulterior motive. out with the asimov and in with the rand? you're damned right i'm doing a marxist analysis of asimov.
the only thing i really still had was the martian way, which i picked up at a garage sale or something, years later. it's a 1975 copy. they weren't actually given to me by my grandmother (although my clarke and verne was), but were mostly bought at drug stores with allowance change, which was the same as the king. although i also remember buying some at garage sales with my dad, too.
everything else - the complete robot, the four robot novels, the three empire novels, the seven foundation novels and the three that are coming - are mass marketed paperbacks of recent manufacture. unfortunately. but, i couldn't find anything in the local used stores...
i'll take another run soon, especially in search of the stuff i couldn't find for cheap. but, if i can get a new book for something in the $10 range, and free shipping, i'll usually take it.
7:39
and, yes - that means that, at some point, we're going to do a scathing review of ayn rand's...she wrote two books, right?
7:57
hey, i was 13 years old, my step-mother gives me a copy of atlas shrugged, i didn't know what it was other than that it was thickish, i read a few chapters and said "this is terribly boring" and that was really the end of it. i just put it down and never bothered with it again. and, that says something about how boring it was, because i was the kind of kid that read anything.
like, i remember going to her father's house one weekend and reading lord of the flies in an afternoon when i was about 12. just cause it was on the shelf. that's the kind of kid i was.
i can't think of any other book that i rejected at that age, ever. and, i really had no idea.
it wasn't for a few years that i realized that i was a victim of child abuse.
8:06
i'd actually argue that cryptocurrency is an environmental catastrophe, and the concept should be completely shunned by any sort of legitimate institution.
about the last thing we need right now is tie currency production to energy use.
8:17
i mean, there's a lot of questions about the legitimacy of the whole thing - i have a pretty strong philosophical opposition to the idea that individuals should be allowed to generate currency without doing any sort of labour, and outside of any government. i hold weakly to a labour theory of value. what is it, exactly, that gives cryptocurrency value? i don't have a good answer for that, and would consequently neither want to hold or trade it, or accept it as currency.
but, that aside, it's exceedingly morally questionable to be wasting energy on creating money. i could never do anything but boycott a system like that.
8:21
i'll state again that i'm an advocate of centralized, socialized banking.
i don't think we should have private money creation, and i don't think we should have competing currencies, either. i mean, i guess you can trade in what you want, but i won't carry out any transactions with you in cryptocurrency, that's for sure.
8:25
it's less that i don't think it should be illegal (i do actually think it should be illegal) and more that i don't see the value in pretending we can police exchange.
a total boycott would simply be more effective than a ban, and i would call for that, instead
8:27
the state does not generate power via controlling the currency, and challenging it's currency monopoly will not challenge it's power.
conversely, just about the only thing i could imagine that a state is actually good for is standardizing a system of exchange, so that citizens don't have to waste time and energy thinking about it.
as an artist that would actually like to abolish exchange altogether, all that competing systems of currency are going to leave me with is annoying conversion problems.
8:29
about the only vaccine mandate i've seen that i support is for health care workers, although i'd also support requirements to enter longterm care facilities (and haven't heard anybody suggest it. i don't think you need a vaccine passport. bizarrely. i mean, if such a draconian system is good for anything at all, it would be good for keeping diseases out of old folks homes, right? nope - it's being directed at kids in bars, instead.).
that said, these aren't government workers, and the constitution is pretty clear - this is the state overstepping it's bounds.
i'm not an american, but i'd really suggest that the administration back off on this. that's not a precedent you want to hand to the next republican president. i mean, they say one thing now, but do you want to give the president the authority to fire gay people, or ban abortions?
the rules exist for a reason.
and, it's just not worth it.
9:02
so, i had to skip out to the city hall today to fight the second of two trespassing tickets. these were the consequences of the hospital incident, where i had to get myself arrested to generate a human rights case to get the money to pay for the orchiectomy. they gave me two tickets, which is the last lingering part of the issue.
i got them all the evidence, i made myself look pretty, i got to the meeting space and...
case withdrawn. done.
logic would dictate that the other case will also be withdrawn. you'll recall that the cops tried a sneaky trick on me, in ramming it through over thanksgiving, without giving me a chance to defend myself. so, i had to appeal it. if they're going to drop this one, it stands to reason that they'll drop the other. right?
but, what seemed to happen is that the cop didn't show up, which meant they couldn't prosecute. so, they had to withdraw. a technicality, or another dirty trick?
everybody seemed to be a little uncomfortable about my dress, in the sense that it makes it hard to prosecute me when i look like i should be in sunday school. awwww. remember - i'm a 40 year old transwoman that looks like a teenage girl. i'm not very threatening.
but, whatever the truth of it, it's done, now. i still have the other one.
i will need to spend the night doing other legal concerns, and we can talk about that when it comes up. but, what happened today may just be proof of the old maxim: 90% of winning is just showing up.
22:59
so, while the rest of the world ought to be putting restrictions on canada, given that it is now an epicenter of the new omicron strain, our brilliant leaders have decided to enforce testing on every country except one.
and, which is that one?
a country with a low circulation rate? a country with a high vaccination rate? a country with a low death rate?
no.
the country that doesn't need to be tested is the united states - probably the single most likely place that this variant is going to root itself in, and the single most likely origin of substantive spread to canada. makes sense, right?
no.
so, don't let them tell you this is a health policy. it's not. this is a political decision designed strictly to capitalize on the xenophobic fears of the trumpian far right, which is clamouring for closed borders, despite the fact that all evidence is clear: as policy, this is stupid.
23:21
i've said this over and over again: if you're concerned about the rise of fascism in this country, if you're concerned about the far right, then the political entity that should concern you most is the increasingly extreme right cryptofascist tendencies of the liberal party of canada.
23:24
the really disturbing thing - and i'm using that word consciously. disturbing. - is that they apparently seem to be angling for some kind of concession from the americans.
it's like they're playing a c in a prisoner's dilemma, in an attempt to gain special privilege - oblivious to the fact that canada is of minimal importance to the united states, and that if they gave everybody special privileges then they'd be giving nobody special privileges.
worse, if there was actually a reason to close the borders, it would not be in our self-interest to keep the borders with the united states open. rather, in case of an actual serious health concern, that would be and should be the first border to be closed.
so, this is all going to no doubt come off very puzzling to the americans, who are going to wonder why the canadians are insistent on playing stupid games.
i'll say this again: game theory is a mathematical tool to model conflict using an analogy of games. it has nothing to do with playing games in a literal or allegorical sense. but, sadly, that's exactly what ottawa is doing, here.
if we were going to play this stupid game, we should have at least anticipated that the americans would need to put us on an equal footing with mexico, moving forwards. but, we're apparently slow learners.
23:43
we broadcast these empty aphorisms of cooperation with the americans, but when it comes time to cooperate on much of anything, we seem to consistently be missing in action.
why didn't we wait a few days to co-ordinate strategy, if we wanted to broadcast an intent to co-operate? why did we stoop to an opening move in a zero-sum game, instead?
the former would indicate an honest intent to co-operate; the latter suggests a desire to fein cooperation in a long strategy of destructive competition.
so, let me step in for ottawa.
these are idiots. they don't know what they're doing. don't take them seriously. they want to co-operate, and lack the basic understanding as to how. unfortunately, you'll need to do the extra work in helping them, or it won't get done.
23:52