Leaf Cutters and Bitcoin. . .WTF!

It's only two days away from the solstice, and it aches my spirits knowing that so far almost every day off I've had since the first week of May, including today, has been either too cloudy/gloomy, or chilly, or rainy. The downpour this morning prompted the dog and I to go out only far enough for some of her relief essentials during her walk before she quickly dragged me back in; so she could then burrow and crawl back under my bed sheets to find that token warm spot she left. It was tempting for me to do the same thing, and just swear today off as another wasted, lazy, unenjoyable day for this season. Any day during the summer season when I can't start it by enjoying my breakfast and coffee on my balcony in the fresh air and sunshine seems like the beginning of a lousy day. I could have followed the dog's idea, but I have too much on my mind to allow me to rest. I decided to divert myself and escape from all that mental clutter and noise by writing here.

I sense now more than ever, after being so cooped up because of the dreariness and rain, how desperately I'm missing and being estranged from traveling, and just freely being able to walk around in nature and being bedazzled by brand new places. I realize that it's been more than a year since I just simply went fishing. I spent much of my evening last night in my armchair exploring destinations and favourable lodgings in Bing Travel and AirBnB. I also studied and tried to make sense of some literature on Bitcoin* and other digital crypto-currency movements that are happening, and all the unique options, securities, and freedoms they are allegedly supposed to allow when booking online and traveling abroad. More comments about that down the page.

With the setting being so gloomy and dreary for this time of the year, outside it seems almost too green. Normally, that wouldn't ever be a complaint from me around here (It's certainly better than when it gets too grey and white around here), but with the absence of sun, there has also been a sparseness of any flowers and blooms, making it look barren in another special way. Walking down the street under the canopy of thickly-leaved elms in the gloom and rain, I was struck with a special memory: of the insect nature, of all things.
 
More specifically, the verdant trees and the early day gloom triggered and took my wanderlust stricken mind back to a time when I was trekking through the rain forest, along some jungle trail that cut through some foothills near the coast when I spent time in South America**. On that excursion, something caught my eye on the trail. At the first flashing glance I had of the movement, it struck me that there was a little reddish-brown and green snake crossing the path slowly. However, on closer inspection with a clearer view, I discovered that it was really a dense column of ants carrying bits of fresh leaves on their backs. They looked like little surfers heading towards some beach carrying along their little green longboards, all in unison at a perfectly synchronized rate of marching in one direction to make them all look like one organism. This was my first encounter with leaf-cutter ants.
 
As strangely interesting and fascinating as they were to me at the time, I still didn't hold them in any special regard in the grander scheme of things that were happening in and beyond that jungle. I had enough of my own challenges I was going through in trying to adapt to that environment and the social scene of the nation I was in back then. However, later on I did gain some perspective of this creature's role in the interdependent symbiosis of that particular ecosystem. It turns out that this seemingly insignificant ant and its bizarre behaviour is greatly responsible for being a balancing component for keeping an entire forest system alive.

Most of us, who appreciate biology, are already familiar with the intricate role of honeybees, who work symbiotically as nature's reproductive postal workers/surrogate penises for flowering plants. The leaf-cutter ants are just as critical as an element of a life support system in a rain forest. The leaf-cutter ants act as a soil conservationist, habitat builder, gardener, and farmer. The leaf-cutters trim the leaves from select trees in the upper parts of the forest canopy. The consequence of billions of them trimming away these leaves is that it allows more sunlight to penetrate onto the forest floor so other smaller species of plants below can then photosynthesize and survive, and hence introducing more food and habitat, allowing more animal species to thrive in the middle and lower parts of the forest matrix. The ants take the fresh leaves back to their colony, where they are used not to directly feed the ants, but to nourish a specific type of fungus which is grown on the cut leaves. The fungi consuming the leaves is actually what the ants and their larvae feed on. The fungi also work in a copacetic union with other microbes to then accelerate the decomposition of the leaves which greatly helps to replenish nutrients and minerals the rapidly depleted/leeched topsoil on the rain forest floor. It's an intricate and sensitive system that has cycled for millions of years. Even though the ants have an important and integral role in it, they are not its most dominant force nor its weakest link. The system they interact in, without any one dominating power, is self-sustaining, interdependent and completely de-centralized. I reviewed this process, because it was supposedly important to know before I could try to get the gist of what the Bitcoin author was trying to explain.

By coincidence, the author of this Bitcoin book was trying to explain its workings by trying to use the life dynamics of these particular ants as an example. I was eager at first for the comparison, since I was indeed awestruck by them when I first saw them working, and I thought the author could actually somehow use these very same creatures as a relatable, comprehensible, and meaningful example to me to posit his analogy to the workings of Bitcoin. His leaf-cutter ant metaphor involved the establishing and creating a functional new digital currency, where there is no real direct intervention or regulation by any one national government authority on settling on what the value and potential transaction opportunities/limits can be for this type of crypto-currency, and the actual bottom-of-the-pyramid users generate and control this self-sustaining transaction system instead. Did you understand any of that? Who knew that social insect behaviour and digital currency macro-economics were so much alike? I sure didn't, and do you know what . . . I STILL F*&^%ING DON'T!!! I feel like my time was wasted now for reviewing something so bizarre, and I failed to anchor any of this crap to a workable concept that's meaningful to me. I confess that I'm no stranger to at least trying to study and attempt to understand some pretty wild esoteric ideas in a lot of fields, but the one that makes me want to gouge out my own eyes when I glance upon it is the subject of economics, and the words of people who think they have all the answers about it, and can't produce an intelligible and tangible example to explain so abstract. I don't know what qualifications you need to write a textbook explaining economics which now include more abstract computer coding for transactions and more esoteric tech-lingo, but after reading this stuff, I think it involves going to whatever school it was that Nostradamus went to, or whatever one the crazy old bastard who wrote the book Revelation did. I only got to wondering afterward about what it was, and much of it that he had actually smoked from some bong while he wrote that stuff. I don't intend to bash the guy who wrote this book too harshly: he did openly declare that it was his raw, unfinished copy, meant for more editing. I'll give him some great credit for daring to do his best to make describable a technical phenomenon that is itself changing very quickly in leaps and bounds as app development for it gets enhanced. It's still all gobbledegook to me. The comparison to Nature's ecology with human economics doesn't help me much either. I tend to think that Nature didn't account for human stupidity and human greed in her design, which the real workings of human economics is full of. Look how she is suffering now because of it. As a result, his example became nullified for me. Trying to follow any economic trend or related news just disturbs me, I can even see the result of doing it reflected by the quality of my own writing now. Rambling and discordant; lacking of a real central theme: just as I find regular discussions about the dynamics, theories, and policies in this field.

Between the two subjects of the ants and crypto-currency economic practice and theory, one had me a bit enthralled and interested; the other put me to sleep in my armchair. Hint: I didn't wake up with drool rolling down my chin, as if coming out of a coma, after reading about the ants. The subject of economics, especially as it is today, is all too cryptic, complicated, boring and nonsensical for me. It's all loaded with a bunch of cold and prickly theories which have more to do with making hyper-competitive businesses and corruptive governments flourish, and less to do with satisfying the real and current needs of the human condition. Google defines it as: the branch of knowledge concerned with the production, consumption, and transfer of wealth. It sounds sweet and simple, but it's a little too general, and it also has too much wiggle room to allow for doing perverse, greedy, and unethical things as options to gain wealth. My personal simplest, yet exact, definition of economics (or at least as to how I try to apply it in my own life) is: the knowledge, practice, and study of managing and transferring given resources, assets, energy and time in a responsible, practical, effective, efficient, and ethical manner. The inclusion of the words "responsible" and "ethical" alone to the definition of economics shows you just how screwed up this world is when brought to light in the way we are living in under today's current actual economic system realities (or I should say tyrannies). My idea of what economics should mean doesn't jibe well with that used by most of the rest of the world. Maybe that's why I've been a poor student of it, or maybe I'm just pragmatic, and don't want to really waste time learning any more about a convention that really hasn't been working well for us to begin with. 

When it comes to Bitcoin, I can see now how those in power in institutions that are too archaic to readily adapt to this (like most governments) being really scared of it, along with those who are without technical savvy. Black market activity is not as easy to do with Bitcoin as people think it is, so those who are trying to sidestep accountability and transparency will have even more difficulty doing it as the technology evolves. Those digits still leave trails. I wonder what other propaganda wars/changes will ensue as it becomes more established. Boning up on some knowledge of Bitcoin is something not I'm really doing out of real interest; I'm just regarding as a necessary labour/evil because I might someday be forced to use it and comply with its terms; plus I may at the very least need to learn how to avoid being screwed over by it.

If we already avail ourselves to use some sort shopper's card for collecting 'points' for discounts and freebies from our favourite retailers, a casino card, or some means for collecting Air Miles® or any facsimile thereof, we are already resorting to de facto alternative forms of digital currency with an arbitrarily assigned value. So, why should we really be surprised, or feel so threatened that such a thing is Bitcoin has come along? We already seem to not mind too much about blindly feeding our personal information and data about our shopping and consumption habits for the fungus that is the market researcher to gather and exploit whenever we use such points cards. Using Bitcoin may actually lessen some of this sort of intrusion. The threatening thing I suppose is that it's a lot more abstract and more technical than other forms of payment that we use, but that's the way money has already been constantly evolving through the decades and centuries. Money, in any form, will always be used in corruptive ways so long as greed, waste, and stupidity in people exist. People might actually have to try to be a little less ignorant, and make an effort to actually tune into markets, and learn how to read candlestick charts and conversion tables to protect their interests as this digital convergence with money happens. I can see how that is intimidating for some, especially those who just want simple. All I know is that: a. there will be a huge powershift that will arise from this, and b. that for now I'll be studying the degree of convenience, security, and volatility of the Bitcoin system a little more before I commit to changing my dollars to binary digits in a QR code.
    
*-The weird and seemingly unrelated imagery on one of the EPUB books I was reading about Bitcoin also no doubt compounded the thought-triggering (it was a picture of a leaf-cutter ant).
**- Cue in me mimicking David Attenborough's voice and accent here . . .
 

Crash Habits

I realized that it has been some while since I wrote here. Nothing eventful has happened between now and my last entry that is really notable except for the fact that I've decided to take a sabbatical from the long-distance running to let my bones and joints heal up properly. I'm substituting in more cycling for fitness. I opted out of the Saskatchewan Marathon this year, as well as the Bridge City Boogie that is scheduled for today. I'm stuck in the midst of the second day of trying to resolve computer problems, and today I took the radical step of doing a total overhaul of my operating system.
My Sunday so far has gone as follows:
Stage 1: Start reinstalling Windows 8.0 operation system, since all my free time yesterday was used in vain and wasted effort desperately using whatever help advice and fixes I tried to deploy.
0% installed . . .
Showering, hygiene and grooming . . .
10% installed . . .
Prepared and had breakfast (scrambled eggs with onions and jalapeños and salsa, hashbrowns and coffee; loaded and turned on dishwasher
25% installed . . .
Go for another walk with dog to kill time between software loading, get rained on, return home quickly. I'm kind of thankful for the rain to make me feel less regretful and having an excuse for being cooped up inside to attend to the configuring . . .
33% installed . . .
Cleaned kitchen and sweep floors . . .
54% installed . . .
Folding laundry, changed bedding, and cleaned/dusted/vacuumed bedroom, groom the pooch . . .
67% installed . . .
Made more coffee, chatted with my Mom for a bit on the phone . . .
89% installed  . . .
Start praying to Jesus, Buddha, and whatever other patron saints and deities there are for restoring system crashes who'd care to listen to my plight. Twelve minutes later, a successful installation occurs. On to Stage 2 of this soul-crushing operation. Ella pokes me with her paw to get my attention, and then jumps up on my lap to try to comfort me from my noticeable unrest from this irritating fiasco.
Stage 2: Begin downloading and installing the layer of Windows 8.0 updates necessary before I can ever tack on the latest Windows 8.1 upgrade (92 needed).
Start a new blog entry on desktop (this one) . . .
0 of 92 downloaded . . .
I unload my dishwasher and started preparing stuff for lunch. I then begin reading Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, by the late Douglas Adams, feeling about as useless, surreal, and absurd as the Electric Monk introduced in chapter 2 of the book through the flow of this process. A half hour has passed by, then I see . . .
0 of 92 downloaded!!! . . . <a myriad of expletives at this point> . . . oh wait, holy crap it finally took some action to install updates. Loading and configuration seems like trying to escape a Black Hole at this point knowing that I'm not even half way finished of what I need to do to correct all this.
I think the point of how aggravating I find post-crash massive scale installations has been made, and this is probably the main reason why I would hate having an IT career as a tech support worker. I couldn't handle dealing with the levels of livid pent-up frustration while talking myself through a task, I'm sure my impatience would only get worse when dealing with someone else. If I were tied to a desk incapable of hastening the process, and couldn't make the busywork, or anything else constructive or productive for things like what I just described to curb this aggravation, I'd be totally at my wits end.
It's my own damn fault that this has happened. A complete refreshing install once a year is what I would recommend for anyone who uses their system at my degree of usage, but I follow my own advice rather poorly. I haven't performed any maintenance like this since I purchased my laptop a few years ago.
Being that we are now so interlinked with technology, this all leads me to wonder if there could be an entirely new psychological profile inventory made solely based on a person's ability to organize, attend, adapt, and using time-passing habits through the tedious process of recovering from a computer system crash and other monotonous first world problems: much like the formal stages of dealing with the news of hearing that one is approaching their mortality in a short given time (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). It's being affronted by the irony of taking so much lagging time is used to set up things that are supposed to process all the other things in our lives in nanoseconds.
I forgot how long and agonizing this process is, and if I were more prudent I should be given myself more substantial things to multitask at while this was happening, like planning a manned mission to Pluto or something . . .

. . .It's now 3 days later, with one night shift, one migraine, two excruciatingly sore eyeballs, and cruddy weather within that time. I have my system up and running again. I plugged in the old apps I had (actually used), leaving the rest in the digital oblivion to prevent them from cluttering up my hard drive; one of them was probably responsible for this trouble to begin with. I also took advantage of rigging this baby up with the newest version of MS Office: to crawl out of the primordial ooze of what was Office 2007, and start crawling on solid ground with more cloud-capable features provided with Office 365. It's a hell of a jump, and I'm ashamed I waited this long to come to this point to do this enhancement, and I'm thinking more that my crash that forced me in this direction was a blessing in disguise.

I'm so far impressed with the new features. I'm testing Word's capability of uploading my entry directly to my blog, right now. Office 2007 had the same feature, but it calved on me for some reason ages ago, and I just didn't bother coming back to it. I like the fact that I have more formatting options and better correction utilities at my disposal now. Maybe someday I'll manage to actually get creative with them.