Thank You Robin Williams . . .

One person that always made me laugh with his lightning quick wit and intellect, and poignant observations was Robin Williams. It's especially bewildering and difficult to fathom something as abruptly tragic and shocking as the recent news of his death, and knowing that the word of it came to the world as a report of suicide. I don't know what else I could add to the words of loss and the sentiments for him that haven't already been said. I just know that this instance is a harsh reminder to be a lot more mindful in watching my own self when I'm feeling more blue than usual. Even though I've been having a good long stretch of days off, I've been in a rut, feeling very confined and useless, not knowing where to direct and commit my energy. I just don't know what fun seems to be anymore, and I've been only wasting my time avoiding the heat and brooding. I can't just conveniently escape anywhere because the repercussions of the fiasco that's now over a year and a half old continue to stifle me. The news of his passing has only made my spirits plummet even more. I'm surprised that I even got word of this tragedy at all in a timely manner, as I have been actively avoiding all the news links entirely with things getting crazier and worsening between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, Iraq, plus the increased local violent crime reports that the Ex season here inevitably brings.

I often fail and neglect to acknowledge just how sad and depressed I sometimes really get. I just try to hack and slash through whatever challenge I'm trying deal with at any given time; foolishly thinking that my own patience will be strong enough in the end to conquer whatever it is, forgetting that I need to come up for air once in a while. The feedback usually comes to me in the form of headaches, muscle tension, GI distress, and back pain, or with less afflictive cues like the expressions and behaviours directed to me by my dog, the most honest of creatures, whenever I'm disturbed by problems and bad news. Those are the signs of when I need some time out to process such things emotionally. More often than not, I'm left to face and deal with such demons alone. I rely on comedy and the thoughts of comedians a lot to get me through these ordeals. Sometimes it's a very necessary thing to use as a shield from all the suffering and struggles I witness and watch other people having day in and day out. So, it's an especially hard thing to digest when a true king of comic genius, who has had a brilliant and successful career on stage and screen and a reputation of generosity, goodwill, and kind-heartedness, gets toppled and crushed himself by the grip of depression. Perhaps it's selfish for me to say, but the loss of Robin Williams under these circumstances makes me question if I'll have enough wherewithal, fortitude, and resources to ever deal with the baggage if things take an even more drastic turn for the worse. He was a person who seemed to have had so much more than I do at his disposal in terms of a network and resources to maybe deal with his personal problems, and yet things somehow failed for him. How then, given my limits, would I ever be able to cope? 

The films: Good Will Hunting, The Dead Poets Society, The Fisher King, and Mrs. Doubtfire, are all there within my top 50 all-time favourite movies list. I am grateful for Robin Williams' contribution to all of them. The world of entertainment, in both comedy and drama, will be a more desolate place without his unique presence, spontaneity, heart-touching intellect, raw energy, and spirit.
 
Goodbye and thank you Robin; may you find your peace at last.

Hacking German/Deutsch Sprachehackung

 It's the first day of August. I can't believe how quickly summer is drifting by. This morning is calm and cool, but I expect 33 degree heat later today, and a thunderstorm by the late afternoon or evening. I hope I'm wrong about that. I have been learning some more German vocabulary and grammar for about 12 consecutive days now, using around 10 to 15 minutes per lesson.

Es ist der erste Tag des August. Ich kann glauben nicht wie schell der Sommer vorbei. An diesem Morgen, die Wetter ist sehr ruhig und stille, aber ich erwarte 33 Grad für Hitze später Heute im Nachmittag oder Abend, mit ein Sturm möglich. Hoffentlich, wird das nicht so sein. Für über zwölf Tagen, ich hatte mehr Deutsch Sprache gelernt. Ich arbeite für nur 10 oder 15 Minuten jede Lektion für mehr Vokabular und Grammatik zu lernen. Das ist genug jetzt. Zu schreiben mehr in Deutsch, muss ich mehr Kaffee (oder Bier) zu trinken.

So, why another language, specifically German? My outlined answers are as follows:

1. The obvious mission – I still want to travel to Europe someday, and it only makes sense to learn that which is most commonly spoken there as the primary and secondary language. Putting that together with my English and the French and Spanish I know, and I should be able navigate around most of Western, Northern, and Central parts of that continent well enough. One could be a hopeless dork and be confined to traveling around with a tour group full of complainers who can't think outside the box (my idea of hell) who wouldn't dare to speak a word of any other language of the visited nation, and not discover anything really different from what could already be found in a guidebook. I prefer doing the total opposite and going rogue: being like a Jason Bourne and heading off the beaten path; operating independently. To do this, knowing at least the bare essentials of more than one locally spoken language is a must.
2. To make learning the "cousin" languages easier – There are the other languages of the other nations I want to visit along Northern Europe (Dutch, Frisian, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian) in the same Germanic linguistic family that share a lot of the same cognates found in either English or German. Having this other German dataset should (in theory) make learning these additional regional languages easier just as knowing French, a Latin born language, made it easier for me to pick up on Spanish. Learning the complex forms of case articles, three forms of grammatical gender, and different word order would temper me up better if I really wanted to learn something even more complicated in depth like Russian or Ukrainian.
3. Cognitive Improvement – Studies are showing more and more that learning new creative skills, adapting to novelty, and solving puzzles (without too much stress) and testing the working memory are the best things that can be done for stimulating the brain enough to ward off things like dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Learning a foreign language covers all these bases. It's a cheap form of prevention that I can do now that may keep me from suffering hard later. I take the issue of preventing geriatric mental illness a little more seriously than most. It's because I currently don't (and possibly wouldn't) have a trusted life-partner around to take care of me if ever I should become chronically ill, or ever need help to guide me along if ever my mental gears started slipping due to anything age-related in the future. I've worked long enough in health care to see what the real personal and social costs of cognitive impairment are, and how I don't ever want to be rendered into some zombie-like, dementia-stricken elder with no grasp on reality, or left at that the mercy of a system whose only answer to deal with you in such a state is to over-medicate you and shut you away. My inspiration came from hearing about a lady who was in her nineties who was still learning other languages, and she was still very cogent and bright during her interview.
4. It ultimately helps me to speak my own language better (or at least makes me recognize the ways I use it poorly) – when I stepped outside my box to learn Spanish years ago, it struck me as to how badly I use the subjunctive tense in English when I compared the two languages. Learning German now helps me to clearly see the functional difference between accusative and dative cases as it is so much more necessary to be aware of using them precisely when speaking German, which I wouldn't have learned as readily or adequately if it was explained to me in an English lesson.
5. To fit my idea of personal betterment – when I take into account the most interesting people that I've ever met in my life that I had the pleasure to engage in amazing conversations with, they had mostly these characteristics: they were bright, but in a way that had nothing to do with the number of years they spent in University, they were "richer" people, but it had nothing to do with the measure of the material wealth that they had, some were less well off than me. The one overlapping element they all had in common, which I believe made them bright and "rich" with experience, was the fact that they all could speak more than two languages, which effectively made them wiser with a grander world view of things. To learn another language automatically puts you in the place of having to find another way of thinking or perceiving things. I find myself envying those who are able to think and dream in more than one language, I think that's a fantastic mental talent to have. I'm hopelessly inconvenienced with only being able to think and dream in English. To be able to speak another language or two fluently really is hard to do without a reasonable amount of social intelligence: another enviable quality to have, which is probably what made those other people's company so enjoyable. German's distinction in the role of human betterment, despite having a relatively small number of worldwide speakers compared to Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Arabic, and English, is that it's the second most used language for scientific publications. Using time to learn another language is the only time when I feel like my brain is actually growing, unlike other times when I'm just passively absorbing and then regurgitating other trivial stuff.
6. It forces me to become a better listener – something that I wish all people could learn how to do better (myself included).
7. Because learning another language is becoming cheaper and easier to do than ever – thanks to cross-comparing my ability with apps like Google Translate, and Duolingo, I can drill and test myself at my own pace.
8. A 30 day program project - It also all part of a 30 day program to see how much I'm able to learn, and to test my ability to commit to it that long. Learning German is challenging enough to force me to re-think things and to be transformational, and yet harmless enough that if I fail at it the consequences won't be too harsh.
9. I'll learn something that won't go obsolete – the only things that I feel I learned in school that have never escaped me and served me most practically were basic mathematics and the ability to tactfully and correctly use language, which is useful in a highly technical world for. . .
10. Building programming competence and confidence – making an effort to understand something which would ordinarily look and sound like garble to you and then putting into some functional and logical order to get something done is the very essence of computer programming. I strongly believe that you have to have some proficiency with practicing this with human languages first before you can even apply it into controlling something as stupid as a box full of silicon chips.

I'm doubtful that I'll ever learn enough German to be fluent enough to understand the great intellects like Goethe, Thomas Mann, or Einstein; to read their actual thoughts in their own words. That's not my ultimate mission. I just hope to know enough to be understood when I need to make requests, or ask for directions. If I re-translated my little composition above, I'm sure I'll find glaring mistakes. The case articles and genders are the hardest things for me to understand as an Anglophone learning German, but I'm trying. I'll see if and how I'll improve after the 30 days has past. 

Re-Motivating for More Clicks

For myself, guilt was the prompt to make me examine the subject of psychological motivators for running more closely. It follows from last night after making the mistake of having my first, last, and I'm sure to be my only experience of dining on poutine. The spell of a sluggish indigestion is still haunting me. It seems funny to admit this now, especially being that I'm Canadian and that it's this late in my life for doing so, but I have never actually sampled poutine before (for which I'm now grateful). I either need the constitution of a much younger man, or I'd have to be completely wasted to dare myself to eat this kind of crap again. For those Non-Canadian readers who have never heard of this stuff before, let me explain to you what poutine is (pronounced "pooh-TEEN", not like the current Russian president's last name). I'm ashamed to say that it was invented here in Canada. Some while ago in Quebec, some bozo of a chef took a look at a plate of ordinary and already greasy fries and gravy, and thought to himself: "Hmm, let's see, what else does this need . . . Aha, I know, MORE ANIMAL FAT WITH THE ADDED POTENTIAL TO OBSTRUCT ONE'S BOWELS!" (Perhaps that idea sounded better when it was said in the original French). And he thence and thusly proceeded to plop on some nice gooey cheese curds onto this warm greasy mass, and TAH-DAH, poutine was born. In summary, poutine is the one of the most perverse ways to introduce the greatest possible number of calories in a single mouthful whilst instantaneously elevating your body's blood triglyceride index to levels of lethality. It's like the "fugu"* of the world of French fries. Consuming this stuff falls just slightly short on the spectrum of calorie ingestion depravity as drinking an entire litre of melted butter followed by another litre of whipping cream; or just taking a short cut to bypass digestion altogether, and getting a liposuction done in reverse, with the cannula inserted directly into your aorta and filling it in with 100% pure whale blubber. I sheepishly admit that the curd and gravy component of the mix was rather tasty, and that is what halts me from completely branding this stuff as downright obscene. I could only finish a third of the portion I was offered. I'm not really a fan of French fries to begin with, and yet I stupidly chose this avenue of having a dish which should best be served with a side of nitroglycerine tablets.

 
But I'm digressing. Back to the subject of running. I finally returned (after a whole flippin' week!) to a pattern of recuperative sleep again after this past cycle of insomnia; enough such that I thought I could finally get back into the swing of running again without risking some serious injury to my already stiff legs, back, and neck. My physical conditions for it are improving, but I also realize that I've been rather lax in setting the right tone for the mental ones. Any real honest runner will tell you that the activity is more mental than physical. So, what I thought I would do is slap down some reminders in print to keep me focused on why I should continue to keep up with it. Some are carrots; others are sticks. I hope to be listing more of the former than the latter. They are as follows:

1. A Pound of Butter (stick) – It was brought into mind after what I wrote about the poutine. For accuracy, I should be using a pound of pork lard for an example, but I don't handily have any around the place to serve me with a visual. The grams per litre density of butter is roughly more or less equal to that of human body fat. Butter is about 911 g/L, while human fat is generally about 918 g/L: that's about two of these 1 lb bricks of butter in a litre. Now, having a concrete visual of what this actual volume is like, and imagining having 14 more of these things being pressed, packed, and tucked into me subcutaneously gives me more of a disturbing and disgusting picture of what would result if I just let myself go for half a year, because knowing from past experience, 15 pounds of extra weight is what I can easily acquire through an entire winter of idleness. It's also a disturbing picture when I imagine how much of a substantial proportion of matter with this consistency and density might be actually be coating my arteries and heart. The seven kilometer run I did today used about 685 calories, and that can be computed as to how much volume of fat which that run potentially shredded away, assuming there is approximately 3,500 calories in a pound of adipose tissue (again, roughly the same as butter), amounts to cutting away about a fifth of that pound of butter you see there. This is perhaps the most depressing calculation to make for this entry: knowing that I'd have to run 35 kilometres to make that entire block of butter, representing the same volume of body fat, completely disappear given my age, mass, height, and metabolism.
2. The Views (carrot) – I'm fortunate to have a lot of great vistas around this town that can only be seen from the running trails, like this one on the pedestrian deck of the North CPR Bridge with the view of towering over the weir of the river. The torture of running to there from my place and then scrambling up the stairways to get up there is sometimes really worth it just to feel the breeze. The Bessborough is also a nice feature that is omnipresent from most views along the trails between the University and Broadway bridges.
   
   
   
3. Encountering Random Spontaneous Social Events (carrot) – I occasionally spot free public events, like this one I found in Rotary Park while on my way home. I participated with this group for a little bit, practicing some outdoor yoga long enough to discover just how seized up and inflexible I really am.
   
4. Sleep (carrot) – We generally tend to underrate sleep too much. When you sleep, you aren't spending money you don't have, nor are you mindlessly cramming your face full of excess food, you're not stuck listening/arguing with annoying people and being in toxic relationships, and generally not finding and creating more reckless ways of sinning and hurting yourself and others (unless you fall asleep while operating machinery or a vehicle). It heals both body and mind. The Dalai Lama says that it's the best form of meditation. If we all thought this way, we would all try to nap/sleep more. Running is a great way to snap you back into a pattern of a more relaxing sleep. Soreness usually (inevitably) finds you the next morning, but believe me, it's a hell of a lot better than getting no sleep at all and then waking up repeatedly to the same kind of pain knowing that you've done really nothing to acquire it other than just staying awake too long.
5. Beer (carrot and stick) – I try to avoid drinking my calories as much as possible, but when I do this is my favourite way to do it**. I like beer too much to stop drinking it, but I can't drink it as liberally as I used to without some bad physical consequences if I don't exercise. So long as I continue to like beer, I'll have to run more to keep it off of me. There is an entire site devoted to people like me who are geeks who can brew beer, and are around this certain age/maturity where they have this cyclical carrot-stick relationship with their beer consumption and appreciation/need for running so they can drink more beer. The site is called Brew/Drink/Run http://brewdrinkrun.com/ , in which the title itself is a pretty obvious and brief mission statement. In a fitness perspective, I'm lucky that my favourite pub is in a Goldilocks Zone, not too conveniently close; yet not so far away that I can't walk or bike there. I can leave my car at home, and still not have to trouble myself with calling cabs. The walk there and back usually amounts to the exercise I'd need to burn off the couple pints I had. Thus things balance out.
   
    

*- In Japanese cuisine, fugu is slices of sashimi trimmed from a pufferfish, which contains a highly reactive nerve poison called tetradotoxin, concentrated in some parts of its skin, flesh, and organs. Even small residual trace amounts of it can be lethal. The supposed thrill for diners eating such fare is knowing that if it wasn't cleaned and prepared by the chef properly, the next bite could be your last, sort of like a sushi Russian roulette.
**- I just realized I said that sentence in the same way the "Most Interesting Man in the World" would in the Dos Equis beer commercials.

Sabbatical Ending/National Holidays/Luggage Flags

Canada Day came and passed rather uneventfully. I worked that day, and I didn't partake in any of the local festivities. I arrived home in time in the evening to watch the dog dash under the furniture with fright once the fireworks stared blasting from close by Diefenbacher Park. The park bustled with a lot more noise and people than usual for the occasion due to the fact that the holiday fell midweek this year, limiting time for most folks to head up to cabin country or camp at the northern lakes. Travel out of town to places south and east of here was made difficult and limited due to the flooding disaster there, so more people were compelled to stay in town and gathered around here. It's Friday today, and I've noticed people packing up their picnic coolers and camping gear to escape the city for the weekend. Since Canada Day is also the official start of the next six months of the year, it's also a day where some reflection and reckoning is done, and a mark to use as a reset point whenever I feel I veered too far away from some ambitions and other things that I had resolved to do back in January.

Fitness climbs back into place as the number one priority. I've been noting that I'm probably at least seven kilograms* heavier than I was at this same time in the season last year. I was also noticing from glancing in the mirror how sickly I'm looking. The rainy month of June has left my legs and torso, which are usually fully tanned by late April or early May, looking too freakishly white, like I was rolling around in flour. The lack of vitamin D for so long would also explain why it has been so hard to bounce back from my lack of resilience lately. So, I decided to end my sabbatical from running. It has been five weeks since I last ran. I probably would have ended it sooner had it not been for the fact that I gibbled up my knee a while ago. Maybe it's still a bit premature to get back into it considering that, but I'm desperate. I picked the wrong day, and time of the day, to hit the trails too. It reached up to a 36 degree humidex reading by the time I got back in from doing it today. I somehow survived the almost 6 km trot. Today's sweaty spell in the heat and humidity maybe did a lot to finally reset my metabolism closer to its normal summertime mode. Today was the first time I actually used the air conditioner in my suite for the year. I'm now indulging in the long lost simple pleasures of listening to music, and of course, writing. I don't have any energy left for much else.
I've also been dwelling on the East Coast weather for the whole continent, as I have a couple of cousins who live in the path of Hurricane Arthur in their respective regions. Between that, and the recent flooding southeast of here, any complaint I have about the humidity earlier today here is trivial in comparison. After following a thread from the one living in North Carolina, who is experiencing the American Fourth of July holiday, her comments about it made me pause for thought about how different each of the cultures are about celebrating nationhood. It's a bit helpful for giving me a base for an explanation to my foreign reader(s) who put forth the question to me as to what I thought were the differences between Americans and Canadians. Since our respective national holidays are so close together, I thought I would entertain the question. I still don't know if I could comment fairly, but I'll try. 

Of all my wishes to travel, the curiosity to go to the states and see what was involved in a Fourth of July celebration has never really been there. I'm very uncomfortable being around and amid rallies where brazen displays of patriotism are everywhere, like the way the Americans seem to prefer to do it. It seems like there is more noise and spectacle involved to try to sell the idea to people that America is such a great place to live in. It's just not done the same way here in Canada, or it is at least not done here to the same degree. Here, you are permitted to just quiet down and be more reflective and appreciative of what you have and who you are for living in this nation. More people here tend to opt for being around someplace peaceful, like a park or around nature for that; not marching around in a noisy parade down Main Street. It's just a general opinion of mine, without an intent to stereotype. There are probably a lot of Americans who do prefer a quieter and more low-key holiday.

Just because I'm not appreciative of the American manner of celebrating nationhood doesn't automatically mean that I'm completely spiteful toward Americans, but it brings to light the whole issue regarding national pride that makes me mindful of the kinds of Americans that I really do dislike, and how they offend me as a Canadian. One example is in regards to "flag abuse". It's when those "proud Americans" who travel abroad**, the kind of really overly-patriotic ones who aggressively and obnoxiously tout how great and wonderful their country is while belittling the other cultures they are visiting, the ones who even go out of their way to do their own bit of Canada-bashing, but yet have no qualms about usurping the Canadian flag to sew and tag on their luggage in hopes to avoid getting swindled, assaulted, insulted, and ignored for service. Goddamned hypocrites! One minute, such people are ready to verbally piss on our heads, and then the next they are willing to use our flag like some sort a get-out-of-jail-free card in Monopoly when shit hits the fan. Sadly, such people usually do inevitably attract a lot of negative attention. When they use our flag, and yet continue to behave boorishly, arrogantly, and ignorantly to other people of other nations, that is a problem for me. It's like a less-criminal, but just as disrespectful, form of identity theft; it's because they actively misrepresent what Canada really is, all because of our flag being on some stupid and rude American's backpack. I'll admit that we as Canadians aren't all 100% polite and worldly people, but we certainly don't need to be giving the rest of the world the impression that we are actively adopting more of these sorts as our own, as if we have some sort of commitment or obligation to fill our national "asshole per capita" quota for the tourism industry. If I ever get on with pursuing any future dreams of traveling abroad, I really hope that I'll arrive at places serving North American tourists that have enough savvy for distinguishing the difference between the real Canadian tourists and the posers. I really wish and hope that I won't need to play the game of having to wear my nation's flag on my gear just to be treated respectfully. It shouldn't have to come down to all of that when you make an effort to behave with civility to begin with.

*- I'm noticing that when I gain weight I tend to use metric, and then switch to pounds when I start shedding it. Probably because the number for the gain is then smaller than that of the pounds lost. One of the more creative ways I choose to delude myself.
** - Again, not to generalize. Not all Americans are "bad" tourists. I feel sorry for the "good" ones who are automatically cast into this stereotype and preyed upon.

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.

The Future(s) That Didn't Come

"To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting." - R. Buckminster Fuller

Ever since last week, as the comic con geeks and sci-fi nerds were celebrating Star Wars day around the globe (May the Fourth be with you), I've been dwelling on the not-so-fiction based topics centred around the future and human society. I got to thinking about the ideas I had formulated back in the days of my youth about what I imagined the future (this present) would be like. Helping a friend re-organize and add fixtures to her garage over this weekend drew me to thinking about and the subject of the futuristic architecture and living space again; put into the context of the stuff of what I had envisioned decades ago in my teen years.

I wasn't very hopeful in those formative years that we would ever survive as a society, or that I would even survive to adulthood given that the media was always reporting on the sabre-rattling between NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations, spelling out that the Cold War was going to turn hot any second with little or no warning. It was depressing knowing that the most radical advancements in technology then always seemed to be in the hands of the military, which made it feel even more like the race toward Armageddon seem inevitable. There was more than one teacher I had tuned into reminding us of all that gloomy business. I got into reading magazines like Omni*, Popular Science, and Popular Mechanics when I was about twelve or thirteen, more to escape that fear than anything: to turn toward looking into some sort of future that didn't involve some sort of annihilation. Back then, I was actively being a 'futurist': actively speculating what the future technologies and society would be like if we survived, or altogether managed to avoid such destruction. I'm, of course, thankful that events occurred where the scenario of being reduced to a pile of ashes or stricken with the lingering torturous suffering of radioactive fallout never happened, but sadly, neither did the better future that I was preparing for come to fruition either. The forecasted future(s) of technical innovation and social evolution that was to provide enough for every citizen on this planet to live comfortably with an abundance of energy and material resources for physical and societal well-being never came, nor is development coming quickly enough for such possibilities. It's great to see that for the most part, we have been able to stamp out and hamper hard-core global Communism to allow ingenuity, technology and efficiency to thrive. Now all what we have to do is stamp out and hamper hard-core global Capitalism and religious theocracies, and the respective crushing poverty, oppression and ignorance it brings to billions. All these radical systems I mentioned do nothing good for the ecology and environment of this planet.

I was very intrigued back then by the work and writings of Richard Buckminster Fuller. He was such a brilliant man. He got me turned on to his version and vision of applied geodesic geometry, the concept of tensegrity, and synergetics. Also, it was he who got me absolutely hating my geometry class in high school at the time, which seemed in comparison so backward, so primitive, so dull with all the in-class recitation, and rote learning of proofs that we would never have practical use for in the real world. There was nothing creative about it; learning from a teacher who didn't do much more than regurgitate from an antiquated textbook from the 1950's. Each minute in that class felt like a step backward into some sort of intellectual retardation. I dropped it. To do that for an entire school year was hell to me.

Today, I'm very disappointed to see that geodesic dome designs aren't more commonplace for being used as self-sufficient homes, or at the very least ones that are used as greenhouses for local sustainable food growth to avoid the cost of shipping. I'm upset that there still isn't a pan-global hydro line network, lines across the Bering Strait to make a Trans-Siberian/Trans-Manchurian hydro line that switches energy from one continent to another at times when low night time use occurs the surplus production gets diverted to the other side of the globe when and where the need is high during their respective daytime hours, thus making the use of that water powering turbines more effectively and efficiently, thus relying less on other more destructive and wasteful power production. It angers me that South Korea and China have more Mag-Lev bullet trains than this continent, a supposedly more technically advanced one. As a citizen of Earth, I'm pissed off that there is money galore to peck into pristine spots on the Earth to access oil and natural gas with methods that contaminate and pollute the water, but isn't yet an established infrastructure for a cleaner hydrogen economy.

The one established trend that I'm glad was predicted correctly by Becky Fuller and is the phenomena he coined as "ephemeralization" or dMass: the trend of being able to do more with less energy and material** and resources. Think of the mass of material that a smart phone has been able to do away with as computing memory capacity with a given amount of chip-space gets ever more faster and powerful as it falls within concordance with Moore's Law. I attached a You Tube video which gets the point across better than I can.

Another great thinker I respect is Jacque Fresco who was a peer to Bucky Fuller, the founder and creator of the Venus Project. He is a (yet) living contemporary architect and social engineer for resource-based synergistic systems.

 

 

In regards to having a better future all comes down to being a depressing realization that lot of great systemic things have not come to fruition because they fly directly into the face of people who are stupid, greedy, incapable of using common sense, and can't fathom what a paradigm of interdependence looks like, and the ideas are supressed because of some institutional propaganda, promotion of omni-ignorance and pervasive poverty in places; not allowing a better systems to get a toe hold to begin with. I'm still lost in wondering if I should be hopeful for a better future or not.

Buckminster Fuller would be rolling over in his grave if he knew that the average schmuck with a cellphone or tablet, something that has manifold times the computing power that was used to put a man on the moon, is using an obscene amount of time doing nothing more with it than trying to reach a next level of Candy Crush instead of using an app or apps to actually make a difference in their lives.

*- Omni was a futuristic magazine, but unfortunately, it itself didn't have a future. It stopped publication in the early 90's. However, I heard rumours that it may be revived in a digital edition. Omni is an interesting title, because as it relates to Fuller, it was frequently used as a prefix by him in a lot of his visionary writings.

**- Bucky would argue that there really is no such thing as solid "material", but rather "energy-events".