This is one of the possible results of congress enacting the Terminators as Secret Service Agents Act. The world could use fewer jerks.

I found this article on BBC today. Augmented Reality (AR) is a pretty sweet concept. The technology looks very cool, totally validating years of cyberpunk fiction. But there’s a problem with the article as written. And the problem stems not from any direct fault of the journalist, but from a dramatic misunderstanding of the nature of computers and robots.

The article mentions “Terminator Vision” and it is this very concept that is suspect here. By way of explaining, let’s build a mental concept of the flow of information inside of a Terminator’s computer-mind.

In the films (and indeed, in many robot films) when we, the viewers, see from the Terminator’s perspective, it’s a sort of infrared image with a text-based overlay. A Heads Up Display (HUD). I always passed it off as an abstraction, so we could relate, in some way, to how a Terminator relates to the world. However, it never occurred to me that someone would take that as literal. Why, exactly, would a Terminator need to generate this needless text in its image field? It doesn’t need to read it. It creates an unnecessary step in its data processing.

Here’s the algorithm that would be going through the CPU’s image analysis circuit:

1. Input image from eye-cameras
2. Analyze image thusly: separate out faces, identify them, identify weapons, identify surrounding structures and other objects
3. Evaluate possible threat sources
4. Evaluate possible actions based on threats, possibility for combat, and meaningful interactions with human companions (See Terminator 2: Judgment Day)
5. Generate text cues
6. Output: Overlay text cues on HUD for Terminator Higher Brain to then READ and presumably respond.

Why would the Terminator ever need to read this text in order to make an informed decision? The beauty of being a walking computer is the ability to evaluate raw data and process it without forming it into words. It’s faster and far more efficient. I can make allowances for, say, Robocop, who is actually a man with human eyes who might actually need a HUD in order to evaluate incoming data. In fact, any scenario involving a human inside a machine is going to necessitate some sort of AR technology. A cyborg’s lower and higher brain functions occur in the same place (unlike in humans). A cyborg doesn’t need the raw data to be filtered through a process, evaluated, and then passed back through the eyes. It’s ludicrous. Thus, the entire concept of “Terminator Vision” as a euphemism for AR is formed out of ignorance of computer technology. QED.

As for the recent American behavior at town hall meetings: grow up America. Read your history and study other countries. This country is far more likely to turn into Nazi Germany than Maoist China if continue to allow ourselves to be controlled by corporate interests. Don’t people understand that the government is a non-profit organization (or negative-profit, as the case may be)?

I don’t understand how people can allow themselves to be so closed minded about this issue. There is a certain income discrimination going on in health care in this country, and so many people are totally willing to let it continue. I mean, we all know that poor people don’t actually deserve health care, right? Right?

Anyway, one other thing:

Presumably, they would stay in Canada. Where they belong.

tschüs.

Everyone has their idea of a dream honeymoon. This is mine, in case you were wondering.

I’m not really all that sure how many regular readers I have. The information on Google Analytics is mystifying at best. But, in the interests of preserving those few readers that I may have, I want to make it clear that the fact that there will probably be no posts for the next week and a half is due entirely to the fact that I’m getting married on Saturday and have five hundred tiny, almost insignificant tasks that amount to the trials of Hercules to accomplish before 2p.m. on Saturday afternoon. It will theoretically culminate in some sort of “I do.”

Also, I will be gone all next week in Grand Marais, Minnesota, a lovely little town on the north shore of Lake Superior. Bed and Breakfast and all that. It’s going to be great.

Supposedly, Matthew Arnold wrote the poem “Dover Beach” while on his honeymoon. If you read the text of the poem literally; that is, if you take it to be fact, it paints a bleak picture: a man, sitting at the writing desk in the bed chamber, gazing out over the moonlit cliffs of Dover, while a newlywed wife lies on the bed, alone, depressed, possibly shivering against the cool Mediterranean breeze.

I’m not sure if that’s how it really went down, and nobody will ever actually know the truth of the matter. However, the point is, that is not exactly the sort of honeymoon that I am likely to have. So, no blog posts. I may bring my laptop. If I get a few minutes to reflect, or if they discover the theory of everything, I’m sure my Blackberry will tell me so, and I’ll make up some excuse to post the news here. But barring that, you won’t hear from me until early August. Until then, Adieu.

Liebe ist Musik.

Some years ago, I wrote a post on my old blog about Harry Potter and certain moral issues pertaining to it. At the time, I had primarily been lamenting the fact that these kids at Hogwarts never take an English class. I mean, they’re growing up to be illiterate wackos with the power of the cosmos at their fingertips. Dangerous to say the least. But at the time I was also taking issue with the fact that they never learn science. It’s not like it doesn’t exist. There’s the muggle world, where tons of people are doing science every day, but the wizarding world is totally ignorant of this fact to their own detriment. Finally, I figured that the existence of magic ought to be utilized for humanity as a whole, and not just for the people who could wield it.

I was, essentially, being deliberately obtuse. Obviously I understand that nature of the narrative. I am a huge fan of the Harry Potter books and enjoy the films as a visualization of the stories that were so carefully told in the novels. Rowling is a wizard of a sort herself. A wizard of words, if that isn’t too cheesy for you. But it’s more than that. Her prose itself is not really that sophisticated. It’s more her ability to build a universe that doesn’t fall apart two days later. The world in Harry Potter is actually quite stellar. It’s an entire mythos that’s very fun and engaging.

In some fictions, we get pretty generic settings. Take for instance, one of my favorite sci-fi television shows: Firefly. It’s an incredibly generic sci-fi setting that is only held together by the strength of its characters and the writing. I mean, a sci-fi western is a really cheesy idea that has been literally done to death. And yet, a stellar cast with great chemistry, great acting, and helluva decent script make the show what it is.

But in Harry Potter, we have a setting that carries its characters. Let’s face it, most of the characters are cardboard cutout archetypes, Harry Potter being the worst, most boring offender. He’s an utterly one-dimensional character who, despite this fact, we actually manage to cheer for. Who is he really? In a high-school drama, he’s the jock. Think about it. If it weren’t for that British accent, you’d have exactly the character in the above image.

I watched the new film last night and it did not disappoint. I’ll spare you the details, because they’re not relevant. Suffice to say, it is and does exactly what it’s supposed to be and do. It is satisfying in that you can watch it once and never have any pressing desire or need to ever watch it again. In a sense, it was a blessing to get it over and done with at the midnight showing.

It was fun, but the films, moreso than the book, have this thing called set dressing that highlights some of the holes in the world that Harry Potter inhabits. A lot of crazy stuff is happening left and right. Terrorist activities by the Death Eaters, right? Just what in the hell is the British government doing about it? I’m talking about the government that governs sixty million beer swilling britons, not the Ministry of Magic that oversees a few thousand (?) magic-slinging ones.

I mean, isn’t there a public outcry to, oh, I don’t know, do something? All I want to know is, how they’re spinning it. I think it’s perfectly possible for the right spin to be spun and still manage to maintain the same narrative, but there’s just this part of me that is absolutely dying to know what’s going on in the muggle world!

Is that because I’m a muggle and, thus, sympathize with them? Is it because I’m a compulsive critic who’s always looking for flaws and problems? Who knows? I invite anyone and everyone to think up headlines that might appear on TV and in muggle newspapers to explain these catastrophes and post them in the comments section.

verbotene Künste.

A while back researchers located some dinosaur burrows in Montana. Of course, this proved that dinosaurs exhibited a burrowing behavior when the need arose. Just recently, further burrows were discovered in Victoria, Australia. The important thing to take away from this is that it shows a similar survival behavior from different species from different hemispheres. 110 million years ago, the Earth was a warmer place, but when Australia used to be situated at the south pole, it still got pretty cold in the winter. And apparently this was how they kept warm.

They were small dinosaurs, which makes sense. Comical as the image of a T-Rex burrowing into the soft sand of a riverbank is, it probably didn’t work that way.

The above cartoon is, as usual, my way of trying to be funny. Whether it’s successful or not, is not my call, but what I like is the idea that dinosaurs might compare survival adaptations, defenses, weaponry, in a civilized tone. It’s an anthropomorphism, which is the main point here. A similar discussion most certainly did occur between dinosaurs, but it probably would have been much more violent and probably involved the T-Rex trying to eat the Triceratops (though there is some debate over whether T-Rex was a hunter or a scavenger or both).

The thing is humans have three or so key survival adaptations: opposable thumbs, upright stature, gigantic brain. Each of these things is a tremendous liability in other ways, however. For instance, our upright stature makes us slow runners. Our huge brains mean our head are big which makes human childbirth a harrowing and very dangerous activity.

So basically, when one is trying to make the argument that humans are the pinnacle, the zenith, the ultimate, in biological evolution (or creation), they have to acknowledge the fact that humans have problems. We really have no natural weaponry, no defense against cold, our immune systems suck, we’re not strong, fast, or agile. All we have is our brains and our ability to use tools.

Dinosaurs were the most successful animals to ever walk the planet. They lived for millions of years. Bipedal man has been here for about five hundred thousand years and homo sapiens for only about a hundred thousand. We have a long way to go before we are even in the same league as dinosaurs. If anything insects (cockroaches, for instance) are the most successful animals currently creeping across this world. Crocodiles, sharks, and other similar species are far older than humans. Turtles live longer.

I mean, if your standard is simply “ability to survive,” then humans suck. We have a very high opinion of ourselves and it’s utterly undeserved. That’s the funny thing.

Again, this is from a survival-ability standpoint. Obviously we’ve made more art. We have language. We have “civilization,” whatever that means. And I think a pat on the back is well deserved. Maybe a polite, quiet round of applause.

Good work people. Keep it up for a few million more years and we’ll really be something. Just don’t screw it up in the meantime, alright?

Glück.

It’s a difficult world that we live in. It’s a world of expectations and everyone seems to expect different things from it. As some would have it, we are to submit to the pseudo-random flux that is evolution. A biologist might define evolution as: the change in allele frequencies in a population over time.

Humans have the unique ability in all the animals on Earth to sort of transcend their instincts. We can act in ways that are contrary to the way we have evolved to act, in other words. I’m not trying to get into a free will debate here, but the fact remains that our ability to perceive evolution for what it is allows us to make reasoned judgments about it. It allows us the unique ability to consciously manipulate it.

Creationists often argue that evolution has never been observed in a lab. Apparently they have never heard of the Westminster Kennel Club.

As the technology for gene manipulation becomes every more sophisticated, a debate is growing about the ethical implications of so-called designer babies. I have very clear objections for eugenics, but as long as gene-screening of embryos is freely available to everybody who wants a child–and not available exclusively to the filthy rich–then what’s the harm? Everyone has a different idea of what beautiful is. What can possibly be wrong with giving your children a little extra edge in the uphill battle for survival?

What I wanted to talk about today is a little different than designer babies, however. I’m almost thirty years old. I’m past the point where my genes could be screened and I could be selected out of a pot of possible embryos. My Adonis-like beauty and Einsteinian intelligence were the result of good old fashioned chance. But that’s it. There’s no way I can improve myself further at the genetic level.

But are there other options? I came across this article today on Science Daily and it got me thinking. There’s a lot of technology being developed for people who lose limbs. This particular new technology is promising because it involves laying microelectrodes on the surface of the brain, rather than embedding them within the neural tissue as a way of detecting neural impulses, translating them, and using them as a computer interface or as a method of controlling a bionic limb. I actually really like that the article uses the words “bionic limb,” terminology that used to be the playground of science fiction writers.

So far, the technology is able to improve the lives of crippled individuals. It is not, however, capable of bringing them back to full power, so to speak. The question that we must entertain at this point is: what happens when it is?

What happens when bionic limbs meet–or exceed–the capabilities of our natural limbs?

Bionics and cybernetics are pretty science fictiony, but this article shows that dramatic progress has been made in the field, and perhaps in ten or twenty years viable, lifelike appendages can be attached with all the articulation of a real hand. But maybe they’re better and stronger than before! A wounded soldier with his purple heart proudly pinned on his cybernetic chest stands tall and proud among a crowd of normal people. He smiles benignly upon them, only dimly remembering the day when he was a mere mortal. He holds his metallic fist above his head, a salute to his great-great-grandfather who had nothing but a leather-wrapped stick to bite down on when the field medic went at his gangrenous leg with a rusty hacksaw.

It’s not that far-fetched!

And even if it were, what are the ethical implications? It’s called “transhumanism.” One could call it forced human evolution. It is a movement that supports the use of biotechnology to augment the human body, not just in the case of injury, but as a voluntary act. A purposeful denial of the limitations of our naturally selected man-bodies. The idea that injury, aging, disease, and death are involuntary and undesirable carries a lot of merit.

Buddhists spend their entire lives attempting to overcome suffering, but their approach is holistic. It emphasizes acceptance of things that can’t be changed. Transhumanism, as a philosophy, urges people to reject the notion that their body is a temple that should not be altered. Body-modification as art is one thing. Body-modification in the name of utility, physical improvement, and life affirmation is another matter entirely.

Robocop spent three films trying to regain his lost humanity, and this is one of the possible perils of transhumanism (also called “posthumanism”). Nietzsche’s description of the Overman is one who has surpassed humankind, but still cares for the transience and vitality that humankind represents.

Bear in mind that evolution short-changes us. Humans are not the pinnacle of evolution. We are merely the product of a natural mechanism that allows animals that are “fit” to survive. As any biologist will tell you, an accurate description of it would be “survival of the sufficiently fit.” In other words, that which survives, survives. All a human needs to do is survive to reproduce. That’s it. In fact, that’s easy. All sorts of terrible maladies and suffering can crop up after that deed is done. Cancer. Osteoporosis. Heart disease. Love handles. And what’s worse? We pass those tendencies on to our children because it’s easy to reproduce.

The question is whether or not we want to accept the qualities that natural selection has, somewhat arbitrarily, assigned to us, or do we wish to strive for something greater? Do we make ourselves something new and distinct? Do we push the limits of human potential?

Some extra reading is important. I highly recommend anything by Nick Bostrom. He’s a professor at Oxford and a noted transhumanist philosopher. Specifically, look at:

• A History of Transhumanist Thought(pdf)
• The Transhumanist FAQ(pdf)
• In Defense of Posthuman Dignity(html)
• Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up(pdf).

In the end, it’s not about whether or not you value human life. Everyone except the most staunch sociopaths value human life. It’s about whether you value human life enough to go beyond it.

do svidania

As you may well know, I hold firm to the idea that science is profoundly important to humans, though it’s sometimes a difficult thing to articulate exactly why. And so, at the risk of beating the proverbial horse, I’m going to take another crack at establishing some of philosophical reasons for scientific research.

One of my favorite movies is Hurlyburly. It’s a little obscure, and my reasons for liking it are a little tangential and not necessarily relevant to this discussion, and so I hope that the connection I wish to draw does not come off as pointlessly esoteric.

Anyway, Sean Penn’s character is this totally self-absorbed Hollywood casting director, a low-life bottom feeder of the film and entertainment industry. He is essentially a member of a vast machine that pumps out entertainment to the masses and the part that he plays in this machine is utterly insignificant in the general scheme of things. This–and a lot of drugs–put him in the state of mind of always questioning his place in the world and how he is to relate to the world. He continually asks when presented with some outside information that is not directly relevant to his life, “How does this pertain to me?”

On the one hand, he is just being utterly self-centered. But on the other, I think he’s asking a valid question. Many things happen in the world that have no bearing on our day to day lives. But are we going to make the claim that starving children in Africa are irrelevant? Are we going to say that the potential for revolution in Iran is not important? These things don’t affect me directly, but as Anna Paquin’s character points out in the film, everything pertains to everything else in the sense that everything is part of the same “flow,” as she puts it.

I’m not trying to be mystical about this. These things that happen in the world always pertain to us because everything pertains to us. Even the most insignificant detail, like the fact that I’m sleepless in a hotel right this very moment because my flight home was delayed until tomorrow morning, is significant. It might, say, affect your decision to book a flight with Northwest Airlines–now Delta–in the future. It might affect your decision to decide on a connection at the Indianapolis Airport (I don’t recommend it).

To move on, there were two new studies that struck me as profoundly relevant, not only to our lives, but also to each other. I will point out that they will not necessarily affect how you live your life, but they definitely pertain to you.

First of all, researchers at the University of Missouri have shown that, as humans evolved, there is a strong correlation between brain size and population density. In other words, they have shown that brain size is directly related to social competition. What this means is: our brains are bigger because we compete with each other, and not with other species. This is pretty serious stuff.

And now some research out of Georgia Tech suggests that the fact that our brains are bigger is the reason we have higher cancer rates than chimps who are much less susceptible to cancer.

So let’s look at this. We–not necessarily willingly–gave up a relatively cancer free existence for our intelligence. That intelligence evolved as a result of competition within our species.

Interestingly enough, it seems that population density is also directly linked to culture. So there is a tension that exists when humans are together. But this tension can be utilized purposefully. It stems from competition (since that is the nature of the world) but it in no way means that we are incapable of transcending our natures and working together. We can do great things when we work together and if it means we’re more likely to get cancer, well, I think it means we have all the more obligation to use our brains.

Gute Nacht.

My favorite part about science is the fact that so much of it is, in essence, just for fun. The problem for grant writers must be spinning it so that it sounds like there’s a practical “use-value” for research.

One of the first posts for this blog was about a scene from Also Sprach Zarathustra. Specifically, Nietzsche was making a claim about the value of gold. Now, I had not expected the reaction that this claim would elicit from some of my friends. One friend in particular happens to be a stock trader and professional poker player, a guy who makes his living by understanding the value of money. He argued that gold is not useless because it has exchange-value.

I and other friends argued that there was a fundamental difference between use- and exchange-value. I mean, if gold had a use-value, it wouldn’t be used as currency. Of course, it’s often used today in many industries as a conductor, but that’s beside the point. Nietzsche did not write by electric light, so in his time, the analogy holds, and even to this day, only a tiny percentage of all the gold mined is used for industry. The vast majority of it is locked up in jewelry and hoards.

Of course, the comparison that I was trying to draw at the time relates directly to how scientific research is conducted and the reasons for conducting that research. For instance, a recent discovery has been all over the science news circuit as well as the blogosphere, and it’s kind of a big deal. But the take-away lesson of the story is kind of tricky.

Science always has a sort of “cool factor.” You hear about new a new kind of supernova that was discovered or this new quantum entanglement discovery (links above), and you consume that knowledge immediately. You are joyous. It’s a sort of cathartic experience. I mean, quantum entanglement in a mechanical system! That’s pretty rad, right? But then you ask the average reader of Scientific American what it means in practical terms and you might get a vague answer about quantum computers. Based on this discovery, however, that’s a really long way off. This discovery is cool despite its apparent uselessness. We like this kind of knowledge simply because it’s interesting and satisfies a need deep inside ourselves. A need to know something true about the world that we didn’t know before.

This is why scientists do this kind of research. The scientists working on the project are way more concerned with knowing things than making the world a better place. Or rather, they are trying to make the world a better place through expansion of knowledge because knowledge has an intrinsic value that is not easily defined.

“Hey, dudes, we’ve finally demonstrated quantum entanglement in a mechanical system!”
“Oh, dude, you rock!”
“Yeah, I know right? This is totally sweet in and of itself.”
“Yeah, man, the only thing we’re really interested in is continuing our research in this field!”
“Woo!! Bong rips for all!”

Or something like that. They want more grant money for pure research. But somehow they have to convince the people with the checkbooks that there’s a utilitarian reason for doing this sort of research. Again, some vague claim about computers that are orders of exponentially more powerful, couched in very careful rhetoric that doesn’t actually promise results anytime soon.

I mean, the LHC is the perfect example of this. They’re looking for evidence that the Higgs Boson exists. It might not! And whether it does or not, knowing will be way cooler than not knowing.

Science is not about progress. Science defies progress. Science shatters the myth of progress in many ways, which is why in some situations pure knowledge is not without its consequences. For instance, evolutionary theory defies the very concept of progress.

And so, quantum entanglement has been demonstrated in a mechanical system. This is totally sweet. It has no bearing on our lives, but we are overjoyed to know it. Maybe someday down the road, this knowledge will have use-value, but for the time being, research will continue and we will be happy for it. Because we are so damned curious. Like kittens.

Ciao.

I’m getting married in a couple of months that entails a honeymoon that me and the future missus are planning on spending on the north shore of Lake Superior. A lovely town called Grand Marais. There are bike trails in the area, so, rather than rent bicycles there, we decided to bring our own bikes. This made a bike rack for the old Buick a necessity.

As luck would have it, we received one as a gift recently. While trying to decide whether to install it immediately–the only upside being the pleasure of being seen as the type of people who have a bike rack on the car–or wait till later, I noticed the above label which so intrigued me that I snapped the picture you are now glancing up at with my cellphone.

In case you’re not up on your French or Spanish (or English), the three sentences are informing you of where the rack itself was manufactured. Presumably, if you speak English, it was manufactured in the good old US of A. If you speak Spanish, however, then you be under the impression that it was manufactured in Mexico. But the French could only assume that it was manufactured in China.

To imagine that this exact bike rack’s place of manufacture is wholly dependent on the language that you speak is absurd. So there must be another explanation. I see two possibilities.

On the one hand, perhaps someone screwed up. It’s entirely possible that the person who designed the label got mixed up and the copy-editor didn’t catch the error. Or, what seems more likely, is that the factory that built this bike rack actually exists in some sort of pocket dimension, outside of our objective reality, that happens to have openings into our reality in the US, Mexico, and China. I just find it so unlikely that someone missed this obvious error on the packaging, that this is the only logical conclusion.

The question is, if this company has independently developed the technology to build factories in pocket dimensions, why aren’t they marketing that instead of just building bike racks. The question almost answers itself. They did not, in fact, build the factory. They happened to stumble upon the open rifts to another dimension accidentally and there was already a bike-rack factory there. Perhaps left there by an ancient civilization that had developed dimensional travel technology and presumably enjoyed taking their bicycles with them when they went on road trips.

So all at once, this label is proof of the existence of pocket dimensions, the possibility of accessing them, and the past existence of a great and mighty civilization capable of dimensional travel that, for one reason or another, has long since disappeared without so much as a trace.

Take that, causality.

In 1961, Kennedy said, “Hey, Russia. We saw your Sputnik, and that was cool. But hey, guess what? We’re going to put a dude on the moon. That’s right. That moon.”

And we did. In 1969, Neil Armstrong ambulated in a way that was at once small and giant, once again proving that distance is dependent on perception–without a doubt the most important discovery of the Apollo missions.

So that’s why things like this are really frustrating. Why is it that this so complicated? I would really like it if someone could explain to me why it takes fifteen years to build a nuclear reactor, when Wal-Mart can throw up a store in seven weeks? Is it a question of money? They’ve got the design already. What is it that costs so much?

We used to be able to set a goal and meet it. What went wrong? Is it a matter of money? Motivation? Are we simply not smart enough?

What is this barrier that’s preventing us from cranking out a working tokamak in six months? The design and the technology exist today. If it’s a problem of motivation, perhaps it’s that we don’t have anybody with a forceful enough personality to come out and say, “Here’s how shit’s going down, so listen up.” We need an Alexander. We need a Genghis. We need a freaking Kennedy. And none of the old, red-faced, boring Kennedys. We need the young Kennedy who told us we could land on the moon. Nuclear fusion should be a walk in the park by comparison. I had high hopes for Obama. I’m not seeing the results that I want, but I haven’t given up on him. Yet.

We know that there’s an astonishing amount of money locked up in hydrogen. The math is solid and so is the physics. It’s a given. It’s clean energy. It solves almost all of the energy problems that currently plague us. It’s as abundant as stray cats in Rome.

The deputy director of the project says, “you really need to know whether the major components work. It’s absolutely clear that this is the right approach.” I’m not so sure. But I can see a couple of different perspectives.

It’s entirely likely that this is a situation where we have too many hands in the pot. It’s great to see an international project that brings people together into a unified goal. But when that goal is just a huge, inefficient money sink, then it’s not serving anyone’s needs. My problem is the fact that this is actually something that we need. This needs to happen or we’re all screwed. Fifteen years is too long to wait for a solution to our budding energy crisis. We need it like yesterday.

Maybe it wasn’t Kennedy that was our motivator. Maybe it was the Russians. It was a threat that the Russians were going to beat us to the moon that really kicked the space race into high gear. What we need is the new millennium’s Russia. Terrorism is obviously not it because they’re not strong enough, not pervasive enough, and nobody really takes them seriously. There’s no palpable fear. We need a threat the size of Russia during the Cold War to drive us toward what we’re actually capable of. Alien invasion, maybe?

Perhaps the guy is right. Maybe the fusion project actually is too big to complete without the kind of bureaucratic machine behind this one. If that’s the case, then I have my doubts about whether we’re capable of such a feat. I mean, look at the Large Hadron Collider. It was proposed and approved in 1995. Fourteen years ago, we decided to build it. That means that it was theoretically possible for us to build it fifteen years ago. This means that technology has not improved in that time. It was beset by problems and delays and other nonsense and despite the fact that it was successfully activated, it broke pretty much right away.

If we extrapolate that out, assume that the same level of ineptitude is likely to plague this fusion project, there’s very little hope that this thing will be operational until 2050, far too late to solve any of our energy problems.

Our only option, as far as I can see, is to not hold our breaths on this one. Our current attitude toward goal-setting is pretty loose. In the 60′s we set goals and we met them. We don’t really do that so much anymore. Multiple sources of energy are going to be needed to fill the gaping hole left when oil prices get too high. Solar, wind, and possibly good old fashioned nuclear fission. Fusion is probably going to remain a pipe dream for some time yet.

Bummer.

Just to be clear, I in no way advocate suicide. 90% of the time, there’s a better option. That’s why this story is so interesting. In case you didn’t read the story, here it is: China. A bridge on an overpass. Traffic is at a standstill because a crowd is gathered. Why? A man in debt is threatening to commit suicide by throwing himself off the bridge. One commuter, fed up with it–this is the twelfth time in two months–pushes through the police cordon and shoves the suicidal man off the bridge and onto the inflated emergency cushion waiting below.

The suicidal is hospitalized with minor injuries and the pusher is arrested.

The question is not whether the shover did the right or wrong thing. Hell, if he hadn’t shoved the dude, we would never have heard that this was the twelfth time since April that someone had threatened to jump off that very bridge. We never would have heard the story. I would never have written this post. You, dear reader, would never have read it.

See how one small act has given you some amazing water-cooler conversation? Every single person who reads this post will tell their friends this story. Without fail. Why is that? It’s partly because we have a morbid fascination with suicide and death. It’s also because it’s such an unexpected story. Ask yourself, how do people normally deal with suicidal people?

We mollycoddle them. We try to reassure them: “Your life is worth living for.” We try to talk them down: “Why don’t you just step away from the edge.” This is, in essence, what’s been ingrained in us since we first started reading and watching TV: If you threaten to kill yourself, people will listen to you.

Have you ever had a boyfriend or girlfriend who threatened suicide if you dumped them? Have you, yourself threatened suicide if your significant other dumped you? You’re doing it because whether you want to kill yourself or not, you know that it gets people’s attention. The thought of death makes people act differently toward you. It would be a lot easier to break up with someone if you knew that they would get along just fine without you. A threat of suicide throws all sorts of other thoughts and emotions into the mix.

So what, in essence, did the pusher in the story do? He broke the jumper’s spell on the crowd. He had their attention. He fed off of their energy. It’s an incredibly selfish act because real suicidals, that is, people who actually commit suicide, are far more likely to do it in secret so they won’t be stopped, either by themselves or others.

Consider that Hunter S. Thompson killed himself in a way that might actually be considered courageous. He was not insane at the time. It was likely that he had been planning it for weeks. He was on the phone with his wife when he shot himself. He did it because he was ill and didn’t want to drag it out any longer. He wasn’t happy anymore. He wasn’t having fun. Since he couldn’t enjoy life and because it would be worse if, for some reason, suicide was no longer an option, he decided to do himself in.

Consider that Kurt Vonnegut smoked Pall Mall straights every day of his life because he said it was a “classy way to commit suicide.” Strange then, that it wasn’t the cigarettes that killed him.

The question here is whether or not we are the sort of culture who values the right to choose the time and place of one’s own end. If we did, then no crowd would have gathered for the jumper. He would not have been able to gain the attention of the crowd. No one would have had to push him to make a very poignant point. If the guy were really going to kill himself he would have done it already. The only reason he was able to draw a crowd is the fact that we have made suicidal threats a viable method of gathering a crowd. We treat suicidals like children (granted, they probably have some sort of psychological need to be treated like children, to no longer be responsible for their actions) and this feeds into their pathos. Why don’t we just push them? Why don’t we just tell them to grow up? Where do you draw the line when it comes to something like this? Normal, sane people don’t have the emotional energy to deal with suicidal friends, so why do they hurt us in an attempt to aggrandize their own psychological problems?

And how do we mistake the attention seekers for the people who actually need and deserve real help? These people do exist.

I’m not trying to be crass or insensitive here. And so before you judge me harshly for saying these things, bear in mind that I am only asking questions. Carefully consider what I’m saying and then decide whether or not this is worth thinking about. I am merely trying to point out an interesting disconnect in which some people are exploiting a society’s tendency to indulge people who actually have problems. It’s interesting from a distant, intellectual perspective. It’s deeply troubling from a human one. And I don’t have any specific answers.