The word “dream” in the English language is a complicated one. On the one hand, it can be used to refer to a person’s hopes and aspirations. For instance, it might be your dream to own your own business or to make out with Ellen Page. Or Leonardo DiCaprio. I suppose it’s a matter of preference.

The word “dream” also refers to the activity of the brain during REM sleep, when our unconscious mind creates a world for us to inhabit while we slumber. Both of these meanings of the word are applicable in the case of the fantastic film “Inception,” by visionary–and I do not use this term lightly–director Christopher Nolan. You might remember him from such films as “Memento” (it wasn’t as good the second time, though we all must admit it was really, really good the first time) and also, of course, “Batman Begins” and incomparably, “The Dark Knight.”

Spoiler Alert: You have been warned.

“Inception” works as a film on several levels. As a science fiction film, it is totally in the vein of Phillip K. Dick. It’s a sub-genre of science fiction which is commonly called magic-realism. We have a device, this dream machine, which is totally fantastical, and yet Nolan has deposited it into modern day, and the characters in the story treat it as commonplace. It has been seamlessly integrated into our modern world. Its functioning is not explained and doesn’t need to be. How it works is not important. What is important is that we, as the audience, can accept it because the characters do. This was a common technique in Dick’s stories. Recall the Empathy Boxes and Mercerism from Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep.

So what Nolan does with this science fiction device, by making it commonplace and not bothering to spend absurd amounts of exposition explaining how it works (a very huge mistake made in a lot of modern sci-fi movies), is open himself up to exploring the important themes of the film. And boy, there are a lot of them. First, he discusses the concept of an idea as a virus. This is something that is proven every day. I’ve discussed memetics before on my blog, but this film hits it on the head. The main character (Leo DiCaprio) is plagued by the guilt of having murdered his wife essentially by implanting an idea into her head. Her death came about as a direct result of his first attempt at the inception of an idea. An artificial inspiration which caused her to commit suicide. The idea that he put in her head is another big theme that is lightly but poignantly touched on by Nolan. Namely, death as an exit from reality. Death as a solution to a reality that can’t be verified.

What I get a kick out of in terms of theme is how Nolan integrated the idea of memory. How memory changes the way we view the past. I recently read about a psychologist who had set up video cameras all around his home with the intention of capturing all the significant events in his growing child’s life. After so many years, he was remembering his child’s first step. He remembered it as happening in the evening in the living room. When he reviewed the tapes, he discovered that the event had actually occurred in the upstairs hall in the middle of the day. This is because when we remember things, it is not like replaying a video tape. Every time you remember a significant event, you are reconstructing it. Re-experiencing it and at the same time, changing it. Every time you remember something, you remember it differently. And this is why it is interesting when Cobb (DiCaprio) builds these memory worlds where he is trying to change the past in his own mind. All he really succeeds in doing is torturing himself, because, despite his sharp memory, he cannot actually recreate the entire event or the characters in their entirety any more than he can deliberately change them. His dead wife as a subconscious projection is a shadow of the real person. She becomes something malevolent. Something cancerous in his psyche. Something that haunts him and his work.

It is also important to point out the film’s success as an action film. And if we do this, it becomes necessary (and somewhat enjoyable) to make the obvious comparison with The Matrix. I say pleasurable because I can finally drop The Matrix from my list of movies to ever watch again. Inception does everything that The Matrix did only better and in greater abundance. The Wachowski brothers took the Platonic idea of the Cave or the Brain in the Box, if you will, and made it into an action film. It took the philosophic and touched on it and used it as an excuse to make what amounts to an escapist fantasy. Then they tried to pass it off as deep when in the end, there’s nothing of real substance or value.

Nolan has done something completely different. Instead of posing the question and then never bothering to answer it, Inception continues to dig, relentlessly exposing more facets of the question of dreams and the unconscious just as the characters, Cobb in particular, continue to dig deeper, moving further and further into the meta-dream. Dreams within dreams within dreams. The thought that he and his wife spent fifty subjective years in their own world, constructed from their own thought goobers, is astonishing.

And again, looking at the action of the film, I find it to be very successful. It is not as…”techie” as The Matrix. They didn’t use as many wires or CG. In fact, there’s very little CG. Nolan likes to put stuff on film as much as possible. And he does a great job of it. The fight scenes are more believable, even if they are fantastical. The action is more exciting because the characters are more realistic. The dream-within-dream time dilation thing is incredible. That there are, at one point in the film, three different action scenes happening at the same time and at different speeds is pure magic.

It is rare to see a film so expertly plotted. And we can see echoes of this in his big breakout film. Memento was very well plotted and had the mark of something very cool. But it was, in the end, premature. I can’t watch that movie anymore. I don’t even particularly like it. I am a little nervous that Inception won’t stand up to repeated viewings, but I am cautiously optimistic about it.

In the end, I think what makes Inception successful is a sort of perfect storm of very cool things. The cast is superb. The acting and dialogue are stoic in the places they need to be, funny where appropriate, and emotionally challenging at just the right moments. The set design is immaculate. The world-building (the meta-narrative) is perfectly executed. The integration of themes, the mixing and matching of what amounts to be a sort of theme-salad, is so well proportioned, doesn’t stifle the action, and manages to flourish while nothing else suffers. It is not didactic, I mean and The Matrix is horrifyingly didactic, which is absurd considering it has the intellectual depth of a kiddie pool. Inception is magnificently plotted and paced. I was spellbound. I was entranced.

In the end, Inception did something for me that only a few films do. It affected me. When I walked out of the theater, I found myself questioning my state of awareness. Was I asleep? Was I awake? Was the world real? The idea infected me and even today, about twenty-odd hours after watching the film, I’ll find myself looking for clues that I am awake.

Zu träumen ist zu leben.

I thought it was vitally important that the vial in the image look like Re-Animator fluid. Imagine the carnage that would be unleashed by the unwitting dupe seduced by the promise of a cureall that turned out not to be just harmless linseed oil, but instead the sadistic creation of Dr. West that turns its users into a cannibalistic psychotic zombie creatures.

And Obama had such good intentions. Herbert West is laughing all the way to the bank.

The problem with this whole thing is, it’s not too unbelievable. People can be duped into buying just about anything if it promises to lower cholesterol or burn fat or cure scabies. People like to think that they aren’t gullible, but they are. We like to think that we’re past the days of the soapbox salesman selling his crazy potions and tonics, but we’re not!

With your indulgence, I’d like to offer evidence for my case that Americans (and probably most people) are easily duped by anything that promises to make them better with little or no work.

I work at a natural food cooperative. Some people call it a health food store, which ought to send up red flags because it is not a health food store. Organic potato chips are only marginally better for you than conventional ones. They’re still fried in oil, loaded with fat and carbs. I work at a grocery store, albeit a member-owned cooperative grocery store.

Among the many things that we sell that are genuinely good, we also have a lot of things that pretend to be good but are actually quite pointless. I find it fascinating that someone who wants to get healthy will walk toward the supplement aisle before they head for the produce cooler.

We sell a lot of vitamins. This, in and of itself, is not a problem. We also sell “medicine,” that is, cough syrup and pain relievers and the like. But, what does an organic pain reliever look like? If you look closely at any of our “medicines,” that is anything that isn’t actually a vitamin or mineral, it will almost always be one of two things: herbal or homeopathic. I am fine with herbal remedies. I suspect that they work in the sense that they’ve been used for thousands of years and this seems to be better in many ways than the FDA’s method of testing drugs, which routinely passes drugs that later turn out to have devastating side-effects that aren’t evident until years later.

Just you wait and see what a generation raised on Ritalin will look like in another ten years or so.

Anyway, it’s homeopathy that I take issue with. It’s a form of medicine based on the theory that if you dilute terrible poisons with enough water and in the right way, then the water itself begins to take on curative properties. And not diluted just a little bit. We’re talking about diluting it to the point that, in a given, average-sized lake of homeopathic medicine, there might be a molecule or two an active ingredient.

That’s right, people (many, many people) believe this. And this shit ain’t cheap. People are paying through the nose for inert substances that have no medicinal effect whatsoever.

Moving on. You have no idea how many times I’ve been manning the till when some dupe walks in and starts looking at the herbal supplements and turns to me and says, “Do you have [insert herb that they heard about last week on Dr. Oz]?” Ninety percent of the time the answer is no, of course we don’t carry that. We do carry a bunch of other things that have probably the exact same effect, but no, they want whatever it was that Dr. Oz was so up in a tizzy about. I don’t care that Dr. Oz works at Columbia University. I hope he dies of a heart attack so he never bothers me again. He’s a charlatan. You know what he should be telling people? “Folks, there’s only one way to be healthy and that’s to eat good food and exercise.” That’s it. There’s no other way. No amount of herbal antioxidant is going to replace good, healthy, organic food.

Food is the keyword here.

An important case in point is the acai berry. It is actually good for you. Dr. Oz said it was and as much as I hate to admit it, he’s not a complete idiot. For those that don’t know, acai comes from South America and has been lauded and praised for its antioxidants, polyphenols, and other nutrients that your body does benefit from having. They do have to be shipped from South America, however. This is a problem for conservationists, I would say.

And you know what’s better for you than acai berries? You’ll never guess. Blueberries. Blue-motherfucking-berries. Oh, and strawberries. Concord grapes. Red Beans have more antioxidants. So does red wine.

Blueberries grow wild all over the north country where I live. And it’s true, people do eat them and love them (they taste a hell of a lot better than acai, too–acai tastes a lot like sweet dirt in my opinion). But we have a demand for acai. So we sell it. And I can’t say shit because we make money on it. As much as it rankles.

I’ll close with something amusing. A guy walks into the store and looks around for a while. Eventually he approaches me and asks, “Where are those marshmallows you used to have?” I reply, “I don’t think we’ve ever carried marshmallows.” Which might not be true; I’ve only been there a year. So then he says, “Yeah, you know, those ones you used to have. The marshmallows. They’re made from the Nile river fish.”

I stare at him for a handful of seconds. And then I can’t help myself. I start laughing. A hearty chortle from deep inside my stomach. He starts laughing, too and says, “I guess that does sound a little strange. But I tell you it’s real.”

I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine anything more absurd than catching fish in the Nile–the Nile is incredibly polluted, I’ll have you know–with the intention of making fucking marshmallows.

What a world.

Gelächter ist Medizin.

There was a time, long ago, that people knew the value of a dollar. And this is not in some “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” sense. I mean, they literally knew what a dollar was worth. For most of 1975, a dollar had a specific value such that one troy ounce of gold was worth $42.22. Exactly. There was a time when banks had to make sure that they had enough gold in their vaults to fund all of the paper money that they had issued. Since the Federal Reserve was established in 1913, that meant that all of this gold was kept in the same place. Safe and sound, and ready to be exchanged at a flat rate for paper currency.

You might remember me mentioning gold and its relative value vis-à-vis anything else. I talked about how Nietzsche spoke of gold’s relative worthlessness. Of course, today we have tons of industrial purposes for it but by and large, most of the gold in the world today is socked away in various hoards because gold’s real value is its exchange value. This is what Nietzsche was talking about. We value it because it’s very, very shiny and has little or no use outside of this fact. So for time immemorial we’ve used gold as a currency itself. Gold (and silver) coins were the most common form of currency. You can’t forge a gold coin because no matter what, you still need freaking gold in order to make the coins. So gold always has intrinsic value.

A friend of mine says that gold used to be backed by grain. Which is an interesting idea that I haven’t backed up with any formal research. Anyone with any further insight into this would be repaid handsomely in honor and accolades.

The problem with gold, of course, is that it is also very, very heavy. So carrying chests of it around is awfully inconvenient and requires carts and wagons (or trucks in today’s world) and a security detail (who must all be paid well in order to make sure they don’t rob you themselves). So paper currency, pegged to the value of such-and-such amount of gold was invented. But this paper currency (usually issued by a private bank) had to be backed up by that gold and had the promise of such an amount of gold upon presenting it at the issuing bank. This is what builds confidence in a currency.

During World War II, the Japanese hoarded tons and tons of gold as part of their plan to create a new, stable currency that would become the standard currency for their entire Pacific empire. As terribly as they lost the war, they knew that if they won, they would need to have the confidence of the consumers in their currency or there’d by no way in hell that it would maintain any sort of real value.

But many, many currencies are off the gold standard now. In particular, the US dollar (the third most valuable and by far the most pervasive currency) is not pegged to any specific value of gold. To make this point really clear, consider that gold no longer has value but instead has a price. What I mean is, gold used to, essentially, be our currency, though it was abstracted through the use of paper banknotes. Now, gold is just another commodity with a price and not a particularly standard price either. It’s continually fluctuating. At the time of this writing, the price of gold is 942.80 USD per troy ounce. The gold itself isn’t changing, however. It’s only the standard price that people would be willing to pay in American dollars.

Here’s the thing. Paper money is worthless. It’s even more worthless than gold (and gold is essentially worthless; I mean, you can’t eat it). Paper money only has value insofar as everyone involved in its distribution can agree that it has value. That’s it. If nobody can agree that it has value, then it has no value whatsoever.

Take for instance, the scene in the novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe where a bunch of morons (modern humans) have crash-landed on a primitive planet Earth. They quickly decide to adopt the leaf as their standard currency and all assume that they are rich since there are so many trees. But of course this leads to rampant inflation and even simple transactions require the exchange of, say, an entire deciduous forest.

So why is the US Dollar proof that Americans are stupid? Because somehow they have decided to trust the US government and the federal reserve enough to allow them to back the US dollar with–get this–nothing at all. There is nothing backing our currency. It has zero real exchange value. Zilch. Nada. Absolutely nothing.

They have essentially adopted the leaf as a national currency. When the Fed decides we need more, they just print more goddamned money and there’s nothing in the vaults to back it up. They create this crap out of thin air and Americans accept it!

It’s traded on currency exchange markets. It supposedly has an exchange value (and technically does, since people are still willing to exchange it for goods and services) but this isn’t guaranteed by anything except the Fed’s word that the dollar will maintain its value. But what is it worth? We don’t know because it isn’t pegged to anything!

The biggest and most profound evidence of human stupidity is the fact that other countries love the dollar. In a sense, it’s a pretty remarkable currency because, despite its utter worthlessness, it has managed to remain stable (the most important property for a currency to possess) for decades. There has been steady, but not uncontrolled inflation over the years, but it really hasn’t been a huge problem. Most Americans live pretty comfortably in their absurd little fantasies about the stability of the greenback.

Is it going to come around and bite us in the ass? Probably. Is it going to become necessary to peg the US dollar to some precious metal in the future? I have no idea. I’m not an economist. It just seems absurd that people are willing to trust a currency that has absolutely nothing supporting it whatsoever except, what, credit?

QED

Alles dass Glitzern

Click on the image to see it full size. I’m working on a new theme for the blog so that I can include larger format images. It might take some time.

This is pretty much exactly what would happen if William Shatner came ’round to tea at the Prime residence.

So I realized today that I have no really good reason for using Optimus Prime as the subject of so many of these comics (if you can call them that). Perhaps it’s that I see him as the sort of ideal outside observer. An alien not of us, but very sympathetic to us. He likes humans in a way that is not patronizing or insincere. He shows us–the inferior race–a kind of respect that is rare between humans.

Prime is the perfect idealist. His most famous quote (from the comics as well as the various Michael Bay films) was, “Freedom is the right of all sentient beings.” On the one hand, it’s the sort of magnanimous statement that gives a person shivers, especially when uttered by the always earnest Peter Cullen. But it’s also, when one really deconstructs it, astonishingly prejudiced against beings that are less than sentient. Regardless, I’ve always wanted to identify with Optimus Prime and I respected his sage wisdom (and awesome robot-fu) as a child.

Perhaps I use him in so many comics because I happen to own an Optimus Prime action figure myself, which makes it easy to photograph him from any angle I want. Do you know how hard it is to find a photo of William Shatner in the perfect pose?

The subject of ‘Hidden Portals’ was spawned by a headline that I saw on Science Daily. It’s one of those headlines that really plays tricks on a guy like me. I read something like this and I get really excited. I imagine, of course, teleportation (something that would really put GM out of business). And, thus, that’s the idea that I explored in my art project.

But that’s not exactly what’s going on in the article. In fact, the article is further misleading in that, try as I might, it’s difficult to figure out what, exactly, these researchers actually accomplished. Upon further research into the matter, it turns out that what they have created is not an actual, workable prototype of a hidden doorway, but instead have built a functional conceptual model of a doorway that does not permit electromagnetic waves to pass through it, but would allow other entities (say, a person) to pass through. A mirror that you can walk through.

It’s actually really cool. But this is the thing that’s frustrating about science sometimes. They’ve proved that it’s theoretically possible, but they haven’t actually built it yet. My question is, of course, why the hell not?

It’s a curious thing about science. In fact, it’s the critical difference between science and applied science (i.e. technology). What use has a scientist for technology except as a way of furthering our understanding of the world? They’ve proved that it’s possible to build the doorway. In a sense, it doesn’t matter to the pure researcher that it ever actually gets built. For the pure researcher, actually building the device would only be important if it could be used in further research. This might be an oversimplification of the pure researcher, who is, of course, only human, but the point remains.

Technology, like for instance these new metamaterials involved in the creation of the hidden portal is, essentially, a means to an end. And I don’t mean this lightly. “Means to an end” is a concept that bears considerable weight to a philosopher. Technology is a means to an end. And it is nothing more than that. To a scientist, the end is knowledge and understanding. To everyone else, the end is often creature comfort or experiential. We use technology as a means to the end of enhancing our individual lives or the lives of others. Both are perfectly reasonable ways to use technology.

Without letting this become a lecture on ethics, I think I’d like to bring this whole thing full circle.

I’d like to bring this around to what I find so interesting about Optimus Prime. He is, in a sense, a piece of technology. But he is also a sentient being. He is the ideal exemplar of a higher being that treats lower beings with dignity and respect. He is a piece of technology that doesn’t treat humans as a means to an end. They are an end in themselves. To be treated as an end and not a means. That is the true meaning of “freedom,” folks.

Now, if only someone would build some mirror-portals so that I could buy one.

Freiheit ist nicht frei.

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.

I imagine the recent negotiations to have gone something like this. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I like to imagine that Uncle Bill threatened Kim Jong Il with a Roman spatha.

I for one am glad that Bill Clinton gets a little attention. He gets to be the goddamned hero for once. And you know what? Despite everything that anyone says, the right thing happened. Two innocent women were freed from a very bleak future.

This is vitally important. It is not possible to see this as a bad thing unless you are a terrible person.

So anyway, NASA has released an image that was captured by the Spitzer telescope. I like Spitzer and I am a huge fan of the things that we get to see because of Spitzer. And this new image is not a disappointment. It’s an interesting spiral galaxy with a strange eye-shaped structure at its center. I think the most notable feature, however, is smaller galaxy that appears to caught up in orbit around the larger galaxy’s nucleus. It makes a lot of sense from a physics standpoint. The moon orbits Earth which orbits the sun which orbits our own galactic center. Why not have larger, binary galaxies? All around pretty sweet.

The thing that I wanted to focus on, however, is not the image itself, but rather, the language used to describe the image. And exerpt:

• “The ring around the black hole is bursting with new star formation. An inflow of material toward the central bar of the galaxy is causing the ring to light up with new stars.”

I know that I’m not the first person to point this out, but if we want to be perfectly accurate with our language and consider that this galaxy in the image is about 50-million light-years away, shouldn’t the above quotation be phrased more like this:

• “The ring around the black hole was bursting with new star formation. An inflow of material toward the central bar of the galaxy was causing the ring to light up with new stars.”

I mean, really. The image is of the state of that galaxy fifty million years ago. I’m not an astronomer, but I am a linguist. When astronomers discuss these things, do they use past-tense language? I’m really curious about this, because it seems to me that by using simpler language to ease communication, then some information is lost in the discussion. By using present tense, you must make the (to be fair, usually accurate) assumption that the reader understands that “is” actually means “was the case fifty million years ago.”

On the one hand, I’m curious about the type of language that professional astronomers use. On the other, I feel like I ought to lobby for the use of accurate language when describing celestial objects like distant galaxies.

Perhaps the most viable solution would be to take Rush Limbaugh, freeze him, stick him in a pod and launch him to that other galaxy so that he can report back to us about what it’s doing. With any luck, we’ll miss and he’ll be lost in the inconceivably vast void between galaxies forever.

Would it be easier to just send him to North Korea where he would be forced to do hard labor for ten years?

Singen Sie mich adieu.

New edition of Scientia Pro Publica up. It’s looking great this week. Read it or miss out on very interesting things.

There are organisms that reproduce sexually and there are organisms that reproduce asexually. The former outnumber the latter by many orders of magnitude. Hell, even plants have sex on a pretty regular basis–though it’s a sort of kinky, bee-assisted sex. The question is why? Asexual reproduction is far more efficient than its more popular cousin.

In New Zealand, scientists found an astonishing opportunity to test one hypothesis. Snails are known to reproduce both sexually and asexually. In the fresh waters of New Zealand, both types of snail live side by side. So they could watch, over time, the changes in populations.

Here’s the thing. Evolution is affected by pressures. Behaviors and adaptations result for many different reasons, but the need to survive appears to be the primary factor in most adaptations–there are exceptions to this, of course. And so, the fact that sexual reproduction, which is terribly inefficient, is more popular than asexual reproduction is something of a mystery. Aside from the fact that it’s more fun.

They hypothesis that these researchers in New Zealand were testing has to do with parasites. Parasites infect all organisms. Consider that a population of snails that reproduces asexually essentially just clones itself off ad infinitum. Every child is genetically identical to its parent. It inherits all of its parent’s strengths, and, more importantly for this discussion, all of its weaknesses.

The offspring of a species that reproduces sexually is genetically unique, as it’s a sort of random mixture of its parents’ genes. So what’s a parasite likely to have an easier time with? A species that’s always the same, with the same defenses and the same weaknesses to exploit? Or a species whose members are always going to be different, have different chemistries, have different defenses?

The study showed that the population of asexually producing snails showed a marked reduction over time as a result of infection from parasites. The sexually reproducing snails showed a far more stable population trend and far less susceptibility to infection by parasites. The evidence seems to show that the evolution of sex was influenced strongly by parasites.

The thing that I find interesting about these findings is what they mean when examined in light of other things that we know about sex evolution.

Consider: Sex evolved as a defense against parasites. Once it became established as the dominant reproductive activity, sex took on a life of its own.

Peacocks have these long, ornate tails that serve absolutely no survival purpose whatsoever. They are purely a result of sexual selection. They are used to attract a member of the opposite sex. In fact, survival-wise, peacocks must strike a delicate balance between ability to attract mates and ability to escape from predators. The tails are a hindrance in a survival situation, but they ensure that their genes will be passed on. And so there are two completely separate pressures affecting the size of peacock tail feathers. One pressure creates a trend toward a smaller tail and other toward a larger, more showy tail. A very interesting tension.

But then look at humans. We are interesting because, not only are we social creatures, but we are also sentient. The most intelligent species on this planet. Sexual selection in humans is a far, far, far, more complicated affair than even that of peacocks. Look at the bizarre and strange rituals that humans adopt. Look at the prejudices, the tragedies, the arguments, the problems, that all arise as a result of a defense mechanism against parasites.

Sex brings out the absolute worst in humankind. I suppose it wouldn’t be poetic if it weren’t also true that sex can bring out the absolute best in humans as well. Poetry and literature as we know it would probably not be possible if it weren’t for sex.

I just got married. I couldn’t be happier about it. I don’t necessarily believe that monogamy is the only way that humans can (or should) interact on a sexual level, but I have made a choice to join in that sort of relationship. The fact that we can choose what sort of relationship we want to be in is probably one of our biggest problems because anyone that wants to have a different sort of relationship than what is deemed normal is often ostracized or worse.

Perhaps the best literary example of what came about as a result of sex is the Trojan War. Imagine it. Helen of Troy. The “face that launched a thousand ships.” And also spawned one terrible Wolfgang Petersen movie. All of that, because of parasites.

Maybe the Transformers are better off without it.

Maybe not.

Liebe ist in Ihrem Herzen.

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.

Scientia Pro Publica has a new edition out. One of my articles was accepted, which is totally cool.

This week’s edition was published by John over at A DC Birding Blog. There’s a very good lineup of articles in this edition and I hope that everyone can click on over and check it out.

The next edition is in two weeks, over at Pro-Science. Look for it there, or, if you like, you can submit an article by clicking right here.

Ciao Bella.