Holidays, is there nothing they can not do? Here it happened again that I missed celebrating the most celebratory of Holidays, John's Son Day. Why it seems like just four years ago that I was reminiscing over this Holiday and why we celebrate it every year. Though, realistically, this John's Son Day finds me without the means to celebrate - maybe next year!
To all of those who did celebrate it, I hope it was a blast!
The Edward
I heard a story the other day on the radio, and now I know we are screwed as a species. It was a rescue story about a pod of whales. Some Humans had discovered a pod of whales heading for shallow water and gathered many other Humans to prevent the whales from going to a place where we knew that they would surely die. Maybe people helped and I believe almost all of the whales were returned to the ocean, where they would be safe. The story was told with such a positive note that I had trouble believing that none of the news staff understood the dire implications.
First off, the "rescuers" believed that the whales didn't know what they were doing. That the Humans could look at the whales and know that they didn't intend to go into the shallow waters. Maybe the whales had their reasons! Maybe they were great whale explorers, swimming into uncharted waters, ready to claim a new area for their whale country. Maybe they were planning on offing themselves because they had some disease that would kill the rest of whales if they came into contact with them. Maybe they were suicide-whales hoping to take out some enemy creature. The Humans involved didn't know nor care, they thought they knew better and took action then patted themselves on the back for a "good deed done" while this belief was probably the furthest thing from the Truth.
Secondly, the belief that the whales were doing something deadly or dangerous and that we had the moral obligation to prevent them, even if it stymied the whales' plans, whatever they were. This is the one that will hurt the Humans the most. Picture Humans in space, flying around, exploring and sending data back to the Home World - very valuable information that all Humans want and a few put themselves in potential harms way to gather. But, the Aliens they meet will see the Humans as the Humans saw the whales. If it is really a moral obligation to help out a species if the "greater" species knows better, any Aliens the Humans meet will simply return these lost people to their Home World, then tell all their Alien friends about how good they feel about themselves for helping the lost Humans by preventing them from possibly going somewhere dangerous.
We should proudly help the whales achieve their objective as we hope to some day be helped by a more advanced race.
The Edward
Get this, I was at the grocery store just a little bit ago. On the way in, I saw that they had a BBQ pit outside with a sign that said one should pay inside the store then come out and get ones tasty BBQ'ed treats. Who knew that this BBQ Pit would enable me to help someone - more on this later...
Anyway, so I made haste into the store! After I bought the basket full of frozen foods that were my original intent, I bought a ticket for two hot dogs.
We had been having a cool-wave this summer, which finally broke today - it is 20 degrees warmer than the rest of the summer (ie 93 outside right now, rather than the 72 we had been having). So I rushed to my car, dropped off my groceries, then was rushing back to get my hot dogs... and that is when it happened!
A smartly dressed woman pushing a baby carriage walked up to me and said, "Pardon me, but could you help me?" I was so taken aback that I stopped. I waited to hear what it was that she needed my help for! Maybe she needed directions, ie she was lost. Or maybe she needed to know the time. Or maybe some other simple thing I could say to solve her problem before I got my hot dogs and my groceries melted.
And I kept waiting. At this point, I realized that she was either going to ask me for money, in that she was a scammer, or she needed honest help of a larger magnitude than I could supply at that time. Since she knew what her problem was and she was willing to stand there for 10 or more seconds staring at a stranger waiting for an answer, she must have thought that the solution would require more than 10 seconds to solve. So, even though I didn't know the exact nature of the problem, I knew what she considered the duration to be - very long.
Either she was going to have to spend a long time trying to convince me to give her money, or it would require a lot of grunting and sweating on my part - neither of which sounded good at that time. So, I said, "No" and walked on to get my hot dog. I couldn't believe how much I helped her! If I hadn't be going to that hotdog stand, I would have missed an opportunity.
The end.
I know, some people may be asking for the punchline - "but Edward, where in the story did you help her? She asked you for help, and you said No!" But that is where I helped her. Evaluating her situation, I knew the outcome. She would have either tried to scam me, which would have been a waste of my time and hers, or she would have spend a lot more time explaining the problem to me with me in the end not doing what it was that she wanted. Either way, she wasn't going to get what she wanted from me, so by saying No as quickly as I could, I gave her the freedom to find someone else who would be more capable of helping. Just because I might have been the first person she asked, I definitely wasn't the best person to ask. By the time I had my hot dogs in hand, she was nowhere to be seen, so she must have found someone to do what she wanted.
Also, I couldn't help her. What she was really asking was if I would do something for her, not to help her. And since she didn't tell me in her opening remarks, she obviously thought that my initial reaction to her request, if I knew the full details, would be No. Since she was trying to bait a trap, I felt that I never really could help her in the grand scheme of things, so I would at least help her by giving her more time to find someone else - someone on whom the trap would work better.
I was just happy that I answered the question correctly!
The Edward
I was reading more from my latest link under DIVERSIONS, "You are not so smart" - an interesting blog. It ties in with a movie I just watched called "Dreams with Sharp Teeth", which is a documentary on the life of Harlan Ellison (he has authored a lot of books and stuff). I really liked the movie - very inspirational. Sure, he likes to sue people and seems like he can be kind of abrasive, but he seemed like a good guy to know. Maybe some day...
There was a lot of interesting insights in the movie, but one of the key insights that stuck with me was him talking about other writers. Well, people he didn't think too highly of as being writers. He said he hears this all of the time, "I like having written, but I hate writing." He said that kind of person isn't a writer, he is a hack. Harlan loves to write as well as having written. He said something about a true writer, if had his hands and feet tied behind his back, would be tapping out words on his typewriter with his forehead. I think a typewriter is a type of word processor for really slow computers.
It is that dedication to writing that seems to fit into the sentence I hear from self-help (really, self-help from others...) people: "Do what you love and the money will follow." It always seemed like a platitude. After seeing the movie, I could see that here was a person who loved what he did and seemed to be enjoying success. Maybe there was some truth to this? But what was that truth...
I was still mulling this over in my mind, trying to see how it all fit in with what I know of this World, when I stumbled upon "You are not so smart." There was a blog post about the two people inside of everyone - just like this "move" I was watching the other day. This all came together for me. You can read his blog post about it for clarification of his idea, but this is my post about how it all ties together.
One of you thinks only of the now. The other you always thinks of the past. We all try to balance this fun-loving, live-the-now you and the you that wants to have memories to reflect on. The author claims this is a challenge, which seems true. But then Harlan Ellison comes to mind and his quote. The best way to balance the two yous is to love what you do and do what you love. :)
Build memories (people who like having written) and enjoy the now (people who love to write). Resolve the conflict to a better life! If the now-you likes something that the past-you will like to reflect on in the future, you have a winner!
The Edward
I remember it like it was yesterday. A few years ago I was in Japantown with some friends. We were in a restaurant enjoying our food when a most shocking event occurred! A man burst through the kitchen amid raised voices, and he was brandishing a large knife, which I had assumed he lifted on his way through the kitchen. He trip and fell to the floor near our table. I got up and ran out of the restaurant. Shortly others came out. Why did I run? Better yet, why did it take others much longer than me to leave?
I was reading about the Bystander Effect just a few moments ago. It has happened many times throughout history - it happens every day actually. ("it" not being me reading about the Bystander Effect, but the Effect itself, just to clarify) The first time I heard about it was in High School psychology class. The story was about a woman who was raped and stabbed in New York City while 30+ watched. No one called the police. There was outrage after the event! "How could these inhuman monsters just watch this woman be brutalized for so long without any of them lifting a finger to call for help?!"
It was a shocking story, but it is repeated every time someone drives past a car on the side of a busy road. Everyone thinks that someone else will help, someone else has or will take action. Or they do not want to feel like a fool, "There probably have been twenty other people who have called it in! They will tell me that they know about it already." So no one does.
The same with the woman in the New York City that I had heard about. But I also learned a trick at that time. In situations like that, when people can see other people, no one will take action. They will look around and see that everyone else is calm, so they think that if the other people are calm, I should be calm to, or else I will look like a fool.
So, if someone is brutalizing you, calling out for help will not work - no one will help. The trick is to get someone to take action, so you have to call out someone specific in order to change the crowd. Point to someone and say "You, help me!" If you know the name of one of the people around you, let's say Bob, say "Bob, help me!" Once it is personal, people realize something is wrong and action needs to be taken. The crowd will turn. I hope you never need this advice, but if the situation occurs, it could save your life.
Back to my situation all of those paragraphs ago - I ran out, making noise on the way, so that others would know that the situation was wrong/dangerous. I hoped that by breaking the calm that the diners had, they would take action quicker than if I did any other thing. I do not know if it had that effect for sure, but at least that was my goal based on the psychology of crowds and influence.
The Edward
I heard a story the other day, the claim on the news was that there is this jellyfish that is immortal! I thought, "Wow, that must be tough to verify!" How does one verify if one is immortal? But then again, that isn't the point for today...
In reading the story online, I found out that this jelly fish goes through many stages of life, but when it gets to the end, it just cycles back. So, young, middle, old, then young again. Based on this, the scientists claim that this jellyfish is immortal. Shocking, I know! Hard to believe that they were that logically incorrect and still made the news!
What does immortal mean? Everything changes. Take you for example, today you know things that you didn't yesterday and you probably forgot things that you knew yesterday. If we expand that out for a few decades, at what point are you not you? General Semantics answers this question - something I blogged about a long time ago. You are not you. Every time you change anything, you have changed - an old you has died and a new you born with someone else's memories. Every second is a rebirth! So, am I saying every second should be your birthday? Yes, yes I am.
"But," you might be thinking "the story of the jellyfish is different! They mean that it is the same continuous life form! Sure, there are differences, but it is the same." Actually, it isn't the same. When it is young again, what did it lose? It has changed, its chemicals are different, its memories are different... Is a butterfly the same as a larva? Is a hamburger the same as a cow?
Throwing all that I believe away, we can celebrate the scientists' discovery of immortal life! If this creature goes through many phases and yet we consider it to be the same creature, just with different memories and different chemicals and some of its old chemicals have been used by other creatures, then I am proud to announce that I just discovered that humans are immortal!
That's right, you read it here first, Humans Are Immortal! They start as babies, go through young adult, adult, old age, then the newly announced dirt phase. During the dirt phase, there is some memory loss and loss of functionality, but so again, the matter that made up this "dirt phase human" goes back into the system and a new human is born!
I can not wait for the science to be able to track me back through my past "lives". Some day, I hope to recover all of my lost memories, something that the jellyfish can not do. So, I guess we humans are even more immortal than the jellyfish, or at least we will be some day. And since we are immortal, today is the same as a million years, so I can wait.
The Edward
I heard the news - the US has passed some sort of Health Insurance Reform. We can all probably agree that it would be great if everyone had health care for their entire lives (not so sure about insurance, but care is good). And we all know that the only reason everyone in this country doesn't have full health care coverage is because of evil corporations, evil insurance companies, and evil doctors/hospitals. Given that all of that is true, we have nothing to disagree about, so we can move on to a thought experiment!
Imagine a strange world, a world in which health cover is expensive not because of evil people, but for some other reason. In this other world, let's see if we can figure out why health coverage is high and what they could do to meet the goals of: 1) cheap coverage and 2) coverage for everyone. As I said, this is some other world, not ours, so nothing to get upset over, just a thought experiment.
Let's imagine that the rules that we have here of economics works there as well. Let's say that as demand of something rises, if the supply doesn't also rise, the cost will go up. So, if they added 30 million new people into the demand for something, but didn't change the supply, say the number of doctors/hospitals, then the price would have to rise.
If these things are true, then we can see why health care costs so much - a lot of demand, but a limited supply. Unless, in this other world, there are hospitals just sitting empty and doctors with no patients, because if that were the case, then there would be an oversupply, which would have caused the prices to fall, and since we stated that the prices were high, we can assume that all of the hospitals are full and all of the doctors are busy, just like here.
Now, as mentioned, we add 30 million new people with demands, which is good, if these people are sick, we want them taken care of. But, if there are no idle doctors and the hospitals are already full, where will those people go? Who will treat them? So, prices would rise in this strange land.
Now let's say that their government decide to step in and fix this rising price problem by fixing prices, what do we think will happen next? Price can not rise, supply will not change, demand will be high, so the only thing that happen is rationing. There was rationing before, it was just set by price, those who could pay got the rations. Under this new system, rations will have to be set some other way, by some government agency. That person will decide who gets health care and when, and to make sure it is fair, it will be decided by who can fill out the government mandated paperwork the best or who will wait in the longest lines. There is no other way with the rules as stated.
But, you say, why did I propose all of these things, create a thought experiment that has no solution? Well, you are wrong, I see a solution - do you?
The only thing that actually isn't fixed is supply. If prices are high, and demand is high, one just has to increase supply to bring down demand. So, if this other world government instead increased the number of doctors, increased the availability of medical supplies (instead of putting a 10% tax on them, which will cause fewer of them to be sold), increased the number of hospitals, etc, made the supply so overwhelming, the price would naturally fall. Doctors and hospitals would be begging for business, trying to increase their demand.
So, I'm suggesting, that is this other world, that if the government feels that they need to do something to decrease price, increase quality of care, and achieve their goals, there is only one solution: pay for loans for doctors so that there are more, create science programs to research better medical technology, increase production of medical devices, and make more land available for hospitals, just to name a few.
But we do not live in that land. We live in a world where evil people are stopping us from getting health care, a land were people would let their fellow humans suffer and die rather than lose a profit margin. Too bad, the other world has a way out of their problem.
The Edward
Using Edward's Arcane World for non-view purposes? Is this how I'm going to do it in the New Year? Well, maybe this is my view of your world... sort of.
Something odd happens to me every so often, and I have no explanation for it. Actually, that is a lie, many things weird happen to me all of the time, which is one of the many reasons why I started this blog. But this one thing stands out from the rest, because I feel that there has to be an explanation for it! Any doctors out there?
It happened again tonight, so I explain the situation and see if you can tell me what is the cause.
I can not eat spicy food. I really just tastes like burn to me. Everything burns, my lips, my hands, my mouth, my tongue, my stomach, etc, you get the idea. I've tried over the years to build my tolerance to spicy with mixed results. It still burns, but every so often, I make my way through something mildly spicy without being sick.
But, here is the weird part... every so often, I can not taste nor feel spicy food. Not at all. I can eat the spiciest thing I can find, and it has no burn whatsoever. None. I can taste everything else fine, I try other flavors and I can tell them all apart. But not spicy.
It has happened only a few times in my life, though it could happen more frequently but I am unaware of it since I rarely even try spicy food. But it happened tonight. I ordered a very spicy dish, and nothing. Others told me it was spicy. I got home and tried some hot sauce, nothing. Chocolate, fine. Salt, fine. Every other flavor I've tried, a-okay. No burning on the lips, mouth, stomach, nothing.
I admit, it kind of worries me in some ways. Can my reality change so much? Is spicy really just in my mind? Has my mind been causing this burning all a long? Hard to imagine, since the pain seems so real and it matches others experiences with spicy. Or is it that my mind can just block it out sometimes? Or is it something else... like aliens trying to sent crop circle to my taste buds? Or some horrible crippling disease for which this is the first symptom? Will I be coughing up blood in the morning? Who knows?! Maybe it would be more fun than it sounds.
Has anyone every had anything like this happen to someone they know or even to themselves? I mean really, crop circles in the mouth sounds too exotic to be real, and yet, I have no better explanation.
I hope to find an answer! Somehow. I've searched online. I've asked people. Now I will ask you. Though, I am sure there is an intersection of some of the afore mentioned groups. Non-people should feel free to reply as well.
Talk to you again soon.
The Edward
That line was the teaser for the next episode of a dating show I watched when visiting my family back East. It been with me ever since then. The line was spoken by one of the dating counselors to one of her male clients on the phone. This dating service has one rule, no sex until both people are committed to each other in a monogamous relationship. That is the premise of the show (and that the men are millionaires, while the women are not): they set up some dates for the "couple", film it, then show the aftermath of the clients breaking that one rule.
"Vaginas are a lot of fun to play with, but you are not marrying a vagina." That is my recollection of how that quote ended. The idea is that people going to the dating show are looking for someone to marry. Probably most of the women these men date have a vagina and could have a lot of fun as a couple with it, but the vagina overwhelms the sense of what it would take for a long term relationship. They even state something like that. Yet, it is a lie.
For the parts of the show I saw, it was always the same. They have a great first date based on the feedback of the women. They are wined and dined like never before by these millionaires. Then they go one a few more dates and decide that they want to lock the man into the relationship by having sex with him. Then they end up on the show again crying, saying that he got what he wanted and now the relationship is over. The interesting part was that they actually called both parties on it, they would tell the women off for trying to entrap the man with vagina and call the man for using his vast resources to overwhelm the women into thinking they needed to have sex or else he would look elsewhere.
So, even though the premise is that sex is common and easy and can skew ones sense of goals, it turns out that both parties want to have sex but for different reasons - neither of the parties actually believed that there was long term viability of the relationship.
What I came away with is that part of their initial premise is correct, people who are going to last long term do not seem to have sex right away. They know that they can have sex easily, but they want to focus on making sure that they person they are dating is actually a good partner. Once that is established, then sex is a part of their relationship. But for people who know that there is no real long term potential, they go for it as soon as they can, so that they at least get something for their efforts.
Why has this stuck with me? Because of the entire show, that seemed to be the only honest thing in it, and it seemed to be a very good summary of dating - I had never thought of as good and of as succinct way of explaining my view of sex to other people as that one line. Vaginas, in my experience, have been indeed a lot of fun to play with, but I am not looking to marry a vagina, but find a partner.
The Edward
