There’s nothing quite like a looming deadline to make me wonder just how a car’s alternator works.
I guess you start with some coils of copper wire arranged kind of in a circle. Then you introduce a spinning electromagnetic field somewhere in the middle, and then there’s something about a right hand rule, and then electrons squirt out the other end. You can use those electrons for firing spark plugs to make the engine go, to power the headlights, or to recharge your phone. It’s magic!
Magic, see? If you click on the image it moves. That might be magic too . . .
It’s also a great way to keep from getting anything productive done (unless you’re in the alternator business).
See, there’s something about needing to get to work on a project that makes a mind wander. Some people call it procrastination, or poor time management, or just fucking off. But I like to look at it differently.
It’s easy to get stuck in a rut when it comes to problem solving that you’ve been working on for a long time. Tunnel vision takes over and we tend to fall into closed loops of “critical thought.” We can sit surrounded by white boards and computer screens all day and never generate a new idea, but then as soon as we hop in the car to drive home, or take a shower, or start cooking dinner, or read about engine compression ratios on Wikipedia (or really, it seems, start doing anything during which it’s hard to take notes) a light turns on.
Sometimes it takes relying on the periphery of our minds to tackle projects in a new way, and that takes putting blinders on what’s right in front of us. Those blinders can be a crappy sit-com or an online forum for diesel enthusiasts, or sometimes just lying in bed until 10am trying to figure out how to have a lucid dream.
And so if you catch me spacing out some time, or screwing off while I should be working, I hope that I can get the benefit of the doubt. I’m probably plugging away.
The game is over. The machines have already won. Skynet has been on line and self aware for quite some time now, although the warheads haven’t quite flown just yet. It seems that it’s taking a more subtle approach in murdering humanity.
Courtesy of xkcd.com
Take, for instance, Strava, the social media platform for running and cycling that turns every ride into a race. “Connect with friends,” they say, “and make the most of every run and ride” by racing the world with your GPS unit as the timekeeper.
What could go wrong with tens of thousands of people treating each and every road and trail like a race course at any hour of the day?
But while Strava has raised the hackles of critics inside and outside of the cycling community for encouraging impolite and unsafe riding on uncontrolled public roadways and trails, it’s probably a stretch to say that the software is the brainchild of an autonomous supercomputer bent on human destruction.
A stretch, that is, until you pair it with the newest craze to occlude the streets: Pokemon Go.
In the week or so that Nintendo’s mobile gaming platform has been live, it’s pulled millions of pale, doughy enthusiasts from their basements and thrust them staggering into traffic. The result has been predictably horrifying.
At the intersection of self-styled professionals racing against the cloud and cartoon enthusiasts wandering blindly through the world in search of an artificially rare collection of 1’s and 0’s there can only be chaos.
Skynet’s plan is taking shape. I heard it’s only a matter of time before Mario Kart Go delivers humanity’s coup de grace.
Courtesy of NewsThump.com
Now, critics of my theory (there are sure to be one or two) could point out that citizens perishing in explosions of carbon fiber splinters or underneath a bus at the cusp of capturing the elusive Vaporeon have only fallen victim to their own loss of context. That Skynet’s greatest weapon is not a weapon at all, but simply a means to make the annoying and destructive aspects of human nature a lot more fun.
Take Twitter. It’s a remarkable tool for pure democracy and unfettered free speech. It allows the anonymous voice of the masses to be felt from uprisings in Tunisia to protests in Ferguson, MO. It’s one of the last bastions of truly organic communication.
It also got this guy nominated:
And so maybe the critics are right. It’s not that we’ve relinquished too much autonomy to the computer on the dashboard, but not quite enough.
8:53pm – Dogs are so gross. She ate that whole pile.
9:04pm – Ok. Almost there. Just three hours. That’s like three episodes of The Wire. It’ll fly by.
9:17pm – Cottonwood Creek. Man, there sure are a lot of Cottonwood Creeks.
9:19pm – Douglas Creek. I guess that was the Cottonwood Creek. How do they get all the way over there? Is that right? Where am I?
9:26pm – I wonder what Khaleesi’s up to.
9:33pm – This song sucks.
9:43pm – So it’s not uncommon to suffer a head injury and not remember the accident at all, right? Like, just going about your day, then wham! and you wake up in the ICU, right? So at any instant now, I could just wake up in the ICU? I wouldn’t have any idea what even happened. Weird.
9:44pm- But then, what about people who don’t wake up. They hit their head and then die. Do they still forget (or unperceive?) the accident? So that any instantaneous moment on earth could actually be the last one you perceive? Like, at any moment any of us could just sort of cease to exist? Is that how that works?
9:50pm – I wonder if I should get my wisdom teeth out.
Dogs are weird.
9:59pm – Ho man that’s a sneaky cop. Didn’t even see him there. Good thing the van doesn’t go fast.
10:13pm – Dogs are so weird.
10:24pm – Boom! There are the toilets. Just hook ’em up to the van real quick and I’l be on my way.
10:26pm – Score, they’re not even filled to the brim. Shouldn’t have too much splashing on the way back.
10:27pm – My job is weird.
10:33pm – Jeez this trailer rolls rough. There’s gonna be some splashing for sure.
10:42pm – Ok. Just a little bit over an hour now. Almost there. Like, five episodes of Eastbound and Down. Actually that sounds like a long time. Shit.
10:56pm – Maybe I should have a beer.
11:04pm – That’s probably a bad call.
11:14pm – Yes officer. I’m sorry officer. Yes officer. No officer. I was not aware, officer. I’ll get that fixed right away. Thank you officer.
11:17pm – Definitely not getting that fixed.
11:24pm – That guy’s job is kind of weird.
11:32pm – Sure glad I didn’t drink that beer.
11:38pm – God this trailer is shitty.
11:39pm – Heh.
11:50pm – Ho man that raccoon just about bought the farm.
12:03am – I swear these mile markers are wrong. I’m going to come out an measure one of these days. Really? Still 36 to go?
12:14am – I wonder if I’m going to get pulled over again. That’d be kind of funny.
12:32am – Jeez what are all these lights from? This town is fucking bright at night. Is that the airport? What are all those? Are those townhomes? Who would live out there? Where do you get coffee out there?
12:42am – Boom Done. I wonder if I should check for splashing.
Weep for us, for we are lost. We were snatched from our beds in the earlymorning grey, damned by those we trusted the most. Our captors shipped us in crates to the north and through the bars we watched the sun rise over the mountains in the east.
We feared it was our last dawn, but in spite of short rations and inhumane conditions we survived the journey to the coast.
We were moved from shipping crates to a great inflatable barge, and upon this prison ship we risked life and limb again. We are not all of us swimmers, and as the little fat one made his gambit for escape, he plunged into the water and sank like a stone. We resigned ourselves to captivity on the prison barge and endured the horrors we were subjected to.
Upon our floating hell the crew and our guards carried on in an orgy of sin. They drank fermented grain mash and slothed about and became complacent with our captivity. We slipped our chains but found ourselves still lost at sea. We began to lose hope.
But the ships returned to shore, and under the cover of night our rescuers charged these pirates’ compound. The fat one and I were locked together in solitude as the fighting went well into the night. Our captors mounted a defense, and rockets and bombs shook the foundation of our prison walls.
A photo from prison.
We have never seen or heard such fighting. The cruelties we suffered at the hands of our slavers paled in comparison to the fearsomeness of the battle. And in the morning we were with broken hearts to learn that it was for naught. Through the nightlong fight their walls stood stall, and in prison here we remain.
And so pray for us, if you find this missive. And hope that we’ve moved on to a better place.
Imagine, for a moment, that you are on an airplane for a long flight. You occupy the middle seat in the last row, and it’s one of those funny regional jets where the last row doesn’t have a window at all. You are adjacent to the lavatory, and between a morbidly obese couple who is eagerly trading cell phones across your lap so that they can fawn over their cats, whom they miss dearly. The cats are hairless.
You mutter under your breath that you might prefer it if the plane just crashed. It is an objectively unpleasant experience, this flight, and under normal circumstances you’d readily be forgiven for you exasperated hyperbole.
Except that in this allegory a flight attendant overhears your discontent. He rushes to the cabin and alerts the pilot and co-pilot to what you just said. They discuss the topic briefly before they throw up their hands and concede that The Customer Is Always Right. Then they take hold of the stick, turn off autopilot, and crash the plane into the nearest mountainside.
That shit just happened in the UK.
The world is abuzz with the news of the British exit (Brexit) from the European Union. You’d have to live in a pretty deep hole to have missed this, and so I’ll spare you the details and point you toward a real journalist’s summation of what’s going on if you’re still a little hazy.
Instead, I’d like to point out a few observations that I’ve made over the last few days.
The Wrong Side of the Bed – My favorite thing about world politics is how large and far reaching the ramifications of every conversation, dispute, and sleight tend to be. It can be a bit overwhelming, but it’s also a beautiful context for how small the rest of our problems are.
Only have $40 to your name? Just caught your spouse having sex with the neighbor? Just caught your spouse having sex with the neighbor’s dog? Doesn’t matter! Right now Jeremy Corbyn is having a shittier day than you are. I guarantee it. Any time I’m feeling stressed out, or flustered, I like to think to myself, “This sure is shitty, but at least negotiating a Syrian ceasefire isn’t on my plate today.” Try it some time; it helps!
This is the face of a man whose day is going worse than yours. Take solace in that.
Call It Like You See It – The Brexit vote was sold to The People (happy to be fact checked by someone who lives there . . .) on two main principles: first, that Britain has been hemorrhaging cash to the EU that should instead be spent on healthcare, and second, that the EU’s stance on trade and labor has opened the floodgates of needy immigrants who are just coming over the channel to steal jobs and welfare. Now that the referendum actually passed (more on that later), there seems to be some backpedaling going on.
Independent of truth, the campaign certainly worked. And I can’t help but notice that the Brexit campaign, a resurgence of ultra-nationalist parties in France, the Netherlands, and Norway, and the Cruz/Trump Twat Caucus have all risen in the polls as the Arab Spring has fizzled and Middle Eastern political stability has fallen into shambles. Just as many millions of displaced Muslim refugees are flowing out of Iraq and Syria, far right political parties are exacerbating latent Islamophobia throughout the slums of disenfranchised whitefolk and riding that momentum to the highest offices of government.
While the TEA Party, the Leave camp, and Marine Le Pen’s cronies all have different official platforms, a common denominator is palpable: Islam is scary. Not to paint with too broad a brush, but the whole Far Right Renaissance just kind of reeks of Busch League racism to me.
Can We Get a Mulligan? – The Brexit vote presented a perfect storm that combined the most honest, brute force method of democracy, the referendum (where there are no pesky parliamentary middlemen to read the fine print – the will of the people is effected directly), with a largely uneducated populace who was so disillusioned with the democratic process that they truly believed their votes didn’t count.
Seventy percent of British voters, including a majority of the people who asked to leave the EU, didn’t think that the referendum would pass. Let that sink in for a moment. Many people (3 million at last tally) want a do-over now that the ballots have closed and they’ve made time to Google what the heck the EU is, anyway.
I don’t bring this up to poke fun at our unhappy ideologues across the pond. It’s easy to forget that we’re on the cusp of a similarly outrageous decision right here in the Best Goddam’ Country On Earth. Please do try to remember this November that every single thing about Donald Trump is a joke except for the fact that he really is the Republican Presidential Nominee. (That’s actually a joke about the Republican Party.) Hillary Clinton may not be a perfect candidate, but there are no mulligans on Presidential Elections.
