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.
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.
Try this one dumb trick to improve your health and make new friends. It cures cancer and burns that pesky belly fat. It’s an ancient technique that the stars used to get ripped for 300. It’s a trick so simple, you wouldn’t believe you’ve never tried it! It will change your life forever.
Are you ready for it? Here you go! Take off your fucking headphones.
Don’t be that guy.
It may come as a surprise to a lot of you out there, but you are not currently starring in some Truman Show-esque film about your life. You do not need a sound track.
When you’re out for a trail run, would you rather hear that Best of Boyz II Men album you’ve been listening to recently? Or the mountain biker coming around the corner? Or how about the 250lb lion that’s been stalking you for the last 30 minutes? And what about that nice lady who said “hi” to you but you didn’t hear her and didn’t say “hi” back and it really hurt her feelings? Have you thought about her feelings? Let’s be real – that velvety a capella can wait.
And when you’re riding your bike through rush hour traffic you can probably just hum those John Williams tracks to yourself, you know? As a mostly invisible and wholly vulnerable object darting around like a high stakes game of frogger, should you really be depriving yourself of your second most useful sense? Maybe you don’t care if you get splatted, but it’s rush hour already and that will definitely snarl traffic and people have, like, places to be.
I guess the big thing is that whether we like it or not, we all live here. We’re a society. And part of that means dealing with each other every once in a while. A chaotic community like ours can be overwhelming, for sure, and we all need a little time to ourselves. I understand the need for solitude as well as anyone, but the solution is not to strap on a sensory deprivation helmet and wander into traffic.
Headphones are great, and have a lot of applications. They’re my number one go-to for avoiding conversations on planes and fully appreciating The Dark Side of the Moon. But let’s be reasonable, people, and pay a little bit of attention.
There will be no blog post today. The requirements of the Missoula XC preclude my fealty to the attention to detail to which you are accustomed, and which you deserve. I have no excuse beyond that I am sleepy. I hope that you will find it within yourselves to forgive my sloth, and check back next week for a new and exciting edition from The Gentleman at Large.
Race season is here! pc: Tom Robertson
There will be no blog post today, but not for lack of thoughtfulness. I tried, I really did! I even had lots of ideas.
I considered for a while that only two weeks after the last edition, we’re already past due for a third installment of the God Bless Our Parks series.
I thought about laying out a study on how long a person can subsist (thrive?) on caffeine and cortisol alone.
I explored for a few minutes how our current national discussion might be different if that bigot from New York had been arrested on a fluke but that redneck from Indiana had carried of his plan instead. Would the conversation still have migrated toward xenophobia? Or would we have considered for a moment that religious extremism is religious extremism whether the evangelist is brandishing a Quran or a Bible, and that heaping additional punishment on the perpetrator of a violent crime (to say nothing of his or her community) based on his or her ideological convictions is a violation of the rights guaranteed to said violent criminal by First Amendment to the Constitution of Our Great Nation, and that if we actually have any interest in stopping such violent crimes we might be better off exploring the disenfranchisement and alienation that fuels extreme ideology in the first place. And that’s not even to mention that there is only one common thread that runs through every single mass shooting foreign and domestic, which exists more consistently than ideological extremism and even hate. That is, of course, that a gun was used to kill a large number of people.
But then I figured that by press time we’d all have just shrugged our shoulders and written off violent crimes like those that took place in Orlando and Los Angeles the other day as inevitable, as an unfortunate byproduct of living in the Best Goddam’ Country On Earth, and gone on with our lives. (Well, some of us, anyway.) I was also busy with race promotion stuff, and didn’t have the opportunity to read up on today’s mass shooting; I was worried the post might have come off as stale. In the fast paced world of blogging, it’s important to stay relevant!
So to you, my adoring fans, I am sorry. But I promise to do better next week with a new edition of witty, biting, and insightful commentary on how you’re hanging the toilet paper wrong, or the best way to level a wobbly table in a restaurant, or something. But to tide you over, here is a quick clip of what I’m pretty sure Teddy Roosevelt had in mind when he founded the Park Service:
