Global warming is a fact. The earth’s temperature has been rising steadily throughout the course of the past 150 years, and will continue to warm into the future.

That having been said, Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” does not present all of global warming. Yes, it presents the realities of climate change, yes the trend of global warming as depicted in the movie is definitely going to happen. Unfortunately, the movie pins the cause of all of this warming on atmospheric carbon dioxide, and ignores the other factors which contribute to global warming.

The movie focuses specifically on greenhouse gasses, because the focus of the movie is to call everyone out to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. CO2 emissions specifically. I sincerely hope that this movie calls many people to enact actual change of CO2 emissions.

There’s another side to global warming, though. There are many scientists who have other things to say about global warming, but their findings are called into question, and their motives called into question as well. If people say things which are perceived to run contrary to the popular model of global warming, they are immediately flagged as being paid off by the petroleum industries. This is both fortunate and unfortunate. Fortunate because it reduces dissent, and unfortunate because the full truth is not understood. There are more ways to help affect global warming than just carbon dioxide emissions.

Many of these scientists want to promote their views, but they go about it the wrong way. They come up and say “Here’s my findings on global warming. It’s not caused by greenhouse gas emissions, it’s caused by ______.” When they say this, it generates dissent about the greenhouse gas theory, and is harped on by business to help delay regulations reducing CO2 emissions. What these scientists need to be saying is “It’s caused by greenhouse gas emissions, as well as _____.”

Everyone is rallying behind CO2 emissions, which is a good thing because it will effect change, but there are many other things contributing to global warming as well, and I am afraid that a policy tuned merely towards greenhouse gas emissions may not succeed. Also, I believe that these scientists, if they listened to each other, could come up with solutions that would help not only reduce CO2 emissions, but help solve other problems as well.

There are a number of other causes to greenhouse gas emissions that are commonly overlooked. There are three that I would like to talk about right now.

Natural warming of the earth
Warming of the sun
Urban development

1. Natural warming of the earth:
Robert Essenhigh, E.G. Bailey Professor of Energy Conservation in Ohio State’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. Professor Essenhigh follows the research of Cambridge University geologists Nicholas Shackleton an Neil Opdyke, who reported that global temperatures have been oscillating steadily over the past one million years. There is a natural warming and cooling cycle going on, and we are currently in the warming phase. The hockey-stick graph which Al Gore presented, is not the most commonly accepted temperature graph among climatologists today. The other graphs show more of an oscillation in temperature, but still show that rising curve today. In 1850, according to ice cores drilled in Greenland and recorded temperature, there was a significant low temperature. The temperature in 1850 was definitely lower than the temperature was during the medieval times. We are coming out of a valley, and ascending a peak, so there is a significant natural portion of the warming cycle which is contributing to global warming.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/06/010615071248.htm

I definitely believe that we are currently in a natural warming cycle. I definitely believe that this is contributing to the observed temperature increase of the past century. I definitely do not believe that it is the only factor of global warming, and that when the earth’s natural cooling cycle begins all of our problems will be over.

2. Warming of the sun:
Another camp of researchers, a cross-national team of Swiss and German scientists have come up with another reason for global warming: natural warming from the sun.

Dr Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research, said: “The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures.

“The Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently - in the last 100 to 150 years.”

Dr Solanki said that the brighter Sun and higher levels of “greenhouse gases”, such as carbon dioxide, both contributed to the change in the Earth’s temperature but it was impossible to say which had the greater impact.

This team believes that both the sun and carbon dioxide emissions are contributing to the warming cycle. I believe in this research, and I am glad that Dr. Solanki isn’t arguing that the sun is the only cause of global warming, but it definitely shows that the earth is going to be getting hotter.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/07/18/wsun18.xml

3. Urban sprawl
John Christy, head atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama, did an interesting experiment in atmospheric temperature change over the past century. This study showed that most of the global warming over the past century has been recorded on ground thermometers, and not recorded on thermometers in the atmosphere. He and a colleague poured over the temperature readings from weather balloons and satellites in the atmosphere over the past 50 years.

Their research found that the amount of observed temperature increase in the atmosphere is not nearly as significant as the observed temperature increase in the atmosphere, although there is a slower warming trend up higher. This research shows that, while there is significant global warming, greenhouse gasses are only one part of the global warming. To find his answers, he searched closer to the ground.

Cities are expanding rapidly. What used to be countryside – fields, trees, and natural areas are rapidly being replaced with concrete, asphalt, and buildings. These building materials definitely have an effect, called the Urban Heat Island Effect. Temperatures in cities like Atlanta, the temperatures in the cities are 5-6 degrees celsius greater than the surrounding countryside.

Unfortunately, this effect of the heating up will also affect the surrounding areas, warming the climate in and around the cities. As man does more and more of this, it will greatly raise the surface temperatures. The building of cities has been incredibly rapid over the past 100 years, and has contributed to the observed warming of the planet, and also helps to explain why, while the greenhouse gasses are producing a definite warming effect, the observed atmospheric temperatures are rising more slowly than the ground temperatures, which is an indication that there are more factors in play than greenhouse gasses.

These cities and asphalt are raising the earth’s temperature. They’re trapping heat in the concrete and asphalt, they’re rising the temperatures on the surface. They’re playing a large role in global warming. These cities are also the greatest producers of greenhouse gasses, and the single greatest cause of deforestation. As more and more people live on this earth, there is more building of developments, urban and suburban sprawl, and more destruction of the earth. These also cause irrigation issues – people live in areas and put huge drains on water supplies that would naturally be going to keep the terrain the way it is, and this creates desert areas. The spreading of the Gobi desert in China is a definite example of this problem.

Global warming is caused by both natural and manmade factors. There’s nothing that we can do about the natural causes – we can’t make the sun shine less bright, and we can’t change the natural warming cycle. We can do something about the other things though, the manmade things.

“An Inconvenient Truth” calls us to be more ecologically aware, and to reduce our greenhouse gasses. I call everyone to do more than that. We need to not merely be carbon neutral. We need to come up with ways to compensate for deforestation. We must come up with ways to live more in balance with the environment in all aspects of our life, in all the ways that we affect the environment.

Living in Taipei has given me an interesting idea. There are a lot of layers built up one on top of another here in Taipei. A lot of the buildings have grasses and plants on the roofs. There are underground car parks that have parks on top, and if you’re walking around on ground level, you think it’s a park. There are ways that we can build plants and life on top of our cities that would help replace forestation. We can plant trees on our rooftops, grasses on top of our buildings. It would create much more green space. We wouldn’t have to travel miles and miles to enjoy a park. All we’d have to do was walk to the roof of our buildings to enjoy some trees.

Reduce your carbon emissions. Live closer to work – it’s more convenient for you. Help get public transportation in your cities, and use it when it’s more convenient. It’s okay to have a car and use public transportation, you can do both – just don’t fall into the mental trap that if you have a car, you should always drive it around. Busses and metro systems could really be much more convenient. If I’m going across Taipei, sometimes I’ll ride a motorcycle, and sometimes I’ll use the metro system. The United States needs better public transportation.

Vehicle emissions aren’t even the main CO2 producers. Coal power plants are probably the single biggest creator of carbon dioxide. Find ways to make alternative power cheaper. Lobby your congresspeople to put taxes on coal, and to provide incentives for using greener technologies such as Nuclear, Wind, or Hydroelectric.

Plant trees in your yard. The shade they provide will help cool the area around them. They will help neutralize some carbon emissions, but they’ll also help to restore the kind of landscape that existed before humans came.

Carpool. It’s cheaper. If you’re making a commute everyday to work, and a coworker lives nearby, ride with him. Switch off days. It’ll save you both a lot of money, especially with gas prices the way they are. It’ll help to save greenhouse emissions. It’ll be an extra car off of the road, which will help ease traffic congestion, and will help everyone arrive faster.

Lobby your local government to provide incentives to carpoolers. Try to start a program which refunds gasoline taxes to people who can prove that they carpooled. Lobby them for carpool lanes if you’re in a larger area. Less cars on the road means everyone gets there faster. Less cars on the road means fewer roads needed to be built.

This isn’t to say don’t use your car. I love driving. I love cars. Use your car, drive your car, but make the best use of it. If you use it for recreation, don’t drive at rush hour. If you use it for a commute, try to find someone to carpool with – it’s nice to have company. Don’t add to traffic congestion – if people distribute out the times that they drive, less time would be spent on the road for everyone. Less greenhouse gasses would be produced from cars just sitting in gridlock. Driving would be more enjoyable for everyone. If I had the choice between driving in gridlock all day, and taking public transportation, I would definitely choose public transportation. I want to drive and enjoy it. I want to feel the road underneath me and really get to move. Driving in gridlock is a frustration. Don’t do it unless you have no choice.

Hypermedia
(Hypermedia blogging community)

A random jumble.

The internet is a collection of knowledge in short snippets. There is audio, video, text, and images. There are all of these things floating around in cyberspace. Blogging is important because it allows a lot of people to publish their ideas ontot he internet, but the idea of blogging can be extended greatly. Bloggers are constantly pushing their blgos into more and more complex technologies. There are podcasts, video podcasts, videos (ala youtube), images (flickr), news (digg), information (wikipedia).
All of these things are available for the blogger to cut apart and stick in his/her blog. Unfortunately most blogging takes advantage only of text.

The next generation of blogging is no doubt going to become and is headed to a multimedia blogging experience. Mixed medias, pictures, images, etc. All of these things can be arranged and rearranged to create knowledge. If a system were generated to easily incorporate video, audio, and text, cut them apart, snip them, put them back together again, it would greatly allow humans to reorganize data in meaningful ways.

This is the theory of the cutup. With all of the information out there, people can rearrange it from its original form to create new revelations. It does not have to be random, it can be human-guided and still provide insight. I believe that a system which encourages the mode of the cutup for blogging is one that would definitely succeed.

Right now the limitation appears to be on the attention span of the reader, all of the other media need to be organized into something that is short and that the user can observe and understand within a short period of time. More time generally means more bandwidth, and bandwidth is the limitation of the internet.

Anyway, sorry that this is all a jumble, but I will be updating with details in the future.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2004/08/03/primetime.html for further reading

Thanks,
Mike Minneman

I’m currently reading a book entitled We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. The book describes a dystopian future similar to that of Orwell’s 1984. In actuality, Orwell drew most of his inspiration for 1984 from this book by Yevgeny Zamyatin. I’m going to refer to the author of this book from now on as simply YZ, since typing out the romanized version of his cyrillic russian name is, quite simply, ridiculous. Anyway, this book was “published” in 1920 or 1921, I can’t remember which, but it was during the time when the communist ideals and the marxist government systems were gaining popularity and power. This work seems to be a satirization of the mechanization of man YZ sees the communist party attempting to accomplish. He looked at Henry Ford’s factory assembly lines for cars, and realized that they were a heavy influence on the minds of the communist party leaders. Those who wanted the society to work together and to become something other than humans, those who wanted the society to become machines.

The story is told through the main character’s seemingly journal-like entries. He records these because he is the builder of a spaceship which is supposed to send media and material supporting and explaining the views of their state and the extreme level of efficiency they have achieved and what sorts of things they need to do in order to achieve this. The main character, D-503, sees the world through a series of equations. Almost everything he thinks of has to do with the math behind it. When he is invited by a person to come to an auditorium, he looks at the mathematical probability of being asked to that specific auditorium by that specific individual. Everything to D-503 seems to be an equation.

Right towards the very beginning of the book, he looks at the sky and sees that it is clear. He thinks this is a thing of beauty because it has no clouds that make it mathematically imperfect. He thinks the love of clouds by his ancestors was incredibly silly, why should one be interested in suspended water vapor?

YZ very obviously does not actually share this view, and embraces and promotes this view to the extreme in this book in order to satirize the direction in which he thought his society and country were going. It is plain from some of his other works that he does not actually support this view, and looks at those automatic human beings as dead and not alive.
“It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.”

I really like the views put forward in this book, and I am only a few chapters into it, but it has gotten me thinking if our society isn’t so much like the dystopian society of the book. I feel that our society has a need to quantify everything, to force everything down into simplified expressions and equations. To make formulas for success. Efficiency seems to be the most highly revered ideal, and entropy, the most feared and loathed force in the universe. We are constantly attempting to rearrange our surroundings. We want to take the random groves of trees in the forest, cut them up to our specifications, and then build houses from them. Houses which were made from plans drawn up from architects. Architects, who were no doubt students at one point in time, and were told which the most efficent buildings are. What shapes need to be put together. What materials should be used for waterproofing and what angles work best to keep the house cool in the summer and warm in the winter. What types of designs make the best use of limited space in a city; what designs make the best use of cheap materials in the rural areas.

Architects who believe X1 + X2 + X3 = A good house, where X1, X2, and X3 are things such as money saved on heating, ease of obtaining the materials required, and price, among a good number of other things. These architects take this equation and turn it into different equations and schematics. The entire thing is a fight against the process of entropy.

Perhaps that last example wasn’t necessarily the best. I am not an architect, so I can only guess as to what things seem to govern most architects. I have developed my knowledge of architecture almost exclusively from that famous work of Ayn Rand’s, The Fountainhead.

I find other things in the life I currently live similarly formulaic, however. In school, we’re given a set of guidelines and rewarded a GPA at the end. Assuming every student is given the same mental faculties, we’re given an equation such which seems to be:

hours spent studying + accuracy of notes taken in class + attendance = GPA

 

We’re given these types of equations all of the time. Almost everything in our daily lives can be resolved down to equations that somebody or another taught us. Susceptibility to tooth decay = sweets eaten - (brushing + flossing). Even when we do the simplest actions such as tying our shoes, we follow a strict set of steps which has been given to us and handed down as knowledge from our parents and our grandparents. It’s yet another algorithm, a set of steps in order to make sure that your shoe does not fall off. Take the two strings, cross them, tuck one string under the other, pull tight, take one string and fold in half, wrap the other string around the midsection, pull through. It’s a set of steps that we’re given and we follow mindlessly, not realizing that it’s an algorithm. Not realizing that it’s programmed into our systems. We do these kinds of things each day.

 

Organized religion is another thing that seems to me to be another set of equations, another set of steps to meet an end. A procedural method for saving your eternal soul. It seems to me that modern Christianity has also fallen victim to this set of steps, to these rituals and these predefined steps which must be taken in order to become a Christian. Even as an evangelistic tool, the current-day church hands out a booklet entitled The Four Spiritual Laws, which outlines a procedure which, when followed through correctly seemingly equals spiritual salvation. The equation is something like this:

Believe in God

Believe in Jesus

Pray to Jesus to forgive your sins

Have faith that Jesus will forgive your sins

Go to church

Perform actions and deeds which show that you are indeed a Christian

Behave in the way that Christians behave

 

While I don’t disagree with all of it, I think that spirituality and having a relationship with God and with your soul is a lot more than a set of steps. People in Christian circles are always asking “are you saved?” “are you a believer?”. If the answer to this is “I have prayed to become a Christian,” then it’s accepted and taken for granted that you are a Christian. It’s also accepted that once you become a Christian, it’s not really possible for you to ever not become a Christian, and that if you stop exhibiting the behaviors of a Christian, that you were never really saved in the first place.

 

This is confusing to a lot of people because they are taught that if they say the prayer that they are saved. Unfortunately Christianity cannot be curtailed or codified into an equation as simple as the one that the church has to offer. It’s not that the Bible and the message of salvation aren’t true, it’s that they cannot be truncated into something as simple as a four-page booklet and a five minute speech given at a bus stop at 9:24 p.m. at the bus stop at the Allen Street Gate.

 

Our society seems to live by equations. We live by the bus schedules. I know that I personally seem to run my life around the bus schedules. It’s an extremely simple if-then statement.

 

IF(I get to the bus stop before one of the times listed on the bus schedule) THEN

I will get on the bus and I will make it to campus on time

ELSE

I am out of luck and I should probably start walking

END IF

 

Quizzes and tests are other examples of this sort of pervading mathematical mentality. These exemplify the biggest lie and fallacy that the schools teach children, and that is the falsehood that performance can be measured numerically. The falsity that the answers provided to a set of trivial questions listed on a sheet of paper can accurately reflect the performance of any individual. This formula is spread all throughout our society, and I think that you or I would be hard-pressed to find someone who has no experience with this system. Unfortunately, this system, as is the system of the Four Spiritual Laws and simplified evangelistic Christianity is one again completely invalid. The formulas and requirements for meeting these kinds of goals do not and cannot actually capture the soul of a man or the extent of his knowledge and expertise.

 

An interesting development is that it seems that teachers and professors are learning more and more that this rote memorized learning of tests and quizzes isn’t accurate. They have attempted to discard the old algorithm for academic success and are attempting to implement a newer one. This algorithm is called “Problem Based Learning.” This algorithm, PBL, for short is definitely an algorithm. It appears on the outside to be something new, something free. Students working on projects. Since you take out the completely obvious formulaic elements of the old system, then the new system must not be formulaic, and must encourage more freedom and flexibility.

 

Unfortunately just because an algorithm is different does not mean that it is not an algorithm. And if an algorithm cannot be applied to solve something, then changing the algorithm and deluding ourselves into the belief that it is not an algorithm isn’t going to actually help. I remember my CAS 100B class and the presentations we were given on “PMOPS”. PMOPS is the Procedural Model for Problem Solving. It is how to solve problem-based learning questions. It was a list of step by step instructions of things to do and steps to take in order to accomplish a goal. This to me is a clearly defined set of instructions, or, algorithm. It had a list of things for a group or individual to do in order to tackle the problem. It leaves the student to significantly freer use of his resources in order to accomplish the tasks set aside for him, and I think that it is better suited to achieve the needs of our current-day students, but I do not feel that it is completely right. I do not believe that it will work.

 

Those that are dead-alive do not make errors. They are completely procedural. They follow instructions given and do not make mistakes. Those people are the people who our society and our schools and our religious institutions make. They produce only dead things. Those who are alive-alive produce living things. Unfortunately it seems that there are fewer and fewer of us left.

Something that has interested me since before the movie “The Matrix” was a twinkling in the Wachowski brothers’ eyes is the idea of a virtual world in which the users interact as if they were actually living their lives there. One thing I’ve realized for a long time is that many online computer games do a good job simulating certain aspects of life in a virtual world. First person shooters, allow you to take on the role of someone else. For example, in counter-strike you can be a virtual counterterrorist agent fighting terrorists (or vice versa). Many games let you live out certain fantasies, but few “games” have been very all-encompassing.

Games such as World of Warcraft or Everquest preceding it have done relatively good jobs in creating fantasy world which are quite encompassing. You have the ability in these worlds to go around and buy and sell items, to make things, to sell the things you’ve made, to go on quests, and it’s very open-ended, but it does limit you on many things. You can’t own property, not everybody who is using WoW can see everyone else due to the split up of servers, the goods you can make are generally quite poor to what can be found in dungeons or rare boss drops, which forces you to primarily be a fighter instead of becoming a professional tradesman.

A couple of “games”, I use the term game in quotes because they are much more than games, have attempted to emulate life in it’s entirety. As far back as middle school, I was involved in a simulation named ActiveWorlds. ActiveWorlds was really the prototype for all that has come since - all of the alternative virtual lives. You could either be a tourist, or, if you paid (or obtained a stolen account in some of the less reputable places in ActiveWorlds)  you could own property, message people, shop for real-world goods, and just explore, make friends, and engage in an alternative life.

The simulation which has taken over and with wild popularity has largely replaced ActiveWorlds is a technology called “Second Life”. It’s free to get an SL account, but for premium membership you have to pay. People have started doing amazing things with SL. One of the key features is in SL you can own land AND property, and also there is the ability to create objects through a highly capable object editing system. The clincher is that SL “linden dollars” can be converted to or from US$, which enables characters to pay real money for virtual objects, including land (there is a booming real estate business in SL - people have actually become real estate agents in SL and have been able to completely support themselves in the real world with the money they make from this), clothing, almost anything imaginable. People have created video games within SL which have been taken up by real-world producers and been created. People have actually made half-decent movies performed all by virtual actors in SL.

Anyway, it’s not totally there, and the controls are pretty wonky, but the future is here sooner than we might think.

Also, if any of you want to get an SL account (again, it’s free) and join me in a virtual Jonathan Coulton concert www.jonathancoulton.com, it’s on the 14th in second life, and he will be streaming live from an undisclosed location in the real world. Should be a blast!

Society seems to be creating larger and larger cities, while also rapidly expanding suburban areas. As the world’s population increases, so will the amount of people in our cities. Unfortunately with more people, there is a higher demand for resources of all types. Today I will be focusing on the demand for water.

Fresh water is incredibly important for mankind. We drink it, we clean things with it, we bathe with it, we even remove our waste with it. 2/3rds of the earth is covered with the stuff, but unfortunately most of it is not drinkable. Fresh water, is at a much higher demand. One daily activity which uses a large amount of water per person per day is bathing.

As time has gone on, bathing has become more and more regulated for the amount of water it uses. Originally most people took baths, showers came along later because they were quicker and because they used less water. The original designs of showerheads used a very high volume of water to wash an individual, but showerheads are evolving to use less and less water. There are “super saver” showerheads, and low-volume showerheads. Actually taking a bath is not nearly as commonplace as it once was, and shower times are being cut shorter and shorter. In order to save on mounting water costs, landlords are putting in these super saver showerheads, and trying to get their tenants to use less water.

Within 200 years, I think we will see another sort of revolution in bathing. With more demand on the water supply, water prices will rise, and there will be demand for a type of showering which uses less water. Hence, I propose a rough idea of the shower of the future:

The shower of the future will be very quick, possibly lasting around 1-2 minutes. I envision a design like a carwash where the shower will have multiple openings and will spray the individual from all angles. A quick rinse will serve to spray off dirt or any large materials. This will be followed by a misting with a soap-type cleansing substance. Finally, there will be a longer rinse, in which to clean all of the soap off. They might use towels or there might be some sort of air-drying process.

I envision the shower chamber as becoming smaller and more cylindrical, in order to conserve space, and also in order to surround the individual from all angles with jets. The jets will be of a pressure sufficient to wash with, but will not be so hard as to be uncomfortable. It will probably be an entirely enclosed unit, with temperature and other controls accessible from a console inside of the machine. The user will simply have to get in, turn it on, and be cleaned.

Well, I finished In Watermelon Sugar just a few minutes ago.

It’s a very sad book about a girl committing suicide from a broken heart, and a guy getting frustrated in his relationship and cutting off without a reason.

It has some very beautiful segments in it, and a lot of segments that really don’t make any sense to me.

It’s worth a read if you don’t really have anything else to do. It’s not too long - finishable in an afternoon or so.

You know, one nice thing about this week is that I haven’t really had a whole lot to do, other than chat on aim, on the phone with steph, and go to the music man tonight with robert. Most of my time has been free, just sitting around waiting for interesting AIM conversations, so I’m finally breaking myself away from sitting in front of this infernal contraption the whole day. Now I can take my tablet PC and sit with that on the ground beside me, and I can read while waiting for people to talk to.

Yeah yeah yeah, I’m on AIM all the time, but can you blame me? I don’t get a whole lot of social contact here.

Anyway here’s the books I’m reading and my current progression through them.

Freakonomics: halfway finished - don’t know if i’ll wind up finishing it anytime soon, it’s more of a book that you pick up and read pieces of, say ‘wow I hadn’t thought of that before,’ and ignore for a few days. The only thing is I’m not a huge econ fan.
Mere Christianity: 1/3rd completed - I really like this one, and when I’m feeling inspired to think about spirituality from a philosophical perspective, I pick this one up and read. Once again, not a sit down and read it cover to cover book.

In Watermelon Sugar: Halfway through - I expect to finish this book either today or tomorrow. It has some really beautiful lines, and I understand most of the plot, but a significant amount of this book still escapes me. I’ll let you guys know when I finish it how it was.

T.S. Eliot’s Book of Practical Cats: I pick this one up when I need some lighthearted poetry.

Anyway I went to the library today to pick up a couple more books since I’m going to finish In Watermelon Sugar quickly, and would like some more cover-to-cover books, so I picked up:

The Mouse that Roared and The Fountainhead.

At least I won’t be bored on the ride to chicago. I leave tomorrow - I need to set up my laptop so it’s running windows (right now it’s running suse enterprise 10) so that I can also catch up on some anime.

YEAH!!!

One difference about girls is that most of them are afraid of turning into their mothers. In my family, my mom is afraid of turning into her mom, and my sister is afraid of turning into our mom. This isn’t exclusive to my family, however, and I know that there are a lot of women out there who are deathly afraid of becoming their mothers. Recently on MSN Today, there was an article about “11 things that women never tell their husbands,” and there was also one that said “11 things that guys never tell their wives,” and one of them for women was “We are all afraid of turning into our mothers.”  The thing about guys though is that they did not list “afraid of turning into their fathers” as one of the things they don’t tell their wives. (Although number 6 or so agreed with the women’s list and said that men were afraid of their wives turning into their mother in laws).

So why is there a difference? Why are women afraid of their matriarchal heritage, while males are not afraid of their paternal heritage? In fact, it is quite the opposite with a lot of guys, they strive to be like their fathers, and even to outperform their fathers - to surpass them. Ken Griffey Jr. wasn’t afraid of turning into his father - George W. Bush wasn’t afraid of turning into his father. In fact, most guys tend to follow in the footsteps of their dads. Sons carry on the family businesses that their fathers ran, college students go into engineering because their fathers were engineers, auto mechanics were introduced to cars by their fathers - the list goes on.

So why does this fear seem to have such a large gender bias?

I would like to argue, although I by no means am sure that I am right, that this is potentially because of the changing role of the female in society. Over the last couple hundred years, the role of women in society has changed drastically. In the 1920s, women were granted the right to vote, and then jobs opened up to women, college started allowing female scholars, and instead of the stay-at-home-raise-the-kids role of the female, it has now become very similar to the male role in society. Women are going out and getting good jobs, earning money to support their families, and this whole female independence thing is really becoming a large movement. I think that part of the female fear of “turning into our mothers” is partly a subconscious fear of a loss of independence, and a return to the days of their mothers where they were significantly less powerful in society.

Feel free to discuss in the comments.

Murphy was running. Running to clear his mind. Running from his past, his life, his friends, his stresses, his achievements and his failures. Running from the wake of himself. It felt like if he stopped running, a wave of himself would overtake him. As his strides took him out of the artifical day of the undercity his lungs gasped full of fresh air. Cold air. Cold burning air that filled his lungs to the point of bursting. It was a good burn. The burn meant that he was more alive at this point than he ever would be during the civic daycycle.

The places he ran through were nice, there was some actual grass, and a clear of the dark grey sky. Humanity had long since replaced the stars with this opaque shield in its quest to defeat darkness. He could faintly see what he thought was the moon. Since it was a full moon, this was one of the few nights that it would be possible to make it out with the naked eye. Usually it was not strong enough to produce enough of an effect that it was visible.

He was glad to be outside. Being cramped inside all day forced to work on net codes and management of millions upon millions of lines of ancient code… code that never seemed to be designed properly, code that never had the right focus. Code that almost always would have been significantly easier to write from scratch. Unfortunately, the code running the net, like the city outside it were too similar. The city had been built on top of earlier cities seven or eight times. The deepest parts of the undercity were said to be over two hundred years old.

He realized that work was catching up with him. He leaned forward and sped up in an attempt to distance the thought from him.

He always set a timer for running. He wanted to make sure that he would be able to have enough energy to make it back - wanted to make sure that he would not wind up stranded in some part of the city he did not know. This time he had set it for half an hour. Half an hour out, half an hour back. One hour total. “Much more than anyone else I know could run,” he thought. He tried not to think about the hour. Tried not to think about the hour that he would have to be up at.

He ran against time.

He ran against fate.

He ran against himself.

He ran against the world.

He ran against existence.

Once, he had read an old book by a man named Albert Camus, titled “The Stranger.” Upon the initial reading, he hated the main character for his apparent disregard for all human values. Lately he had been growing to begin to think that Camus had the right idea. He wished he could merely exist and decide things based upon his whims.

Tonight, with the streets vanishing under his feet, he finally could. The timer beeped.

Murphy ran on.

Running through the dark alleyway, he could feel the cold air rushing past his skin. Step step step step step. Right foot, left foot, right foot, left, right, in for four steps, pause for two, in for four steps, out for four. In through the nose, out through the mouth.  When he first started running, he had no rhythm, now, the rhythm was everything. Running was a dance, his footfalls like a metronome as the solo wound up in intensity.

Bobsolo had always been decent at running. He was tall and lanky with long legs and seemingly endless stamina. He had always been able to get up and run a kilo or two, even without exercising very much. As a child he ran around all the time, playing, but as he got older, the places he could run grew fewer and fewer. He also lost interest in exercising when he was realized he could travel the world in his own mind when connected to the networks. Travelling had nothing to do with the physical body, except possibly for the barriers one set forth in his own mind. People didn’t run much anymore, since they didn’t really have too many reasons to leave their homes. The only ones that did were the few caretakers of the “mechanical maids” - a collection of various “dumb” robots which performed simple tasks. Some washed windows, others vacuumed, and still others would make rounds to pick up litter, keeping the city clean. Other than these few, the alleys were desolate yet clean - at least in the heart of the city where the affluent lived.

It was a about twenty miles from his residence before the first signs of poverty were found. Riding the maglevs, it would have zipped by in about a minute and a half. The maglevs only went from city to city, and only in the industrial districts, carrying the middle and upper classes to and from their jobs. The lower classes rode in a subway, stopping every couple of blocks to let people in and out. The undercity was home only to the lowest classes of people; those still considered homo sapiens.

Solo was light and graceful, a perfect example of the transhuman. At one point in the evolutionary process, the differences between man and machine were clear. Nowadays, in 2185, there was no more difference. Man and machine had been blended, forged together, to create one symbiotic being. One symbiotic being that was now running through the alleys of the outer city. The alley dead ended up ahead. Without losing rhythm, he leaped up a few feet from the wall, pushing downward and throwing his body up as his right foot collided with the brick impediment to his path. His hand crested the top, his cut-off glove met the corner with grip… he pulled, swinging his entire body up and over.

y=-x²+12, a perfect arc.

One two three four Pause two One two three four blow it out through the mouth. As he bounded through the flickering lights of the outer city, he felt completely and wholly alive. The twilight of humanity’s continued battle against the dark pulsed and hummed as electricity pulsed like humanity’s heartbeat.