Arable land map

One may wonder how a geographically small country can have a bigger population than another country with four times as many square kilometers of land. Of course, not all land is able to support the human. Some of it is less productive than the open ocean. To reflect this reality, some day I would like to draw a world map that does not show “land” and “ocean,” but instead “highly arable land” and “everything else.” Such a map would show why the Netherlands and Spain have long been comparable in power and population.

Land has multiple levels of productivity, and there are some maps that show this. But the effect I desire is to show less productive land as continuous with the ocean, literally leaving archipelagos of rich farmland. Maps are terribly entertaining, and this is an idea that merits a lot of experimentation, so this is just the kernel of it.

Humor & Sincerity

Some time ago I got the sense that my generation was in part distinguished by playing with the boundary between humor and sincerity, or sarcasm and sincerity. The boundary between the two is obscured, and a sort of pure wordplay ensues. My friends and I would toss around one sentence after another concerned with their quality as sentences, rather than how they related to the real world, or sometimes even to each other. I no longer think of this as a characteristic of my entire generation.

On the one hand, this may have been limited to my group of friends. On the other hand, other people play with the boundaries of seriousness all the time. On the third hand, I look forward to joking around fluently with those good friends again some time.

On Agriculture

These days it seems that in the rich parts of the world, no more than one percent of us work in agriculture. That won’t do. As I understand it, most of the unsustainable practices in agriculture are there because we try too hard at efficiency. More food with fewer farmers. But, agriculture is the most important thing that we do, so why cut corners? I know a certain gentleman who has earnestly studied soil, et cetera, and he suggested that really it ought to be ten or twenty percent of us working in agriculture. Based on the evidence he presented this seemed agreeable. I may become a farmer myself.

Kleos DNA

Life may be thought of as so much self-replicating, self-perpetuating data. This is certainly a useful view when considering DNA, for example. When organisms seek to produce many viable offspring, they seek to perpetuate their data. Obviously those series of data which best avoid their own extinction are the ones which survive — it is a tautology.

I take a somewhat expanded view when it comes to the identity of, say, a human being. We are certainly genetic data, but we are also composed of data stored in the brain or in our associated objects. We may indeed be considered as partly existing in the minds and records of others — the data that constitutes us may be interpreted to include data which is about us.

If this is a worthwhile perspective, we might imagine that preserving our reputation is part of the same task as creating and preserving our own biological offspring. The data which constitutes us includes not only our DNA, but also the honor and glory which we have earned in our lives. In ancient times this was called “kleos.” If you have no children, you may yet seek to preserve yourself by earning great kleos. It is said that eunuchs were especially ambitious because, unable to seek immortality through having offspring, they could only seek it through a great reputation. Such a metaphorical statement about immortality is literally true when we think of a person as information.

Morning Routine

I am told that among many Zulu men, part of the morning routine is to go into the bathroom and vomit. This is supposed to be a “cleansing” activity; certainly it is effective in shaking off the haze of sleep.

A Little Dream

I once laughed so hard in a dream that I woke myself up.

In this dream, four or five copies of me were sitting around a table playing a game. It looked like I had been reflected through mirrors — all of us were the same age, wore the same long-sleeved white shirt, et cetera — but it was clear that each copy was in a different mood. It was as though the facets of my personality had been refracted out through a prism.

The game was one of these complex modern children’s games with whizzing marbles and colorful plastic pieces. There were two little plastic galleons with little spring-operated cannons that fired metal balls at each other.

One of the versions of me was slamming the lever and firing off the cannonballs as fast as possible. He leaned in with intensity, eyes glimmering with cheeky delight.

The others looked at him with concern. “Hey, don’t break it.” “Don’t be so harsh.”

He only pressed his attack more furiously, and yelled out, “No! More evil!” As he cackled maniacally, the rest of the group cracked up too, and I started laughing so loudly that I woke up.

At the time I was living in tight quarters with a very pleasant roommate, who confirmed that I had indeed woken myself up laughing, and wanted to know what was so funny. I told him what I remembered of the dream, and he agreed that it was pretty good.

Eating

I suspect that there are languages which are very parsimonious with verbs about consumption, and this would be possible in English as well. We could imagine “eat” standing in for “drink,” as in “I had to eat a lot of water after that bike ride.” This could extend to “take,” as in medicine, in the same fashion — “Eat two aspirin and go to bed.” I have for many years enjoyed indulging in such word games with my closest friends.

Antarctica

In the deep winter, the icy weather and long nights are reminiscent of outer space. Indeed the cold of a winter night is the same cold of distant interplanetary space. Much of the reason that winter is so cold is that the heat built up during the day has a longer night-time to escape into the chilly blackness of space. Whatever heat there once was radiates out into distant space, never to return. I once read a science fiction story describing what would happen if the sun were to stop shining — layers of nitrogen and oxygen snow many meters thick; the sky hardened into a merciless starry vacuum; and other horrifying images. Even in summer, when I recall that but for our proximity to a functioning star, we would be frozen solid, I shudder with primal fear.

Life is about fighting entropy, of course. Human exploration of space is a part of that effort. In some places, winter on Earth is similar enough to space that we can run partial tests of space missions without leaving the planet. There is the famous Russian case of a half-dozen people living in a tube for a few years. We need more of this sort of experiment. I propose, for example, that we set up a permanent base deep in Antarctica as a test run for generation ships and planetary colonization. Our Antarctic base would run on solar or nuclear power, it would have a fully sealed, internally-recycling air system, and we could even simulate a time delay of communication with Earth. We might set up such a base to run for five years, or ten years, or many hundreds of years, without interference. Of course, we can’t very well detain the offspring of the original experimenters in the base against their will, especially if they’re only as far off as Antarctica, rather than, say, the outer solar system. But it would be worth considering such a system and probably worth building it. By definition, once a self-sustaining base is built, it is free to operate; and the data it produces would be very valuable indeed. Experiments of living in a tube for very long periods of time are perhaps not glamorous, but they are certainly necessary and honorable. I think of this kind of experiment from the point of view of a potential volunteer myself.

Future Activities

Imagine a future in which we achieve the great promise of civilization and solved all the major social problems. Wars, famines, great inequalities, ignorance, and other such hindrances all put behind us. This is the hopeful vision of the future.

Some of my friends say we will never reach such a future — that we will always create conflicts, or that it is folly to think such progress possible in the first place. Some have said it would be boring or pointless to live in a world without grand problems of war, sickness, and fear.

These doubts may be warranted and responsible, and it is good to be circumspect and realistic when sketching a utopia. But to reject the hopeful future outright is the mark of a profound lack of imagination. It is also in a sense irresponsible. As the saying goes, “You say we can’t get there? Not with that attitude, we can’t.”

After we have solved all the social problems, there will still be an absolutely infinite realm of useful and wonderful activity for humanity to pursue. I mean principally the sports, the arts, and the sciences. I cannot imagine that we would ever lose our taste for a vigorous physical challenge like sumo, or a jaunty contest like baseball. The arts will be there to explore for all future time, and even in the struggle of history and the present we have found it not only pleasant but absolutely necessary to maintain and grow our skills and traditions in all the artistic fields. The joy of science is the same as the joy of the arts, and there will always be new and beautiful patterns to find in nature. If anyone doubts this, I recommend a brief study of invertebrate fossils, which have an astounding and subtle beauty — yet they are among the most humble subjects in all of science.

Meanwhile, human societies will always demand some organization, and even if there is no gross suffering there will be debates on every sort of issue. The political arts should not be forgotten. Adding civic duty gives four essentials. Any person who thinks that the hopeful future would be boring has missed each of these grand traditions, and has a very poor concept of B’z.

Word Dissection

One of the worst fallacies is to reach into someone else’s words and re-interpret them based on connotations of which the speaker was not aware, or based on etymology. “You say that ‘compassion’ means such-and-such, but the root of the word is ‘com-passion,’ so it really means this-and-that.” I will forgo further examples of this tiresome phenomenon. It is a pitiful kind of word magic, impressive perhaps during the fleeting moment that it is delivered, but bearing no weight in civilized arguments. Worst of all is when someone tries to turn a speaker’s words against them — not the speaker’s claims or premises, but the words themselves. Words do not work that way! We may know certain connotations and etymologies of words, but other speakers may not know or intend any such added meaning. A speaker’s utterances refer to shared social knowledge, so it is certainly possible to use words in the wrong way. Children and second-language learners make these mistakes all the time. But these mistakes are only technical, and cannot undermine any substantive claim. A rose by any other name is still the same plant. Verbomancy is to be avoided.