When I first started reading academic papers when I was 12 or 13, I wondered who the hell Ibid was. Seemed a very smart person.

Then I quickly figured it out. But at first (mainly because I didn’t care about it or think about it very hard since I cared about the content*), I thought Ibid must’ve been some huge polymath.

My memories aren’t 100% clear, but I think the first scientific paper I read was a paper by Kary Mullis (et al.) on the Polymerase Chain Reaction. I’d helped my neighbor pass her college microbiology and other science classes when I was 9 and 10, so I already had some background in the area.

Still, it was the hardest thing I’d ever read. I remember struggling with it a bit. No way to Google back then. Unfamiliar words had to be searched out in dictionaries that often didn’t contain them at all. No adult where I grew up knew more than I did, so there was no one to ask.

I don’t regret anything, but I always wonder if I’d grown up somewhere else what my life would’ve been like.

*To this day, I sometimes literally don’t know the title or the authors of books I’m reading — while I’m reading them.

Once you understand a little computer science, you realize that there is no possible antivirus program that detects all threats. It is not even possible in principle. It is flatly ruled out by at least two fundamental features of computation.

Antivirus however is not useless. As in most areas of life, most virus writers aren’t very skilled or are very lazy. Thus, AV programs have some use.

But against a skilled attacker (like the NSA or the Mossad), antivirus programs are basically completely worthless, even if these intelligence agencies have no special backdoors in place.

I need a Firefox extension that redacts all mentions on any webpage I’m viewing of these things:

• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter

• Anything by Amanda Marcotte

• Anything by George Will

• Anything Kevin Drum writes on economics

The list will grow, I’m sure.

Suspect even most very smart people — even the majority in the life sciences — do not understand how tightly intercoupled ecosystems and human life are on earth.

They imagine that humans are at some stage of transcendence of global ecosystems, when in reality due to our numbers we are more closely tied than ever. There is no way climate change is not going to be so close to apocalypse that quibbling over the differences will be just that — quibbling. But it’ll be the kind of semi-apocalypse that humans are bad at dealing with. That is, a long-term one.

Just an estimate, but I think about 99.5% of people have no idea how ecological systems and processes function and how fragile they can be, and how resilient at the same time in the wrong direction. Heck, probably 99.5% of people have no idea there are even such things as ecological systems and webs.

But what should make you worry all the more is that I suspect less than 20% of people who should know, don’t. Those being scientists in related fields.

I’d not be surprised that if in the future the surviving human historians when accounting for the decline of our civilization point to extreme specialization and weird math obsession rather than directly to climate change as the cause of the demise.

We’ve been told it’s not important that there are people who attempt to understand entire systems in toto as I always try to do. I think this is just a variant of neoliberalism attempting to banish real systems thinkers from understanding it and any other important system.

Because if you can understand it, you can change it. Or fight those who have already harmed it for their own profit.

Why do people put “art” on their walls that say things like “Live Laugh Love” and other such saccharine crap?

Try as I might I just can’t understand it.

What’s the message? Is it hopeful? Signaling? Who is the audience and what message are they supposed to receive? Do you need to remind yourself of that, really?

I have so many questions. The semiotics is beyond me.

Yep.

Hillary Clinton may not be indicted on criminal charges over her handling of classified email, but the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, all but indicted her judgment and competence on Tuesday — two vital pillars of her presidential candidacy — and in the kind of terms that would be politically devastating in a normal election year.

Any “regular” person knows they would’ve gone to jail for a good long time having done the same ill-advised and illegal things Clinton did (yes, mishandling classified materials is illegal even if you “didn’t mean to”).

And yes, I’d say the same thing if Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein or Donald Trump had done the same idiotic thing.

This almost assures Trump’s victory. Might’ve been better for her if she’d been indicted, because now Trump will (rightly) have a field day and every regular person will know definitively that she got special treatment that they never would’ve gotten, re-enforcing her “better than the rules” reputation.

Trump must be cackling with glee right now.

Any other year, this would’ve knocked any candidate out of the race. And her supporters can’t see why it’s even a bit of a problem.

What a year.

Why do older people have such trouble detecting phishing emails?

There’s a guy at work, pretty sharp, who is in his early 60s. Not cognitively impaired in any way. Has worked in IT for many years.

He got some phishing email that said something about, “Some questions on your expense report hotel booking” with of course a link to click on something.

I know because he read that part out loud. And literally before I could say “Don’t click on that!” (which I got the first words out) he clicked on it.

I ran over and pulled out his network cable. Machine completely infected, but no damage done because I jerked the cable within two seconds.

I literally heard the first few words and knew it was a phishing email. How could he not tell definitively?

The company I work for has been a target of various spear phishing attacks because we hold a lot of highly-sensitive corporate data. Suspect some of the spear phishing is corporate espionage attempts.

But the questions remains: why are older people generally so susceptible to such attacks?

Seinfeld was one of the most popular shows ever because it perfectly captured the vacuity and dreadful emptiness of American life.

It was better than any sociological study or ethnography, because it was an amplification from stochastic signals of the anomie and casual cruelty that did and still does dominate modern America.

There is nothing people like more than watching themselves, and at last Seinfeld gave them the perfect pinhole looking in on their own lives. Instead of inspiring revulsion and rejection of this abyss of desolation, people liked what they saw.

It’s no mistake a country like that will probably elect Trump president.

Sharpest ever view of the Andromeda Galaxy.

Arguing that none of those stars have planets with life — even intelligent life (whatever that means) — is dreadfully stupid.

Look how many there are. What makes us special?

If there is anything science has demonstrated is that we have no privileged place in the universe. We are not the chosen ones. This is why many people hate science, by the way. It robbed them of their illusions.

I have no idea if we’ll ever communicate with another form of life not from this planet*. But is it out there? Of course it is.

*Though I do suspect we’ll create our successors, given time. No, I am not talking about the fucking moronic Singularity.

As we increasingly rely on models and simulations, we’ll have to by necessity redefine what “simulation” means, and thus we will have also to re-evaluate and recontextualize the meaning, nature and scope of reality.

Simulation might not be real. But when simulacra alter reality and the collective societal nous recursively, simulation and reality are then conjoined and unitary — whether or not the simulation conforms to some now-invisible “true” reality.

Why America Is So Obsessed with Florida.

As a native Floridian, I can tell you that Florida really is just as bizarre as the stories coming out of the state portray it as being. In fact, more so. Because a lot of crazy stuff happens in which the police are never involved so they never make the news.

To quote a former friend of mine (who was a bit too Florida for me): “Most places, a pair of identical twin girls asking to drink your blood while you take pictures of them having sex would be unusual. In Florida, it’s just Tuesday.*”

*Yes, this really happened. I knew those girls personally and yes they were, uh, “friendly.” And thought they were vampires.

Sorry for the bad audio and potato video, but what a great song. And the guitar playing. Damn. What a hell of a duo Tanya and Kristin were. Any justice in the world, and they’d be as well-known as Robert Plant and Jimmy Page (because they are just as good).

If you are given a choice, you believe you have acted freely.

-Raymond Teller

I’m not in shape at all in any way and yet due to the plague of obesity I’m seen as some sort of elite athlete at work because I do things like go on 10 mile hikes with no prior training and climb up (really small) mountains.

Basically anything any non-disabled human should…just be able to do is now some remarkable feat.

I’ve seen also an increasing number of pieces lately where people just take obesity as something handed down by providence, completely unchangeable. I can’t understand this at all especially with how harmful it is and how miserable it makes one (what I care about the most personally).

But yes, I am an elite athlete because I can walk to my damn car without passing out.

In the near future, our superheroes will be those who can merely stand up unassisted.

Just what I don’t need: a cloud-connected keyboard.

Truth be told, all of our keyboards are probably already cloud-connected thanks to the NSA.