I was ten years old in 1986. I remember that year very well.

The reason for my better-than-average recall (for me) is because that was the year that I became functionally an adult — it was when my cogitation noticeably transitioned from some remaining childish notions to fully fleshed-out and abstract. I don’t think I’ve gotten really that much smarter since then, just learned a few more facts.

I could’ve functioned just fine in the adult world at 10 years old if you’d transplanted my brain somehow into an adult body. Which explains why I was vastly bored and disgusted with everything around me for the next eight years.

In many ways, I was a better thinker then because I was more open to new ideas than I am now.

My fifth grade teacher luckily recognized this and pretty much exempted me from class and let me do what I wanted. She was great. Just an empathetic, intelligent and hysterically funny teacher. The kind of teacher that is now leaving the field in droves, I might add. (I just did.)

But this shows how small a town I lived in: the teacher that I mentioned above, some nosy Googling tells me, is now married to a former friend of my dad who was an uncle of my dad’s closest childhood friend — all of whom are also related to me by blood in various ways. So I was actually a relative in some way of my first grade and fifth grade teacher, and also probably others — and now am by blood and by marriage.

The teacher mentioned above called me “Mr. Science” because she (to her credit) quickly realized that I knew much more about science than she did, and allowed me to explain science- and tech-related things both to her and to the class. Endear me that did not, but by that point I was well past giving a crap.

1986 is a year I remember well, as years go.

It was also the year of the flood, which I’ll write about later.

Improperly-rigged heavy drops.

I used to be in a unit that did these. Heavy drops always go first for just this reason. Paratroopers follow. One can see why the opposite might be a problem.

My unit used to drop tanks from the air. This is no longer done, but wow was that a sight to see. They were M551 Sheridan light tanks — “light” in this case still means they weighed 34,000 pounds each.

Below is a pretty decent video of what I used to do for a living. I’ve jumped out of both those aircraft types onto that specific drop zone many times.

Jesus Christ. I just realized that I now use VMs as “tabs” for programs that don’t properly support tabbed operation, or sometimes even when they do.

This is getting out of control.

Consciousness as result of sexual selection – a showy peacock’s tail, a bower bird’s staged abode — functional purpose being attractive to a potential partner but in this case not (only) resident in one sex.

As such like most sexually-selected traits, it reduces fitness but also advertises one’s high levels thereof.

This is probably not a new idea. Truly novel ideas are very, very rare. But I thought of it myself and I’m pretty proud of that.

Chances of being true, even partially? I’d say five percent. Or about the same or better as any other idea about consciousness.

“Loosening up” isn’t something I do.

I’ve never done it. I’ve seen others do it, yes. But I have no idea what it feels like.

Not when I’m sleeping. Not when I’m resting. Not when I’m wide awake.

Even alcohol doesn’t work. It changes my demeanor not one whit.

Yes, I can feel its effects. I hate that it makes me slower. Mostly alcohol just annoys me because it means I could not fight and could not run very well if needed. But I don’t really feel any different other than slightly stupider. And grumpy at my slowness.

Even with four glasses of wine in me.

Reasons I don’t mingle with normals: this one is among them.

Though I am very interested in AI, I think the focus on consciousness is probably misguided.

I used to believe the direct opposite of this by the way, but I’m not sure anymore that consciousness is even important, much less necessary to create even a human-level AI.

Cognition without consciousness. Intelligence without same. Seems outlandish — because we get to define “consciousness.”

But consciousness itself just might be an adaptive trick to boost limited mental capacity to something actually useful in the world. More useful than not possessing it, that is. Not necessary for anything less limited. Or it might be something else altogether. But I’m no longer convinced it’s necessary. In fact it might even be harmful.

Of course one can argue that if you’ve simulated consciousness, then that is no different than consciousness.

I don’t have a strong rebuttal to that contention.

But.

It’s only contingently the case that the withdrawal reflex is adaptive. It’s completely unconscious. I don’t see any reason why other more complex actions that in humans are “conscious” could not be arrayed just as the withdrawal reflex.

I know, it sounds ridiculous to talk this way as our entire mental architecture is against it — but I can imagine an “empathy reflex” or a “navigation reflex” with no gestalt, with no “thinker” needed or present.

It seems to me that what we think of as higher-level thought is just an accident of adaptation, that this can exist just as well without the architecture of consciousness in a different environment.

Meaning without a “meaner.”

These ideas could be completely wrong. I don’t know. But I’d rather have big questions out there than spend my life in boring certitude.

The problem with utopian visions like these is not that they are impossible. No, they are completely possible. There is nothing in an economic system like that incompatible with human nature. (The hunter-gatherer thing is outlandish, but let’s ignore that for the moment.)

The problem is that there is no credible path from here to there. None at all.

We are at a local maximum. There are several very dreadful local minima nearby that it’s easy to roll down into from here — such as climate-caused collapse, or nuclear war, or ecological collapse separate of climate change.

There are better local maxima — far better — but they are up slopes so steep that the chances of climbing them are basically nil. Not now, not ever.

I don’t believe there is a way around this. And perhaps that itself is human nature, that it’s impossible to transition to other much-more-beneficial local maxima without utter disaster.

Clementine 1.3 is out.

Hell yes — the only decent music player on the Mac platform. Perhaps it’ll’ve eliminated some of the bugs, like failing to advance to the next track.

What’s also supremely bizarre in those infected by some sort of Hillary malady is the contention in previously-sane people that millions of dollars donated to her campaign will have absolutely no effect on her policies — and that even discussing it is absurd.

What are these people smoking? Especially since some of these same people have argued in the past against the corruption that results from campaign “donations” (aka bribes), and have advocated reforming campaign finance laws as the process is inherently corrupt and corrupting.

I can’t understand any of this. Is it really that scary that your house price might fall 5% or that poor people might get something a bit better, or that SSI might be improved?

Paul Krugman Doesn’t Understand The 2008 Financial Crisis.

Neither does Kevin Drum — everything he now writes about the financial crisis, NAFTA and trade is either wrong, misleading or an outright and obvious lie.

Hillary Clinton-itis is an chronic and persistent infection whose symptoms include extreme historical retrograde amnesia, disconnection from reality, frequent hallucinations and the tendency to now ignore past shenanigans of an entire class of financial parasites because the status quo might be altered a bit.

It is mostly indicated in older white males, but its etiology being unknown sometimes it appears inexplicably in younger white females. Though the disease is currently untreatable, post-election trauma care such as intensive cognitive behavioral therapy after said candidate turns out to be a Goldman Sachs myrmidon with warmonger tendencies no different than her predecessor and his predecessor can ameliorate and sometimes even completely reverse the effects.

At this time little to no research funding is directed at this life-altering ailment, and further treatments are not expected.

If I had a daughter, I’d name her “Moniker.” Everyone would think her name is “Monika.” However, her name is actually the name of her name.

Her middle name would of course be “Recursion.”

I am sure she would murder me by her early teens for all this.

There were hints of it in 2008, but with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 candidacy it has become completely obvious that many people who term themselves “progressives” are about as progressive as John Boehner.

Among them are Paul Krugman, Sarah Kendzior, Charles Blow and so many others.

I don’t support Sanders. I won’t vote for him and I think he’d make a fairly ineffective Carter-esque president.

Nevertheless, he’s the nearest thing America has had to a true progressive politician in many years. That his proposals aren’t seen as “realistic” in the current political climate is the entire point.

American progressivism is just a variant of neoliberalism these days.

Not sure why I’m writing about it. I don’t think the current system is tenable or fixable. Sanders won’t and cannot fix it. But pretending HRC is the safe choice is just delusional. She’s the safe choice if you like even faster collapse.

Things I learned the hard way in IT:

• If a user claims there is “no vital data” on a computer, never believe them. Even if they insist, even if they claim you are wasting their time. Image the fucking hard drive if you are upgrading. Just image it. Users are completely clueless about where their data resides, or even if there is data.

• If a department claims “no one uses this server, it can be decommissioned,” first power it down. If no one complains after a month, remove it from the server room (if physical) or the virtual environment (if virtual) but DON’T GET RID OF IT for at least two years. I’ve had servers in environments that are only used once a year (at tax season, for instance). Two years full retention of server image (not just data) is usually enough.

• If a telecom vendor tells you 30 days, expect 90+. If they tell you 90 days, count on 180+.

• If a programming group complains about performance and blames infrastructure, learn enough about their code and their databases to be able to read the code and to debug their programming and DB issues. It’s almost never an infrastructure problem, and anyway throwing more hardware at a programming or database issue gets very, very expensive very, very quickly. In some environments, I’ve understood more about what the code was doing at the machine level than the programmers themselves did. (This is not actually uncommon among really good systems administrators. SAs have to know nearly everything about everything — programmers only have to know how to code.)

• If you have a manager in IT with an MBA, chances are you are going to have a bad time.

• If a user claims they have rebooted their machine, also never believe them.

The argument that adult humans shouldn’t drink milk or consume milk-related products because no other mammal does so past the infancy period is a fundamentally stupid one.

Some other arguments in the same vein:

1) No other animal cooks their food. Seen any wildebeest or kangaroo cooking? No? Then humans should not.

2) No other animal* practices organized agriculture. Therefore humans should not.

3) No other animal ferments their food. Therefore humans should not.

4) No other animal uses utensils to eat**. Therefore humans should not.

The problem is that some people think because they are lactose-intolerant or otherwise don’t like milk, no one else should be allowed to drink it. Some liberal nutjobs even think milk is racist because more people with African heritage tend to be lactose-intolerant.

But here’s the thing: don’t fucking like milk, don’t drink it. More milkshakes for me.

Problem solved.

*Yes, I know about the damn fungus ants. Read about them when I was six or seven. Most people don’t, though.

**Yes, I know about stick-using corvids, chimps, etc. See above.

I hate the phrase “thinking outside the box,” mainly because of its misuse in business environments.

But I have noticed that a lot of people just get…stuck. Inexplicably. Where I work, there is an entire team of people when one thing goes wrong, they get stuck for hours. Irrevocably, until someone effectively reboots them.

Something I’d just skip over and try to find the answer later (or make my own), everything on that team comes to a dead halt, like a car out of gas on the edge of the highway.

Often I’m not even the closest to the smartest in the room but I rarely if ever get halted like that. I’m expert at dodging around, finding another answer, doing something a different way, even charging ahead where someone has told me I could not go. And I don’t care much about rules or breaking them, so that helps too I guess.

Increasingly I’ve observed that people objectively much smarter than me have trouble doing what I do because they just got immediately mired in quicksand that I dance over without even realizing it’s there.

Don’t think any IQ tests can measure that, even as much as I believe they are measuring something.