In case you still don't know what bitcoins are, or else would like to understand them better

Bitcoin is a decentralized, open-source, virtual currency created in 2009 by a man who went by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.  The true identity of this man remains anonymous to this day - only adding to the mystique of this already mythical currency.

A bitcoin, like a dollar, is a unit of currency, which means it is a medium for storing value and exchanging goods.  Unlike the dollar, however, the value of bitcoin is not backed by a military, nor is it centralized and issued by a central bank, nor can an infinite amount of it be printed.  More unlike the dollar, bitcoin is open-source, which means anyone, anywhere, with little more than a computer and a working knowledge of C++ (programming language) can learn precisely how bitcoin operates, and can participate immediately in the network.  The full code is here  

Essentially, what Satoshi did was to setup a protocol which would allow a network of users to exchange bitcoins with one another, where the transactions themselves are actually verified by each and every user.  That is, as a bitcoin user, you actually participate in ensuring that other people aren't trying to use bitcoins fraudulently.   This has enormous appeal, because it immediately prevents the possibilitiy of someone like a large bank or government from defrauding the entire network, the way they do, on a daily basis, with the Euro and the Dollar (ie. rigged interest rates, market manipulation, etc.). 

Bitcoins are created through a process called 'mining', a term chosen for its analogy to how gold and silver are mined.  Basically, mining requires that a miner devote a large swath of computational resources to solving a difficult math problem.  In return, the miner is awarded bitcoins.  But most importantly, the mathematical problem solved by the miner actually goes towards securing and validating transactions that take place using bitcoin.  How does that work?

Every bitcoin transaction that has ever taken place is stored in something called the block-chain.  The block-chain is made up of smaller units (blocks), each of which has a few hundred transactions.  The entire block-chain is publicly available to anyone who cares to look.  That is, every bitcoin transaction is public (though the IP address and identity of the buyer/seller may be hidden).  Again, major selling point for bitcoin.  You can literally watch transactions as they come through.  As transactions occur, they are added to the most recent block.  The miners attempt to add this block to the block chain by solving a difficult math problem, which involves encrypting the transactions themselves.  By succeeding, the miners are awarded bitcoins (this is built into Satoshi's code), and the transactions in the block they encrypted are added to the block chain, validated, and secured.  The further back something is in the block-chain, the more secure it is.  This is what makes it virtually impossible to defraud the bitcoin network by pretending you have bitcoins when you don't, or by spending the same bitcoin twice (since everyone is verifying ever transaction, they will notice you tried to spend a bitcoin twice, and will only accept one of the transactions in the latest block).

The protocol written by Satoshi mandates that there should only ever be 21 million bitcoins in existence.  Starting from 0, bitcoins have been mined and continue to be mined.  Today there are 11 million bitcoins.  Roughly every ten minutes, another block is encrypted (added to the block chain) and 25 new bitcoins are created and awarded to the miners that succeeded in encrypting it.  That 25 was 50 a few weeks ago, and will be 12.5 in the not too distant future.  From there, it will drop to 0 in the year 2140, at which point all 21 million bitcoins will be in existence and never another.  At that point, miners will not be awarded newly created bitcoins, but probably transactions will take on a 'miners fee' so that miners can continue to be paid for securing the integrity of the network. You too can start mining, but you may need to get yourself some specialized hardware at this point. Satoshi was clever enough to adjust the difficulty of the math problem to math the number of miners in the game - the more miners there are, the harder the encryption becomes (and the safer the transactions become!). It is all set up so that a block gets encrypted roughly every ten minutes

This is the basic essence of bitcoin.  There are many more details, but that is enough to know for now.  Given recent events in Cyprus, the general incompetency of governements, central banks, and fiscal policy, and the ever present desire for humanity to take back control of its resources and interpresonal exchanges from Big Brother, Bitcoin has emerged as a fantastic alternative to the standard nationally issued currencies.  Indeed, as the world economies continue to implode, we can expect to see the price of bitcoin continue to rise - barring of course a great scare or other black swan on the internet scene.

There are by now numerous virtual currencies, many of which have simply ripped the Bitcoin source code and made minor changes (it is, of course, open source).  These are worth pennies right now.  A bitcoin was worth pennies a few years ago.  Last year, a couple dollars.  Last month, a couple dozen dollars.  Right now, $190.  We are literally witnessing financial history.  Whether or not bitcoin will last through the decade is anyones bet, but virtual currencies are here to stay, and bitcoin is making waves.

To get started, you would do yourself a favour by reading extensively on the internet.  Start with the general FAQ . 

When you're up to it, get yourself a wallet (downloading one is safer than using an internet one, and making yourself an offline paper wallet is by far the safest thing to do.   Note this method does not work for macs, but alternatives exist, like using a virtual machine).  Find someone online that will sell you coins, or better yet someone local you can meet with to execute the trade.  Your bitcoins will then show up in your wallet.  At that point, you can hoard them in hopes of a continual rise in value, or you can spend them at myriad places on the internet, including ebay and reddit.  Of course, at any time, you can sell them to someone for dollars again.  But beware, the Fed is printing trillions of new dollars a year, banks are notoriously fraudulent, and the stock market is in one of its finest bubbles yet.  There will only ever be 21 million bitcoins, there will never be bitcoin fraud (though it is possible for someone to hack into your computer and steal your bitcoins, though this is highly improbable), and no one yet knows if what we're seeing is a bubble, or if this could be a real valuation of the novel financial medium.

As far as I'm concerned, the exploding price of Bitcoin is THE correction we've been waiting for in the markets for years.  Enjoy the ride! 

Life is just a fancy way for water to get around.

Most narratives of the evolutionary story focus rather predominantly on the notion of competition, of natural selection, of survival of the fittest.  Granted, the forces of natural selection are ever present in a resource limited environment (such as the Earth).  Organisms must compete with each other for nutrients, shelter, and mates, and those most successful in competition will be most likely to reproduce.  It is a well worn story, and it has been extraordinarily important in overthrowing an ancient obsession with anthropomorphized deities and creation myths.  But this is the 21st century, and as we mature finally into the era of a technologically competent whole globe societal system, with an ever growing population and an ever more apparent scarcity of resources (and competence...), it becomes essential that we re-evaluate our understanding of the development and maintenance of sustainable systems (such as organisms and ecosystems), if we are to avoid out-competing each other into nuclear holocaust.

Organisms are, fundamentally, sustainable systems.  That is their very essence.  They operate under meager inputs of energy and achieve efficiencies unheard of in human engineering (leaving aside those engineers now turning to bio-mimicry - we'll get to that).  They can withstand numerous large perturbations or disturbances (relative to their size), and in many cases come out not just alive and well but stronger than before (they are anti-fragile!).  They are enduring and productive, and in the case of humans (or ecosystems), capable of immense creativity and profound transformations of the physical environment.  Is all of this merely a matter of competition and descent by natural selection?

The simple answer is: most definitely not.  I contend, along with a growing number of others (mathematicians, physicists, ecologists) that much of the natural beauty and profound capacity of living systems derive not from the arms-race of natural selection but from the inherent pattern-forming processes that underlie the dynamics of our universe.  Life on Earth is a Cosmic phenomenon, and don't you forget it!

See, living systems are first and foremost physical systems.  They are built out of molecules and ions, and are as subject to the fundamental physical laws of the universe as anything else.  If we are going to understand their profound capacities for efficiency, work, and ultimately creativity, we must take stock of some physics.  Now, the laws of physics are unreasonably simple - I am not being facetious.  There is no reason that physics should be as neat and tidy as it is, given the overwhelming complexity of the physical universe.  But, fortunately for us (perhaps necessary for us), much of it is surprisingly easy to understand.  Of course there is the further matter of carrying out detailed calculations, but that is essentially irrelevant (if you are merely interested in ideas), and is ultimately designated to a computer.

To understand the physics of living systems, we begin with a simple system, a hot cup of coffee on a table in a room-temperature environment.  What is happening to our system, the cup of coffee, and to its environment, the room?  Clearly, the temperature of the coffee is running down - heat is leaving the cup (we can usually see it, and it is usually very pretty) and entering the room.  Why is it doing that?  Well, the coffee is made up of (liquid) particles bouncing around in a cup, and the environment is made up of (gas) particles bouncing around in a room.  The coffee is hotter, so its particles are moving faster, and so it is overwhelmingly likely for some of them to bounce their way out of the cup, and into the room, but it is not nearly as likely for particles in the room to bounce into the cup.  So heat (the bouncing of particles) leaves the cup.  When the temperature of the cup reaches that of the room, the chance of a particle leaving the cup and one entering the cup are the same (since they are all going at the same speed, on average), and so we say the system has reached equilibrium.

If given the opportunity, all systems will eventually reach equilibrium.  This is entirely a matter of statistics.  At equilibrium, things are relatively boring.  But on their way to equilibrium, things are much more interesting.  Indeed, the coffee-cup heat is only a simple example.  Far more fascinating are the patterns in rivers, galaxies, neurons, and trees.  Ultimately, all of these designs
stem from a common origin in the statistics of non-equilibrium systems.  Ultimately, I contend, this is the essential character of life on Earth, which is only supplemented and encouraged by the forces of competition and natural selection.

So let's make more concrete steps from coffee mug to living system.  First of all, consider a situation in which we maintain the heat of the coffee, say by keeping it on a hot plate, and the amount of coffee, say by having a constant (very small) influx into the cup to offset evaporation.  Then the system will dissipate heat indefinitely (and display beauty indefinitely in the heat patterns!), as it will never be able to reach equilibrium, since we continue to drive it by providing more coffee and more heat.  Such a system we call a driven, dissipative, non-equilibrium system, or just a dissipative system for short.  Its driven because there is constant energy input (coffee and heat), its non-equilibrium because there are gradients present (temperature difference between coffee and room), and its dissipative because heat is constantly leaving the system.

Living systems, similarly, are driven, dissipative non-equilibrium systems.  They are driven by sunlight (ultimately) and nutrients (more generally), they are non-equilibrium because they are chalk full of gradients and structure and interesting patterns (which don't occur at equilibrium), and they are dissipative because they give off heat (the reason night vision goggles work) and excrete waste.  So they are very much like our coffee cup.  If we did in fact let the coffee cool down, to equilibrium, we might then say that our system has 'died', since it no longer displays interesting patterns.  Similarly, for an organism, if we deprive it of food (nutrients and/or sunlight), it will die, eventually reaching equilibrium, where there are no more interesting patterns (like lungs and brains and fingers and bellybuttons and eyeballs).

Now, this tendency for systems to decay to equilibrium, to dissipate gradients, and to degrade the quality of energy available to them, is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics and is one of the hottest topics in physics, even to this day, despite it being over a hundred and fifty years old.  Essentially, the 2nd Law defines the sorts of processes we can expect to occur in the universe: a cup falls of a table and shatters into a hundred pieces, but doesn't spontaneously re-assemble into a cup; hot things cool down, but cool things don't heat up (unless you heat them); a drop of ink in a glass of water diffuses out until the concentration is equal everywhere, but doesn't spontaneously re-condense into a drop; and so on.  How is it then, in the context of a universe where gradients are always set to run down, that systems as complex as cells and organisms and ecosystems could possibly be built up?  Indeed, this is the standard argument of creationsists and religious folks who know only too little physics.

The key is driving and dissipation, as we noted above for the coffee cup.  A system which is driven and dissipative spontaneously organizes into wonderful patterns as it attempts, as best it can, to dissipate the driving energy.  The patterns that form in cigarette smoke are precisely these sorts of patterns - they emerge in the pursuit of dissipating the energy available in the form of burning tobacco.  The patterns that form in the Earth's atmosphere are similar - they emerge to facilitate the dissipation of the sun's energy into heat.  Hurricanes and tornadoes, which in and of themselves are highly structured patterns, emerge because they facilitate the destruction of many other surrounding patterns - ie. they facilitate the dissipation of gradients and the degradation of energy, in direct accord with the Second Law.  Self-organization in one place, then, emerges in order to facilitate disorganization in another.

On Earth, the primary system for dissipating the incoming sunlight energy is the water cycle.  The patterns of the atmosphere, which are many and quite formidable, exist because they facilitate the dissipation and degradation of the sun's energy.  If they weren't there, then sunlight would just bounce back into space with the same energy it had coming in.  But this is less likely, according to the Second Law, and so we have the formation of patterns in the atmosphere.

Living systems emerge as an extension of the water cycle, in its capacity to dissipate and degrade sunlight.  Life augments the ability of the water cycle to dissipate the sun's energy.  As a result, less sunlight is reflected back into space, and more heat is produced.  According to the Second Law, this is a favourable result.  So from the perspective of this analysis, Life is actually highly probable on a planet such as ours (with abundant water and carbon), as it complies directly with the Second Law of thermodynamics.  So, contrary to the argument of the creationist (which asserts that Living Systems, by containing so much structure, violate the second law), Life is actually a result of the Second law, since it facilitates the dissipation and degradation of the sun's energy on Earth.  Hence life is more favourable, thermodynamically, then no life.

So how do you like that?!  Life is just an extension of the water cycle.  Or, if you like, life is just a fancy way for water to get around!

At this point I think it is constructive to take note of the difference between Human engineering and Natural engineering.  Human's are concerned predominantly with the conversion of heat into work.  We burn liquid fuels, giving off immense amounts of heat (and patterns in the heat, but we mostly ignore these), and use that heat to drive turbines to produce electricity.  We know, however, and have known for as long as we've had the second law, that this process is fundamentally inefficient, in that one cannot convert all of the heat released into an equal amount of work (this is known as Carnot's theorem).  On the other hand, Natural engineering (if we may use such a phrase) is concerned with the exact opposite process, that of converting work into heat: sunlight comes in (work) and is dissipated as heat.  But in between, a whole myriad of processes occur which siphon off the energy of the sun and use it to drive the various cycles and reactions that constitute Life, before the energy is ultimately dissipated.  Somewhat paradoxically, energy ends up being stored in the system for an extended period of time, contributing to its highly ordered and structured dynamics and profoundly beautiful patterns.  In this way, living systems become thermodynamically favourable by adhering to the Second Law, and so are anti-fragile.  In contrast, human engineered systems are profoundly fragile - small mishaps can lead to devastating consequences.

I suspect that in the near future, we will learn to engineer society to derive all its energy needs from incoming sunlight, and to comply more directly with the second law, slowly siphoning off the energy for the myriad processes of our socio-economic system, storing it on board for extended periods of time, and finally dissipating it as heat.  In this way, we will become more thermodynamically favourable and ultimately anti-fragile.  We will become sustainable.

Intro to Information Theory

Information is everywhere, but that's obvious and everybody is saying it.  In a certain sense, at the very heart of experience, there is nothing other than information.  But that's a story for another day.  So what do we mean by information?  Certainly, there is a sense of relationship, of correlation, of geometry.  But can we make it precise?

We can.  Information Theory is extremely well developed and mathematically rigorous.  Here, we will briefly explore the basic intuitions that lie behind it.  In the future, we will explore its many consequences.

Everything starts with probability theory, more particularly, with the main object of probability theory, the random variable.  A random variable is a variable which, lo and behold, takes on a random value from some predefined set of values.  The number of hours a day a person spends in traffic is a random variable, with values taken from positive real numbers between 0 and 24.  A more abstract random variable is the configuration of human civilization in a particular point in space and time.  If we 'measure' this configuration, then we find that the random variable takes on a value of, say, the exact current configuration of our society today, measured by some macroscopic qualities (population density, lifespan, distribution of wealth, velocity of goods, etc.).  But this is only one of the many possible values that the random variable configuration of human civilization could take on.  Indeed, many an author have made their fortune exploring other possible values of this wretched-though-magnificent random variable.

So the neat thing about a random variable is that it comes with a probability distribution.  That is, if we measure the random variable repeatedly, some values may be more likely to appear then others, and so we can talk about the probability of the random variable taking on any one of its many possible values.    We call this set of probabilities a probability distribution over the random variable.

Consider a coin toss.  The result of a toss is a random variable, whose possible values are 'heads' and 'tails'.  If it is a fair coin, then there is an equal probability for both possible outcomes (its probability distribution is uniform).  On any given toss, you literally have no idea what is going to happen.  It's either heads, or tails, but you can't do any better than that.  So naturally, when you flip the coin, and find out that it has landed heads or tails, you will be pleasantly surprised, because you had no inkling as to which it would have been before hand.  We might say, "the probability distribution of a fair coin exhibits maximal surprise."

Consider now a coin which is not fair, but which, by a clever trick of its design, comes up heads 90% of the time when flipped.  If you knew this, then you won't be surprised at all when you find out the outcome of the flip, most of the time.  So this probability distribution has considerably less surprise, because it's almost always heads.


Now this surprise-quantity more commonly goes by the name of entropy.  That is, the entropy of a probability distribution over some random variable is a measure of how little one knows about the outcome of any measurement on the variable.  So its like an uncertainty.  But it is simultaneously a measure of how much knowledge one can gain by measuring the variable, given how little one knew before hand.  And so in an interesting sense, the entropy of a variable, its surprise content, is a measure of its information content.  A probability distribution which is uniform is most uncertain, having maximal entropy, and the most information to gain from measurement - the most surprise.

But that's not the whole story.  When we talk about information, we almost always refer to information between two random variables.  We are not so much interested in what someone says as we are in how much of what is said is heard and understood properly by the receiving party.  Suppose there was a mysterious light on the wall that flashed colours when you flipped your coin.  You soon notice that every time it flashes blue, you flip a heads.  It's flashing blue now.  Will you be surprised when you flip heads?  Not at all.  The flashing light, by being correlated to the outcome of your random variable, reduced the entropy of your random variable.  It used to be a surprise, but now that you have the light, its not.  So there is mutual information between the light and the coin.

Mutual information then is defined in this precise way, as the reduction in entropy (uncertainty) of one variable, given the value of another.  We can theoretically measure the information content between any two variables, or more, by sampling their respective probability distributions, and calculating how much each variable reduces the entropy of the others.  In the ideal case, where there is maximal information, the entropy of a variable is reduced completely when given the other variable.  So the maximum mutual information between any two variables is the entropy of the variables themselves! (Actually, it is the lesser of the entropies of the two variables).  That is to say, something which has a low entropy to begin with (ie. you have some degree of certainty as to its outcome), is necessarily restricted in how much information it can share with another variable, compared to something which has a higher entropy. 

In most cases, this result, that the maximal mutual information between two random variables is the lesser of the entropies of the variables, has a lot to do with the number of possible outcomes of a variable in the first place.  A coin toss, regardless of its probability distribution, has only two possible outcomes, and so is obviously limited in the amount of information it can share.  But similarly in large systems, with many possible outcomes, a distribution which maintains a low entropy necessarily restricts the information sharing capacity of the system.

So there is an interesting trade-off.  Something which is well organized, about which there is little uncertainty, which is accurate and precise and efficient, ie. something which has low entropy, is fundamentally restricted in the amount of information it can share with another variable, by virtue of the fact that it is so organized and predictable!  On the other hand, something which is initially more uncertain, which may be less reliable and effective but certainly more opportunistic and versatile, ie. something which has higher entropy, is able to share far more information with another variable, by virtue of the fact that it can be found in its other states with greater probability.  That sort of trade off permeates everything.

I think about these ideas most often in the context of protein signalling in the cell, where proteins take on particular shapes and are sometimes well ordered and sometimes totally disordered, and one-way-or-another these structural differences relate to their functionality and give rise to the marvels of our existence.  But on the other hand, consider our political organization, and the chains of beaurocracy, clamping down on entropy everywhere they can with enormous energy expenditure.  The reduction in entropy is catastrophic in the face of how much information our governments need to handle if they are to do their jobs.  We need far more disorganization in our society, because only with a higher internal entropy can we properly encode the enormous wealth of information about ourselves and our environment that is necessary to keep track of in the maintenance and evolution of the (supposedly) most complex and intelligent species on the planet.  Libertarians have been saying this for a while but I think I just grounded it in physics. 

Information theory is cool.

How Science Has Outdone, Undone, and Redone Itself

The pursuit of scientific knowledge has been perhaps the most successful venture in the history of human civilization.  The very fact that you are reading these words the way you are reading them is a testament to the success of this pursuit.  Many of the things you value about your lifestyle, your music, your makeup, your magic, your whipped-merry-goo, are a testament to this pursuit.  We call this pursuit science, and it is truly extraordinary. 

Now, I would like to propose to you the following: two-hundred years ago, science outdid itself; one-hundred years ago, it undid itself; and right now, it is in a hurried business of redoing itself.

To explore this proposition, let us take up our strategic but perhaps stochastic starting position around the beginning of the 17th century.  At about this time, a man named Francis Bacon had begun to assert among his fellows the mostly abhorred but somewhat celebrated position that the only knowledge one could truly trust was knowledge obtained from experience.  Not from a book, but from experience.  That is, knowledge about the universe should be strictly experimental.  Strictly a manner of evidence.  Strictly empirical.

Needless to say, this approach caught on big time.  Gallileo had been using it to reach new conclusions about the position of our planet in the solar system.  Newton used it to deduce that apples fall by the same force that holds the moon around the Earth.  James Watt used it to ignite the industrial revolution.  Maxwell and Gauss used it to make mathematics the most powerful tool in the Human tool kit.  And Nikola Tesla used it to show that we could do just about anything.

Around this time, having observed and contributed greatly to the truly supreme and unparalleled successes of science, Pierre Simon Laplace proposed what is now known as Laplace's Determinism:  given complete information about the configuration of the universe at a particular instant, scientific methods permit one to compute the configuration of the universe at any future instant.  That is, the universe is deterministic, and science allows you to determine it.

These developments had enormous implications for human society and for ecological systems.  The pace of evolution on the planet was considerably accelerated.  Human populations exploded.  Quality of life exploded with it.  Science, a once humble pursuit to study and understand the marvelous magic of Nature and her habits, had just about outdone itself.  In response, she proceeded to undo herself.

You see, things had been going so well for scientists, so rapidly, that they suddenly found themselves face to face with the smallest particles they could fathom, in the form of the atom.  And what did they do with them?  They blew them apart.  Into the most cosmic sort of smitherenes they could imagine.  And by the time the dust started to settle and anyone could really get a handle on what was going on, it was 2012, we were all still very confused about the atom, and there was a lot of commotion about a thing called a Higgs.

Of course, in the intervening years, quite a good deal of havoc was let loose.  Physicsists confronted the hard, cold truth that uncertainty was actually built into the fabric of the universe.  Mathematicians failed to produce a framework that could actually stand within and of itself, in completeness.  A little later, biologists stumbled about in the murky waters of genetic bits and biochemical blobs, producing a fascinating wealth of information, having little but a clue of what to do with it.  Everyone wanted there to be a bit for everything: an atom, a gene, a cell, an individual.  Little bit balls that could be rolled around from particular position to particular position.  Deterministic delirium.  Most of the time, most of the people overlooked the waves.

By the time the late 20s rolled around, the leading physicists of the time had come to the conclusion that, actually, we were not dealing with particles, but with waves, which present themselves, at least sometimes, in a manner that is so clearly particulate-like that you would bet your very own bottom that this was a billiard ball universe.  Nope.  No particles.  Just a bunch of waves.

Of course, this was fascinating stuff, and it began to be taught to the next generation and slowly disseminated into the public, but suddenly a war caught on, and everyone working on these problems turned their attention instead to blowing other peoples things up, and to enhancing production.  Naturally, such tasks are deeply concerned with the particulate nature of things.

Indeed, science was so successful that its method was suddenly adopted by governments all over the world, in order to better understand, control, and in some cases help, their citizens.  This was, of course, a horrendous turn of events, and has contributed significantly to science's undoing.

You see, the issue is something like this.  The Universe is just too complex.  Straight up.  There's just absolutely no way around it.  No matter how much you come to know, there will always be an infinite unknown. The physicists encountered this problem in the twenties.  The biologists tried desperately to ignore it, but with the failures of the Human Genome Project, have found themselves diving more and more often into what is now called 'complexity theory.'  And of course, the politicians, who surmised that reason was the ultimate tool in political strategy and economic planning, are failing left, right, and center to do anything truly rational, and, if anything, their rational decision making is only hastening the degradation of our systems.

So where does that leave us?  Science was so successful, it outdid itself.  The universe is so complicated, that science has undone itself.  How, if at all, can science redo itself?  How can we emerge from this mess of complexity with any sense of hope in Human knowledge or understanding about the universe, and about our capacity to plan for the future?

Well, this is where complexity theory, and a whole lot of statistics, comes into play.  We absolutely must acknowledge our ignorance of things.  So long as we continue to strive forth in science and policy with the assumption that we completely understand the inner workings of a system, and can manipulate and regulate that system according to such a 'perfect' understanding, we are doomed to fail.  Our medicines will make people more sick, our policies will hasten environmental and financial degradation.  There is no such thing as a perfect understanding.

Instead, we must come to understand that we ourselves are actually embedded in the systems we are studying.  This was the great discovery of the physicists that sort of fell by the way side when the war started.  We shouldn't think of controlling our environment - we are our environment.  We shouldn't think of controlling our bodies - we are our bodies.  The emerging science is beginning to understand this, and to contextualize itself in this manner.  Such an approach can only lead to greater understanding and awareness of the processes in our universe and our role in them.  We shouldn't think of controlling our economy - we are our economy.  And so the only way to heal is to do things naturally, openly, freely, cooperatively, in harmony with each other and our surroundings. Our rationality must become integral, and holistic.

So long as we ignorantly suppose that we understand a complex system well enough to make rational decisions, we will suffer unpredictable consequences.  But once we take as our starting premise that these systems are above rationality, because they are too complex, there are too many variables, and our simple, singular, sequential logistical thinking can not properly or effectively capture all their nuances, then we will begin to make real progress again, to lift ourselves out of the medical and societal messes we are in, and perhaps to evolve towards a new and glorious era in Human History.

So often we concern ourselves with discerning the parts that things are made of.  If we understand the parts, so it goes, we will understand the whole.  But often, there are too many parts, and the parts aren't well defined, and they flow freely into and out of one other.  In other words, our strict particulate rationality fails.  This is abundantly clear in medicine, where we attack organismal level problems by targeting specific individual molecules, effecting the entire system in ways we cant even begin to predict accurately.  And so the side effects of medication make people sicker than they were when they started out.  We need to put the parts aside, at first, and consider the activity of the whole.  This universe is a whole system.  Apparently, as far as our absolute best physics is concerned, it isn't actually made of parts.

This is not to say that there is no place for rational thinking anymore.  Only that it must be checked by the participatory reality of the universe we are embedded in.  Nothing is certain.  Everything is statistical.  And most certainly, the real world does not always conform to our simplified approximations of it.  So we must be real here, and practice statistics with great care, to study risk effectively, to humble ourselves, to work at the holistic level, and to plan for the unpredictable, because it is always the case that something novel may occur.

In fact, the very evolution of the cosmos depends on it.

This story is partially about a man named Dont-Give-A-Fuck

Sovereignty died with the introduction of the internet.

Actually, he started to get sick a little further back, somewhere around the invention of computers, and eventually became extremely ill.  He is now quite dead.

Of course, Sovereignty's death has had little effect on the rest of Geo-Political Organization, which is still catching up with the matter.  You know how when a person dies, various organizations and government bodies continue to send mail and coupons and bills and surveys addressed to that person, as if he wasn't dead yet?  This is quite a lot like that.  Sovereignty is dead, but he died alone at home when he tripped over the toaster cord, which was in a new spot because he was re-arranging his kitchen, throwing out the deep fryer and installing a new oven, and banged his head on the table.  His sister, Socialism, a transvestite who used to date Communism (before he died too), was around, but they had had a falling out, and she was caught up in her own assortment of problems.  She was also well established in the LGBTQIA crowd, which has gained tremondous steam, and is doing quite well now.

Sovereignty's cousin, Anarchy, and his cousin's boyfriend, Dont-Give-A-Fuck, might have come, as Sovereignty and Don't-Give-A-Fuck actually made quite good friends, but they were on vacation in Africa.  And since his sister Self-Emergence and their half-brother Locally-Organized-Ever-Changing-Flows were playing with dolphins in Brazil, nobody was around to report on Sovereignty's death.  So everyone kept hollering on him, and sending him mail, and addressing him, and looking to him for answers, as if he were still alive, completely oblivious to the fact that he was actually dead, on his kitchen floor, being eaten away at by rats.

At this point, Sovereignty has been eroded to his skeleton.  There is basically nothing left but the bare bones.  The muscle is gone, the intellect is gone, the action is gone  It is quite gruesome, and it has actually started to stink up the apartment quite terribly, if not the whole hallway.

The hallway was actually empty, unoccupied, vacant.  Aside from Sovereignty (who is now dead), and the myriad buggers chewing away at whatever is left of his flesh and blood, all the other tenants either died sometime ago, or moved on to bigger and better things.  Most likely they got caught up in the cult that Finance started before he got married (to himself), or else just retired to small islands to play with the waves and marvel at the stars.  God how Sovereignty used to wish he could just retire to small islands to play with the waves and marvel at the stars.

The biochemical-blizzard-zoo of microbial-metabo-symbiosys meticulously morphing Sovereignty's body into fizzle-heavy-decompost more or less became an entity unto itself.  I'd hardly have been able to justify so many adjectives if it hadn't.  Naturally, it made it's way into the apartment vents and airway routing systems, establishing a steady flow towards the main level apartments and downspouts, eventually oozing out onto the streets.

The people have begun to notice.  The news, especially, has begun to notice.  "Face-for-Station here at one million Orion street, where a bizarre ooze has begun to, well Ooze! out from this apartment building, which only a week ago was promised to be taken care of personally by Local-Big-Blockhead.  Local-Big-Blockhead is planning a benefit dinner in order to raise the necessary funds for care-taking-ofness of the building.  Many Financites are expected to attend."

Of course, Finance and Local-Big-Blockhead don't give a hoot's hollow hailstorm about such-and-such a building.  But since they're supposedly on the case, everyone else is off it, and so no one has bothered to go upstairs.

Now, Anarchy, and her boyfriend Dont-Give-A-Fuck, who if you remember were in Africa, playing with children and teaching them how to read and write, had returned, and Dont-Give-A-Fuck, who, though he was known to certainly not give a fuck, missed his old buddy Sovereignty, and thus intended to pay him a visit, if not at least to hit with a hassle for spending all his time among adults.  Actually, they also had special news for Sovereignty.

It hardly took a second for Anarchy to figure out what was going on when they got to Sovereignty's building.  There was a huge crowd outside, behind a short metal fence, just observing; mesmerized, perhaps, by the steady oozing flow.  Anarchy had seen enough shit in her life to recognize that particular style of ooze.  She also caught the stench.

When they went upstairs, Anarchy didn't hesitate to break down the door.  She was certainly a pretty sort of lady, but built as fuck and ready to take you out.  And I must say, when She and her boyfriend walked into the room, Dont-Give-A-Fuck might have given a fuck.

Giving a fuck though he might have been about the tragic death of a friend, the couple had some reason for celebration.  Anarchy was, in fact, pregnant (the news they wanted to share with Sovereignty), and if one light in the family went out, at least a new one was turning on.

Around this time, too, Self-Emergence (Sovereignty's sister), and Locally-Organized-Ever-Changing-Flows (Sovereignty and Self-Emergence's half brother) returned from Brazil, just lit with excitement about the joy of living and the free exchange of ideas and information that they witnessed among dolphin communities.  Raunchy!  Riveting!  Rapturous!  What fantastic possibilities for Humanity!

Of course, meeting up with Anarchy and Dont-Give-A-Fuck, and hearing the news about Sovereignty wasn't particularly delighting, but it did occur to all parties involved that this was something of an opportunity.  It was something of a chance for creative innovation in the name of their cousin/brother/friend.  A chance to band together and embark on something fresh and exciting, encapsulating everything they had worked upon as individuals their entire life.  A chance to bring it all together to do good for Humanity.

At least that's what Sovereignty tried to do.  At least, that's how it was in the beginning, when Finance was still young, a sharp witted bulls-eye shooter, rocking slam-dunks and alley-oops, yet to be phased by the colossal failures and flaming-tire-pile of suppressed embarrassment and mis-allocation of energy that became the twentieth century.

No matter that.  This is twenty one.  Perhaps, like for American youth, our Civilization (considered in the totally arbitrary but curious aging system which began with the a man called Jesus (who was more probably a mushroom) and continues HERE, with us, today, a little over a month into our twenty first birthday) has finally become of age, and may officially, on a socially accepted and non-interfered with basis, get fuckin' shit-faced.

Consider, Briefly:

Dont-Give-A-Fuck loves to get shitfaced.  He does it quite frequently.  However, he is highly conscious about the matter, and will absolutely do no such thing as lose-his-freakin-mind-in-a-bowl-of-Yager-drenched-titties around the children.  And this is a respectable attitude.  Anarchy, on the hand, shitfaced though she might like to get, finds herself so revolted by Dont-Give-A-Fucks shit-dripping face that she hasn't had all that much interest in pursuing the matter for herself.
Self-Emergence and Locally-Organized-Ever-Changing-Flows weren't particularly interested in booze.  Sure, they indulged, but the stuff was more often a hindrance then it was a helper.  Besides, they were always drunk on each-others capacity for playful innovation and comic-cosmic-consciousness anyway, so booze didn't particularly oftenly occur to them.

End Consideration.

So, the four of them decided to clean up the mess.  While everyone else stood around outside, they took up their mop baskets and rubber gloves, and set to disinfecting Sovereignty's apartment, and giving his body a proper burial.

We don't have to go particularly into the details of this chore.  Suffice it to say that it is just awful.

But what will happen when the job is complete, when Sovereignty's death is made apparent, and the mess cleaned up?  What Geo-Political landscape will arise in his Wake?

Dont-Give-A-Fuck won't give a fuck what landscapes will arise in Sovereignty's wake.  And this is a respectable attitude.

But among Anarchy, Self-Emergence, and Locally-Organized-Ever-Changing flows, something of an extraordinary beauty is stirring.  It is something which has repeated itself many times over in the myriad-mayhem of universes past and future.  Something which defines the very mechanism
by which time unravels
by which information accumulates
by which the Whole-She-Bang comes eye to eye with herself
eyelids flittering
flustered
jittery
lovingly swiveling
day-dreaming stars to infinite.

And that something, dear people, is us, in our universal essence, in our capacity for the exhibition of complete and utter novelty through fantastic innovation and furious design right up against the very fringe of the thing.  And this is not just us.  This is the way of the very universe, which we are so deeply embedded as that it becomes practically annoying to even bother with the concept.  But that infinite capacity for meta-material creation and accelerated novelty, which lies within us all, is precisely what will raise us to our highest heights as we rise out of the ashes of the death of our most beloved Sovereignty.

Long live Self-Emergence and Locally-Organized-Ever-Changing-Flows.

(nobody gives a fuck about Don't-Give-A-Fuck)

Buckminster Fuller - A Guide to Spaceship Earth

So I'm currently reading Buckminster Fuller's "A Guide To Spaceship Earth."
It is absolutely fantastic.

Part of what captivates me so much about good ole' Bucky is his no-bullshit-tell-it-like-it-is-you-must-be-crazy-if-you-think-the-universe-is-not-profound attitude.  Let's take for instance the title of the document I am reading.

Consider our position.  Here we are, on a fantastic space-craft (that is really what the Earth is), ripping through seeming emptiness at thousands of miles per hour around our enormous mother-ship, the life-giving sun.  Not only are we on a space-ship zipping through space at such incredible speeds we can't even fathom them, we are on a space-ship that has been zipping through space at such incredible speeds we can't even fathom them for a duration (4 billion years!) that is probably even more difficult to fathom than the speed we're zipping at.  And to think, if it weren't for astronomy and geophysics, we wouldn't even know!!  Talk about a well engineered space-craft.  Can you even feel all that acceleration?

So that's one hell of a situation to be in.  I mean, it's a hell-enough-of a situation to be in even if you don't know about the cosmic magnitude of the circumstance, ie. that the unvierse has pooled its resources and energy budget into some exuberant structural and systems engineering on a small rock around a medium sized fire-ball somewhere along the outer spiral arm of this here Milky Way Galaxy.  But to come to terms with the facts of the matter, that HERE WE ARE, heirs of Universal Energy and Cosmic Becoming, zipping through god-knows-what-the-stuff-called-SPACE-really-is, on this fantastic Spaceship, is an altogether profound situation.

I mean what the fuck?!

Seriously.  What are we supposed to do?!  Here is this fantastically engineered space ship, equipped with full regenerative capacity and practically perennial propulsion, carrying on its own business of zipping and zapping while all sorts of myriad interesting things occur within the ships compartments and flight decks, virtually oblivious to the literally stellar circumstances of the craft they ride on.  And of course, for those that have become privy to at least the galactically local aspects of the circumstance, there isn't a guide or a manual or an instruction set or a help-forum to be found.  Wouldn't it be nice if there was an Earth-Overflow.org, hosted by advanced alien civilizations, offering help and advice and direction to us newbs in the experiment of intelligent life?

So seriously, what the fuck?!

What do we do?  Well, first of all, we must collect observations.  We must get to know what kind of ship we're on, what its engine consists of, how it operates, what its relation to the mother-ship is, and so on.  We have done a relatively good job of that.  Relative to whom?  Let's say the kangaroos and pythons.  I can only imagine that the Cetaceans have a better grip on the thing than we do, despite not being able to actually get a physical grip on anything, flippers and slippery skin and all.  But given that our spaceship is over 70% water, its conceivable that organisms exploring the water might have a better handle on the systematics of the thing than those confined to land.   Of course we're no longer confined to land, and now we fall freely from space, which is a fun-recreational-quasi-cosmic milestone that will probably lead to the death of many young adventurers tired of terrestrial-adrenaline-rushes and searching for the next kick, before it leads to productive exploration of the atmosphere and beyond.  I hope our parachute technology improves considerably, or that RedBull figures out how to actually engineer wings (I bet you it's coming, otherwise they might get sued for false advertising).

Anyways, the next step is more important.  We need to apply our observations.  If we sum the observations as such: "We are members of a species of organism which has evolved along with other organisms out of the abundant but finite resources of this planet, developing a novel form of generalized intelligence and visuo-kinesthetic capacities which allow us to manipulate and abstract upon the myriad resources of our space ship, providing many-fold opportunities for innovation and consumption.  However, we are growing at an exponential pace and ARE CERTAIN to over deplete the space-ships resources such that it will no longer be able to sustain its crew, who will be doomed to die a hollow death spinning thousands of miles per hour around a sun which can't provide fuel any more effectively than it has for the past few billion years", then we find that not only is our circumstance spectacular, it is somewhat dire, for, as any competent human being with internet access and an awareness of global events knows, we are living in a geo-political shit storm, where all of the above facts are, if not harshly denied, then blatantly ignored.

The shit-storm has everything to do with mentality.  As Bucky points out, much of it is based on thermodynamics, which established the concept entropy, which basically states that, left to itself, the organization of a system must decrease, that is, it must dissipate energy.  In other words, systems are running down.  Psychologically, this translates into the following: "If all systems are running down, then the Earth system is running down, and since there may not be enough to go around, there will certainly not be enough to go around in the future.  Thus we must protect our own and fight every man for himself.  Like in Nature, only the strong survive"

And so we have wars and republicans and democrats and trivial political flings filled with useless jabbering and basically the whole system has gotten up, exchanged its face with its ass, and sat down again.  Completely useless.  Of course, despite entropy being a universal concept, its implementation here is faulty, for while entropy runs systems down when they are LEFT TO THEIR OWN DEVICES (ie. lacking in innovative design and energy input), it may actually encourage self-emergence and novel organizational capacity in the context of innovative design and energy input.  Take the origin of life itself, for example!

So here then is our current position.  Geo-politically, we are Sisyphus pushing his rock perennially up the hill, and no matter what Camus has to say on the subject, we are getting nowhere, and certainly not enjoying ourselves.  On the other hand, armed with 1) an emerging theoretical understanding of the nature of non-equilibrium thermodynamics and self-emergence (where entropy runs systems up instead of down) and 2) an emerging practical understanding of open-source-cross-platform-free-exchange-of-ideas and self-emergent collaboration in the computer sciences, there may be some hope for us after all.

I think Bucky's vision is extraordinary.  Given enough human ingenuity, we can design ourselves out of any mess.  We need only to assemble and do.  It would also be helpful, of course, if the political system stopped interfering with every form of progress that emerges under (around?) the sun.  But in the open-source world, politics becomes irrelevant.  Border's fall down.  True power is put back in the hands of the people, so long as they are willing to share.  And with that infrastructure growing, at an accelerated pace, there may be hope for us astronauts after all.

Design will save the world.  Enjoy the rest of your flight here, on Spaceship Earth.

Alchemy and the Undercurrents of History

This word Alchemy comes up all the time.  It is probably most associated, at least in literature and cultural understanding, with the historical pursuit to transform lead into gold, or to transform other base metals into precious ones.  But there is also a conception among the populace that alchemy has something to do with transformation in general, with the appearance of novelty, and with the enhancement of some system by ingenious means, whether that system be physical, chemical, biological, psychological, social, technological, or whatever.

Now, among scientists the word usually comes loaded as, "Oh, alchemy is just what people practiced before they understood the real laws of chemistry, before they knew about the periodic table and the whole number combinations of atoms into molecules.  Alchemy wasn't really science.  It was just sort of perverse experimentation."  In a sense that is very true.  Alchemy as practiced was always tied into extraordinary notions of the world, of the spirits that operated within it, and of the potential for the human agent to cooperate with the spirits in order to attain the Philosopher's Stone, say, or the Elixir of Life.  But because of that very fact, because of the very extraordinary nature in which Alchemy was conceived by those who practiced it, it actually ran much deeper into the fabric of human psychology and culture than 'perverse experimentation' might suggest.  In fact, I'd like to suggest that Alchemy has formed the very undercurrents that steer the course of history.

In quite general terms, let us take Alchemy to be the processes of transformation that occur at the boundary of what is known and what is unknown.  It is here, at the frontier of knowledge, that the alchemist frolics as he mixes and matches, ponders and pursues, experiments in extravagance and boldly strides forth to adventure in experience at the bubbling edge of human perception, cognition, and control.  It is here that the mythological hero of each and every culture, the Prometheus of Greece and the Indra of India, the human individual in his infinite potential for creative exploration; it is here that he first encounters what was until then unknown to himself, to his society; here that he integrates this novelty into his understanding of the world, for the first time.  It is here that the capacity for cultural and psychological evolution greets him, bearing the sly but genuine grin of eternal creativity.

Now, the essential point for the connection between alchemy and history is this.  An investigation which was once considered alchemy, or equivalently, which had once taken place at the boundaries of current knowledge, becomes common knowledge and thus no longer the domain of alchemy once it is introduced to and accepted by the masses.  That is, as the alchemist's discoveries are integrated into society, society is effectively upgraded, and the boundaries of knowledge encroach infinitesimally on the infinite unknown.  The alchemist is forced to move on, into novel territory, once again.

A determining factor in the adaptability and evolution of cultures, then, is the capacity by which they can accept and integrate the investigations of alchemists.  Cultures which foster alchemy and which have effective means for integrating novelty will thus naturally be more adaptable to changing geopolitical conditions and more successful in the pursuits of civilization.  Free, open exchange of ideas is absolutely essential for a robust civilization.  On the other hand, cultures which suppress such investigations, which foster fear instead of praise, which price ideas and restrict their flow, will find themselves immobilized and stagnant on the world stage in times of crisis or unprecedented change.  They wont be able to attain the proper upgrades, so to speak, to interface effectively with the world in changing times.  And times are always changing.

So if we look back at history, we find this perennial pursuit, this drive to derive, this obsession with progression, this overwhelming impulse bubbling beneath the surface of cutural normality, disguised as a quest to transform base metals into gold, altogether steering the infrastructure of human civilization through the torrents of history, leading us to here, right now.  Today.

So what does Alchemy look like today?  Well, it looks the same as it ever looked - it looks like people pursuing near impossible problems on the edge of what is acceptable, what is known.  And while the devices and equipment look like they may have changed, and while we have technically fulfilled the age old superficial objective of turning lead into gold (ala nuclear chemistry), we find ourselves still very much faced with the same predicament: of consistently updating our cultures in order to adapt to changing environmental and technological conditions.  And that is what Alchemy has always been. 

So let us march this grand tradition of alchemical exploration into the future with us.  Let us be weird and wild, crazy and like-child, investigative and inspired.  Let us play merrily on the brink of knowledge and acceptability.  After all, it is our creative exploration that updates our civilization, that expands our realities.

Merry beings, dear Alchemist.