The Price is Right*

Another “mass shooting" in the United States.

These are kind of a cultural and media feature I guess. I think if American satirist Ambrose Bierce wrote The Devils Dictionary today, his definition for “Gun Control” would  be; Something Americans talk about after a mass shooting.

I have already opined on potential avenues of remediation of the problem.

http://airwaterground.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-new-duck-and-cover.html

And I have a piece out there on the legal/cultural history of The Gun Thing in the U.S.

So no sense in rehashing all that. Besides, it is, outside of areas of war, civil war, failed states, terrorism, etc. kind of an American thing.

For me, the interesting question is why do we put up with this shit? Why the socio-political paralysis on the gun violence thing? 

A speculation.

Maybe people (meaning the majority of Americans not motivated by the NRA brand or that did not fail the President Obama Rorschach Test)
just do not care unless it touches close to home, so to speak?
 The research in recent times about empathy & compassion may point to this. Maybe it is now just another aspect of our mediaverse-newstainment-entertainment flow? The problem is too socially complex and remote for most folks to get jazzed up about. Yet.

* “We shall shortly institute

A syncopation of fear

While it's painful, it will suit

Many customers whose appetites are queer

And the price is right,

The cost of one admission is your mind.”

Postbiological

Postbiological: After the biological phase

Google Scholar search strings:
Postbiological
Nanobiology

Regular Google  search string for postbiological
Goggle News Search String
YouTube Search String
Search string for postbiological natural selection

The Value of Intelligence, some meditations

Regarding survival of a specie or daughter species, not re individuals.

"It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value."

Stephen Hawking

Does Intelligence Provide Survival Value?

Hawking's take on it

Random Walks

My take: Given that N=1, the jury is still out. 

But given the nature of natural selection (fitness = adaptation to change), i would say it depends.... :)

The main reason why i do not like being mortal

The second law of thermodynamics, inter alia, requires of course that no one gets out alive. But my main bone to pick emotionally with this, is that i am REALLY curious about the future. Things are very interesting right now, more so than at any previous  time  in my life, and i wanna see what unfolds along our specie's world line (or for the more technically inclined :). 

Why is it exciting?
Right now, we have in an apparent  multicausal,  multilinear, fitness landscape in at least four dimensions on this planet with the following variables in play:

• Us. Homo Sapiens, by an apparent huge margin the most mentally complex , creature we know of, (N=1)
• The most rapid climate change since the KT Event, or at least perhaps since the Toba Event
• The change being anthropogenic 
• Among the changes underway, in addition to increasing variability in weather and a general warming; thermal expansion of ocean water and sea level rise, and ocean acidification 
• That being conservative, meaning assuming no change in human behavior in the area of rapid climate change mitigation; an impact that may be reasonably estimated to be similar to or greater than that of the PETM , but with a much higher tempo
• Increasing fresh water scarcity
• Increasing toxification in the biosphere
• WMDs
• Rapid use of finite resources
• Our disproportionate and increasing biogeophysical planetary foot print 
• The increasing role of the ESOBC (Economic Socially Obligate Boundary Condition) in confining our solution space (if interested, search for the relevant parts in latest PDF version of Air Water Ground which is linked in the right sidebar)
• Increasing economic disparity, with its rapid rate of increase in some countries
• How information moves faster now than it can be economically valued, and faster than it can be rationally valued (non-limbically valued)

If one is familiar with some science, history, etc.you know there are past examples similar to each of these, and some of combinations of these. But no examples i am aware of the combinatorial elements present in the current spacetime. The suspense makes it very exciting, don;t you think?