Category Archives: Culture

The Matrix approaches

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Did the reader see Walmart’s press release about how they plan to use AI? Their plan is to manage your purchases for you. They will track your purchase history a la Google and assume what your purchasing choices will be and when they will occur. Then your purchases will be delivered to you in an automated driving EV.

This will require Walmart to create a home network that includes your refrigerator (dare mariner say ‘icebox’?), tracking items with guarantee end dates, expiration dates and time-specific items like prescriptions and consumption history. What Walmart doesn’t mention is only they know the real price of things; shopping for best price is no longer an option for you.

Isn’t progress wonderful? First, having a telephone means you don’t have to leave your nest to talk to a neighbor; Second, having a television means you don’t have to leave you nest for entertainment; Third, having online purchasing means you don’t have to leave your nest to visit a store to buy things; Fourth, you don’t have to leave your nest to purchase groceries and other household items – including furniture, curtains, etc. Fifth and most important, if you are lonely you don’t have to leave your nest for company when you can hook up with facebook and other social media services – you can even look for a spouse or sell and buy your automobile without leaving your nest.

So the reader is at great liberty and freedom just to sit in their electric recliner (dare mariner say ‘rocking chair’?)

Has the reader seen the movie ‘The Matrix’? The screen is filled with human-like action seen in online gaming shows but what is important to note is that all of civilization lives in electrified coffins living what each person thinks is a real life but it is provided electronically by the evil boss of artificial intelligence; they are maintained in this dream state so the evil boss can use them as batteries.

Modern technology has improved things quite a bit. The residence is roomier and the human is allowed to remain physically supple; the coffin is replaced by the electric recliner. What is different today is that you are confined to your nest so the evil economy can take your money. Well, maybe your battery power, too, at some future date.

If you would like to electronically visit mariner, he has a showing in his rocking chair every Tuesday. Your credit card balance will be affected automatically.

Ancient Mariner

Snow

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Sitting out a very cold day with 7 inches of new snow, a seemingly useless and interfering stuff, mariner wondered if anyone was glad to see the snow. Serendipitously, the Atlantic published an article about how critical snowpack is to millions of people. Scientists recently discovered a constant temperature where snowpack will begin disappearing for good. An excerpt from the article is provided below:

“That threshold is 17 degrees Fahrenheit. Remarkably, 80 percent of the Northern Hemisphere’s snowpack exists in far-northern, high-altitude places that, for now, on average, stay colder than that. There, the snowpack seems to be healthy and stable, or even increasing. But as a general rule, when the average winter temperature exceeds 17 degrees (–8 degrees Celsius), snowpack loss begins, and accelerates dramatically with each additional degree of warming.

Already, millions of people who rely on the snowpack for water live in places that have crossed that threshold and will only get hotter. “A degree beyond that might take away 5 to 10 percent of the snowpack, then the next degree might cut away 10 to 15 percent, then 15 to 20 percent,”

This situation reminds mariner that when Mother Earth acts, the entire planet and its biosphere are included. We frequently hear news about the mountain ranges melting and providing fresh water to lower habitats. It is another thing for snowpack residents to suddenly lose their water. Conversely, there are many regions in the American west that already suffer from disappearing water and some towns already are dry. One thinks of the warmer temperatures melting ice floes and leaving the polar bear in a difficult situation.

It is ironic that the oceans are rising because of melting polar ice while the amount of drinkable water is decreasing. We’ll have to wait to see how humans handle the situation.

Meanwhile, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

Ancient Mariner

An etymology of religion

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Well, not really an etymology but it is about the words associated with religion. If one were to step back a good distance from the words used in religion, they would discover that there aren’t any major differences between religions. For example, the motivators are: what is the ultimate, singular force that governs reality? What is the best way to survive in the environment? What is the best way to manage humanity? What is the best way to survive when the relationship with reality seems uncertain?

As an illustration, the first god to be documented in the western world was Cybele, originally a Phrygian [ancient nation in today’s Turkey] goddess. She was the goddess of Mother Earth. In Greek mythology she was Rhea, the mother of the gods. Her Roman equivalent was Magna Mater. She was associated with fertility and also controlled nature, symbolized originally by the lions that accompanied her. In Christianity, she is Mary, Mother of Jesus.

Cybele’s role shifted through the ages except for one element: the master of creation. Because of transitions in human knowledge, Mary did not need two lions at her side to assure the birth of Jesus.

An interesting thing to consider is the definition of God. God was male and except for a few instances, was quite anthropomorphic, managing reality through a human’s eye. Would the reader consider the word ‘singularity’ as the latest definition of God? In quantum physics, this is the definition:

In scientific terms, a gravitational singularity (or space-time singularity) is a location where the quantities that are used to measure the gravitational field become infinite in a way that does not depend on the coordinate system. In other words, it is a point in which all physical laws are indistinguishable from one another, where space and time are no longer interrelated realities, but merge indistinguishably and cease to have any independent meaning.

Another interesting example is comparing the Old Testament’s Ten Commandments [Exodus 20:2-17], Islam’s Sharia Law [see Post titled Sharia Law] and Christianity’s Sermon on the Mount [Matthew 5]. Reading the words suggests vastly different objectives but the subject is the same: What is the best way to manage humanity?

This post is Mariner’s way of introducing the reader to a new way of looking at religion. The traditional way has caused wars, social upheaval and ridiculous fragmentation as politics, culture and technology grind the virtues of life into a useless pile of crumbs.

However, AI is eager to help 21st century humans throw everything into a dishwasher and produce an amalgamated religion appropriate for our modern culture(s).

We need Cybele and her lions . . . .

Ancient Mariner

What should we pack when we go to Heaven?

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What with it being the Christian holiday season and what with the world we live in today, mariner’s mind turned to revisiting the Gospels. For his entire life he has struggled with some of the metaphors interpreted by most readers as more literal than they imply. He doesn’t take the Scriptures literally as many readers do; rather, he is prone to searching for behavioral truths.

A significant confusion is the issue of heaven. Since he was a small boy, he wondered where heaven was, given all the family reunions people were counting on.

He focused on this issue as he revisited the Gospels. Owning three versions of the Holy Bible, he even checked out the difference in nuances from different versions. What emerged was a difference in reader perception as to when we would “go to heaven”. Noting all the references to the reward that we would sit at the right hand, or be with the Father, etc., the common Biblical inference is that sitting with the Father is an instant reward: do something nice for someone and you will feel good about yourself in a special way. One doesn’t have to die to be with God. This ‘instant’ reward fits with the core theology of the Trinity, which is a constant dynamic between God, Jesus and humans.

Feeling the Heavenly Spirit in one’s self is a direct cause and effect situation. The example in action is the Good Samaritan parable offered immediately following the Beatitudes and the two great commandments. [Matthew 5] Doing good deeds can’t be put in ‘heaven’ savings accounts. The reward is immediate.

When mariner was a preacher, he often had difficulty understanding why believers chose Christianity as a self-reward responsibility. Jesus makes it very clear that it’s the proactive event that has merit; it’s about helping the other person, not scoring heaven points. In fact, a perfect Christian would never, ever think about what they wanted for themselves.

It is true that putting off the heavenly experience until later when one’s own life is finished seems easier. But Christianity is a ‘do it now then do it again and again – no personal credit allowed’

So we don’t have to worry about the logistics of Armageddon and the Second Coming; it happens all the time. Do a good deed and Jesus chooses you immediately!

Ancient Mariner

In 2023 what was learned that is new?

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For those readers who have yet to subscribe to The Atlantic magazine, you should have by now. True, it requires reading – a forgotten skill today – but it is as honest a magazine as you can find and evaluates everything neutrally – even if the reader doesn’t like the opinion. The magazine is the most awarded of its class. What follows is a collection of observations from the journalists at the magazine. Some are funny, some odd, and some insightful but all are new. Enjoy all 81!

  1. Mars has seasons, and in the winter, it snows.
  2. Bats are arguably the healthiest mammals on Earth.
  3. Mammal milk changes depending on the time of day, a baby’s age and sex, the mom’s diet, and more.
  4. The genetic mutation behind “Asian glow” might help protect people against certain pathogens—including tuberculosis.
  5. The overwhelming majority of sweaters available on the American mass market are made at least partly of plastic.
  6. In 2003, a NASA Investigation Board blamed the disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia in part on PowerPoint. [a Microsoft presentation application]
  7. As much as 36 percent of the world’s annual carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are sequestered, at least temporarily, in fungi.
  8. Mice and rats can’t vomit.
  9. In the 1930s, the U.S. Army considered distributing daily rations of yerba mate to soldiers. [nutritional gourd]
  10. You have two noses, and you can control them separately via your armpits.
  11. It’s possible to lactate without ever having been pregnant.
  12. But if you are pregnant, your feet might grow roughly half a shoe size and lengthen by about 0.4 inches.
  13. Gender-neutral baby names are more popular in conservative states than in liberal ones.
  14. By 2051, North America may run out of three-digit area codes.
  15. Today’s average NBA athlete is 4 to 7 percent better than the average player from more than 10 years ago.
  16. Hawaii’s feral chickens are out of control.
  17. When you look at a tattoo, you’re seeing ink shining in the “belly” of an immune cell that has gobbled up the ink and failed to digest it.
  18. The technology behind the first rice cookers, sold in 1955, is still widely used today—because it’s perfect.
  19. Meanwhile, the corrugated pizza box used by basically every pizzeria has not changed since its invention in 1966, and it does a bad job of maintaining a take-out pizza.
  20. A database of nearly 200,000 pirated books is powering many generative-AI models.
  21. Americans are suffering from cockroach amnesia.
  22. The hippopotamuses released from Pablo Escobar’s personal zoo in Colombia are engineering the local ecosystem.
  23. plastic bag in dirt – Compostable plastic bags buried in soil for three years can still hold a full load of groceries.
  24. Allergy season really is getting worse.
  25. Last month, for two consecutive days, the Earth reached global temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels for the first time.
  26. There are Lord of the Rings–style hobbit-house Airbnbs, an Airbnb in the shape of a spaceship, and an Airbnb inside a freestanding harbor crane.
  27. Cat owners in Cyprus are giving leftover COVID drugs to their pets, but not for COVID.
  28. The same molecule that makes cat urine smell like cat urine is, in lower concentrations, commonly used in air fresheners and household cleaners.
  29. The Sphere, in Las Vegas, can transform its 366-foot-tall exterior into a gargantuan emoji that astronauts can reportedly see from space.
  30. Within eight seconds of flushing, a toilet bowl can shoot a plume of aerosols nearly five feet into the air—and straight into your face.
  31. Until the 1800s, merchants, lawyers, and aristocrats each wrote in their own distinctive script.
  32. The English words flow, mother, fire, and ash come from Ice Age peoples.
  33. car seat with heat marks – By hacking a Tesla’s rear heated seats, German researchers inadvertently accessed private user data.
  34. Many eye creams are functionally identical to facial moisturizers but are far more expensive.
  35. A Dutch man and his family have a perplexing brain condition called “color agnosia”: They can see colors, but they cannot name them.
  36. Hurricane Otis confounded extreme-weather warning systems by gaining more than 100 miles per hour of wind speed in 24 hours.
  37. Foxes have committed mass murder against flamingos at least three times during the past 30 years.
  38. Despite nearly half a century of trying, we don’t have any medication that effectively treats anorexia.
  39. There are no established clinical guidelines for diagnosing and treating adult ADHD.
  40. Elephant seals sleep only two hours a day, for many months at a time, via a series of super-short naps, taken as they dive deep beneath the ocean’s surface.
  41. UPS handles so many packages every year that its workers put their hands on roughly 6 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.
  42. One of Saturn’s moons likely has a habitable ocean.
  43. AI avatars led a church service in Germany this summer.
  44. There’s a lifeguard shortage in America. It’s been going on for a century.
  45. A pill may be easier to swallow if you turn your head as it goes down.
  46. Kramer – During the original run of Seinfeld, the show’s costumers had a hard time sourcing the clothing for Kramer’s wardrobe because his quirky style had become so popular with the general public that they were buying up all of the vintage clothing that made up his look.
  47. AI models can analyze the brain scans of somebody listening to a story and then reproduce the gist of every sentence.
  48. A new idea to curb emissions takes inspiration from the Cold War: a fossil-fuel-nonproliferation treaty.
  49. During a 2018 war game in which the president had been cut off from his nuclear forces, many participants—including former heads of state, foreign ministers, and senior NATO officers—recommended leaving the decision of whether to enter a nuclear exchange to an AI.
  50. Decades of research suggest that hypnosis might be an effective treatment for irritable bowel syndrome, at least in the short term.
  51. Rest is not necessarily the best treatment for a concussion.
  52. People have been living on the Galápagos Islands since the early 1800s.
  53. Bird chicks aren’t innately able to recognize their mother’s calls—they learn to do so while in their eggs and can be manipulated to respond to another species’ voice.
  54. People are likely spending billions of dollars tipping creators on TikTok Live.
  55. Before Tesla and Meta, Palo Alto’s biggest tech giant was a farm that bred racehorses.
  56. Reports of pediatric melatonin overdoses have increased by 530 percent over the past decade.
  57. iPhone cameras can perform trillions of operations to optimize a single photo.
  58. Modern flip phones stink because they’re just made of recycled scraps from the smartphone-manufacturing process.
  59. If you think all phones are passé, you can buy a pair of screen eyes from Apple for $3,499 [adjusts colors for vision].
  60. Some people loop playlists in their sleep to help them game the Spotify algorithm and get more impressive Spotify Wrapped results.
  61. An index ranking the transparency of flagship AI models from 10 major companies gave every single one a resounding F.
  62. lemon lime character – Lemon-lime isn’t a flavor so much as a sensibility that defines soft drinks.
  63. The Italian government provides gluten-free-food vouchers for people with celiac disease.
  64. Some people taking Ozempic to lose weight are also effortlessly quitting smoking, drinking, and online shopping.
  65. Scantron tests, a defining feature of American education, are dying.
  66. Fifteen percent of daily Google searches have never been searched before, according to the company.
  67. American cars hit more than 1 million large animals and as many as 340 million birds every year.
  68. Animals at watering holes in South Africa’s Greater Kruger National Park were twice as likely to flee when they heard a human voice as when they heard lions.
  69. Hundreds of craters on the moon never receive direct sunlight.
  70. The total surface area of the Antarctic’s sea ice in July was more than four standard deviations smaller than the average for that time of year, shattering records.
  71. Oxygen might actually be bad for multicellular evolution.
  72. Last year, the Sunset Limited train from New Orleans to Los Angeles was on time for just 19 percent of trips, making it the tardiest train in the country.
  73. About a third of pregnancies in women 40 and older are unplanned.
  74. MSG stays on the tongue long after food is swallowed, resulting in a lingering savory sensation.
  75. Podiatrists have seen a spike in plantar-fasciitis cases since the coronavirus pandemic began, partly because so many people who work from home shuffle around barefoot on hard floors.
  76. OpenAI’s chief scientist commissioned a wooden effigy intended to represent an AI that does not meet a human’s objectives. He set it on fire at a leadership meeting this year, according to two people familiar with the event.
  77. A luxury trip to Antarctica can cost upwards of $65,000.
  78. Many football fans punch, shoot, run over, or otherwise destroy their TV when things don’t go well for their team.
  79. Checked-bag fees may feel like they’ve been a scourge since the birth of aviation, but they were only introduced in 2008.
  80. pair of talking dolphins – Dolphins have their own version of baby talk.
  81. Gravity-wise, the Earth doesn’t resemble a blue marble so much as a potato.

The race issue is fixed

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If it weren’t so serious and destructive, mariner would chuckle at the white supremacists. They are defending a race that already is destined to virtually disappear. Consider the odds: white people constitute about 20 percent of the world population. That’s one white person for every four nonwhites. Breeding is indiscriminate, especially with modern transportation, climate immigration, wars and abusive national governments.

Further, in spite of the supremacist presence, has the reader noticed that in the United States half the television commercials are biracial and the Hispanics have their own Spanish broadcast networks? One analysis from Wikipedia projects that whites in the United States will be a distinct minority by 2040.

Traditionally, the English language has been the primary language for international communication but this is changing as the advantages in communication via the Internet permit individualized conversations between nations. It is likely that along with English – Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic and Hindi will have a larger role in global communications.

Mariner suggests that parents of young children in the United States encourage them to be bilingual (probably Spanish) or even trilingual as many Europeans are. It occurs to mariner that a new, hybridized language may emerge – complete with slurring for the hearing impaired.

Hasta la vista, baby!

Ancient Mariner

 

Living life on carnival rides

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Spending some time in Chicken Little’s henhouse, where news broadcasts and publications are not allowed, mariner has become aware of how myopic news programming is. Many readers will agree that if one watches the news on Monday then watches the news a week later, it’s the same news. Perhaps Fox news, MSNBC, all the social media sources and ‘streaming’ news together have set the bar very low in terms of other topics that, while not blowing things up, starving people, giving coverage to useless and mostly conspiratorial congressmen, may have more impact on the near future of mankind. Below are a couple of topics that are very important and are changing reality on a daily basis.

Extinction

Back in 2014 Elizabeth Kolbert wrote a scholarly treatise about the rapid decline of the world’s creatures. A quote from the flyleaf of The Sixth Extinction – An unnatural history:

“Over the last half billion years, there have been five major extinctions, when the diversity of life on Earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us.”

Elizabeth cites the disappearance of over 16,000 species of every nature and every family of creatures. There are too many humans (see Overpopulation below) taking up way too much space, consuming way too much of the planet’s reserve of chemicals, and by their nature, deliberately and wantonly destroying critical balances in the Earth’s environment.

Through technology and industrialization, humans have been able to flaunt the natural restraints of Mother Nature, enabling humans to live longer, live conveniently and ignore disturbances in the planet’s biosphere – at the cost of 16,000 innocent creatures and, since the 19th century, destabilizing the careful balance of global weather; an issue that is important enough to make the news. For the last 300,000 years, the weather has been unusually stable, allowing an excellent opportunity for all creatures to flourish. That stability is rapidly disappearing. The inability of humans to evaluate human economics versus planetary economics may be the doom to life on Earth as we have known it.

Humans, being the smarty pants that they are, abide by a major perspective: “If it can be done, do it”. In this vein, humans may be adding themselves to the list of species that are becoming extinct. Less than a year ago, scientists celebrated a special accomplishment: They were able to marry a computer sequence with a chromosome such that the computer sequence can reproduce itself. Now computer programmers themselves may be out of a job. Two scientists, no less than Albert Einstein and  Stephen Hawking, held that if artificial intelligence can propagate itself, humans are too inefficient to compete and will become extinct.

Overpopulation

Regular readers know that mariner has placed great stock in the similarity between mouse and rat overpopulation studies done in the 1960s and 70s and the state of human society today. Quoting managing scientist John Calhoun’s observation about the study:

“At the peak population, most mice spent every living second in the company of hundreds of other mice. They gathered in the main squares, waiting to be fed and occasionally attacking each other. Few females carried pregnancies to term, and the ones that did seemed to simply forget about their babies. They’d move half their litter away from danger and forget the rest. Sometimes they’d drop and abandon a baby while they were carrying it. The few secluded spaces housed a population Calhoun called, “the beautiful ones.” Generally guarded by one male, the females—and few males—inside the space didn’t breed or fight or do anything but eat and groom and sleep. When the population started declining the beautiful ones were spared from violence and death, but had completely lost touch with social behaviors, including having sex or caring for their young. At least the rodents had unlimited food and water – not true with the human population.To human advantage, humans have guns and bombs, shoot children and anyone that seems different. Is this enough to reduce population?

A special carnival ride is the combination of not enough food with climate change. The combination is trashing whole nations’ economies.

And with war on every continent, rising authoritarian governments that will enforce inequality, and artificial intelligence cutting society from the past like a pair of scissors, this is a grand carnival ride!

Ancient Mariner

 

 

 

Preparing for Donald

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Mariner and his wife have had more than one conversation about the possibility of moving to another nation should Donald win the 2024 election. They have done some research. The suggested website is a good source. How would the reader like to live in Finland, a perpetual first-place country?

See:

https://www.cntraveler.com/gallery/the-10-happiest-countries-in-the-world

Ancient Mariner

Where is the sheepdog?

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Remember that mariner writes from a one room apartment in Chicken Little’s hen house. Current news is forbidden here. So mariner writes about whatever drifts into consciousness.

It occurs to mariner that humans are every bit the herding animal that sheep are. Why, around the world, would there be cities with millions of humans in one pasture? (Fences are imaginary boundaries called ‘borders’). Capitalist human sheep would cite the draw of profit and stability. Don’t authentic sheep do the same, looking for better pasture? Just as sheep are maintained by a shepherd with dogs trained to move the sheep for various reasons, aren’t humans maintained by governments and corporations? Where are the sheepdogs? Might they be Governors and senators? Like sheep, don’t humans have to watch out for predators . . . in human’s clothing?

There are differences. A sheep requires the space of one sheep whereas a human requires 1600 square feet, a roof, a bathroom, heat and air conditioning. A sheep eats ground cover; a human eats sheep and other food sources found in oceans, mountains, fields, corn silos and restaurants.  Another significant difference is that there are 1 billion sheep in the world whereas there are 8.1 billion humans in the world.

Has the reader noticed that humans are fond of a sheep’s outerwear? Emulating a sheep by wearing sheep’s wool clothing is quite popular.

Lastly, sheep and humans speak the same language: BAA.

Ancient Mariner

The Plastic Christmas

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Mariner is just old enough to remember when an important holiday event included acknowledging the religious significance of the season. Church services and the rituals of Hanukkah and even of Kwanzaa were a not-to-be-missed event during the holidays.

Except in the most ecclesiastical circles, this is no longer the case. Why? The cultures of the entire planet seem to be melting away but nothing seems to be taking their place.

It is his speculation that participation in spiritual rituals is a personal, perhaps private experience. Rituals are for restoring order and allegiance to ‘absolute’ reality, for realigning faith in self through unity in universal holiness. He suspects that the importance of survival and continuity in daily life may be the provocation for realigning one’s life with spiritual guidelines. Each of the religions mentioned has a common thread that says “faith will make you whole”.

Yet the human experience over the decades has been one of disbursement, of dissemination, and of decreasing need for societal relationships, even with the Holy spirits; diversity has diminished the intimacy that one has with universal faith. Without spiritual judgment, the dissolution of unity has made faith less important. Metaphorically, it is as though the beans of spirituality have been run through a grinder, leaving a formless, powdered society.

Much of this feeling may be attributed to those in the Silent Generation, a generation from a culture that disappeared long ago. Still, where is the new faith? Where is the spiritual bond with the Universe that makes one whole? Is modern society a ship without a compass?

Ancient Mariner