Listen to the Rain

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
-Frank Herbert, Dune

Strange coincidence that I simultaneously saw this article entitled We must declare jihad against AI and also went to a work seminar today about the use of AI in healthcare. The latter mentioned the recent JAMA article about physician vs AI empathy.

I've been an AI skeptic for most of the last decade and for most of the last decade I've been right--I remember arguing eight years ago with someone who laughed at my insistence that we would absolutely not have direct brain interfaces within five years--but I think that's less likely in the future. Nothing is going to constrain AI because there's too much money to be made from out-of-control AI and the social consequences be damned. Look at how much damage has already been done through social media algorithms designed simply to keep people's eyes on the platform--the promotion of outrage engagement, Instagram Face, depression and anxiety in Gen Z, people at risk of having a single bad interaction go viral, etc--and imagine it with programs more sophisticated than the stuff on Amazon that says "Ah, I see you bought a toaster, would you like to buy a dozen more?" That was the point of the Dune quote I posted above, since AI isn't going anywhere so we'll need to manage its social effects.

People talk about AI destroying whole swaths of jobs and that may happen in the future but it's not going to happen currently due to AI's tendency to confidently make up nonsense. It's like Laila--she has a lot of words she says, but she also makes sounds that I'm sure mean something to her but which aren't English (or Japanese, or Hebrew, or French, or any other language she's been exposed to). Like, she's lately switched to pronouncing banana as "bahlahlah." She says it consistently, she knows exactly what it means, but who knows where she got it from. AI is like that. I remember reading a rebbe.io answer where the AI confidently stated that eating poultry and milk together was allowed, which isn't true under any interpretation of halakhah. I just asked it about eating kiniyot during Pesaḥ and it told me this was a matter of individual custom and to consult your rabbi, which I'm a little unsure is the answer an actual Chabad rabbi would give. But it gives those answers confidently and seems to provide reasoning to support them, and it reminds me of that scene in the sealed chamber in 2001 where Dave and Frank decide that if HAL was wrong about the antenna, what else is it wrong about, and if it's wrong about anything, then they need to shut it down to prevent misinformation from jeopardizing the mission. Which is exactly the same reasoning HAL uses to shut them down, which is part of the point of the movie (who is more robotic, the literal computer, or the humans?) and part of the point of the presentation I went to. AI needs to be guided in right thought by humans to really be useful.

To pick an example, if you look at the example interactions that were rated in that JAMA article, you'll notice the most obvious unifying point is that each of the AI responses is twice as long as the human responses. No wonder they were voted more empathetic! There's an immediate perception that the AI is spending more time on the response because it's longer, and since Americans have an extremely common complaint that they barely get to see their doctors and when they do, it's more only a few minutes, that the AI seems to be more attentive. But what if the AI was used as an aid, listening to the doctor-patient conversation and taking notes, filling in the EMR in the background, and the doctor checked the results at the end but otherwise spent the time talking to the patient instead of looking at a computer? Wouldn't that make the doctor seem much more empathetic? And this could be an aid to doctors elsewhere too, since the average of twenty minutes per visit in America is actually on the extreme high end globally. In Bangladesh people see their doctors for an average of less than a minute!

Sure, AI will still sometimes produce nonsense. I remember reading a teacher saying they took psychic damage from reading an AI-written essay that the student had gone at with a blind-idiot thesaurus afterwards, leading to phrases like

Unused York City

but also human medical error kills at a higher rate than anything other than disease or cancer. If AI can assist humans in reducing that even a little...

I don't think we're in danger of getting paperclip-maximized any time soon. It's lazy thinking, or not thinking at all, that'll do us in.

A couple days late to this news, obviously, but we have a coronavirus vaccine and it works.

Back in April I was very skeptical that this would happen, I think for good reason. The fastest previous vaccine had taken years. Less than ten percent of vaccines under development ever make it through trials and are approved. Yet here we are, with not just one vaccine but multiple vaccines. That's even better, because there's greater odds that if someone can't take any particular vaccine due to health concerns, one of the other vaccines might work for them.

They put music over footage of the first shipment of vaccine being wheeled into a hospital:

This works quite nicely. pic.twitter.com/KsGzWkm4Cl

— Matthew Podszus (@matthew_podszus) December 15, 2020

The top tweet is here, with the NBA on ESPN theme, though there are quite a few examples in the thread.

Given what we knew in April, I still think I was right to be skeptical then, but I'm glad I was wrong. We still have some months of restrictions in play as the vaccine is rolled out and we try to figure out how likely people who've been vaccinated are to spread the plague even if they aren't affected by it--latest results are very promising--but the end is in sight, and much sooner than a lot of people (and me) expected.

Yesterday, I saw an article about an LA County antibody study that indicated a much higher number of people had been infected than the official rate. Assuming the numbers are accurate, that 221,000 and 442,000 people who had coronavirus just in LA County is around 25%-50% of the total number of confirmed cases in the entire country currently.

On the one hand, this is really good! On the other hand, it is very bad:

Good
This means the mortality rate and rare of serious complications is much lower than expected. Even taking a place like Italy, with a mortality rate of 7.2%, and lower bound of the LA study numbers, produces a mortality rate of 0.25%, which is much more in line with the flu. That would mean that the major problem with coronavirus is that it's a new disease with no pre-existing immunity, not that it's in itself particularly deadly. It still seems to have a higher mortality curve, but most people who get it have no symptoms, or maybe feel a bit under the weather.

Bad
If the pool of potentially infectious people is that huge, we have nowhere near enough testing capacity to track who's infected, who's immune, and who's in danger. Also, the odds that someone has coronavirus and doesn't even realize it are much higher than we thought, so in order to return to something closer to normal, we'll have to institute randomized testing, including of people who previously tested negative, and probably require wearing masks in public, neither of which we have the capacity for at the moment.

The death rate is still appalling, and reports of lung or heart damage from coronavirus are still cause for concern, but assuming the antibody studies are correct, then it's liable to be a lot less serious in the future than we worried it was. Hopefully.

thosesocks invited me over to watch more Samurai Champloo last night. We remain bad at actually watching it--in two hours we watched one episode, and I think we spent more time talking about how Japan and Germany dealt with the legacy of World War II than we did watching anime--but I noticed something in the intro of episode 8 (the one with the guy who wants to be "Big" and has his own beatboxing posse). In the Japanese, "Champloo" is spelled チャンプルー chanpurū, which is the name of a signature Okinawan stir-fry dish! It's extremely tasty, especially with bitter melon, and in Okinawan it literally means "a bunch of things all mixed together." Like, say, hip-hop and jidaigeki drama. Finally after years, that name makes sense.

She also introduced me to Japanese Doctor Who, and even though I'd never seen any Doctor Who, I recognized a bunch of tokusatsu tropes. She asked me what that was, and when I explained, she found a pilot episode for an unaired show called Jaguarman, which was definitely everything I could have hoped for in an introduction to tokusatsu YouTube clip.

thosesocks wants to have a party now where we watch tokusatsu and drink alcohol from across Asia, which sounds fantastic to me. Maybe after Pesach.

On Monday I went to the Princess Bride popup bar in Lincoln Square with lisekatevans, afschifler, britshlez and her boyfriend. Going on a Monday meant that there was almost no one else there, other than a Dread Pirate Roberts mannequin in the booth next to us that I kept seeing out of the corner of my eye and assuming someone was eavesdropping on us, but they were still out of all the drinks I tried to order and I had to get substitutions. After a long period consulting the menu (PDF warning), I went with the Humperdinck (instead of Twue Wuv) and the Miracle Pill (instead of I Don't Even Exercise). They were both good, and I'd gladly go again. When pinandstutter went, he tried the Twue Wuv and said it was great, and I really want to try it. It was the first thing I ordered only to hear that they were out of it.

Table discussion was mostly about our high school lives and how different our experiences were. afschifler described mine as a John Hughes movie, which is honestly fair. Hey, what can I say? Band kids.

Monday was also the AMA's annual meeting, which was full of good news and one boring presentation. Some guy came up on stage to talk about innovation and big ideas and coming up with a grand plan and so on, but all I could think of as he talked about self-driving cars and Google's quest for self-driving cars is the way that they don't work in rain or snow, which he didn't mention at all. Sure, the videos of Waymo's self-driving taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona, were very impressive, but the whole time I was watching I was thinking, "That would never work here." I do expect there to be a self-driving taxi service in Chicago within my lifetime--assuming we don't all die in World War III before then--but B"H I still have many decades of life left, so "within my lifetime" is a long time.

Also, at one point he had misspelled impact on a slide, so of course I immediately thought:

He protecc
He attacc
But most importantly
His plans have impacc

Someone save me from fatal meme poisoning.

My life hasn't been disrupted by coronavirus yet, but I think it's only a matter of time. With all the event cancellations out there, something I want to go to will be cancelled. I'm just glad that I eventually decided not to go to Japan to catch hanami this spring because a lot of the places I would have wanted to go to would probably have been closed, to say nothing of the possibility of a quarantine either on the way there or back. I have friends who already cancelled a trip to Thailand just to avoid that possibly, and I think they were right to do so. I have friends still going to Japan--hopefully it works out for them!

Tonight is the last "Universal Truths, Jewish Roots" class, and I'm curious to see what the subject will be. It wasn't listed on the syllabus, and the rabbi never got to mention it at the end of last class, so...mystery class!

Just recently we learned that part of the flight-or-fight response involves a hormone secreted by our bones, which means that from a certain point of view, all those bone-hurting juice memes are real.

Or, from another, the true Skeleton War was inside us all along.

I went to Mishkan on Friday and it was just as lovely as it always is, but what I really want to highlight is that we had two melodies for "Lecha Dodi." The second one, for the second half, was Mishkan's tradition one, but for the first half we sang it to the tune of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." You can hear a version by the Maccabeats here, and while we obviously weren't as smooth and practiced as they are, I think the impression on me from the music was the same. People make jokes about how easy it is to write new verses to "Hallelujah," but here's a five-century-old liturgical song and look how easily it fits in?

Come, beloved, and greet the Bride.

Yesterday afternoon I went to Distant Worlds, which I bought tickets for at almost the last minute once a discount code popped up and I learned that Aaron.hosek was going to. And...hmm. As I described it to my friends later, it was good but not great. They played a Chicago premiere of an orchestral arrangement of Searching for Friends, the world map music from the second half of Final Fantasy VI which was nice, and another Chiago premiere of an orchestral arrangement of Suteki Da Ne from Final Fantasy X which was...not. They had Rikki, the original performer, there to sing it in person, but it's been twenty years. She tried, but her voice is not what it was. And the second half of the concert was all Final Fantasy VII, which has good music, but I've never played it so I don't really have any connection to it.

Though, that's also true of Final Fantasy XIV, and that didn't stop Answers from being the best song they played.

I was also happy that Shimomura Yōko was there, even if she never said anything and just waved a bit from the stage. She's much better known for her work on the Street Fighter II and Kingdom Hearts soundtracks, but I just heard an interview with Tateishi Takashi, the composer of Mega Man 2's soundtrack, who didn't know until a few years ago that Western fans thought of him as a video game music god, so I think it's a good thing any time any of those Japanese composers can see how well-regarded they are abroad.

As I left, I heard a woman explaining to her friend why Final Fantasy VII has so many die-hard fans--she said it was because it was the first 3D entry in the series, like Ocarina of Time for Zelda.

After the concert I went out to cake with Aaron.hosek so we could talk for a bit--we made plans to try to make the A New World chamber music concert in January when it comes back to Chicago, since we've been to a bunch of Distant Worlds concerts and, as he said, they're having to make increasingly deep cuts to avoid getting repetitive, but chamber music is a new frontier--and then I hopped on the blue line and went out to Rosemont to meet the suburban friend crew at Hofbräuhaus for German food.

Now, I know what you're thinking: isn't German food full of pork? And yes, it is, but before I went I consulted with thosesocks, who lived in Germany, about what I should get. With her assistance I decided on the fish, and then I ordered it and...it was almost completely tasteless, as were the vegetables that came with it. I ate it, but mostly because I was hungry. No one else finished their food, and while some of that is that I wasn't drinking liters upon liters of beer like most of the others were, I don't think that's all of it. As thosesocks said:

yeaaah, this is why I'm not generally a fan of German cuisine, despite loving lots of other things about Germany… 😅

The company was great! The food was...well, saiyukisiren is organizing another trip to German food for a different restaurant, so. She said they went there more for the beer and the atmosphere than the food, which is fair. I compared it to a maid cafe, where you pay ¥2000 for mediocre omurice and coffee but the maids blow on it to cool it and play silly games with you while you eat. Hopefully this new restaurant has better food!

Today I've played Kirby's Adventure, went looking around Andersonville for a set of chairs for my home--didn't find one I liked that would fit, sadly, though I have one other place I can check--and otherwise did chores. This week I'm finishing up Cowboy Bebop with lisekatevans on Monday, going to lunch at Hanabusa Cafe's soft opening with worldbshiny on Tuesday, and having my final meeting with my therapist before she goes for real on maternity leave on Thursday. Hopefully everyone has a good week!

They spent a week rebuilding the database and index, checking the entries, and then it immediately broke when I opened it after they said they were done. The very first physician I checked had no data attached. For this we spent all that time and money.

Just got an email that they are still looking into it.

I saw an article on twitter about how Glyphosate (aka Roundup) is killing bees. There are previous studies that found no effects on bees' navigation skills or learning ability, but this new study checked bees' gut bacteria and suggests that exposure reduces bees' resistance to disease. So add that to the list of ways that humans are destroying the environment and didn't even realize it until decades later. (h/t to TwentySidedCat for the link)

I went to an Anime Chicago discussion on Sunday about 四月は君の嘘 / Your Lie in April, and it turned out that I was the lone dissenting voice. It was a fun discussion, but I felt a bit like a wet blanket talking about how all the slapstick humor with care taken to animate the blood in an anime about trauma due to past abuse turned me off, and how in a show almost entirely about how music allows us to form connections beyond words, they kept interrupting the musical performances with the audience's internal (and external) monologues. And the main female character is a manic pixie dream girl dying of mysterious anime disease. I gave it a 4/10 and I think the average excluding me was more like 7.75. Perhaps I am a hater.

Other than that I did a lot of nothing this weekend. I some coding practice and made a Roman numeral converter (only Arabic -> Roman, though it'd be easy to make it work the other way too). That took about an hour and a half of staring at the problem with no idea what to do, and once I figured out an approach, writing the function took maybe ten minutes. Then I kept getting NaN as the result, changed stuff, changed other stuff, changed it back to how it started and...it worked. I'm not sure what sorcery occurred, but I'll take it.

I'm sure I changed something somewhere that fixed a bug, but damned if I know what it was.

questionoftheday asks: If you were given the chance to be immortal, and to forever be the age of your choosing, what age would you be? Why?

My answer: 25. I mean, is there anyone who's going to answer differently? I guess some people would want to be younger than that, but given the choice would anyone want to be physically older assuming their mental experience came over unaltered? I don't see why.

Though if I were frozen at the age I am now I'd do okay. I'm 36, and I drank half a bottle of wine and stayed up to 1 a.m. last night talking with lisekatevans and I'm fine today. As long as I can keep doing that, I'm good.

It's probably not a good idea for me to read climate news right before bed.

I've since read some cogent critiques of the piece, pointing out its Eurocentrism and factual errors like the invocation of medieval stasis in the idea that for thousands of years, people would live mostly the same as their parents and grandparents did. This was the popular conception even at the time--see all those medieval paintings with Jesus and the disciples dressed like someone from medieval France--but it was never actually true. There were a lot of changes over that time, just none as visible from the modern age as the industrial or green revolutions.

There was also a good point about the wisdom of "The situation is bad and requires immediate action" vs. "Your descendants will ritually curse your names in the ruins of their ancestors' cities." The first is true, the second might be true, but encourages paralysis. If civilization is doomed, why bother trying to save it? Live in luxury now while it's still possible. Eat, drink, and be merry, etc. I'm definitely inclined more towards inevitable doom, but more in ScreamingInternally.jpg model than the conspicuous consumption model.

I could have written this last night around 1 a.m., but fortunately I've developed better bedtime discipline as I've gotten older and I just stayed in bed and kept trying to sleep.

I'm slowly making progress on re-linking all the photo embeds to their new hosting. I've done Darker than Black, all my video game reviews, and my Japan, Chicago, Translation, Warcraft, and Travel tags. Now I'm working on Fifty Weeks, Fifty Curries and then I'll get to the RPGs tag and that'll probably be the vast majority of everything necessary. I'll catch the last few photos when I find them.

Tonight is the next session of Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom after a month hiatus due to conflicting schedules. We left off right before the protagonists and their hired mercenaries entered a cave system in pursuit of a group of necromancers. They've spent half-a-dozen sessions tracking down the source of the walking dead plague and following them to this cave system, and now the climactic battle happens against at least three necromancers and whatever else is down there. They're mostly uninjured but fatigued, having force-marched through the day to arrive before sundown, and while they have mounts the mercenaries were on foot. Who will win?

Inspired by a friend posting about having to work fifteen days in a row at her part-time jobs and two other people coming in and posting "lol suck it up try working 169 hours a week before you complain. *smallest violin* Put on your big girl panties and work for money so you can buy pretties", which is paraphrased, but not by much. Some of that is quoted literally.

I mean, I'm not surprised that managers set up circumstances that require someone to work multiple part time jobs to not starve, because capitalism. Workers are a cost, not an investment or a value, and they'd be replaced with robots in an instant if robots were good enough to do it. As the Wobblies said long ago:

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
-Preamble to the IWW Constitution

Smash the state, etc.

No, it really annoys me when other workers come in and talk about the virtues of working ridiculous hours, how it's just what you have to do to get by, how you shouldn't complain, "put on your big girl panties," and other bullshit like that. It's like when people complain about the pay and benefits of union workers and want them taken away, because G-d forbid you make common cause and try to get your pay raised. That's communism or something. No, we can't have that. We need to make sure that other people also work hard until they die because if anyone else gets one penny they haven't "earned" then justice is a lie, the Founding Fathers are rolling in their graves, and it's all sad eagles and Jeezus casting people into the outer darkness.

But even beyond the idiotic Prosperity Doctrine-laced workaholism of American culture, it's bad science! Working that much doesn't work:

The perplexing thing about the cult of overwork is that, as we’ve known for a while, long hours diminish both productivity and quality. Among industrial workers, overtime raises the rate of mistakes and safety mishaps; likewise, for knowledge workers fatigue and sleep-deprivation make it hard to perform at a high cognitive level. As Solomon put it, past a certain point overworked people become “less efficient and less effective.” And the effects are cumulative. The bankers Michel studied started to break down in their fourth year on the job. They suffered from depression, anxiety, and immune-system problems, and performance reviews showed that their creativity and judgment declined.
-source

Add that together with the assumption that anyone who isn't rich is probably lazy, and... Ugh, I could write pages and pages about how much this enrages me. It's setting society up to grind people under the wheel until they can't hold it up any more, then throw them away and get another person to take their place. It's awful and we shouldn't have to put up with it.

Then again, there's a significant portion of society who thinks that, when asked about someone without enough money for medical treatment, Let him die! is somehow not a horrific opinion worthy of utter ostracism, so things are unlikely to change any time soon.

You could argue that we need a way for supremely motivated people to put in extra hours of their own free will and not if compelled by their bosses, because there really are people who love their jobs and love spending tons of time at work, and while I may not understand them, there are a lot of people I don't understand but whatever, they can do what they want. It's really difficult to allow this while also not setting up some kind of social norm in favor of tons of hours, though. I mean, Marxism aside, a person who comes in 20 extra hours a week, or spends 20 hours at home unpaid doing extra work, seems like a much better investment than the one who clocks in, does their 9 to 5 (for those lucky enough to have a 9 to 5...), and clocks out. It's more work, after all, and without some kind of productivity analysis, it would be impossible to tell if they're producing less work than they could be with a more measured schedule, so it's easy for managers to point to that person as a model and exert subtle or overt pressure to match them. That's the whole point of overtime pay, after all--to add a cost that discourages that kind of behavior.

The problem, of course, is that overtime pay is per job, so people working multiple jobs are screwed. And a ton of jobs are exempt from it even when they shouldn't be, even as the amount of stuff the average worker has to do keeps increasing with no corresponding pay increase. So yeah, smash the state.

Here endeth the rant.

So, playing Spore, with its enormous number of interstellar civilizations, had me thinking lately about the so-called "Great Filter" (also known as the Fermi Paradox).

For those who don't want to read, the basic summary is this--there are billions of stars in the galaxy. Even if less than 1% of 1% of those are capable of supporting sentient life, that's still thousands of intelligent civilizations. Assuming they achieve relativistic travel, a single civilization could expand to colonize and terraform every planet in the galaxy in only a few million years--and much, much faster than that if FTL travel is possible. The only thing that could stop them, after they got large enough, would be another civilization of similar expanse. So why haven't we found any hard evidence of aliens yet, either in their visiting Earth or in hearing communications? The basic possibilities come down to this:

A) Because there aren't any. Intelligent life is far rarer than we expect...or something destroys nascent civilizations before they expand too far. This (well, and the Borg) seems to be the inspiration for Spore's Grox.
B) Intelligent life destroys itself before advancing. Whether in ecological catastrophy, planetary war, or a similar armageddon. The problem here is that once a civilization expands beyond a handful of planets it would take an enormous catastrophy to destroy it.
C) Technical problems in discovery or communication. SETI mostly listens for radio signals, and human civilization now is slowly moving past wide-spread use of radio signals. Less than a century of easily-detectable transmissions make it extremely hard for any civilization to discover another one. There's also the aliens among us hypothesis, which is that they're already here but keeping themselves hidden, or the posthuman hypothesis, which is that alien civilizations would go through a technological singularity and become essentially impossible for humans to meaningfully communicate with, even if we could find them.
D) The universe is expensive to colonize. Another possibility is alien races who do not have the urge to expand, though this becomes less tenable when projected over extremely long time scales. This also gets into things like cosmological constants being different in different places and other things we have little or no evidence for.

So, what do you think? Are they out there, and if so, where are they?

So, I just read an article in Science News about how, in some cases, obesity may be contagious. Apparently, there's a certain virus which can convert stem cells into fat cells. In the experiment they did, 30 percent of obese test subjects showed antibodies related to the virus. Apparently, though, the virus is only contagious for a few weeks.

This is partially my axe to grind, since I think America would have a lot fewer problems if people wouldn't use "Well, they should show some personality responsibility!" as code for "They're disgusting, subhuman and aren't worthy of our help."

Why I hate Terry Goodkind:
Now with textual support!

The series started out okay, but rapidly descended into thinly disguised BDSM and torture porn, ultra-capitalism wanking / Ayn Rand fandom, and "any ends justify the means when the Ubermenschen do it!" pseudo-justifications for the heroes brutal and capricious mass murdering of their "enemies," which include peaceniks, 8-year old girls, rape victims, and communist Muslimsthe Imperial Order. Also, Richard overthrows an evil socialist empire by carving a statue imbued with the power of CAPITALISM!!111!1!!

The link there has a bullet point list of a lot of the "OMGWTF" moments in the series, complete with direct quotes from the books.

This weekend's Within Temptation concert was amazing. Sharon den Adel is a lot shorter and cuter in person than she looks in the band's music videos. She also sings just as well, which is really impressive considering the stuff you can do in a recording studio. My only complaint is that they didn't play It's the Fear, which is probably my favorite WT song.

I've gotten into Neverwinter Nights and Xenogears more lately. The first because I can play it with schoolpsychnerd and I never beat it originally, and the second because I've owned it for close to two years and still haven't beaten it. Hopefully that'll change soon, and then I can finally beat FFVII. Just in time for the new PSP to come out and me to play Tactics.

Woo gaming.

I have found possibly the most hardcore animal on the planet: "Vampyroteuthis infernalis". It's scientific name means "Vampire Squid from Hell." \m/

Walking alone at night, even through an obviously safe suburban neighborhood, is still incredibly creepy. I just got back from a short walk, and it reminded me of what was possibly the creepiest single thing I've ever done--walk home, alone, from the pub on Inis Meáin back to the house where we were staying. It was about a mile and a half walk, and I think there was maybe one light on the whole path. Two nights I did it with my friends, but the third night I was alone. That was the night where Roxie told us that the previous night, she had left the pub about five minutes before one of the other students, walked home alone along the only path back to the house she was staying at, and arrived five minutes after them. They did not pass each other on the way. Nothing huge, but it was enough to set the mood when the only thing I could hear was the sound of the wind, my footsteps and the beating of my heart.

There was an old barrow off the side of the road. I did not go investigate it.

I originally thought that being married would be some kind of major change--that I'd be made different somehow, because of it. Apparently, I was wrong. softlykarou and my relationship hasn't really changed after being married, other than being introduced to people as "the married friends" with a smile and a faint twitch. This is, in retrospect, not a bad thing. I imagine that having a child, if that ever happens, will be a much bigger change.

So, I went to pay for gas today (since I had maybe a gallon left in the tank), and discovered that, once again, gas is $3 a gallon. And this is in April. I'm willing to bet that it'll be $3.25-$3.50 by the summer, and that's assuming a hurricane doesn't push it up to $4.50 or higher.

These prices actually don't bother me too much--maybe they'll convince the 50% who voted for Bush in 2004 how stupid a mistake they made--but the problem is, people won't realize that it's a good opportunity to push alternate energy research. They'll just scream for lower gas prices now and vote out anyone who doesn't deliver. Not that, strictly speaking, I can blame them. I have plenty of free space in my budget to soak the price increases. Most people don't.

Worry, worry...

While Donald Rumsfeld crewing a ship that would possibly be in charge of a first contact situation is, in my opinion, pretty much asking for the beginning of a genocidal war, there's a reason I chose to include it as the title of my post. After a theoretical physics paper presented at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics annual conference won first place, the U.S. government has expressed interest at using the theories presented within to develop an honest-to-gods warp drive. Even the way it works is fantastic--generating a huge magnetic field to provide thrust, or, at high enough power levels, drop the spaceship into another dimension where the speed of light is faster. A literal hyperspace.

Of course, I'm leery about it actually working, and more worried about how much of an effect that strong of a magnetic field would have on the crew, not to mention shipboard equipment, but still. My government believes in this enough to fund research into hyperdrive. How awesome is that?

I've been reading Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead recently. I've always hated Ayn Rand's philosopher (as a sort of disclaimer), and this book hasn't changed my opinion. I think the main character is supposed to be likeable, since he's a shining paragon of self-sufficiency, but really, he's just a self-absorbed asshole. I put the book down after the rape scene where the woman, after Roark (the main character) leaves, goes to the bathroom to wash herself, but stops because that means she would remove his scent from her skin and she's obsessed with him...not cool.

schoolpsychnerd came to visit this weekend, and most of what we did...was play WoW. Well, okay. We did a bunch of other stuff (like watch Cowboy Bebop), but I got her hooked on WoW as well. According to kraada, I am now the moral equivalent of a crack dealer. Really, I'm not sure that's so wrong :-p