Letters to the Editor
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Faith - Embrace the Nothingness
Faith isn't about knowing the answer it is about embracing the unanswerable. Both is the ability to affirm yourself as a mortal being and an immortal entity. Faith is abandoning the illusion of control that comes with knowledge. You can build an integrated circuit but you can't build an emotion or a feeling. You can evoke love in a piece of art but you cannot create it.
Too often politics is a barrier to faith. Faith has no politics. If you meet someone who claims to have more faith or piety than you, ask if they know God. If they answer yes then ask how they can know the unknowable.
To have faith is to trust that you will be preserved in the unknown.
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Optimal Control.
I am going to speak our code for a moment, if only to build credit in your eyes.
I too, understand a P-N junction. I can calculate solutions to PDE's and have instituted genetic algorithms to solve optimization problems. Would you like to discourse on economic theories or the 3-coloring problem?
I too understand exactly through what you are going. All these things made us masters for a day. They are not going to enable us to sit and reflect and accept. You are not in control. You never were, not for a moment.
We may end up poor. I am not concerned with that. I don't like this lifestyle. I don't need it. Can I still walk to a local spot get a coffee and a bocadilla and crack open a notebook and derive. Do we still have libraries in this future? If so I think we will be okay.
Great beauty has flourished and died in this place. It will go on.
Also, don't be such a nationalist nor crybaby. We may be over, this great experiment may have been selected against. Just wait and see. In the meantime, crack open a beer and do a sudoko.
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If he had not shared the existence of a daughter, I would swear the One-Eyed Man was my father.
Cary, I've been reading your column as a guilty pleasure for years, and I have to say, this is the one time I have to disagree with you at every conceivable level. I don't have a scientific background to match that of The One-Eyed Man (OEM) but I do have a fair bit, combined with a lot of historical knowledge and a voracious appetite for current events. And he's right. Anyone who knows anything about the way technology gets developed and implemented knows that its impossible, I repeat, impossible, for even the most miraculous new tech to save our asses from the changes coming to the environment that we have so royally screwed. Even if the OEM himself was to come up with cold fusion (which is the Holy Grail of cheap, clean energy) tomorrow, it still wouldn't be enough, with all the CO2 already in our atmosphere. And I think it's pretty obvious that there's no realistic change that society can make that's going to make a lick of difference. Hell, we know what the problem is, and greenhouse emissions are actually worsening! The worst-case scenarios from the 90s are now considered moderate. The melting icecaps, worsening tropical storms, scarcity of food and clean water, world hunger, resource wars, environmental refugee migration are all going to happen. I don't know if it will start within our lifetimes, or our kids' (some say it has already begun), but these things will happen. These are a fact it was too late to change years ago.
The answer, Cary, is NOT to go on vacation and think happy thoughts. That is what got us in this mess in the first place, that faith that everything is going to work out for the best. Faith is, and will always be, a way to avoid constructive action. I think OEM once had that faith that humanity's curiousity, ingenuity, common sense and yes, decency could eventually solve all its problems given time. I had that too, before the magnitude of our collective folly became apparent. And make no mistake - we have fucked up on a level beyond the fuck-ups of any civilization before us, and the consequences are, at this point, inevitable.
Cary, do you have any idea how bad it could get, and why OEM is so upset? When the doomsayers like Al Gore talk about a "much-reduced standard of living," they're not talking about a smaller house and only one small car. They're not talking about becoming what is presently considered "working-class American". They're talking a level of poverty more in line with the poor in Latin American shantytowns, maybe even African. Go have a look, and then imagine your great-grandchildren living there. With antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis.
I'm not advocating depression, or nihilism. I'm advocating desperation. Get mad! It's your water they're crapping in! It's your lungs they're burning! It's your children who have to inherit the toxic mess we've created and are still creating! So organize and fight by whatever means you can handle (no, I don't advocate violence; the insurance industry makes that an exercise in futility in any case)! Or run to the hills and set up a self-sufficient farm in the mountains of New, but I'd recommend you have a few guns, in case things get as bad as they might. Or just give up, live in the suburbs, take care of your family and know that some day, when they are old and remember what the world was like when they were young, they will blame you for not standing up. Or do whatever you have to do to escape your terrible knowledge - drugs, reality television, whatever.
Or, as many have done, make your money at whatever cost, knowing full well the consequences of your actions, and be content in the knowledge that the wealth you pass on to your children might protect them from the consequences of your sins while the rest of us rot.
OEM, I feel for you. You are a Cassandra, doomed to see the future and be ridiculed for it. I can give you no comfort, because with what you know there is no comfort to be had. If really you want to escape, there are ways. You're a scientist; you can lose yourself in science fiction literature, much of what was written in a more optimistic time. In terms of drugs, ecstasy, aka MDMA, is good for happiness without too much stupidity.
But you have a duty - to your world, your species, your daughter, your self-respect. You know it. Fulfill it.