Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Yes, it is definite.  Dolphins have language.  We don’t know what they  talk about.  We don’t know if they have poetry, and music.  We don’t know if they have folk tales, passed down from generation to generation.  We don’t know if they talk about humans and what assholes we are for putting down all those nets.  We don’t know if they have some words that only adult dolphins are supposed to use.  Scientists haven’t figured out very many individual words yet, there is no Rosetta Stone or anything equivalent.  There is a word they  think means fish, or it might mean ‘something good to eat” or “Hey, look, over here.”  A bit of work remains to be done.
However, the thing with language is that once you’ve go a bit of it, it becomes correspondingly easier and easier to learn, with  each passing word.  So, we’ll start off by figuring out ‘fish’ and work out from there.

I can just imagine the conversation dolphins have:

Are you hungry?
Yeah.
Whaddya wanna eat?
Fish.
Fish!  OMG, that’s my favorite, too.  What do you like to do in your spare time?

Oh, I dunno.  Swim around and stuff.
Wow!  That’s so cool.  We have so much in common.  You are really hot, btw.  You look like a….

Like a dolphin? Thanks, so do you.  so does everybody else.
Oh.

And I suspect that’s about all they ever talk about.  But, seriously, I’d be  very happy to find out it’s more than  that   That would be awesome.

It’s raining outside as I  type  this at 11:15  p.m. or, as the Czechs would  say,  23:15, which makes a whole lot more sense, but old  habits die hard,  especially when there  is  no particular reason to change them.
It is not a hard rain, it is a  gentle rain, one that it would not be unpleasant to be out walking in, but it is an overdue rain, a necessary rain.  I was just standing out on the balcony a bit, enjoying the change in air pressure.

It’s been a seriously hot week, I saw somewhere that every day this week was the hottest day on record for that day, and I believe it.  That’s happening more and more often.  That’s happening more and more often, and we still can’t get people to take global warming seriously.  We have these arguments over oil pipelines, and the point is we shouldn’t be using oil at all.  Solar and wind could  power the  grid, and we need to work on batteries that  will power our cars and planes.  And we need to get over cars entirely, but that’s not going to happen any time soon.
I am jazzed about the trans-Canada bike trail, though.  I don’t know the details, I saw one short  video on it (4-5 minutes is about  my  limit, my attention span.  Longer than that I don’t watch) but it looks sort of like a combination of trails, some meant for pedestrians, some for bicyclists, and some for horseback riders.  That’s all good, except that I think horses definitely deserve their own path and don’t belong with the others.
Canada does cool stuff.  So does Iceland.  So do a handful of countries around the world, now and again.  Japan does cool stuff sometimes, if just being weird and techno-geeky can count as cool.
I’ve no idea where I’m going with this blog and a clear direction is not emerging, so I am off to bed with this thought: when a country does something which is totally awesome wicked cool, like the trans-Canada bike path, other countries should take note and try to do it, too, to one up it, and thus we would make progress, step by step, one foot in front of the other, until we reach the golden future every sane person desires.

Sam is back from his school trip to France and he seems to have had a good time and saw a lot  of cool stuff, although he’s not exactly speaking fluent French or anything.

I felt a  little bit  bad that neither of us were there to  meet him when he got off the  bus, but H was at work  and I was teaching.  But, being old enough to take a trip like this, he’s certainly old enough  to find his way home and, in the end it was no problem at all.

Today, I used my most recent book of poetry in teaching, I tried to drag out the introductory conversation so poetry wouldn’t take up the whole period, I saw  a big risk of boredom there.  In the end, it was not a bad lesson.

One girl said “Ech, poetry” and I’m pretty sure it was in the class which suggested, last week, in a lesson on “what should we do  more of this year,” that we do more poetry and, in fact, I think it might have been the same girl.
There was a strong tendency, since I let each of them choose which  poem to read, to only read the short poems.
Like at any poetry reading, almost nobody was actually listening.
Nobody read with the inflections I would have, that I  imagined as I was writing them.
Those are the  negative points, and I don’t think I’ll do  it very often.  Once a year is about  right.  On the plus side, I think most of the students were impressed that I’d written a book of poetry and, in one class, a couple of students photographed the page they were reading from, and one girl  looked the book up on Amazon.
Also, discussing  the meaning of  the poems gave me lots of opportunities to give pompous, pretentious mini-lectures on the meaning of life, the  universe and everything, which is fun for me because I like sounding important and deep and thoughtful and all that, and maybe good  for them, too.  I hope so.  Other than  a little help with English, which they will either learn or not learn and it has little enough to do with me, it is  what I have to give.

I just saw this headline, and it was from a major, respected (I think) newspaper:  We are Almost Certainly Living in a Hologram, Experts Think.
Here’s what I think: that’s a load of bollocks.
Computer simulations do not have free will or internal emotions, but I do, and I assume, therefore, that you do, too, being human.  Also, we have the  fossil record of our  own, very organic evolution.  So, if it were all a computer simulation it would have to be one that starts with the creation of single celled life on this planet and has been running for billions of years.  Occam’s Razor says you can leave out that step, I mean the programming by  super intelligent beings from another dimension step, and just assume that we evolved  organically.

Picard is Pissed Off, I’m Guessing

The  whole ‘the world  is a hologram’ nonsense makes for a great science fiction plot (I wouldn’t say the Q episodes were Star Trek’s  greatest, but  they were certainly among the funniest), and is an interesting hypothesis, but since there is nothing to back it up, and it is so far beyond anything we know that there’s no way we  can even find any evidence of it, it’s absurd to state it  as a fact, or to say that it’s ‘almost certain.’
We can’t know what’s outside of our universe because we are not outside our universe.  That just seems totally obvious to me.
I think the reason people write rubbish like that is the  same reason  people invented religion in the first place.  We want an explanation for our existence, and most people are  willing to just accept one, if somebody  can make it sound plausible.  The genius programmer from a universe that dwarfs  our own is just another way  of saying  God, andit’s so  unnecessary.
When it comes to the big  issues, the  meaning  of life, the universe and everything, it’s important  to remember this:  we do not  know.

I’m not quite  ready to buy the body double rumors, or the idea that she was poisoned by the Russians, although I am keeping an open  mind.  Putin does dislike Hillary Clinton and I don’t think either one has any particular objection to murdering their opponents.
I don’t think he has motive,  though.  If Hillary dies, he’ll have to deal with President Tim Kain, which would be roughly the same thing.

On the other hand, I’m not buying the flu story, either, which is kind of tragic and sad and makes me seem paranoid and unreasonable because there is nothing at  this point that she can say that I would believe.  I just assume that every word out of her mouth, every statement from her campaign, is complete bullshit.
But, I have often noticed that people who pay no attention to politics whatsoever, which I tend to view as some sort of moral deficit, like they’re not doing due  diligence, are happier than those of us who obsess over it.

They say “it doesn’t matter, they’re all crooks” and I must admit, except for Bernie Sanders, who ran up against a brick wall, they are right.

I don’t think humanity is completely doomed, though.  Despite the corruption of politicians and the missed opportunity of having a better society, which is an opportunity we’ve been missing for the last 10,000 years or so, at least, things continue to improve, even as things are falling apart.  Science moves forward, the stream of new art, and music, and literature, continues to flow, and so on.