www.gurukalehuru.com

Sort of a science fiction day. Watched Valerian. I’d seen it before, and remembered I liked it, but, like a goldfish in a bowl, I guess, it was interesting straight through. One thing I really liked about it, was the cool alien worlds. The beaches of Mul (there’s supposed to be an umlaut over that, but my keyboard offers me no such possibility) and the Big Bazaar, or Grand Market I think it was called. The story, in the end, was not that amazing, our hero and heroine saved the nearly extinct alien race and caught the bad guy, but it was visually spectacular and that’s what I want in the future.
Then I went back to binge watching Another World. Season two is easily as good as season one. Sure, there’s action and cool science stuff, but there are ethical dilemmas galore. Do you sacrifice one person to save the whole crew? Can you ever really trust an AI? But the central question of the whole show is are the Archaians friend or foe – it’s looking like mostly foe but there have been a couple of points where negotiations seemed to be open – like when they saved the little girl.
But, it seems to go back and forth and the people on Earth have definitely seen a friendlier face than those out in space. But, it got me to thinking: it really will be a problem because we can’t even make that determination very well in our every day lives. There have been tales throughout history, and up to the present, across all strata of society, of people misjudging people, trusting somebody for years, maybe a business partner, maybe a spouse, and then are betrayed.
So, there’s no reason to think it will be any different when we meet our first alien species.

Once again, my view of reality is shattered, and one more pillar holding up the ceiling of how I thought the world worked has crumbled.
Over the past couple of days we put together a 2,000 piece jigsaw puzzle. Well, mostly Helena and Isabel. I put a couple pieces in here and there, and Sam stayed the hell away, as he tends to do with anything not football related. It was a puzzle of several of the world’s landmarks, the Eiffel Tower, Sydney Opera House, the Roman Coliseum, stuff like that. I was amazed that we finished in two days. With one piece missing. It was an edge piece, mostly light green lawn and at the top a strip of white, which was the base of the Mayan Pyramid.
So, anyway, just now, Helena, seeing I wasn’t doing anything productive with my day, suggested a solution. Since she just happened to have on hand the same exact puzzle in a different box, which is not as surprising as you think. I don’t think the puzzles quite outnumber the books on our shelves, but in raw area, they’re pretty close to even. She suggested I sort through and find the missing piece, and I said “Oh, hell no” or words to that effect, because I am not even good at jigsaw puzzles, much less finding 1 piece in 2,000, but the more I thought about it, this was an entirely different skill set. I didn’t have to find one piece. I just had to eliminate all the others, first by sorting out everything that wasn’t an edge, and then tossing aside everything that wasn’t light green.
I found it in about 5 minutes. But, it didn’t fit. It had to fit, that was it’s spot, but it didn’t fit. I called Helena over, expecting her to tell me I was stupid and that went somewhere else, but she agreed. She then found a couple of other pieces which could only go in a very specific spot, and they didn’t fit, either. Same picture, cut in different ways. “Why would they do that?” she asked. “To stop people like us,” I said.
But, really? Why would they do that?

I’ve started watching a series called The Billion Dollar Code, at least in English, I don’t know what it’s called in German, and they’re speaking German throughout, except for the occasional throwaway phrase, like “made my day” or when they’re actually speaking to somebody who speaks English.
The language is one of my favorite things about it, I’ve even picked up a few words, like echtzeit (not sure of the spelling), which means ‘real time’ and they use it a lot.
Sort of like ‘The Social Network’ it’s the story of a couple of computer nerds who sue Google for patent infringement, because they’d come up with a system called Terravision, which really was dead similar to Google Earth. Also like ‘The Social Network, it’s based on true events, so that’s always good.
I don’t know how the real event turned out, and I’m going to watch the series through and see, but I hope they get a nice payout, especially the actual computer genius behind the whole thing. I mean, the partner thought of it as an art project, he neither had the grand vision nor the chops to carry it out, but he probably deserves something, too. As well as all that crew that was helping them out.
So, I have to keep my snoopy fingers away from Wikipedia until I have binge-watched the whole thing. A battle of wills, indeed.

I’ve just got a feeling, from reading the article (and looking at his picture, I know that is not the right way to form opinions, but there it is) that Siggi Thordarson is not exactly the sharpest tool in the box.
Not only did he say that the FBI had promised, in return for his co-operation, not to inform the Icelandic authorities of any crimes committed in Iceland, he then told a reporter ‘My worry was that if I told them who was hacked and how, like Landsvirkjun and the government’s website and all that, I would become a target of Icelandic authorities.’
Well, they know now, dumbass. Anyway, he’s been arrested in Iceland, presumably for his hacking of Landsvirkjun, whatever that is, and the government’s website, and I won’t be terribly bothered if he spends a long time in jail.
After all, the U.S. government based their whole case against Julian Assange on his evidence, which he now admits was a lie. That isn’t going to give Assange the last ten years of his life back, but he should be freed immediately.
That’s what’s important. Not Siggi Thordarson.

I watched “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix the other day. It was a very compelling show, semi-documentary style, that is, it was mostly documentary but they did have sort of a story woven through it, a sort of a dramatic re-enactment in between the interviews and science fictiony scenes of three clones manipulating people’s minds, sort of like in ‘Inside Out,’ which, IMO, was one of those made for kids’ movies that had a serious, adult message. Animation can, indeed, be art.
I was rather stunned by the statistics, especially the suicide rate of pre-teen girls, which has tripled since the rise of social media. Tripled is pretty damned alarming, especially since I have a 14 year old girl whose relationship to Tik Tok could probably be viewed as an addiction. At any rate, I’m really, really glad the schools are open again because that’s a few hours of each day she must do something else.
But, all the stuff about algorithms, and how they give you more and more of what they see you are attracted to, is old news and personally, I see it as a sound business model. If you’re going to be bombarded with ads, it makes sense they should be about something you’re interested in.
Even the stuff about how Facebook knew they were causing psychological damage but plowed ahead anyway didn’t surprise me. I wish Mark Zuckerberg were a better person, but he’s certainly no worse than the executives at Monsanto, or Nestle, or Exxon, or Dupont, or Boeing, or Raytheon, who know that they are actually killing people, whereas Zuck is just providing a service which allows people to poison their own minds.
Which is worse – social media which lies to you by showing you more of what you want to see, without checking it for accuracy, or the government (pick a government, any government) and their allies (the mainstream media and the big corporations) who lie to you by lying to you?