Of astronauts and aliens

This is the first weekend since I got here where I had nothing that needed doing, so I looked in the local paper to see if there might just possibly be an event going on in Flagstaff that I could attend. I was lucky. There was. It turned out I had 72 choices. So in the end I jammed a trilby on my head and went to the folk festival.

It was fun. At the entrance someone asked if I’d be so kind as to make a $3 voluntary donation for the privilege of parking and attending the festival, and she seemed genuinely pleased when I coughed up the money – Glastonbury-goers eat your hearts out!

To me, folk music means someone with an apparently serious earache singing about something miserable in an unintelligible Geordie accent. But I forgot – this is the Wild West. It was all mandolins and steel guitars, and sad songs about simple folk and their dysfunctional relationships. And there was no bluster or machismo either – everyone was just terribly, terribly nice. I do like this place.

Strange things happen here. At the folk festival a woman came up to me and said “Excuse me, but are you Steve Grand?” In my usual masterful way I managed to splutter “Er, um. Probably. Do I know you?” She said, “No, but I know you very well. I spent all morning editing videotape of you.” That’s a story for another time, but it’s that kind of a place.

Then this evening I headed for a lecture (free this time, none of that exorbitant $3 nonsense for a mere day’s entertainment) about how the Apollo 11 astronauts trained for their moonwalk around here. That’s what people do in Flagstaff: they train for things. Astronauts trained for the Moon; Olympic athletes train to run at high altitude and beat the crap out of me; Geologists train on the volcanoes; astronomers train in the observatory; national park rangers train to range parks… There’s a kind of earnestness about the place that I find very endearing.

The lecture was on the same road I live on, so I figured it wouldn’t take long to get there. Yet again I massively underestimated the scale of this country. And there was a delay due to a herd of elk. So I didn’t make it in time and if you were anxiously waiting to be enlightened on the subject of astronaut training you’ll have to wait a bit longer, sorry. But the sunset over the lake was stunning, so I didn’t mind.

Having Grace to dinner

Just in case you get the wrong impression from this giddy social whirl, here’s proof that I’m really just a lonely, sad geek. I’ve rebuilt Grace the Robot and she keeps me company at dinner.

“Male, 51, good listener, no sense of scale, seeks buxom robot for artificially intelligent conversation.”

Anyway, all this is irrelevant gibberish. What I really wanted to talk to you about is my new game. But oh dear, I seem to have run out of space. I was going to tell you about my plans to open a pet shop and sell aliens. Maybe next time…

Our hirsute brothers and sisters

Norm sent me a link to an interesting article on his site that suggests we are more closely related to orangutans than we are to chimpanzees. I lack the expertise to judge the research but it certainly seems respectable and comprehensive work.

Image © Sharon Gekoski-Kimmel 2000

I hope they’re right, I really do. For one thing whenever I’ve had the chance to watch my fellow great apes I’ve always felt more kinship with orangutans than with chimps, bonobos or gorillas (or even humans, sometimes). Their largely peaceful, solitary, gentle existence would make such a good common ancestral model to aspire to. Chimps always seem a bit nasty to me. Some would say that this makes them a better mirror of humans but that’s only true for modern humans (and indeed modern chimps) - I don’t know that we were always this warlike.

Plus we might have a little more chance of saving the few orangutans who are left if we recognised them as our brothers and sisters. Chimps seem to have a little more time left (not much but a little).

I wouldn’t dare say this in public, obviously, because someone might write deeply affronted comments on my blog or something, but if you ask me the differences in appearance and behavior between many human races are barely any smaller than those between the most orangutan-like humans and the most human-like orangutans. Sure, orangutans can’t talk, but they can do pretty much everything else – row boats, wash clothes, solve problems… They ought to be included in the human race, I reckon (along with the other hominids too). It would certainly challenge us to think more clearly about a lot of things if we expanded the definition of “us” rather more widely. After all, Australian Aborigines were not legally regarded as human beings by whites until 1967. Us and Them is such a basic categorization, something we are all guilty of making all the time: My friends versus my enemies, my family versus the rest of the village, Christians versus Muslims, Catholics versus Protestants. If you ask me (and I realise you didn’t, but this is my blog versus your blog) the more inclusive we make the category of “us”, the less meaningful the category of “them” becomes, and this is a good thing.

The evolutionary tree does not end in big lumps, within which all pigs are the same, all humans are the same, etc. It ends in trillions of individual leaves - every single living thing is unique and more or less distantly related to every other living thing. The notion of species certainly makes sense – there are reasons why some creatures can’t breed with others, and that means that creatures who can interbreed end up being more similar to each other and more different from those with which they can no longer share genes. This is also true to a lesser extent when geography or culture separate people – Irishmen end up looking more like other Irishmen than they do Russians, because they share genes more often. But so what? It’s still true that we are all different and all the same. Hedgehogs, jellyfish, azalias and E.coli are all “us”.

There are certainly places we need to draw lines, but there is no single line that works for all questions, so we need to get into the habit of turning our instinctive black and white categories into more subtle shades. For example we need to draw a line (perhaps a very fuzzy one) between things that are conscious and therefore have moral rights and things that aren’t and don’t. We don’t actually have a clue where to draw that line yet, but few of us are even asking the question. It almost certainly doesn’t fall between Homo sapiens and all other living things, as religion-reinforced intuition and arrogance would have us believe. Sometimes we also fail to differentiate between finding where to draw a line and choosing where to draw it.

Anyway, I realise this little rant would apply equally well if chimpanzees really are our closest cousins, but I just wanted to raise a cheer for orangutans. After all I was (until I went grey) a redhead just like them, so that makes me and the orangs into ”Us” and all you dark-haired gorilla offspring can go hang…

Between a rock and a hard place

Today I went out, ostensibly to think about my game. I went to Slide Rock in Sedona, where a canyon creek produces a delightful water slide, and bottle-green water cascades through brilliant red rocks as if designed for a film set. Unfortunately I was in a bit of a delicate mood and there were also a lot of women in bikinis, so not much thinking got done and therefore I have nothing to blog about.

I sat opposite a spot where people could jump about 15 feet into the water below, which they did with gay abandon until a pretty, preppy girl of about 18 called Jessica came along. She walked up to the edge, hesitated for a moment and was lost. She chickened out and withdrew in a flurry of nervous giggles. But she had a couple of friends on my bank, who hollered at her for being such a wimp and generally tried to encourage her, thus making it ever harder for her to get up the nerve. She tried again, and chickened out big time. People started to notice, but she bravely kept on trying, and kept on chickening out again. After about ten minutes it had become a major life ordeal for her, and had drawn a crowd of about a hundred of us who were helpfully counting to three and chanting “Jump! Jump!” at the poor girl. Can you imagine? By now it was completely impossible for her and she walked away, with shame and bitter disappointment seething inside her. I really felt for her.

Anyway, up above all this, taking no notice whatsoever, was a small hoodoo, on which sat a precariously balanced cap rock, whose only mistake had been to have a crack in one side, a thousand years ago, which had widened and isolated the rock from its neighboring strata. Once water had seeped into the crack and found its way to the soft sandstone below all was lost for it, too, and it gradually became marooned on a pinnacle of sand, maybe three inches across, from where, unlike Jessica, it will soon plunge into the foaming depths below.

Those foaming depths are formed into a series of potholes, because once such a rock falls into a hollow it can’t float out again, and hence acts as a millstone, grinding and digging itself an ever deeper and more inescapable hole.

The potholes in turn alternated with beaches, because of the way that, once a river starts to churn and bend, the outside of the bend gets the brunt of the water and debris, and so gets carved deeply, while the inside ends up with a slower current and consequent deposition. Once the process has started it can’t stop, until eventually the curve becomes horseshoe-shaped and a flood breaks through the ever thinning wall to produce an oxbow.

And the pebbles on these beaches were graded very neatly, with all the big stones at the top and all the finer ones at the bottom, not because God had carefully arranged them for best effect but because small stones can fall through the gaps between big stones, but big stones can never fall through the gaps between small ones.

And the people who sat on these beaches laughing at Jessica were arranged in clumps that drifted, rose and fell rhythmically during the afternoon, because everyone finds themselves in a tension between the desire to be with other people and the desire not to be seen to stand too close to strangers. As the gaps between them fill they find themselves in a crowd and wander off to find some space, thus becoming a nucleus for further aggregation.

And the level of noise rose and fell too, as each person had to speak louder to be heard over the others, who in turn had to speak even louder, until the crescendo reached the point where someone paused in their conversation to wonder why everyone else was shouting, then others wondered why that person had suddenly stopped talking and stopped too, and then finally those who were a bit slow on the uptake realised that they were the only ones left speaking too loud.

I have absolutely no reason to tell you any of this other than to remark on how amazing it is when positive feedback meets negative feedback and each has a time delay. The result is self-organisation. The result is also very beautiful, and anyone who thinks all this order needs a designer is sadly mistaken: you only have to look at things which have been designed to see that they can’t compare. Only randomness ratcheted by selection and driven by feedback can produce such elegance. Self-organisation blows my mind even more than women in bikinis.

And meanwhile, whilst everybody was kicking the pebbles and wondering about the noise and remarking at the tops of their voices to their neighbours about whether that hoodoo was safe to walk under, Jessica realised that no-one was looking any more, stepped up to the edge and jumped, bless her. I think it probably made her week.

Luckily the rest of us noticed in time to cheer.

Stunning portrayal of a global train wreck

Oh my goodness! Alon told me I should see this, in a comment to yesterday’s post, and yes indeed, I should have, and so should you. Watch it now. I’m not even going to attempt to describe it, you’ve got to watch it. Now!

(If it won’t stream smoothly, get a YouTube downloader and watch it from your hard drive (I used the downloader built into Speedbit’s DAP). It’s an 800MB download and then it requires a further 90 minutes to blow your mind.)

When you’ve watched it, make sure that everybody else on Earth watches it too.

 http://www.youtube.com/user/homeproject