Nonsense and Sensibility

Come In, Number Five, your time is up! Hear the terrible and tragic cry of the grammar nazi. Feel pity for the nitpicking OC attentions of your inner copy-editor. C'mon, you know you have one in there.

Reach out and touch someone in the head. There'll come a time, don't know where, don't know when -- perhaps when Kurzweil's Singularity comes around -- which, in my ever-so-jumbled opinion, will be a couple of centuries after The Rapture of the Christians -- a time when we're able to transmit thoughts, emotions, sensations and memories direct from one sentient brain to another, but for now... for now we're stuck with words. Words written or words spoken. Words used carelessly and words use in malice. Words misused and abused and deliberately or otherwise misunderstood. But all we can do is paint the best word pictures we can and hope the some glimmer of the meaning we intend pierces through the ego fog and tickles the palate of some other. Sometimes that means ignoring the usual meaning of the words themselves and enjoying their song, their sound, the music they make devoid of the overlays of conventional comprehension. Maybe that's the best way to make use of words, the way that stays truest to the sensations and memories and evocations we're trying to transmit between us. It's a challenging task, and one many feel called to, but few respond with full commitment.

Wake up. Time to write.

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Well it's nine o' clock on a Saturday,
The regular words shuffle in.
They've all come along for a memory.
Let's dispose of them in the bin.
Singin' La la la ladiddaaa, la la ladiddaaa da da da da...

Sometimes in the Forest...

And sometimes in the Forest you find a fairy and sometimes, seldom, so very, very rarely, one is slow enough to catch and so you catch it and eat it, all crunchy and sticky and thinly sweet like nectar, and never enough to satisfy and not enough substance to really nourish, but still a seldom treat in the forest.

And they go well with the Mushrooms that sometimes you find, off in the far ends of Winter after some rain and tucked away in the deeper gloom where the trees grow thick and not much light reaches the ground so almost nothing grows but what takes hold on the crumbling and dusty mouldering and falling apart logs that litter the floor of the forest. And then if you're lucky you find one -- sometimes one of the red ones and sometimes one of the brown ones all yellow and spongey beneath -- and they are very good along with the thin and stringy sweetness if you're so very lucky enough to find and catch a slow fairy in time -- and sometimes it's one of the orange ones, though they so quickly grow a green and bitter slime in the centre of their caps after the rains when they catch some little bit of water in the upturned cone they make. And even when you get them in time and they don't have any slime in their middle, I don't much like their flavour, though other people love them very much. And so when I find the orange ones I bring them back to give to some other people who do like them, and never bother eating them myself, not even with forest fairies, so quick and airy and crunchy sweet.

And it's not so easy, catching a forest fairy, for you must always, always catch them in time. And time does not bend so easy or willing so twisting up a snare takes a great deal of patience. And I am afraid that many people, I'd go so far as to say most people, have no idea what patience, real patience is and they foul up the making of a snare (if they even have the patience to learn that such a thing can even be done) and the snare snaps back and all your bending and twisting gets undone as the time springs back into the shape it wants to be. And even that springiness is precisely the thing, precisely the property that makes time so very, very suitable for making a snare for catching forest fairies and nothing else will do for that job, not being quick enough to catch them at their play as they flit beneath the undergrowth in the dank and dark secrets of the forest. And so you have always to catch them in time and nothing else will do.

And it is, I confess, a lot of work just to catch something so very lacking in substance, even though they are so thinly sweet and rare enough that they're a seldom treat, all crunchy and melty on the tongue and also good with cheese.

Is it an Ism or is it Useful Stuff?

How do you know if something is still just technology -- as opposed to stuff that just works? 

Well, according to the astonishingly bright, though regrettably deceased, DNA¹, the presence of a manual is a strong clue. If a thing comes with a manual, then it's probably technology and may or may not actually do what you want it to do.

I recently bought a Brush Cutting machine -- a sort of industrial-strength version of a weed-eater. Or strimmer. Or whatever the hell you call it in whatever backwoods you inhabit. The thing is that the little ones fall apart at the mere sight of the sorts of grasses that tend to populate -- I might say "infest" -- smallholdings. Grasses thicker than your thumb, and head high... I digress. The machine is a splendid thing. With a metal blade fitted to its whirling end it can cut down small trees and could even serve as a pretty fearsome weapon of war if need be. It came with a manual. Not a hell of a thick manual, admittedly, but nevertheless, a Book.

So, while I sort of agree with DNA that this is a strong hint that the thing is leaning toward being technology, I think we can refine the notion a bit. For a start, I think we can hypothesise that the thicker the book, the stronger the hint. My mother recently bought a new Mercedes. One of those cars with computer screens that tell you when you're about to ding another car in the parking lot or when a tyre has gone flat (i.e. too late) or that utterly fail to warn you that you're about to drive off the end of the unbuilt section of elevated freeway because the thing's data was loaded from the original planning diagrams and not the reality of the bits that never got constructed because the project ran out of money. The Merc came with an instruction manual slightly thicker than the complete collection of DNA's slightly mischaracterised but terribly famous trilogy.

And there's a potential weakness in the hypothesis if we take the notion of what constitutes a book too literally. My newest computer -- unarguable a technology and hardly useful for anything except raising my blood pressure to dangerously unhealthy levels by reading the blatherings of self-entitled narcissistic know-nothings on various social media websites -- the current President of the USA, for example... my newest computer came without any book at all, which should, theoretically, qualify it as "useful stuff" and not at all a technology. The thing is that there is a book for it. A whole lot of books, in fact. It's called The Internet. So rather a fat book, and growing fatter at a quite alarming rate.

Then, too, there's another reason why Brush Cutters and Mercedes Benz motor cars come with instruction manuals. The manufacturers, or, to be more accurate, the manufacturers lawyers, feel compelled to fill the first few hundred pages with cute little pictures and long explanations about how, if you ever go near the machine while it is running, or bring petrol anywhere closer to the machine than a neighbouring province, you risk losing limbs, life, children and your life savings due to the dire hazards involved. You are warned that, should you fail to memorise the handbook, verbatim and in its entirety, you will automatically absolve the manufacturer of any and all traumas you might suffer as a consequence of using the machine, up to and including the creation of those elusive subatomic particles that physicists try to detect using the Large Hadron Collider and that create black holes that will destroy the Earth. It's OK. Apart from the fact that we already seem to be doing a pretty competent job of destroying the bits of the Earth that keep it a pleasant place for humans to live, we all know that those first hundred or so pages of the manual are not really there for anyone to pay attention to. Anybody who actually obeys all the instructions is likely to end up wearing a tonnage of safety gear so great that they'd be unable to stand up without a prosthetic exoskeleton. And that thing's going to come with its own instruction manual, isn't it. 

No, the warnings are there so that, if you do accidentally chop down the neighbour's prized Rhododendron bush, or a cow, or a planet, they're legally not to blame. It will all be your fault for not reading the small print on page 73 where it said that the machine should not be operated within 150m of any other living organism.

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[1] Douglas Adams

That Faint Whiff of Failing Statism

Bushpig poo. Oh, the stench! That's what Keira the Mighty Hunting Dog has rolled in. Oh, the joys of washing Bushpig poo off a dog of great fur. The smell can haunt the place for days.

So, too, the stink of kleptocracy and state capture.

Occasionally I get the urge to analyse politics and make predictions, despite considering myself to be crap at politics and having a dim view of politicians. I define them as The Lowest Form of Life On The Planet, having crawled out from under a rock when they saw the rest of us departing the trees. But one think I ought to write down "for the record" is this: 

By sometime in the mid-2020s, South Africa will no longer exist for practical purposes as a functional nation-state. 

Of course I am as crap at predicting timelines as anybody else -- you really can't time the market -- so my choice of timing is likely to be a bit off. Also worth noting that I don't think SA will be alone in this, though it might be among the "early adopters". I think that we will see a significant weakening of the grip of nation-states as the primary repositories of sovereignty over the course of the next hundred years or so.

The thing that prompted this was Patricia de Lille's resignation asleader of the DA in WC so that she can concentrate her energies on strengthening city governance in CT. I don't read anything sinister or bullshitty in the news. Indeed, it makes perfect sense if you remember that the DA has always had a federalist agenda. And perhaps there are people within the DA's strategic planning (Hello, James!) who likewise foresee a weakening of the centralist nation-state and a concomitant resurgence in the city-state as our go-to source of governance.

If we look back a little, the DA has had enough time running the City of Cape Town (and the Western Cape Province, though I consider that to be of much lesser significance) to get this working the way the want (more or less -- nothing's perfect in this world). In other words, they've probably managed to fire the truly rotten apples within their bureaucracy -- or at least strongly encouraged some early resignations -- and have had the time for the remaining functionaries to absorb deeply the fundamental principles of how the DA wants things done within their administration. Now it is time for them to take things to the next level. And isn't that pretty much what Peppermint Patty said...?  It is far too early for this stuff in Tshwane or Jo'burg. Getting the fundamentals in place in those cities is going to take until at least the next municipal election. 

Not only does the DA want and need to show people what sort of government they aim to deliver, they also need to explore for themselves how to do that, and CT is the best available and meaningful platform for doing that. It is also a way to strengthen city government as a means to actively weaken state (central) government. Thus they act not only as a necessary and imho highly-desirable preparation for a substantially non-functional nation-state entity, but as active change agents in bringing that about.

The recent visits to foreign countries by various DA officials -- much decried by the ANC -- is entirely in line with this. If you no longer trust the nation-state to work at developing trade ties with foreign entities, then it is certainly wise to begin to do so yourself, and all-the-more so if those relationships can be forged at a city-to-city level. Incidentally, it also sends that message that the (DA-run) cities would seem to consider that the nation-state is failing to do an adequate job of foreign trade relations.  No wonder the ANC is upset at them for this. The ANC is being shown up as crap -- or, at least highly partisan -- at a key job they ought to be performing.

It also serves as an early indicator of precisely what I predicted above: the imminent (though gradual!) collapse of the central nation-state as dominant repository of sovereignty.

It looks a lot like forces in the USA are aligning in ways that will push that nation in a similar -- federalist, devolutionary -- direction. A key difference for them is that, unlike so much European and Asian history, they have never had strong city-states as sovereign entities. 

But who am I, a South African, to criticise the USA's choice in misogynist, despotic, kleptocratic Putinesca for president when we're still stuck with Jake and can't seem to get rid of him and his state-capture cronies...

At least I could wash the Bushpig shit off my dog, and the smell will soon dissipate.

The Mars Problem

Getting to Mars -- more specifically, getting people to Mars -- is challenging enough, but it seems that one of the really hard parts is that very last step: getting them from a Mars parking orbit down to the surface. Mars's atmosphere is so thin that big parachutes only work up to a point. Bigger weights, bigger landers, and they're just not able to slow the craft enough to prevent a really hard landing. The thinness of the Mars atmosphere also means that our usual way of slowing incoming spacecraft -- by wasting their kinetic energy as heat -- is not terribly effective for Mars. So, up to now, most Mars mission planning has assumed that you'll need to slow for a landing by burning fuel. Retro-rockets. The advantage is that we have a pretty good idea how to do this. The disadvantage is that you have to lug a whole bunch of fuel all the way to Mars just so that you can land. Then you might want to take off again, so more fuel wanted there, and quite a lot of it. One way to handle this is to send it on ahead in its own spacecraft, park it in Mars orbit, and refuel the human-carrier upon arrival. All doable.

I think there's a better way, though it does rather presume that we intend going to Mars lots and lots, otherwise it is probably just not worth all the trouble. I think we should, send a robot factory ahead to build a space-elevator from orbit to the Martian surface. Sure, we don't really know how to build such a thing yet, but we also lack the technology to get really bulk shipments from here to Mars in the first place, so there's some time to work on the problem (and there are people actively working on it, anyway.)

Then, too, Mars is a much less challenging target for building a space-elevator than Earth is. In building our first space-elevator Mars's thin atmosphere is a positive advantage, as is its lower gravity. We'd get to build a useful, working elevator under slightly less challenging, but still real, conditions than if we try to build one for Earth, so good practise for us, and we simultaneously solve the problem of getting people down from Mars orbit to the surface. And back again, if they want. Plus it gets us past a whole horde of technical unknowns that we need to overcome if we're ever going to make access to space from down our gravity wells and an easy (for some value of easy) and cheap (relatively) prospect.

Let's go.