20100220

Saturday, February 20, 2010

School is great. I could live in school. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up doing something like that, turning into one of those lifelong academics. I wish I could do more now, but soon I’ll be able to. I go to shore duty and that should free up some more time for study. It’s not like I’m not studying a ridiculous amount as it is, I’m just not doing it in any particularly organized manner, and not for college credit. It’s all good, though. It seems like most of the classes I’ve taken, I’ve already been prepared for. Hopefully I can keep that going, at least to some extent. I suspect that there’s virtually no way that could be for medical school, but at least I can prepare as much as possible. Right now, philosophy is dominating my life, but I don’t see any reason why I’d have a problem shifting gears. In fact, philosophy is giving me a better faculty with which to understand everything else. It really is the paradigm for everything else—the philosophy behind it. The threads in the blanket of philosophy stretch out to every possible space they can reach, like life itself expands to the extremes of its own ability to survive.

I’ve been listening to Richard Dawkin’s The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. It’s very well put together, and the way it presents arguments is much more sophisticated and well put together than those in The God Delusion. I want to go back and revisit that one again as well. I’m planning on setting up another blog for book/literary reviews here: http://literaphile.blogspot.com/. And I’ll pour out some extensive thoughts on those book there, but The Greatest Show on Earth gave me a couple ideas I wanted to mention, because they tie in to a couple subjects I have been thinking about quite a lot lately. The first one came to me during a treatment of DNA, and how it is self-replicating. Mr. Dawkins talks about how someone being eaten by a tiger might at least feel some solace in the idea that they were being sacrificed to one of nature’s great beasts, and similarly with an anaconda. He even quotes Blake’s Tiger, Tiger during this segment. But, the he says that dying from the common cold just seems so “futile.” “But, it’s all futile,” he says, because DNA just has to replicate. It doesn’t care if it does it by the tiger eating you or the cold-virus making you sneeze. I don’t want to delve into evolution and DNA. I rather think Dr. Dawkins does a fine job of it in his book. But, I do want to compare the idea of DNA being a self-replicating chemical machine to the idea of nanobots. I am sure that this is not a new analogy, but, when listening to the audiobook, that was the first time it had crossed my mind.

A self-replicating nanobot world might end up being something very like a DNA world, as nanobots found better ways to carry out their replication and provide themselves with the resources they needed to replicate. I don’t think there’s much probability to the fear that self replicating nanobots could devour the entire world because they would be quite limited in their functionality. I really haven’t done the research or have the knowledge that I should on nanotechnology, especially since it’s an emerging industry and shows promise in being such an integral part of the future, and the futurist movement. But, that’s a subject I’ll have to elaborate on later.

Another idea I want to use in my political writing concerns Mr. Dawkin’s discussion of the reason why trees grow so tall—because they have had to compete against one another for sunlight in the forests. He talks about how growing taller costs the trees more valuable energy and resources, and that it would just be better if the trees could settle on a rule to grow to a certain height, and not grow any higher, they would save themselves from wasting a lot of energy. This would make a great analogy for the way our society works, and how, if we could just agree not to take advantage of each-other in competition, we’d save a lot of energy, and prevent a lot of suffering. More elaboration on that to come as well.

I really need to get working on writing these books, and I think I will be able to do that during the deployment. I hope I am not on the watch-bill for deployment, but it doesn’t look too promising. I’ve just been too excited to get back and get off of the USS VANDEGRIFT, finally. It’s been a long time and I’ve been through too much bullshit there, too much time spinning my wheels and not moving nearly as fast as I should have, thanks especially to several people who just can’t bear to see someone else do well because it would make them feel worse about their position in life. But enough with that negativity…

It’s time to reorganize, refocus, and make another push.