Category Archives: Musings

What?

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Seasoned readers know mariner is old. He has been old long enough to recognize that there are new habits about every phase of life. From time to time he will recognize his new ‘old-age’ habits. There was the time when he was breaking the shell of a soft boiled egg for breakfast. Born a natural left-hander who was forced to pretend to be right-handed when learning to write, with the egg he was aware that only his left hand knew how to correctly break the shell; if he damaged his left hand, the right hand simply wouldn’t be up to the job. Probably, mariner wouldn’t eat soft boiled eggs again.

He has seen science shows that show how advanced the technology is for artificial limbs. But he wonders, do artificial hands have palsy?

This post, however, focuses on how brain habits shift because of hearing loss. On the surface, it’s all about sound waves, echos, poor speaker technology and the slippery way folks slide through their words and stop breathing when it comes to the predicate clause.

But the brain adapts to this inefficiency. Think about it: With normal hearing the brain, with no time delay whatsoever, interprets what words are spoken, compensates for echoes and other interfering noises, understands context, mood, relevancy and other implications included in the sounds of words. And at the same time applies internal judgment about the greater circumstances affected by the conversation. Simple example: Someone says “The world is flat.” In the same instant the brain hears ‘flat’ it has formed a reaction. No extra time was needed.

It is this ability of the brain to instantaneously receive, interpret and manage the circumstances of speech that disappears when hearing is affected. Mariner suspects that if someone had full hearing restored after a lengthy time of deafness, for awhile their brain would still use the altered habits that filled in for awkward reasoning processes. The brain would have to relearn the mental processes that are instantaneous with normal hearing.

The common reality for hearing deficiency is that the brain grabs and holds onto a few key words, typically the most clearly enunciated words, then tries simultaneously to add words and searches for general meaning – while the person talking continues talking. If a conversation includes talking about several comparative instances at once, or if the person excessively uses pronouns, or if any of the aforementioned external disturbances occur, the brain looses touch. Then comes the brain saying “What?”

So the biggest change that occurs with hearing loss is not the mechanics of sound waves but how the brain processes what it is hearing – which is nowhere near instantaneous comprehension; even continuity is fragile.

Ancient Mariner

Collections

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What does the reader collect? Books of fiction? perhaps many cookbooks or manuals or business notes or hobbies? Mariner’s wife is a librarian, an avid fiction reader, and has a collection of books about authors. Mariner’s life has been a knock about life jumping from job to job, from hobby to hobby, from theology to physics to Pogo comic books to collections of tapes, discs and books about TV shows and popular music.

Mariner and his wife have built a tornado shelter made of books and CDs. But it is that time. It comes for everyone: the collections gather dust; some books have vanished from memory until they are found among boxes of books kept in the attic because the bookshelves are full, many books are inherited from parents and family, many reflect hobbies and interests long past their time. But time and circumstance persist: it may be the right thing to pare the collection to a needed minimum.

This is a hard moment. Books are part of our existence. Books are full of memories just like our brain. As an experiment, pull out an old book from a certain time in your life. Leafing through its pages, you are transported to another time, another version of your life. These are meaningful memories.

Mariner’s habit of using metaphors may explain, perhaps, why one feels so protective of their collections. First, a description of the example: Telomeres are tiny hairs on the end of each chromosome. Their job is to count the number of times a chromosome can reproduce itself. Eventually, the hairs fall away and the chromosome will stop reproducing itself. The term for that is ‘aging’.

That is exactly why collectors are hesitant to give away their collections: a book is a telomere. Casting away the collection is paramount to acknowledging the end is drawing near. We are no longer producing our lives.

But the ‘chromosome’ will, at a given moment, surrender its telomeres for practical purposes – usually when having to move to another home.

Yes, like a telomere, books are part of our internal life experience. Nevertheless, time requires the transition.

Ancient Mariner

Dormancy

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One doesn’t usually think of dormancy as an active response to a situation. It is common to recognize dormancy in bears and frogs and of course in the plant world where endless species shut down to a dormant, death-like state for the winter. Even Homo can use dormancy, a dormancy with gradations.

For the last two weeks of zero temperatures, sleet, bitter winds and snow, mariner chooses to be a bear – almost. He does sleep a lot more, a privilege of being a retired bear, but he is restrained to his lair. He peers out the window of his lair to see a barren, white world. The only sound is the wind whistling against the window.

It would be nice if, like the bear, Homo could gather fat in warmer times then use it to pay for heat in the winter.

Homo has learned to use dormancy as a tool. For example, attics and basements are put in a state of dormancy on purpose. Another example is spring cleaning. Does this mean we would be a dirty bear all winter? Of course not – we borrowed this style of dormancy from the frog who hibernates in soft muck just below the frost line.

In the final analysis, though, Homos aren’t hibernators. If Homos aren’t careful about their style of dormancy, that word converts to loneliness, depression and even ill health. Homos are forced to continue to live an active life that energizes, that socializes, that sees the end of dormancy. Otherwise, we live the life of the sparrows, many of which don’t make it to greener times.

Ancient Mariner

Mother Earth’s Code of ethics

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Mariner has been reading and watching educational shows more than usual because the rife of today’s world seems beyond the pale. One is horrified when one sees how much of humanity lives life in ten square feet of bombed ruins with no water and no dependable food sources.

One thinks of the atrocities put on Native Americans, slaves and oppressed conditions even today subject to rape, physical beating and forced labor.

How did the American buffalo deal with forced extinction by humans? How do lobsters off the coast of Connecticut deal with warming water that forces them to migrate to Canadian waters? And the Coral Reefs, a sizable community of many types of plant and animal life – how do they feel about looming extinction?

Then there are the billions of years that passed before us; what did all the reptiles think when an asteroid changed the planet forever?

It seems that the core morality of Mother Earth responds to a different code of ethics than her inhabitants would like. Are humans too brash when they discount life in the same manner as Mother Earth? Have humans adopted the planet’s ethical model that allows disregard for normalcy and slower evolutionary change? It makes one think of the Holocaust where thousands of humans were disposed of without acknowledgement of the value of human life. One learns that on Planet Earth, buffalo and humans are equal in value.

Ancient Mariner

Ever metaphor?

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Greetings, readers – This is an unusual post about one of our intellectual tools – the metaphor. The human brain has a logical process that, he suspects, AI and all its fellow technologies will never master – human comparative analysis (HCA).
There are about 80 million neurons (brain cells) in the human brain. On top of that, each neuron has over one million atoms. Recent scientific discoveries show that each neuron can reorganize itself internally based on the situation. A recent article wrote “The cell can call together committee meetings within the cell when conditions call for it.” It will be very hard for common electronically-based atoms to compete with neurons that can reorganize their algorithms in committee meetings at the level of an atom.

Here is a simple metaphor that encompasses the entire Trump conflict:
A cup on the counter contains creamer, honey and coffee, three liquids which have been taken from their normal world in containers. They are confused about what is happening. Then they see the approaching spoon. In fear they say, “Oh no! Here comes a spoon! What will we become?”
The spoon is Donald Trump. The liquids can only hope all will be well in the end but who knows, maybe they will end up in the kitchen drain.

Let’s label this the ‘spoon metaphor’. In one simple picture, the brain can pull together the context of its human experience involving many subconscious experiences, spatial conditions and conscious awareness to understand the comprehensive, real world experience from an approaching spoon. Mariner can’t accept that AI, seeing an approaching spoon, could interpolate the specific, undocumented meaning and provide a correct assumption.

Metaphors come in all sizes, shapes and scope. It is a common way to transfer broader meaning without using a ton of words; it a key teaching method as well as an expression of attitude. Waiting in a doctor’s waiting room, one could say they’ve been there so long that the doctor should provide beds; a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the situation is provided by the metaphor ‘provide beds’, reflecting emotion, physical restraint and organizational efficiency.

Metaphors are especially powerful when they are used to provide insight into very complex ideas. Last November 30 mariner wrote a post about what reality really looks like. He pondered the different reality seen between a human, a snail and a dog. Each will claim they see what reality really looks like but actually, the structure is completely different for each species. Without the use of broad metaphors, an article on the same phenomenon was published in an online magazine called Salon referencing an article in Discover Magazine. It ran on for pages.

Mariner habitually converts experiences into metaphors. Be glad, he saves the reader pages of reading which is often replaced by a simple and often entertaining metaphor. Eat your heart out chatGPT.

Ancient Mariner

Are we tongue tied?

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As many folks may experience, a sound sleep may be disturbed by a brain chasing some weird thoughts during the night. Mariner experienced this phenomenon last night when he was disturbed through the night by his brain struggling with language.
This time it was the troubles humans have because they must use the same sounds over and over again for different words because the human limits on making different sounds cannot handle the billions of words humans have invented. So humans have to use the same sound for many different words and meanings. Just a few simple one-syllable examples:
Cow, now, sow, plow, mean, bean, lean, tree, flee, see, flea, sea, etc.
If one sounds out the vowel letters in the alphabet (a,e,i,o,u and sometimes y, which is redundant to i), that’s about the limit of different noises a human can make. Humans try to stretch these sounds so they can invent more words. That is called slurring, or respectfully, dialect.
So humans use five sounds over and over and over again by attaching distortions of the throat, mouth, tongue, teeth, lips and jaw. These noises are called consonants.
Twenty-six letters constitute all the letters one is supposed to need to make words. But it isn’t that easy thanks to the Great Vowel Shift that occurred between 1400 and 1600. The shift made it easier to invent more words with the same vowel noises. Check these examples:
plough as well as plow, slough as well as slough – tricky, one uses the ‘ow’ sound, the other uses the ‘u’ sound; the other direction to make more words with no more vowels is to combine words, allowing vowels to be used more than once in one word. For example, tie dye as a simple one and Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is a complex one that means ‘fear of big words’, something about which Icelandic and Welsh languages have no concern.
What would it be like to be a crow and have to develop an entire vocabulary based on ‘caw’ noises. They have, you know.
So mariner can understand the problems ChatGPT (which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) has trying to capture nuance and relevancy in human languages.
The dialect piece can be entertaining. Jimmie Carter and Fats Domino never end a word with the ‘ur’ sound; mariner’s friend from Boston puts ‘ur’ noises wherever he likes.
Thinking further, one wonders how the vowel noises are represented in sign language, There are only so many gyrations of the face, arms and hands.

Ancient Mariner

Homo’s predetermined job for Planet Earth history

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It was just yesterday in Earth years that the first placental primate emerged, about 87 million years ago. It was the beginning of the Mammalian Age. Over those centuries,  mammals took many paths to become all the warmblooded, childbearing creatures that are around today; for example, mice, gorillas, reindeer, panthers, lions, beavers, monkeys, cattle, squirrels, bears, horses, gophers, whales, rabbits, sheep, wolves, warthogs, etc.

Dendropithecus turned up 13 million years ago, an early ancestor to a new line called Apes. Gibbons diverged from the line of great apes some 18–12 million years ago and that of orangutans (subfamily Ponginae) diverged from other great apes at about 14 million years ago.

African hominids diverged from orangutans about 12 million years ago. Hominins (including precursors of humans and the  Australopithecine and Panina subtribes) parted from the Gorllini tribe (gorillas) between 8 and 9 million years ago; Australopithecine (including the extinct biped ancestors of humans) separated from the Pan genus (containing chimpanzees and bonobos) 4–7 million years ago. The Homo genus emerged as H. habilis over 2 million years ago. To cut ancestry short, 300,000 years ago, the early relatives of Homo sapiens arrived.

The point is this: Homo sapiens and all its fellow mammals, some plant eaters, some scavengers, some herding, some predators, are in this Mammalian Age together. In an era that began 87 million years ago, it has become clear that humans have a predetermined role that in just 300,000 years mammals are disappearing at increasing rates. 10,000 years ago, wild mammals represented 99% – today only1% represent wild mammals. The rest have been scavenged big time by Homo who represents 32% of mammals along with 67% represented by homo-owned mammalian livestock.

Are humans just a pawn in the planet’s galactic history? Are we  another version of the giant dinosaurs who were bringing the Pleistocene Age to a close when the asteroid struck? The planet has few rules life forms must follow; one of them is ‘survival of the fittest’ Twice in the far distant past the planet wiped out all life with ice and with volcanic reorganization of the earth itself.

After an unusually long period of stable, supportive weather, the planet has begun to respond to another Homo behavior, carbonization, to begin raising the surface temperature of the planet. Further, Earth’s molten core is becoming active. Does Earth have plans to begin reorganizing the continents? It is predicted that Earth will undergo a global ice age in 200,000 years.

What does the future look like? Homo will have to wait to see what future versions of AI and chatGPT have to tell us. Is AI part of the next age sans mammals?

Ancient Mariner

Our career molds our empathy

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Readers know mariner’s distaste for the invasion of privacy by new technologies embedded in our vehicles, budgets, social life and that of our children as well. Perhaps his unusual resistance can be traced back to his career.

He has had dozens of jobs from paper boy and soda jerk to preacher, parole officer and computer system consultant. The longest career was as a freelance consultant hired by corporations to install computer upgrades – thirty years. He never was wanting for the next contract because he ran a stable project that met its goals. One would think that such a consultant would have to be a computer expert and indeed he had a major in computer science but not one in computer engineering.

In fact, what made mariner successful in project management was his previous experience as a preacher and a parole officer. Mariner did have an associate or two who were computer engineers and coding specialists which made it possible for him to manage the difficult part of the project: people. He had learned a technique that creates team ownership. Each project worker was assigned to an eight to ten member group; each member owned a segment that was an integrated segment such that the other workers had a role in the worker’s success. Mariner was always present at these group meetings playing the role of coach and at times, decision maker but never taking away segment ownership. In the end, the group managed itself.

But the transition in the corporate power structure caused by a new computer system was often tragic. Employees who had worked there for many years were told they would be laid off; workers were transferred to lesser jobs and hopeful careers were interrupted. coders and technicians who were unfamiliar with the new technology were pushed into dead end corners of operations. In larger corporations, there were fierce political battles between vice presidents and key managers because their political power, created by the amount of data they controlled, was no longer needed. Everyone will own all the data.

Did the reader catch the phrase ‘everyone will own all the data’? Were the upgrades in mariner’s projects ancestors to Google, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok? The major reason for mariner’s projects was to move from a network where the workstation computer created data that was uploaded every night to data storage devices where it could be integrated with other workstation data; the core work data remained in the workstation to be managed by a network of employees. Hence, a supervisor, manager or vice president was important because they managed (owned) the data in their unit’s workstations.

The effect of his projects forced a reorganization of the corporate workforce without, he suggests, any grace or feelings about a large segment of displaced workers and managers. In his projects, the workstation became a data entry terminal little more complex than an ATM.

Now, long out of his career, he understands the subtleties of data ownership and how it creates, metaphorically, a democratic operation. Today, one’s private computer – much more personal and life-important, is being taken away to live in the clouds of the AI corporate data banks. Now everyone owns all the data – including the reader’s data. The reader’s computer is just a data entry terminal.

Democracy will have a hard time existing in an AI world.

Ancient Mariner

 

Free, 1st class education online!

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For many folks, filling the mind, body and soul can be a real challenge. Especially if one doesn’t watch TV for news or entertainment, one hasn’t had a smartphone implant, one is getting really old, one is severely ill or one suffers disabilities.

If the reader has any interest in the state of their contemporary knowledge or has a strange confusion about how reality works, mariner suggests documentaries. Documentaries come in all forms of media. Want to travel? sign up for onsite education programs sponsored by a university. Want to avoid travel? register for a campus-based class. Like to read? visit the library or purchase an institutionally recommended book. Like to scroll a smartphone? download documentaries from endless institutional resources.

Even among the morass of television broadcasting one can find excellent documentaries from felting to building a house or, if one is intellectual, try watching 51 seasons of NOVA on PBS. YouTube has a number of top class documentaries – especially about human history and documentaries about well known personalities.

If one likes to talk back, Ted Talks is a good watch for eccentricities in human life – or watch the pseudo doctors who can heal any ailment.

Mariner presents below a teaser list that he feels provides a life lesson as well as new information:

⊕ HACKING THE MIND – PBS. This is an older documentary that still is popular. It shows a blind man whose eyes can actually see where to go and a three-year-old who forms firm prejudices without any thought process. The major point is that the subconscious brain is really in charge of everything we do.

⊕ SECRETS IN YOUR DATA – PBS. A lot of consternation is around today because new AI technologies will invade our privacy. Do not worry – it already has. One example displays to a person the names of all his friends and acquaintances from many years  ago; how about everywhere you went on your vacation, including stores. The major point is that everything is known to Google. Now it’s time for Google to live it for you; Google also speaks the subconscious language.

⊕ MESOPOTAMIA – THE GARDENS OF BABEL – YOUTUBE. This is an outstanding documentary about the beginning of western society. It began 15,000 years ago along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the region between Iraq and Iran. Many of the worldly events like the Tower of Babel and Noah’s flood which were realities in Mesopotamia’s time, show up in the mythology of the Old Testament. Mesopotamia was the giant world leader for 300 years until surrounding population and new industrial progress allowed smaller states to bring Mesopotamia down. Hmm, 300 years? new industrial progress ….?

In a past post, mariner said that neither the human eye nor the snail’s eye reflect what reality really looks like. He took this insight from the following documentary.

⊕ DECODING THE UNIVERSE, 4 PART SERIES – PBS. The subject is quantum mechanics, a reality that doesn’t work the same as the universe humans live in – a quandary in itself – so pay attention (a warning to anyone who wanders into the quantum world). It seems the mysterious Black Cloud has some important functions that hold the Universe together.

So check out documentaries on the television and check out hobby interests on YouTube. They will fill one’s day many fold.

Ancient Mariner

 

The good life

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Living here in a small town is very pleasant. The local folks are engaged in the practice of survival, that is, participating in community activities in various holiday celebrations, neighborly exchanges of small gifts and visitations, and multi-generational family gatherings. There is a positive air covering the town!

Nevertheless, only because few residents want to talk about it or still watch broadcast news and have ignored social media’s tendency to fawn upon itself, it is almost possible to separate community from national and world catastrophe. One forgets how pleasant normal life can be.

It’s amazing how many hobbies surface during the holidays. A service organization is building a tiny house for a veteran; the quilting club is turning out quilts for sale; several folks make their own holiday greeting cards – some quite exquisite; many choirs perform musical events around the county; there are Santa events in most public service agencies. Even Nosey Mole was seen wearing a Santa hat.

Appropriately, if not conveniently, the weather outside is frightful but the fire is so delightful, and since we’ve no place to go let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

There is no doubt that a human’s emotional survival skills have evolved with significant intensity and purpose. Let us pray that increased disorder will not test them further.

Ancient Mariner