All the fuss today is about the metaverse, how it is a three-dimensional version of reality. Around the world trillions of dollars are flooding into this commercially-focused technology. When one considers why the public is interested in the metaverse, it appears the metaverse is just a three-dimension version of social media and entertainment. Very few of us may remember when silent movies gained sound, later color and today computerized graphics; shortly the metaverse will introduce interactive watching. All in all, the metaverse still will be entertainment with a huge snack bar. A customer needn’t go to a mall with movie theaters, one soon will be able to go to a theater that has a shopping mall – and stay home as well!

In other words, humans will continue to experience a whirlwind of new services, entertainment and gossip but life at the street level still will be the same.

But a true shift in human culture is coming – not through metaverse, avatars and emoji, rather through a new computing age called quantum computing. Quantum computing, already a growing industry, will make today’s computational speed seem like an old Smith-Corona manual typewriter. The speed, along with miniaturized storage, will allow computers not only to run stock market trading as they do now but computers will run governments in a similar fashion. Computers will manage supply chains and huge corporations – automatically with minimal human attention.

In short, computers will become our policy makers. Congress can’t keep up with today’s computational speeds; will Congress even be needed when computers figure out policy at the speed of light?

What quantum computing gives to computers is a primitive version of consciousness. They can do their own research, learning and decision-making. It will take a generation or two to iron out stable, human oriented parameters (a sort of automated Supreme Court) but after that, politics may not be a front row influence.

The danger, of course, is the power that Lord Acton talked about will be in the hands of even fewer humans. This is evidenced today in the stock market where a few corporations control parameters for the computers that do the buying and selling instantly before any human notices a change. Conversely, common investors like us don’t have a chance. Will this be the world of quantum computing?

The missing element, which we live with today, is emotional judgment. Scruples and fairness require more than speed-of-light analogs and algorithms. Run by capitalists, oligarchs, dictators, socialists or communists, will the quantum age simply automate today’s inadequacies?

Ancient Mariner

It is true that the hearing impaired can be a nuisance, causing the speaker to repeat words and phrases and often requiring moving around so sound waves are not distorted by walls or distance and may require lip reading and over enunciated spelling of each word. Television is a show stopper; hearing aids cannot focus between sources talking simultaneously.

The hearing impaired are as bothered by this as much as the nonhearing impaired. But the difficulties don’t entirely lie at the ear of the hearing impaired.

Unlike the Germans and Russians who love to pound out soft consonants, the Americans pretend to say their soft consonants. Oh, there may be a lip gesture or a soft noise deep in the throat but the rhythm of syllables is lost as the word becomes a slurred reference to any properly articulated word or phrase. To hear English properly spoken, tune into CBS Sunday Morning with Jane Pauley; odds are the reader speaks three times faster than Jane – on-the-scene reporters perhaps four times as fast.

What follows is a sample or two that emulates what the hearing impaired may hear. It replaces supposedly spoken consonants, words and phrases with an underscore (_). For those who like puzzles, mariner will not provide an interpretation.

The _o_ was caught in _  _o_  _cause of _  _o_. I used _  _o_ to bring a _ow truck.

The _rolu_ is you _int lock _ door this _or_. You _oly were _stract_.

Along with mariner’s lifelong friend, a philologist, together we used to collect some really lackadaisical speech patterns. Here’s a few with impaired hearing added:

_kowe_      skoeet, let’s go eat

_roly          probably

Jeetjet       did you eat yet?

In addition to word enunciation, many speakers significantly drop their volume on a predicate phrase – whole phrases are not heard.

Mariner hopes this illustrates the difficulties of impaired hearing versus hurried, inarticulate speaking. As the impaired listen, their brains, for tiny milliseconds, must stop listening and do a dictionary search for probable meanings. In that millisecond, a conscious link with the conversation is lost, likely will be halted and require the speaker to start over again.

Achint Manner

Economically, and therefore culturally, the planet is a mess. Way too many nations are on the brink of revolution, starvation, oppressive war by authoritarian governments or destructive, violent, militarized guerilla groups. Human rights are declining – including in the United States. More rapidly the assets of the world are being sucked into the secret coffers of the planet’s oligarchs. In the US, children are routinely shot; across the Middle East women are brutalized.

Further, in the book “The Network State” by Balaji Srinivasan, he lays out how ‘nation states’ will be replaced by internet-enabled ‘network states’ run from the Cloud.

This universe sucks.

Our saving Grace is in the universe of hobbies. The hobby universe has different physical laws. For example, time flows at arbitrary rates controlled by the hobbyist; global dynamics simply don’t exist; hobby ambition and success are forces in the atmosphere and with a good location, the troubled universe completely disappears.

But one must be serious about this path. One needs a noncritical subject in which to invest serious attention and dedication. The whole object of the hobby universe is to escape the troubled universe, to forget everything except the target of one‘s hobby. Before all other thoughts and emotional interests, except for family and very close friends, the hobby is foremost in one’s mind.

Give a moment to consider what noncritical activity has drawn unusual interest in the past; what interesting thing floats in your mind during casual moments? Perhaps you are fortunate to have a hobby but haven’t made it the most important activity in your daily routine.

Once the hobby is chosen, it requires religious intensity, a desire to engage in the hobby at every chance. There are many subjects that are common for hobbyists: one thinks immediately of handiwork such as woodworking, pottery, glass blowing, metalwork, restoration of an object, art, weaving or building furniture.

There are activity hobbies like gardening, fishing, competitive biking, stock car racing, canoeing, hiking, camping, golfing and neighborhood sport leagues. There are social hobbies like working for charity building homes, cooking meals and providing transportation. Intellectual hobbies include activities like reading, becoming a world class expert on the dung beetle or mastering a new musical instrument; perhaps private tutoring or a part time librarian. If one has room, animal husbandry.

The key, however, is to walk through the warp door into the other universe. Desire. Determination. Curiosity. Achievement. As the old Eddy Arnold standard says, ‘Make the World go away’.

Ancient Mariner

֎ If the reader hasn’t checked in on science since their days in high school and college, they may need this update:

“B mesons come in many varieties, but all have a constituent called a bottom antiquark. One way in which these mesons decay is by the transformation of the bottom antiquark into a so-called “strange” antiquark and a pair of leptons.”[1]

֎ The answer to Y men die younger than women:

“As men get older, they don’t just lose their hair, muscle tone, and knee cartilage. They also start to lose Y chromosomes from their cells. Scientists have linked this vanishing to a long list of diseases and a higher risk of death, but the evidence has been circumstantial. Now, researchers report that when they removed the Y chromosome from male mice, the animals died earlier than their Y-carrying counterparts, likely because their hearts became stiffer.”[2]

֎ The Villages in Florida or homesteading in Alaska aren’t the only escapist real estate options:

“The virtual real estate market has really taken off in the last year, especially after Facebook’s decision to focus on the metaverse. Real estate sales on four platforms alone — Sandbox, Decentraland, Cryptovoxels and Somnium – topped $500 million in 2021, according to MetaMetric Solutions.”

֎ If you didn’t learn cursive the first time, you can’t learn it now:

Cursive handwriting is no longer necessary. With computer-based writing exams as part of the Common Core curriculum, typing quickly and accurately is becoming more important than writing in neat script.

For the really old folk like mariner, typing is no longer a productive skill. What’s next? Can the reader imagine a class of students all talking at once as they use their voice-to-print app?

֎ Schools don’t teach cooking and home economics anymore. Will they teach students how to order tonight’s dinner through a voice-command box? [Mom already knows. Here comes Grubhub.]

So much to catch up on.

Ancient Mariner

[1] Economist magazine 7/22.

[2] Science Magazine/Weekly News.

Mariner hasn’t posted since the three-horse series (except for a quickie about undetectable spyware on smartphones; mind your personal pornography). Dealing with negatives without a break isn’t fun – noting public polls express the same sentiment when stating a significant drop in news broadcast viewership.

Of immediate concern is this matter of inflation. It is insidious. Today’s reports show inflation at 9.1 percent for the nation and over 10 percent in Baltimore, Houston, Miami and Seattle. One can say, “It’s only a dime out of a dollar” but the same math says, “It’s only $100 out of a thousand”. A typical salary may be around $3,000/month – that’s a cut in income of $300 to cover the monthly budget. Add to that the fact that wage increases lag behind inflation by more than 2 percent.

– – – –

Starvation is by far the greatest uncovered news story in the world – including the United States where poverty is growing rapidly. Insufficient wages alone can bring down a nation; in the news at the moment, consider Sri Lanka and Madagascar. It’s a plight the world around: falling populations (Australia), collapsed labor markets (dozens of countries in Africa, South America and Middle East) are causing government instability.

Yet these tragic conditions, which are responsible for 36 million people dying from hunger this year, do not get press. In the United States, the richest nation in the world, 1.6 people in 200,000 die from starvation and 41 million suffer lack of access to minimally adequate food.

True, these are turbulent times in the world today. The US is no exception having to deal with Covid, Trump, shooting children, runaway capitalism and no national identity . . . small potatoes compared to the issue of poverty and starvation. The struggle is one between critical judgment and compassion. Compassion loses every time.

Ancient Mariner

The public service is to keep the reader informed about violations of the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution which states:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Below is an excerpt from Politico’s tech newsletter:

Mobile phones are becoming more essential and more powerful. But they aren’t keeping up with phone spyware, which is getting more aggressive and harder to detect.

As it does, an unsettling vision of the future is arising: One where we all carry surveillance devices without intending to.

It sounds dystopian, but that future is more or less arriving now. The mobile devices of politicians, human rights defenders, journalists, and other individuals have been compromised — all by so-called Pegasus spyware made by Israeli company NSO Group, which the Commerce Department blacklisted last year. This advanced spyware can be installed on devices through what are called “zero-click” vulnerabilities, where the spyware installs itself without the targeted individual clicking on a malicious link or doing anything to activate it. And once Pegasus has infiltrated a phone, there’s no easy way to tell it’s there.“

When someone steals your personal pornography or pants size, you ought to be reimbursed at market prices.

On other good news, three Gen Zers are running for Congress. It’s about time! One is a Trumper, two are progressives (Zs are born between 1997 and 2012).

Ancient Mariner