RedBeard’s Curious Life

The essential foundation of our entire economy is energy. Some other support is provided by material property, time, and intelligence, but those are worthless without energy. In the face of a dwindling energy supply, changing climate, and increasing population, strain on our economy will likely increase.

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Just over a year ago, I lost my mother to cancer, lymphoma specifically. RIP Jane Campbell, 1955-2007.

Obviously it’s taken me a while to kind of recover, and I think writing something about the process might help me some more. I’ve actually refrained from writing other blog posts because I didn’t want to let this pass without committing something to written words. I don’t aim to depress myself or others, although I’m sure a few tears will escape my eyes while writing the next several paragraphs.

She fought the cancer and endured treatment for many months before it overcame her. Nothing quite compares with the experience of picking up the phone one morning and having your sobbing father say you don’t have much time to say goodbye. She proved wrong the doctors’ estimate of 2 days, more than doubling that in the face of fatal lung failure, congested with metastasized tumors. We ended up having sufficient opportunity to say our goodbyes, talk about fond memories, settle affairs, and partly work through our grief before even completely losing her. It was a grueling several days in the ICU with no humidity, not knowing when the time might come or what to do afterwards.

I will definitely miss a number of things about my Mum, especially her strong character and caring nature. We had plenty of disagreements and fallings-out, but we never held a grudge against one another, and she was always so pleased with the accomplishments I’ve made in life: good grades, nice friends, fun & well-paying jobs, and all the other little things. She didn’t micro-manage my life but rather left me to my own devices, although there were times when I felt she and my dad made decisions for me that weren’t in my best interests – going to school out of state while moving across the country left me feeling pretty lonely, but I came out of that in the end and met some cool people along the way. She always had compelling tales from her childhood, like stealing the neighbor’s cat, riding the train to school, her brother heading off to boarding school, living in various exotic places like Singapore, and many others that presently elude my memory.

She was rather different from me, but those are probably the things that stood out the most to me. She had a really nice signature, always identical, flowing smoothly through sharp lettering and annunciated with a dominant but relaxed J. She had a knack for making friends, easily eliciting life stories from people mere minutes after meeting them; we were always on good terms with the local Chinese restaurant because she’d befriended the manager. Our cat always loved her, perhaps because she always fed him the good stuff, but he was always following her through the house or curled up by her side. She wasn’t the epitome of health (she was overweight and had high blood pressure and diabetes), but one of the things she expressed regret for was her lack of physical activity – she stopped the swimming she had enjoyed in her youth and the walking she often did around town in England – and she urged me to take better care of myself than she had of herself.

A number of my significant life experiences have been shared exclusively with my Mum. We visited England the summer I graduated from university and took a blitz tour of London in a day that gave me many good photos. I would have ended up in a jail cell had she not come to bail me out after getting arrested for running a stop sign. She visited me at Georgia Tech and we ate steak for Thanksgiving dinner in downtown Atlanta, when the holiday would otherwise have been dull and boring on the deserted campus. Living in Epsom while my dad worked in Scotland during the weekdays, she played a huge role in my early development. My brother tagged along on some of those, but my mother was obviously the dominant factor in all of them.

It’s clear to see that I’d be in a very different place without my mother’s support and guidance, and it still makes me sad that I won’t be able to further reward her with the various experiences most people eventually get to enjoy. She’ll never have the chance to babysit her grandchildren, or even to know their mother. She won’t ever enjoy a retirement in a warm, relaxing place. She won’t befriend yet another Chinese restaurant manager. She won’t visit her friends and family in England again, or travel to Italy where my brother was born. Clearly she’s not the only one missing out here – all of those things involve numerous other people who have been robbed of the possibility of knowing this lovely woman.

I don’t do a ton of driving, as I live quite close to my office and try to avoid rush-hour traffic. Despite this relative lack of exposure, I encounter many incidents that are… less than optimal while driving on the public roads around here. Some straddle the line of legality, some are just annoying habits, and some are shortcomings of the traffic infrastructure. Without further ado:
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Immortality is a concept that crosses the mind of most people from time to time, whether it be in the form of the Highlander, the timeless literature of Shakespeare, the heinous acts of Hitler, or simply spreading their essence via offspring. Indeed, as all life struggles against the universal entropy to preserve a semblance of order, humans take it to the next level by trying to preserve individuality, especially that of notable specimens. While all of the above approaches to immortality are held in similar esteem, modern medicine continues to make effective steps towards the significant extension of individual lifespan. Since this approach is hardly exclusive of the others and can be explored in a scientific manner, I shall present some material on the topic.

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I’d like to announce my candidacy for the 2020 presidential election. You might think it a little premature, but this country needs a serious kick back into gear before it becomes totally derailed, and I see no reason to wait until I’m of legal age to begin spreading the word. Our national self-image is so disjointed from reality that it’s become a comedic target, and this rift is only serving to increase our complacency and widen the gap between our peak potential and our current state of affairs.

My platform? Elementary, dear reader. This country needs an engineer to properly address our political and societal machinery that has become rusted and inefficient. Many areas need to be modified, and nothing is safe from reform. Among the areas that need the most work:
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I have a number of things that I’d like to say about energy, but I’m going to split them into multiple blogposts. Today I’ll cover my take on the relationship between energy and life.

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United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: “[The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”

Towards this goal, our Congress has implemented a number of laws and offices with the intention of protecting the production of intellectual property. The primary areas of interest are summarized as follows:

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So I just blew a few hundred bucks on clothes, and another hundred on a gameboy advance with some games. And I’m planning to spend more!

I did the Black Friday thing and waited for half an hour outside Circuit City at 5 am to get the gameboy, then headed to the mall where I snagged a number of tops for about $150, with a free hat & scarf thrown into the mix. Then I went back and spent another $90 on some jeans and a sweater and got another free hat & scarf, but they didn’t have any more of the color I actually wanted. In retrospect, I could have saved an extra $40 or so if I’d sprung for their store credit card, but the store is closed now and I’ve already paid for the stuff with a different card.

I’m about to order some more shirts and pants online, and perhaps some music CDs and gameboy games too. I looked for GBA games in retail outlets but couldn’t find any worth buying. The best I saw were a couple of used carts in gamestop, but since they have a “buy 2 get 1 free” and I couldn’t find a 3rd worth having, I passed on them.

Call me a consumer whore, but all this isn’t more than half of a paycheck and will last me well into next year.

I was told by someone that I got too into the details on my last post. This one would turn out rather long if I got into the details, so here’s a publishing of the notes that I usually transform into a more grammatically-cohesive structure. Let me know what you think. If people bitch, I might dress it up with pretty things like transitions and support.

*Life is a constant struggle against entropy
*Entropy still present in all life, with random mutation of genes introducing new genetic codings
*Darwin’s theory is that the “fittest” mutations survive
*Fitness mainly a function of ability to reproduce – survival, impregnation, protection
*Instinctual behaviors coded as part of the surviving genetic “firmware” encourage reproduction
*Humans seek happiness, thinking it’s an emotion not felt by “lower” animals
*Happiness still hinges on instinctual influence, with attraction and copulation filling in a key aspect that perpetuates the “lower” fitness level
*No matter how much we analyze and understand beauty, it’s unavoidable to feel attraction to beautiful/suggestive images or sensations
*Fashion seems to act mainly to accentuate or create the impression of positive physical attributes
*My excuse for having virtually no fashion sense is that I don’t find men attractive, and thus have no in-built mechanism to identify what would make me look attractive. I mainly just buy whatever’s cheap and somewhat popular.
*Life is basically about sex, but there are many other activities that invoke the pleasure centers of the brain. Sex is just the best one.

Addendum: Intelligent Design is unverifiable, and also not mutually exclusive with evolution.
Evolution is a valid theory (as it has not been disproved), ID is a hunch.

So apparently there’s a bit of an uproar about GTA:SA because there’s some “adult” content that can be accessed via modification of the game. While there’s no doubt that Rockstar actually made the content, there is doubt that they intentionally left it in the game. I would say that their testing process didn’t involve teenage kids trying to hack the game, and it’s likely that only a couple of people realized the content was still on the disc even though it wasn’t accessible through normal gameplay.

But honestly, I don’t see what the big deal is. I’ve seen the video, and it doesn’t look like anything you wouldn’t find in a few R-rated movies, except horribly lacking in detail and human expression. It’s more of a pantomime than a realistic depiction of sex. GTA involves carjacking, murder, prostitution, gang violence, drugs, and various other things we’re prohibited from enjoying in real life. It’s garnered a significant amount of press and controversy over that content, and it’s one of the best selling games around, so it’s little wonder that people tried to hack it or that the press instantly responds to this game that has already graced their headlines with sensationalistic melodrama.

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