Bring on the "Jesus who?" era!

The U.S. has finally started to catch up with the trend in other developed democratic countries. I think Gregory S. Paul's thesis accounts for much of the decline.

This also shows the problem with trying to "religionize" cryonics in an effort to make it more socially competitive. It would make more sense to associate cryonics with an ascendant, compatible social movement, instead of an implicitly hostile, declining one like American-style Christianity.

Engineers versus philosophers

How much of the cultural resistance to cryonics derives from beliefs about the alleged superiority of "philosophy" over practical problem solving?

Austrian economists resemble Jehovah's Witnesses.

A blogger, while praising Austrian economics and the Ludwig von Mises Institute as his motivation for running a marathon, writes:

The institute has a special place in my own heart, for without the vast library of historical and economic literature that it generously provides online for free I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to pursue an independent education in economics.

So why, exactly, do Austrian economists have to give their literature away, like Jehovah's Witnesses and similar religionists? Because nobody wants to buy it? Or in other words, because the market rejects its production as a waste of resources?

I notice that the non-Austrian economists who write those Freakonomics books don't seem to have that problem.

I also notice that the two other sources of libertarian thinking in the U.S., Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein, never had to give their novels away. Those novels stay in print, long after their authors' respective deaths, because of market demand, not because of a private command economy which keeps producing this literature in defiance of market signals.

Unintentional message?

From The Meaning of Psychological Abnormality, by Jerome Kagan, Ph.D.:

Each historical era within a society poses special adaptive challenges for its members, and traits that would be regarded as maladaptive and possible signs of a disorder in one era might be more adaptive in another. For example, adolescents who wore sexually provocative clothing and rejected the existence of God would have been both rare and a source of parental worry in 17th-century Massachusetts, but today these traits would not be regarded as signs of pathology.

So, in our culture adolescents who become atheists and wear sexually provocative clothing (apparently not that uncommon these days) display "adapative" behavior?

Manned space travel, running on fumes.

I've finished skimming through the ebook version of Mary Roach's Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void.

I found it sadness-inducing, because it gave me the sense that manned space travel currently runs on fumes, or to change the metaphor, precariously survives from a depleting supply of capital built up and set aside for it 40-50 years ago, without the ability to replenish the supply and keep it thriving. Its increasingly marginal role in our society relates to the problem of framing cryonics as part of a "future" based on a space-faring civilization, when the historical trend doesn't point in that direction.

In fact, cryoncists now have a problem when some of us say we expect to do this or that as space explorers in a few centuries, assuming that the trauma medicine of an advanced civilization in Future World could revive us in a sufficiently functional state. People under the age of 40 or so alive now can't relate that to anything they've experienced in their lifetimes, apart from unambitious near-Earth activities. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if in a few years someone hears of NASA and asks, "Doesn't that company rescue trapped miners or something?"

You can see an example of a space-motivated cryonicist in the following video, around time 3:09:



So I point out again: We need to reframe and rebrand cryonics in a way that younger people, who've grown up with experiences and expectations different from mine, at least, can understand.

BTW, I don't care for this video. Parts of it make me think of Cialis commercials. And, of course, its case for cryonics depends on discredited fantasies about "nanotechnology."

The Discovery Channel's survival experts now sell knives.

Mykel Hawke, from Man, Woman, Wild:



Bear Grylls, from Man vs. Wild:



And now Dave Canterbury, from Dual Survival:



I suppose in a way this marketing trend appeals to magical thinking. Some primitive hunter-gatherer or warrior would want to possess a knife like that carried by a higher status and more successful male in his tribe, in an effort to share in that dominant male's superior mana. Consumer culture, where impressionable people want to buy the products used or endorsed by celebrities, reflects the same kind of reasoning. Though in the case of survival experts elevated into minor celebrities by the Discovery Channel, the knives they've franchised under their names have to function as tools based on their own merits, which distinguishes them from symbolic goods like, say, designer clothing.

BTW, Canterbury's quote:

I asked Dave what prompted him to pursue his own knife design after having worked with so many others. He told me that “A knife is the ultimate survival tool; it is the first item on the list of survival items I encourage people to carry, as it can create everything else in an emergency.”

reminded me of something Robert Heinlein writes in one of his "juveniles":

Yes, it gets better.

This heads into Jerry Springer territory:

Laetitia, don't forget to ask about the BHT in his fridge and, why he chlorinates the pool so heavily...

Hope Laetitia's prepared to deliver on a daily basis, per Brian's demands http://abstrusegoose.com/strips/lie_of_omission.JPG

Yes, that's what he meant when he said I didn't try to satisfy him. I couldn't keep up the quota. Can you, Laetitia?

Apparently a number of women bear the name of Brian's mistress, so I haven't pinned her down online yet, much less gotten an idea of what she looks like.

The context supports the idea I've picked up from various sources of treating women like temporary contract workers instead of taking them on as lifetime commitments.

Why do women subject themselves to this?

I've had contact with a 40-something, somewhat heavyset woman through Adult Friend Finder who lives in metro Phoenix and offers to do various sexual favors for me.

Eh, I don't know about that. One, I think I can do better, as in, an aftermarket and healthier woman in her 30's.

Two, I have health, hygiene and disgust issues about women in their 40's who reveal a history of promiscuity. (According to Jonathan Haidt's research, I would probably score highly on the "purity/sanctity" scale characteristic of conservatives.)

Three, I got burned by She Who Must Not Be Named, who made a similar offer to me in 1994 when she went hunting for a cryonicist/Extropian man to marry. (And how has the marriage with your preferred man worked out for you now, honey?)

And four, I don't understand why women of any age offer themselves in this way to men. I find the whole phenomenon mysterious, and I suspect these women have ulterior motives.

"What happened to the future we were promised?"

 

"Nanotechnology" as the paleo-future

The time has come, in my opinion, for cryoncists to let go of Eric Drexler's "nanotechnology" as an infeasible paleo-future idea from the 1980's, and set it aside into a category near the one we've assigned for flying cars, nuclear powered flashlights and other dubious technological proposals from the 20th Century.

Where does that leave cryonicists on the threshold of our mysterious, far-future year 2011? On the preservation side, we need to push a lot harder for advances in brain vitrification. On the conjectural revival side, we need to investigate connectomics, synthetic biology, organ printing and other real sciences and technologies which show progress in the here-and-now and give indications that they want to go to interesting places. (BTW, organ printing provides an example of "exaptation" as a source of technological progress, as Steven Johnson discusses in his new book, Where Good Ideas Come From. Who could have guessed 20 years ago that the ink jet printer would lend itself to the production of functioning human organs?)

Drexler's ideas have probably harmed cryonics on the whole in the past generation. They have made us complacent and accepting of unnecessary sloppiness in performing suspensions, which many of us have rationalized by the hand-waving about how our "friends in the future" will fix the damage caused by today's fucked-up suspensions with their magic nanomachines.

This simply will not do. Cryonics need rebooting, and this rebooting requires some fresh and empirically defensible thinking, along with a willingness to eat the sunk costs of chasing after mirages like "nanotechnology."

Steven Johnson's TED Talk

Johnson plugs his new book, Where Good Ideas Come From.

So, how do we exploit these social mechanisms and apply them towards solving cryonics' problems?

Cryonics article in the Australian "Rolling Stone"

Life on the Rocks (PDF)

The author, Mark White, calls Robert Ettinger's 1962 book The Prospect of Immortality "a curio of U.S.-style Atomic Age optimism and unsettling utilitarianism."

Ettinger's book does reflect the time in which he wrote it, but the Emergency cryonics tries to solve continues regardless of passing historical situations. I do see the need for a restatement of the cryonics thesis which incorporates what we know, and what we have to work with, in the second decade of the 21st Century. And I think that should include alternatives to Drexler's discredited ideas from the 1980's. Cryonics needs rebooting and rebranding to make it understandable for people who view the "Atomic Age," not to mention "the assembler breakthrough," as their fathers' and grandfathers' paleo-future.

Of course, a few paleo-future ideas still have something going for them, despite their falling out of fashion. Peter Thiel, for example, thinks we should "go back to the science fiction novels of the 1950s and ’60s and try to run the past 40 years again."

Interesting quote from Peter Gay

". . . since God is silent, man is his own master: he must live in a disenchanted world, submit everything to criticism, and make his own way."

The libertarian as arrested adolescent?

The reminiscences I've read online about the late David Nolan emphasize the role of his adolescent choice of literature in making him a libertarian. His long-time friend and libertarian colleague Robert Poole writes:

Dave and I came to libertarianism by similar paths, growing up reading Robert Heinlein’s individualist-oriented science fiction and then discovering Ayn Rand’s writings. It was many discussions and debates with my MIT YAF friends that persuaded me to finally read Atlas Shrugged in the summer of ’64, a summer during which I spent many evenings distributing Goldwater literature door-to-door in the Miami area where I grew up.

Now, I grew up reading some Robert Heinlein. But I could tell by my early 20's that he bullshitted for a living, and I didn't consider him a serious thinker. The libertarian themes in Heinlein's stories might have some relation to real life, but he mixes them up with fantasy material about, say, Martian woo-woo powers, interstellar travel and promiscuous polyamorous families. So which parts in these stories did Heinlein, who drew a disability pension from his service in the U.S. Navy and probably got his (socialized) health care through the VA (unless the new biography about him indicates otherwise), intend for us to take as practical ideas?

I read Ayn Rand's novels in my late 20's, and they struck me as verbose comic books without the pictures, though not without a few good things in them like her celebration of productive work. Though in Rand's case, she experienced the process of extracting wealth from nature vicariously and imaginatively, since she preferred to stay indoors and write about fictional producers instead of producing herself.

The stories about Nolan's Bildung strike me as a bit odd, because he apparently came from a comfortable middle-class American background, and he lacked the traumatic experiences with the existing order which often show up in the biographies of people who become political radicals and revolutionaries. For example, Vladimir Lenin's radicalization probably dates from the age of 17, when the Russian government executed his older brother for a botched attempt at assassinating Tsar Alexander III. Che Guevara's radicalization reportedly resulted from witnessing the poverty and degradation of Latin America during his training as a medical student. Even on the libertarian side, Ayn Rand's radicalization had a basis in real grievances against the hardships inflicted upon her and her family by the Bolshevik regime, including the confiscation of her father's business.

But in David Nolan's case? He grew up with a full stomach, clothes on his back, education, health care, electricity and a decent place to live, in a relatively free country where plenty of people around the world still want to migrate to; he got to go to an elite university (MIT); and he read some dodgy pulp novels at an age before men's judgment usually matures (the mid 20's, according to the evidence accumulated by auto insurance companies). Yet the novels counteracted his empirical reality, and he decided just from Heinlein's and Rand's published fantasy lives that the existing political system screwed him over and required the formation of a new political party and ideology to make things right.

Setting aside the question of libertarianism as an idea, does this make any sense?

Nolan's behavior reminds me of the whiny white, middle-class teenagers living in L.A. in the 1950's in the film Rebel Without a Cause. Anne Frank would have gladly changed places with Natalie Wood's well nourished, bathed and attractively clothed character, who says something like "You call this living?" upon first meeting James Dean's character.

David Nolan, who apparently couldn't see how good he had it in life, asked himself early on something like Natalie Wood's question, and then spent the rest of his existence pursuing a political vision which, frankly, most Americans don't find that compelling, even if they've read the same novels which influenced Nolan. I just find Nolan's story underwhelming for some reason.

Talk about interesting timing.

If the people who run Alcor knew they had this in the works, why the recent poor-mouthing?

Richard Feynmann as nanotech's ventriloquist's dummy

Anyone who studies the history of creative thinking and problem solving will discover that even the greatest thinkers generate plenty of errors along with their productive insights. For example, biologists in 2010 don't teach Charles Darwin's speculation about "gemmules" as the mechanism of hereditary, except in a historical context as a detour from the true path discovered by Gregor Mendel, because in that instance, Darwin got it wrong. Regardless of his stature today, Darwin's useful contributions to biology don't validate his patently bad ideas.

Observers of the social movement surrounding Eric Drexler's "nanotechnology" have noted the confabulated history, really more of a mythology, which has arisen around Richard Feynmann's long-obscure and quickly forgotten talk in 1959, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." As this editorial says:

Hoping to dissociate their nanotechnology work from dystopian scenarios and fringe futurists, some prominent mainstream researchers have taken to belittling Mr. Drexler and his theories. And that is where Feynman re-enters the story: Mr. Drexler regularly invokes the 1959 lecture, which broadly corresponds with his own thinking. As he told Mr. Regis, the science writer: "It's kind of useful to have a Richard Feynman to point to as someone who stated some of the core conclusions. You can say to skeptics, 'Hey, argue with him!'" It is thanks to Mr. Drexler that we remember Feynman's lecture as crucial to nanotechnology, since Mr. Drexler has long used Feynman's reputation as a shield for his own.

What happens to Drexler's reputation if Feynmann's "shield" either doesn't exist, or has gaping holes in it?

In other words, what if Drexler has created a huge distraction, now going on for a whole generation, from reality-based ways of solving our problems by latching onto Richard Feynmann's version of "gemmules"?

She Who Must Not Be Named's husband says some reasonable things.

"I'm not giving Hollywood another dime. I will never enter a movie theater again and neither will you" -Brian Richard Shock 12/29/09

"People who play Dungeons & Dragons are morons." -Brian Richard Shock, 11/16/2009


I wouldn't call D&D enthusiasts "morons," but I've never understood that hobby's appeal, much less the appeal of it source material, apparently fantasy novels like Tolkien's. Ironically Brian has let a Gandalf-length beard grow much of his adult life. The context supports my characterization of She Who Must Not Be Named as a female version of Comic Book Guy.

I also participate in the boycott of Hollywood. I haven't seen a movie in a theater since 2000 (I think since I saw Gladiator). Those goofs have plenty of money already without needing any of mine.

"Beware the Non-Cryonicist," by Jim Yount

The Old New Atheists, part 1

I've recently finished reading Philipp Blom's new book, A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment, actually the first book I've read all the way through on my Barnes & Noble Nook.

I found it a bit derivative of Peter Gay's book, originally published in the 1960's, titled The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism, but I enjoyed Blom's book nonetheless as an exercise in popular intellectual history. Blom, more so than Gay, emphasizes the fundamental divisions between what he characterizes as the radical Enlightenment, centered around Baron d'Holbach, Denis Diderot and their circle, versus the soft Enlightenment represented by Rousseau and Voltaire (despite the differences between the latter).

The radical Illuminists emphasized materialism, atheism, education, scientific progress, the championing of the interests of the oppressed and the destruction of artificial hierarchies which, they argued, lack rational justification and fill the world with unnecessary suffering. The soft Illuminists, by contrast, wanted mainly to reform religion in the direction of deism, and they felt comfortable with the existing social and political structure, apart from the Church's malign influence. You can see this in their respective lifestyles. Holbach had his own money from inheritance, which he applied towards running a "propaganda factory for atheism," as Peter Gay phrases it; while Diderot until relatively late in life made a precarious livelihood as an independent man of letters because he wanted to preserve his intellectual freedom. By contrast, Rousseau often sought handouts and patronage from aristocrats, while Voltaire lent money from his personal fortune to princes.

The social forces which led to the French Revolution tended to favor the soft Illuminsts' agenda, as evidenced by the contrast between each side's leaders' final dispositions. Holbach's and Diderot's remains wound up scattered and almost forgotten in the ossuary of an obscure Parisian church, while Rousseau's and Voltaire's intact remains eventually wound up in the Panthéon, in recognition of their higher attributed status and social acceptability.

I plan to write about the substance of Blom's book in a future post, but in this one I'd like to write about how I imagine the reality of Holbach's and Diderot's world. The French suffer from the stereotype now about desultory hygiene, in the 21st Century, despite otherwise enjoying the good health which comes from living in a developed country. But what about their ancestors' hygiene and physical condition in the 18th Century? Even upper class French people almost never bathed, and almost everyone must have gone through life itching with lice, fleas, mites, or scabies crawling on his or her skin, probably literally from birth. Diderot, probably itching himself from his own parasites, must have witnessed an endless stream of stinking, filthy, infested, malformed, brain damaged or otherwise physically impaired people on the streets of Paris, thanks to ignorance, poverty, exhaustion, malnutrition, chronic diseases, exposure to environmental toxins, chronic anxiety induced by superstition, and the stress hormones generated by living in a hierarchical society which freely employed violence and capital punishment to keep the lower orders in line.

And not to mention that the French people had to eat from depleted topsoils which had undergone cultivation since pre-Roman times. French intellectuals noted that their visitors from the New World, like Thomas Jefferson, often stood a head taller than them. The colonists tended to display better physical condition than their fellow tribesmen still in Europe because the former grew up eating from topsoils which had only recently begun their drawdown of nutrients with transplanted Eurasian crops.

Yet somehow Diderot and his friends saw beyond all that ugliness to envision a much better way for humans to live, even if they lacked the knowledge of public health we now possess. They thought they could lay the groundwork for this better world with their subversive writings based on certain philosophical and scientific ideas. Given what they confronted on a daily basis, their vision seems all the more impressive.

I'll get back to Blom's message in a day or two.

Confused discussion of cryonics from 21 years ago

From Future Stuff (1989):



First of all, they didn't "freeze" the experimental animal.

Secondly, cryonics covers a broader area than just suspended animation which current techniques could reverse to restore the organism to good health. Cryonics involves the cryopreservation of the human brain, at the very least, when the prospects for revival and recovery of the individual remain unknown. It makes a rational gamble about the capabilities of trauma medicine in the future. For some reason this aspect of the cryonics argument fails to communicate effectively.

And "unknown" does not mean "miniscule," "infinitesimal," "tiny" and other dismissive words applied to the prospect of cryonics' success, a point of epistemology which also fails to communicate well. As Thomas Donaldson, Ph.D. in mathematics, has argued, we can do things now which change the assumptions in any model about the probability of saving the patient, so that the outcome becomes a movable target.

I've started to explore Adult Friend Finder.

I find AFF a bit confusing, because it mixes posts by women who want hookups, including photos of their sexual equipment, with posts from other women who upload clothed photos of themselves and seem to want boyfriends.

I also don't understand how a woman could develop, and then advertise, paraphilias like "light bondage" or "voyeurism."

The Anticult's new howler

Yes, I advocate conducting cryonics experiments on children. No other interpretation of my words (such as looking at the context) could possibly exist:



Don't Jews have a problem like this called "blood libel" or something?

Now let me explain the reasoning for what I clearly intended as a thought experiment. According the actuarial table, a human male has the lowest probability of dying in his lifetime at age 10 (0.000085). The probability of dying goes up every year after that. So I take that probability at age 10 as a proxy measurement for the best condition of the human cardiovascular system in your lifetime.

Everyone's cardiovascular system, the plumbing necessary to remove blood and perfuse the brain with cryoprotective solutions in a cryonic suspension, deteriorates with age, so that cryonics organizations often have trouble getting good perfusions of suspendees's brains in their 70's, 80's and 90's, even under optimal conditions. I used the child example to show the contrast with the usual experience of cryonic suspensions.

Add in the fact that cardiovascular diseases cause progressive brain damage as we age, and the knowledge underscores cryonicists' urgency to have these conditions treated aggressively at younger ages to try to postpone their devastation for as long as possible. In my case, I've started to do that with Lisinopril to lower my blood pressure, weight loss and some things I'd like to try to raise my HDL level.

BTW, The Anticult has promoted me to "full-time cryonics promoter." I wish I could make a living doing something like that, instead of running a motel (something I feel I still don't do very well, even with nearly 20 years' experience; I certainly don't have the right sort of personality for it). In my fantasy self re-invention I'd rather work behind the scenes by trying to advance the search for engineering solutions to the Emergency cryonics attempts to address, for example through the effort to make "ideas have sex," as Matt Ridley phrases it, seconded by Steven Johnson. Who could have predicted, for example, that NASA knew some things which helped to save the Chilean miners? I'd like to find some nonobvious sources of expertise out there, similar to NASA's contributions, to improve the odds of cryonics' success.

Brian Shock on "Coast to Coast AM" in 1997

Brian Shock, who used to work for Alcor, married She Who Must Not Be Named and later left Alcor's employ (or more likely, got fired). I do not know if he still has cryonics arrangements.

I caught the rebroadcast of a talkshow where he appeared as Alcor's spokesman, back in 1997. You can download the mp3 files:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

I wonder if richiekgb also ridicules "transgenders."

He seems to find such hilarity in a certain cryonicist's reported self-castration. Why stop at him?

Why not also ridicule this individual, another cryonics activist? I've heard of a couple others with similar situations.

richiekgb's posting history

Apparently richiekgb joined the Cult Education Forum for the express purpose of criticizing cryonics.

More absurdity from the Cult Education Forum

I've started to enjoy the functionally illiterate richiekgb's posts, and The Anticult's increasingly paranoid and delusional rants. I wish cryonics had more critics like those fellows.

BTW, richiekgb must illustrate the collapse of the UK's educational system; he can't spell common English words correctly. I've known people who speak and write English as a second language, and they generally don't make those kinds of mistakes.

"The Intensive Care Unit of the Future"

Link

The cost of cryosuspending everyone.

If you add up the annual military budgets of the top six countries with the biggest armed forces, you'll come up with a figure of about 10¹² dollars a year. Approximately 50 million people die every year. Dividing the first figure by the second gives a ratio of $20,000 per death.

The Cryonics Institute, the low-budget cryonics service provider, charges about $30,000 for keeping someone in cryonic suspension.

The two figures don't lie that far apart, and in fact diverting resources away from the complete waste and destruction of military spending would go a long way towards improving living conditions and lowering the incidence of avoidable deaths in our troubled, confused world. That would bring cryonics within the affordability of more and more of the world's inhabitants.

"A Brief History of Immortalism," by Mike Perry

Couldn't attend.

I had a medical appointment yesterday. As my father says, "Take care of Mark first."

Besides, I really don't want to fly anywhere, unless absolutely necessary, given the current clusterfuck about airport security.

I might fly out to Tulsa after Thanksgiving anyway, rent a car and drive over to see Dad at his nursing home in Siloam Springs, and Mom and my sister Michele at their home in Springdale. I'd rather visit living people than go to funerals.

Something about the anti-Fed rhetoric I don't understand.

According to some versions of anti-Fed propaganda, supposedly since the founding of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, the U.S. dollar has lost, say, 95 percent of its "value" in 97 years, which I guess implies an exponential decay rate r = ln(1 - 0.95)/97 ≈ - 0.031.

One, that already sounds like a dollar "collapse," taken literally. Yet Americans in 2010 live far better with their allegedly "collapsed" dollars than Americans alive in 1913 did with their pre-"collapsed" dollars before the Federal Reserve went into business. A dollar "collapse" of that sort doesn't sound like a catastrophe.

Two, doesn't this trend also suggest what could happen to the dollar in the future? Instead of some kind of discontinuity like hyperinflation (the American right's version of a global warming apocalypse), why wouldn't we just continue to see the dollar's conjectural "value" decay exponentially over the long run at about the same rate as over the previous century, along with rising real living standards?

More clueless speculation than "facts"

Insubordination to humanity

Consider the following partly-baked analogy:

Suppose an aircraft carrier far out at sea experiences damage which will eventually sink it and kill everyone on board. However, the nature and extent of the damage remain unknown, and the carrier might not have the skilled manpower and resources on board to repair it at sea and keep the ship operational.

The captain gathers his senior officers, engineers and mechanics around him, and says, "Gentlemen, we have an emergency, and we need an engineering solution to it." What would this captain do if someone in that gathering dismisses the very idea of finding an engineering solution as "denial," "false hope" or "snake oil"; says that the captain should "get over himself" for wanting to live; and on top of that says that saving the crew would just add to the population problems of the people on land?

The captain would act well within his rights to have this wise-ass thrown into the brig for insubordination and mutiny. The captain wants that engineering solution for the sake of his entire crew, not just to save himself because of his alleged narcissism. The mutineer, by contrast, has not only disrespected the captain's experience and authority, but he has also endangered the lives of everyone on that carrier by trying to demoralize the rescue effort.

Cryonicists find ourselves in a situation rather like this captain's, only we lack the power to throw the mutineers into jail for their attempts at sabotage. Cryonicists say that we have an emergency which threatens everyone on the planet, and we want engineering solutions to it. In the absence of a sufficient level of social mobilization, we've had to attempt the solutions ourselves in our own fumbling, inadequate way. I've tried to convey through my story the frustration and anger I experience, at least, when I confront the critics who threaten the survival of everyone alive through their attacks on the value of the rescue effort. The cryonics movement exists to try to save your lives, and not just ours.

If you don't think cryonics will work, then tell us your rescue plan.

Ben Best's recent talk about cryonics

I like the iframe code.

Attempted blog sabotage?

Somebody in London, England, with the IP 109.153.117.252, has attempted to screw with my blog.

Selected Journal Articles Supporting the Scientific Basis of Cryonics

My health heads in the right direction.

I just need to figure out how to raise my HDL. Unfortunately in the current era, "good health" really means "dying at the slowest feasible rate."

Robert Ettinger on "Transsex and Supersex" (1972)

I first read this in 1974, at age 14, from a book which I found enormously influential in my life. This chapter probably sheds some light my odd situation with the kinds of things other people seem to cope with organically and conventionally:

I learn something new about Arizona every day.

Something in fact which makes me go, "Hmm..."



As part of my belated effort to have a less sheltered life, I've thought of hiring an "escort" in the coming months just so I can say I've done it. ;)

More misinformation from the Cult Education Forum

Hard to know where to start with this, except to say that at least one prominent cryobiologist got into the field precisely because of its applications to cryonics. I heard this cryobiologist, still in good standing in the field, say on the live webcast of a talk he gave recently at a life extension conference that his contribution would not appear on the video records because he feared reprisals from the cryobiological community, even though he has performed defensible research about the preservation of the rabbit hypothalamus through vitrification. Nobody I know of with any influence wants to speak up for this scientist's intellectual freedom.

As for cryonics' organizations alleged exploitation of "elderly, impressionable or dying people desperate not to die," the overwhelming majority of us sign up at relatively young ages and in good health, when we can still get affordable life insurance (the most common means of funding one's cryonic suspension). I signed up at age 31, for example, because I understood early on that we face an emergency, and we need technological solutions for it. In my case, something apparently went wrong with our culture's process of indoctrinating me with its usual terror management fantasies, so I turned to a speculative engineering approach instead. Manage your risk, not your terror.

Southern living conditions, unfit for 21st Century humanity

Poverty wages, under-education, poor health, apart from the more civilized enclaves in Florida and Texas. Arizona comes out looking somewhat better, by comparison:


Source
American life expectancy, education and earnings by state

Why do Southerners tolerate this situation, when they have the example of better functioning areas of the country to follow? You can't blame it on the subtropical climate: Just look at the maps of Texas and Florida.

It also supports my sense that the people in parts of the Pacific Northwest and New England live in a more advanced civilization than Southerners.

I wish I had a time machine.

I could go back a century, before the dollar allegedly lost "96 percent of its value" thanks to the Federal Reserve System, and buy the things I want at amazingly low prices. I could walk into a Best Buy store in 1910 and buy an iPad for $20, for example. I could get a root canal, if I need another one some day, for about $80. I could even buy a Saturn Sky sport car for $1,200.

I've had exposure to some better things in life.

And I still think I deserve them.

I don't feel guilty about existing, and about wanting better things.

But I don't necessarily mean "better consumer goods" by "better things."

I mean "better things" like more money (not to spend, but to save and apply towards wealth-building); better health; work which challenges and develops my strengths; the respect of people who also impress me as having good judgment; and especially those elusive, fulfilling sexual relationships I keep hearing about.

And especially, especially, healthy radical life extension, because I'd like to try my hand at the kinds of work which don't exist yet, like, say, rearranging the solar system to make it more habitable for human-derived organisms, as astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky recommended.

I thought about this as a contrast to the deprived hillbilly grandparents I had on my mother's side, and the petty bourgeois grandparents on my father's side. (My dad's father practiced law in small Oklahoma towns, while dad's mother owned small but unthriving businesses like beauty parlors, until she got a job managing the PX, as a civilian, at Fort Sill in the years before her retirement. My father came from a slightly better class of people, in other words.)

Three of my four grandparents, now all deceased, seemed like basically decent people (not the country lawyer, however). But I could tell even as a child that they didn't have much going for them. It never occurred to me while growing up that I could go to one of them for advice, for example.

Well, I don't want to hang with undistinguished people like my grandparents. I consider that experience "spiritually depleting," for want of a better term, though of course worse people exist. I can't see how someone could go into a career dealing with heavy-duty spiritual depleters like criminals, drug addicts, homeless people and other derelicts (the constituency of many liberal politicians). I want to hang with competent, successful, efficient people who show that humans can accomplish something other than just sitting on the porch all day and talking about other undistinguished people. I consider the best company I can associate with as a key element in the "better things" I want from life. The better things in life supply me with spiritual fuel and reward the effort to keep on existing.

My maternal grandmother died today.

Kathleen Langley (1918? - 2010), from the Dogpatch side of my family. She stayed mentally competent until the end, according to mom, and died from pneumonia. She probably had fluid in her lungs because of heart failure and kidney failure.

She lived in the same nursing home in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, where my father, age 83, currently lives.

So I have the following data points about my grandparents' lifespans:

Hugh Potts, SSN# 446-32-2990. 1895 - 1974, age 78.

Mozelle Bibb (married to Hugh Potts, then divorced him and remarried), SSN# 445-18-8950. 1907 - 1998, age 90.

Ervin Langley (Kathleen's husband), SSN# 508-10-3521. 1907 - 2001, age 93.

I seem to have a pattern in my family where the men marry younger women.

Take care of what you post on Twitter.

The flip side of rejection? Watching the woman's marriage to the other guy disintegrate, especially because she put herself into a disadvantaged situation in relation to her husband. I suspect she spent way too much money on her compulsive hoarding habit over the past 16 years (on science fiction collectibles, for example), instead of saving it for her protection in case the marriage went bad. Just imagine a female version of Comic Book Guy:



And yes, I do have a mean-spirited aspect to my personality.

Support for my proposal

Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, provides support for the idea of seeking relationships with people from backgrounds dissimilar to yours to help in your own problem solving. I propose that cryonicists start to talk with technical problem solvers, otherwise known as inventors, outside of our usual social networks and comfort zones to see if they can give us some insight into tackling cryonics' many challenges. I cannot rationally defend the idea that we'll find some of the missing pieces this way; but what cryonicists have done so far seems to have resulted in stagnation, so it makes sense to look.

You can watch Johnson's talk on Book TV here.

And none of this "end times" nonsense as well!

This sounds distressingly familiar, demonstrating that the UK has Christian religious obsessives similar to the ones in the American South. Though in other respects the UK shows signs of becoming a "Jesus who?" society:

From:

Some things children should not be taught, by Thomas Prosser

A scrutiny of the youth evangelism strategies of one of the UK's largest faith groups, evangelical Christians, should give liberals serious cause for concern. Let us take as exemplar the work of Soul Survivor and Audacious, two large British youth evangelical organisations that run holiday camps attracting British youth in their tens of thousands. One striking aspect of these camps is the intensity of the doctrine that is preached and the zeal with which it is delivered. Leaders passionately inform children and teens of their conviction that evangelical doctrines, all of which are of course highly questionable when considered soberly, are absolutely true.

Children at Soul Survivor meetings have, for instance, been told that their generation can help bring Jesus back to Earth within their lifetimes. The "conversions" of children on the basis of such techniques is exploitative and can cause emotional pain when, in later life, it is discovered that such beliefs simply do not bear rational scrutiny. Other lessons preached at these camps are even more potentially damaging to children. At recent Soul Survivor meetings that have been featured on God TV, leaders have told young people they will be judged by God on the content of their thoughts when they die, that witch doctors can stunt the mental and physical capacities of children by cursing them, and that Jesus can heal children of medical ailments.

Prosser argues that concern for children's welfare requires some prophylaxis of the religious environment:

I believe a public commission should be established that issues non-legally binding guidelines on the forms of doctrines that it is desirable that children are taught. The preaching of hellfire or of divine faith healings to children could form part of such guidelines. Non-compliers could be "named and shamed" by such a commission.

Such a venture would carry the advantage of leaving intact the parental right to educate children in their faith tradition, but would also go some way towards recognising the potentially damaging impact of certain religious doctrines upon developing minds.

Given the UK's growing Muslim population, would Prosser also extend this to undesirable Islamic doctrines for children, like the "72 virgins" nonsense?

I continue to wonder how I would have turned out if I had grown up in a more rational milieu which hadn't exposed me to fundamentalist Christianity: None of this foolishness about "getting saved," expecting the "end times," internalizing negative attitudes about human sexuality and so forth.

A new "It's Not Science Fiction" commercial from the U.S. Air Force

I assume that the U.S. Air Force's real medevac jets don't morph into STOL aircraft like something the X-Men or Race Bannon in Jonny Quest would fly:

I see advantages to living in Phoenix.

A lot of cryonicists say they don't like living in Phoenix, and I've known a few who've cycled through a sojourn in Phoenix and then moved elsewhere.

Well, somebody must love Phoenix; how did it become the nation's fifth most populous city?

In fact, I could see moving to Phoenix myself in a few years as the immediate post-Creekside stage of my life. I've even joined the Inventors' Association of Arizona ($125 a year), which holds meetings in Phoenix, with the goal of cultivating contacts with creative technical thinkers to see if they can help with cryonicists' goals. (They don't have to "believe in" cryonics, or want to sign up for it. I'd just like to know if I could find inventive problem solvers in Arizona's inventor community who would find cryonics' technical problems intriguing enough to work on. Has any other cryonicist tried this yet, in any city?) I don't know when I can ever attend the meetings, however, living as I do out in the sticks near Prescott.

I'd also like to move back to a city, after spending nearly 20 years in rural areas, to meet single aftermarket women in their 30's who don't smoke, don't have kids, don't drink much alcohol, don't have STD's, don't have a crystal meth addiction, don't have a bunch of notches on their bedposts and don't have debts they want some man to pay; but who do have good health, good teeth, a decent job, health insurance, a positive net worth and realistic expectations about men for their age. I'd have to educate them about the importance of cryonics in my life.

I'd prefer to find a woman like that in the cryonics community already, of course. But given cryonics' demographics, most single straight guys in cryonics have to seek female companions exogamously. Though I know of a male cryonicist who recently lucked out within the tribe, so to speak. He's reduced the single female population in cryonics to N - 1, leaving a situation of extreme scarcity even scarcer.

Another wish

I'd like for cryonics to get on the track of steady, consistent progress towards our goals, instead of lurching from one discontinuity to another: financial crises, scandals, fads, gimmicks, ill-advised business models, incompetent CEO's, bad decisions, unnecessary lawsuits, etc.

Unfortunately some of the sources of discontinuity still have enough money, status or fear-inducing potential to cause further mischief.

I handled an iPad today.

And I found it pretty damn cool, and definitely science-fictional. Its touch screen reminded me of Robert Heinlein's imaginary technology of "parastatics" in Orphans of the Sky, which he applied not just to the controls of a multi-generational starship, but also to the important machinery as a whole:



I can't think of a personal use for an iPad, however. I'd like to buy a laptop of my own, but I don't want to spend the money on it just yet. But I have it on the agenda because I have some writing projects in mind that I'd like to keep separate from the company's computers.

Escaping from "starvation economics"

A book published by a couple of polyamory advocates argues that love really exists in abundance. We don't live in the "starvation economy" of emotional insufficiency we usually assume:



Where do I find this alternative market?

Birthday thoughts

I turn 51 years old today, or 612 months, as I sometimes calculate my age. According to the actuarial table I have a remaining life expectancy of about 28 years, which would get me to the year 2038 as a first approximation. However, three of my grandparents made it to their early 90's, so I might have the potential to squeeze out another dozen years or so, and tough it out to, say, the year 2050.

Assuming that I have 30-40 years to look forward to in this part of my existence, what would I like to see happen? Well, in my fantasy future, I'd like for the older cryonicists to show me appreciation and respect, based on the consideration that they will probably go into the dewars, if they wind up there at all, somewhat before I do. They have self-interested reasons now to cultivate the people who will have the ability to look out for their interests in the next few decades when they no longer can, for example ones to make sure their dewars stay full of liquid nitrogen. I will gladly assume that role for them, where feasible, provided that it also makes sense emotionally for me to accept that responsibility. And in turn I will cultivate the younger cryonicists who impress me as worthy of the task of looking out for my interests, along with the interests of preceding suspendees, in the decades after my suspension. Cryonics needs an "apostolic succession" of leaders, activists and researchers over several generations, if it has any chance at all of succeeding.

If, however, the current cryonicist elders advise me to do something equivalent to dating the fat and ugly women, especially if they don't like my posts about Peak Oil's threat to air travel, or about the "nanotechnology" delusion and the need to rethink revival arguments, then I might not have such a strong motivation to protect their interests in their vulnerable state. Wouldn't you think so?

The rocket scientist as man of action

I noticed this interview on The Art of Manliness blog some time back:

So You Want My Job: Rocket Scientist, about aerospace engineer Davy Haynes:

3. If a man wishes to become a rocket scientist, how should he best prepare? What kinds of degrees and credentials does he need?

Math and science studies are critical to being a good engineer in any area, and certainly so as a rocket scientist. A degree in Aerospace, Mechanical, or Electrical engineering is essentially mandatory today, and a Masters degree doesn’t hurt. I also think some practical preparation, or experience, is invaluable as well—stuff like student design projects, R/C model aircraft construction, amateur rocketry, and of course, practical piloting experience.

Some space exploration obsessives have taken up aviation as the next best thing to piloting a space ship. Wernher von Braun flew small aircraft, for example.

Arthur C. Clarke, by contrast, took up scuba diving as his substitute for exploring new worlds.

I've wondered what I would have to do to get a pilot's license at my age, but with the ischemic damage in the retina of my right eye, I doubt I could pass the vision requirements.

Notice that Haynes doesn't say, "Read all the science fiction you can," though many aerospace people do read more than their share. I used to work with a fellow in the lodging business who obsessively read science fiction, fantasy and horror novels and comic books, played computer games in those genres, and needless to say watched those sorts of films on DVD all the time. The consumption of those media did not serve him well as preparation for practical life. The real-life versions of Comic Book Guy don't thrive for that very reason: they've wasted too much time on make-believe.

However, Haynes makes it sound too easy to enter "rocket science" these days, at least in the U.S. In the real world, plenty of perfectly good American engineers find themselves discarded by their 30's because American corporations keep outsourcing their jobs or giving preference to immigrant engineers who'll work in the U.S. for less money.

Another reason to attack the nanotech delusion

Cryonicists who should know better often shrug off today's fucked up suspensions by saying that our Future Friends' magic nanomachines will repair the damage regardless.

We should not accept this sort of excuse-making from our cryonics service providers. This way of thinking (really, an exercise in negligence) also supports the stereotype of cryonics as a species of cargo cult, not to mention accusations of denialism.

We have only one shot at this. You cannot get a second cryonic suspension which does a better job in case something preventable goes wrong with your first and only cryonic suspension.