Dream Dance

Day 333 - All Your Minds are Belong to Us

Capitalism is strong when it aligns with meritocracy. But just as often it blindly rewards vice and avarice even when punishing true value. While we may marvel at the mechanics of market efficiency, we recoil from its cruelty and inhumanity.

Aaron Ngensani lived at a difficult time. He was born when an epidemic of auto-immune problems that had been sweeping the globe ravaged him and many of his peers. A sickly young man, he turned to science and a life of the mind, finally finding employment with a giant biotechnology firm. As was typical he pledged his creativity to the company. Anything he did while he worked at their labs would belong to them, terrifying intellectual serfdom that bothered no one at the time. After all, what could one man really accomplish?

There's no question that the equations of PSI scanning are entirely a product of his own personal genius. Trying to solve a problem in his own field of genetic imaging, he was able -- with a handful of surplus optical gear and an underpowered portable computer -- to do something that no one had ever done, and to see things that had never been seen. Within a few years the images and applications coming out of Monsanto would transform the world of sensing technology.

Too late for Ngensani. He died not long after, only about six months after the company officially recognized him as the inventor. He may have been the last tragic victim of the twisted incentives of the Financial age.

If he had been born ten years earlier he might have missed the worst of Ljungdahl Syndrome. If he had developed PSI equations without using company equipment, and had the money to patent them, then -- as unlikely and sad as this possibility might seem -- perhaps he could have purchased first-class treatment. Such were the options at those times.

If he had been born ten years later, however, and had done his work under the Princeton system, he would have had primacy for his invention. Everything done with his brilliant insight would have fed back to him. Even suffering from LS he would have had a fighting chance, and everything in the system would have been pulling for his success and for his further contributions to knowledge and scientific understanding.

He was just, basically, unlucky.

The quote above is from Phillip Princeton's most famous speech. Ngensani's story featured prominently in the introduction and in the inflammatory (and dangerously seditious) conclusion. The powers in charge called him a terrorist, but Princeton was first and foremost a philosopher and ethicist. Private knowledge was tyranny, and we were all Aaron Ngensani.

Day 328 - Children of our Hopes and Fears

Jayln's very, very pregnant, and she's been sending out pictures to prove it. I feel like I must be the only person here who grew up around little kids -- and therefore lots of pregnant women. You know what: that's what they look like. It's not some sort of medical anomaly. It's normal. Pregnancy predates what we think of as human society by a long, long time. Look up Venus figurines and get over it everyone! It's not new.

I have to admit to being a little excited, however. I love children, and I think that having a baby among the science team will lend some -- I don't know -- reality? Perhaps community is the better word. There's a tendency -- especially among the younger team members -- to think that what they are doing now is a stepping stone to their ultimate position. As if today will only be looked at in retrospect and doesn't affect real people, today. But of course it does. What everyone does now affects everyone who is here. Here, today.

Add an innocent infant to the mix and let's see how their calculations change.

Everyone has studied ethics; it's required subject matter. Yet I think too often the theory that's apparent on the blackboard doesn't translate into personal commitment until there's a real-world example. Not just a hypothetical, but a flesh and blood person whose life may change because of those decisions. In some way, Jayln's baby can argue for her own rights before she even understands what her rights might be.

However, I'm also concerned that her baby's rights might tend to supersede the Tanzen. The Tanzen had a lot more babies here before we ever discovered their planet, and yet the bias may be toward the kids that will benefit us.

Day 324 - Dance of the Jijibugs

It's pouring down rain outside. I feel like my hab is under siege by thousands of hyperactive gnomes with ball-peen hammers. I may be in the middle of a shallow lake by tomorrow. Fortunately my foundation is on stilts. Short, short stilts.

Nonetheless, I have some fascinating reading to keep my mind off the din and the coming flood. Wald's released his report on Jijibugs. I'm second author, actually, and while I did help him with the data collection and analysis, the experimental design and the conclusions are all his. It's very nice work, and it shows how DF actually operate.

Jijibugs (Euhereped icelandii) -- whose common name is already a terrible pun on characters from children's fiction -- are absurdly cute. They are a bit like hairy geckos. Small dorsofocillus with flat bodies, their many-thumbed paws have developed nanobrachiating fur that lets them cling to any surface. The paper has several humorous pictures of them stuck in the corners of eves and overhangs of buildings in the main campus in Iceland. The females, who are about three times the mass of the males, stake out defensible locations in their territories so you'll often find a fat Jijibug female staring back from any number of nooks and crannies anywhere you might go. They are not common on my continent, but the campus seems to be ground zero.

Dorsofocillus require two matings with a delay between them to produce offspring, leading to some fairly extreme tradeoffs. The males demand that their first mating will not support rival males, so both matings have to be by the same male to assure fecundity; in response the female Jijibugs require dowries. They will not mate unless they are paid.

After the first mating, the male Jijibug spends several days gathering a collection of mutts which he binds together into a packet with his sticky saliva. Presented to the female, she consumes it but may or may not allow additional matings. Eventually she accepts his offer, or he cuts his losses and moves on.

Wald worked out the remarkable details of this dance. The female response to dowry packets fits an almost perfect Poisson distribution -- as if they were gauging the number of available mutts in their nearby area and requiring that the males find some reasonable subset of them. The caveat is that if any packet was smaller than some minimum they failed to trip the female's threshold and were treated as if they didn't exist. This is the kind of sophisticated response you'd expect from a finely tuned biological system. The females select males that can reach a certain minimum standard for each attempt, and that can also achieve a total appropriate for their circumstances.

The males, for their part, have different strategies. They cannot predict what size of packet the female considers valid, nor can they know exactly when they will hit the break-even point for their efforts. Since spending more time on one female means less time on others they always try to shave those as close as they can. Some try to make packets as big as they can at the cost of the total number, and some take the other approach. Still others seem trapped in indecision. Wald has some fantastic footage of a Jijibug male fine-tuning his packet size. He removes a whole bunch from the packet, then he adds them back, first one, then another, then another, then after much contemplating another, then he removes a whole bunch and starts again. It's hilarious. And it all fits with the science which makes it all so much more compelling.

I have to admit, though, for me it's a little bit melancholy. Tanzen are dorsofocillus as well, but none of this reminds me of them at all. I've spent years studying their courtship and mating behaviors and there is nothing like this kind of calculation visible. I'm sure that it's there, somewhere, but it's sublimated in other behaviors that we haven't decoded yet. One way or another, we fundamentally don't understand the Tanzen. Not yet.

Day 319 - Hymenoptera and my Enlightenment

When I was 16 I got my first batch of ants. It was believed at the time that Crabs worked a lot like the social insects, and that entomologists would be in the best position to solve their riddle. My adviser suggested that I join the Hymenoptra Project, and I was eager to find something I could sink my teeth into.

I made the enclosure by modifying a standard plan. Printing the parts and cutting sheets of transparent polymer took weeks, mostly because of my limited shop time. I recycled some of my toys to get the blue dot stock. Once I had it built, with the cameras and sensors installed, someone from Winnipeg sent me live animals: my own personal Formicidae. They got to work building tunnels and I did what I thought was science.

I was diligent at least. I watched and made notes. I did some of the common easy experiments and then invented a few of my own, eventually producing a graph of how long it took them to clear a tunnel cave-in with dirt grains of different sizes and moisture levels. It took me quite a while to get good data and I learned more than I ever thought there was to know about sampling and measurement error and statistical significance. The ants died and I had to get more. Everything I put on the Roam was brutally dissected, battering my already fragile teenage sense of self-worth. More than once my ant habitat got within inches of destruction in a fit of temper.

The turning point came for me browsing a myrmecology hub when I ran across some new but fairly basic research that had turned ant genetics on its head. It was a new way of looking at genes and behavior that, while not revolutionary, nonetheless opened up hard problems in a new way. It was unmistakably obvious -- I didn't know how I could have missed it before. I remember the feeling: a sense of light, not lightness, but an inner radiant energy. Things felt brighter, more clear, as if my mind had been cowering in a thunderstorm and the sun had finally come out. Suddenly my little setup seemed petty and backward, and I realized what I needed to do to in order to really answer interesting questions.

I took my childish ant farm apart and started again.

Day 315 - I Know a Wiener Man

When I entered grad school I had only one real cite. I had published a lot, the usual childish stuff, school assignments, and the research I did in my undergrad program. None of that amounts to anything. If you had looked at me in the Roam you would have seen the glow of a million meaningless links -- the chaff of my everyday life -- a tapestry of refs and dim cites -- everyone that had some role in helping me grow up -- and one laser-bright cite. That contribution to genuine research was my gateway into the real world of professional references and citations. It probably got me admitted into the program.

Pi looks like a supernova. She's the center of a massive spiderweb of cites stretching halfway across the Roam and back. Even so, I hadn't really realized how much power She represented. When She invited me into her Crab working group that made an automatic link, a link more intense than most of my refs. When She made the invitation official it added a ref, a ref that outshone my meager cite. I can see why so many clamber for Her attention. The grace of Her favor can change lives.

The biology building at U Potsdam faced a tree-lined arcade, and around lunchtime it would fill up with food carts. I had the good fortune my first week to discover the very best sausage vendor in probably the entire world. I'd signal for one and he'd jab his tongs into a boiling vat of some kind of oily liquid with what looked like small bundles of sticks floating in it. He'd pull out a fat Wurst and wrap it in warm flatbread, garnish it with a little pickled cabbage, a smear of a fiery local sauce called Mustard and a couple of shakes of melange. Juicy and delicious, the skin snapped when you bit through. I lived on those things. Nearly every lunchtime I'd forge another link with the sausage man.

As a young grad student with one cite to my name I was probably a typical client. I'd be somewhere right in the middle of his profile. Pi's ref changed that. Unless you've studied economics it's not always clear how the ebb and flow of the Roam affects the allocation of resources, but my change in disposition had a significant effect on my friend. He was no longer just supporting an undifferentiated gang of struggling students. Suddenly, through Pi's ref, he was supporting Her efforts. In his tiny way his cart helped to enable Her massive enterprise, and he became more important and valuable overnight.

From being a minor blip I was now an outlier -- a datapoint way off his normal client profile. To make up the difference he had to take on more clients. He added a second cart to his operation, and found volunteers to staff it. He got better access to the soy proteins and other ingredients he needed. It would be around now I think that he asked me for a ref. I'd given him several before Pi, but this new one was more significant. Soon after he opened a standing counter in a fairly prestigious place near the park.

I'm proud that I was able to help a humble but talented person achieve the success they deserved. It's sometimes a little scary though, just how much that success can be a matter of good luck. It doesn't always work out so well.

Day 310 - Running Myself to Death, At First

The first phase of my training program made me a generalist. I really don't react well to variation in my routine, and yet this was exactly what was required. Coach would update my programs based on results from the previous day, so I never knew what I was doing from one moment to the next. Today I would run sprints, the next day I ran 6 twelve-minute jogs at 90 minute intervals, then a day of rest, then a half marathon tomorrow. I never knew what was happening; it made me crazy. The schedule didn't intrude into my other schoolwork -- that wasn't it. But imagine coming home after a long TA session and being told to run a 5K. The mental effort to get my legs moving nearly killed me.

Physically, though, it worked. I realize in retrospect that Coach inherited a long history of physical training knowledge and knew exactly what my body could do. He never pushed any one thing farther than it could go. When my fast fibers ached we did long loops; when my slow fibers screamed we did lunges; when my joints screamed we did crunches. I don't know how but I was able, each and every day, to rise up and do the thing he told me to do.

And I hated him, just as he predicted.

There was a point where I felt that some kind of poison was building up in my body, and that no matter what happened the next time I saw Coach I would be compelled to kill him. I felt that. It was something that the muscles and sinews of my own body would do without conscious volition, just to get relief. And he came in and smiled, and that was enough to diffuse the pent up tension. He got a reprieve. And then he said "You get a break." And my entire body collapsed, physically and mentally. I had no idea that I was at that kind of edge, but he did.

We went to a show: Leben einfach ist, warum bist du? at the Spaßwerk Theater. Not just the two of us -- it was his intern and some kids from my lab as well -- and it was rather dull quite honestly. I went to sleep early and Coach canceled my morning classes. When I woke I found the next week had no training. The week after it started again with a more predictable program that was easy to schedule my life around. I had crossed a threshold, and Coach had rewarded me with the thing I wanted most.

And, just this once, I loved him.

Day 306 - Understanding Otherness and Sameness

Eddie has an apprentice. I think I've identified it much earlier than Sid ever did with his flawed probe data. He knew that Tanzen artisans ended up with apprentices but he never really saw the process happening. I caught it, and my more accurate records let me review the history.

Edith first broke away from her peers about six months ago. Instead of playing together she started to spend more time just staring at Eddie. The Tanzen youth all spend a lot of their free time just watching -- or seeming to watch -- the various adults. It's hard to say for sure; Tanzen eyes don't betray a lot. There's a definite pattern, however, that Tanzen youth gather around adults and twitch and circle and spend a lot of time just attending to what they do. It's a bit hard to explain.

It became much more obvious about two weeks ago. Edith could see Eddie, although she may not have been focused in that direction. She was sitting in a circle of her siblings and cousins, as they often do. As Eddie worked his clay, Edith worked her hands. The children all twitch -- it's just something you get used to watching Tanzen youth -- but Edith was clearly moving her hands in the same way that Eddie was. She was working phantom clay. I've never seen it more clearly. She was practicing the moves needed to be a potter.

This is not the same as how human children practice adult activities. As a child we might pretend to make dinner or pretend to play an instrument or pretend to win cites or pretend to be married. Imagination for human children is very top-down; they apprehend the high-level goal in a childish way and ape gross behaviors. Becoming an adult means leaning the subtleties that informed those actions.

Tanzen are different. Edith's moves were almost disjointed. She would move one hand in half of the move needed to form the bowl of a pot. The other hand was doing something else. A few minutes later she moved her other hand in the same motion that Eddie used to split a large lump of clay. This is something that requires two hands. One hand holds the lump and twists it against the pressure of the other hand, while that hand pushes down and tears using a rippling thumb action. Edith was only doing the ripple action; her other hand was tormenting her sister. Even the main hand was only part time. It took a lot of slow motion replay to see what was happening.

It seems she's decided to learn pottery. Every day she spends some time standing near where Eddie works and her twitching, while still distracted, has become more -- I'm not going to say focused, because that' not right. It's become more rigorous. She's lost a little of that childish, random quality. Edith is 7 seasons old, about two seasons from sexual maturity. This is far earlier than any probe data showed signs of apprenticeship.

The interesting thing for me -- and I'm going off into the deep end here with no observational statistics to back me up -- is that Eddie knows. I can sense it. He knows that Edith is watching him, and he's different somehow. I'd like to say he's slower, like he'd like her to have a better chance to see what he's doing, but that's not true. Replays show he moves just as fast as before. And yet I can't help feeling like there has been a change in his behavior. A change that might say, "I understand you."