The ball of magma

Sometimes, concepts are difficult to grasp, as a child two examples that I can give are God making the earth in seven days, and differential equations.

God making the earth in seven days soon stopped making sense when you started asking questions, like when did god make the dinosaurs then? And at that point you are introduced to “The Article of Faith” and yes it is capitalised like that, you see the stories are all simplified because back in the day peasants and so on were simple folk, and if you were given an elaborate demonstration like you might get in a chemical lab making nylon, there would be no area left unexplained, and the whole purpose of God (TM) is that you have FAITH and BELIEVE in him, without proof….

For me at least this all sounded a lot like hocus pocus and any impulse to believe anything religious of any kind was rooted out by the time I was seven, sure, I still went to church and played along, as a kid you don’t have a lot of choice, but the fact is apart from maybe a visit to the dentist there were few things less attractive to me than going to church.

For what it is worth I have also seen some incredibly good people who were deeply religious, but from what I can see even absent religion they were basically good people anyway, they disputed this with me, telling me their faith gave them strength, to me it was just a coda, the incredible technicolour spaghetti monster would have served as well.

But the point here is no matter how hard I tried, I could never grasp the idea of religion. Nailing jelly to a wall.

Later in my youth I transferred from one school to another, with a brief hiatus in between, and at the second school I found that everyone was doing differential equations in maths class, and like religion, I struggled mightily, it was explained to me time and again, but it later turned out that there were a couple of intermediary maths principles between what I already knew, and diff, and without them diff was very hard to grasp and understand… the fact is I left that school shortly thereafter and so never really grasped diff, and then outside in real life and engineering I never personally came across it.

I did come across engineering scenarios where people used diff and other stuff, but they were always the guys who would design a valve and pipe manifold on CAD that couldn’t be assembled without custom tooling because no allowance was made for spanner heads or bolt extraction, understandable given that most of these dweebs had never held a spanner in their life, so in practical terms it never intruded.

But again, the point stands, now matter how hard I tried back in school, I could never quite wrap my head around diff, as in I never actually learned it, and I define learning as internalising it, like language for example.

Of course people not being able to wrap their heads around something is common in school, it is what school and teachers are for after all, and somewhere along the way I picked up that matter falling towards itself due to gravity and coalescing into planets, or proto planets really, involves a pretty impressive amount of heat generation, and planets themselves involve pretty impressive numbers, and then you add heating from tidal effects and heating from radioactive decay and the ball spinning in near absolute zero vacuum apart from solar insolation forms a crust and maybe an atmosphere as a blanket, and maybe life pops up… and this all ties in with physical geography lessons and so on.

Like all school boys of my era I could tell you that the earth has a solid iron core and a molten iron layer above that and then various semi molten (all depends on pressure innit) rocky layers out to the crust and tectonic plates, I do not actually know if that is a fact, as in there haven’t been any empirical experiments, but it is an accepted fact, and in truth it may have been modified or refined since I was a schoolboy, or maybe we were only ever taught the basic shit.

But recently I was talking to someone who wasn’t aware of all this, where the fuck does all this hot rock come from in volcanoes, and it was like watching some kid back in school who’d just come from another school, and missed a year of lessons, they struggled, hugely, and failed utterly to grasp it, how can solid rock float on anything, how come the crust doesn’t melt if what you say is true, how how how how…

But there IS a quasi religious belief about them, the belief that the things that they have seen and experienced over their entire lives, is pretty much all there is and all there is going to be…. Tambora / Yellowstone / World War 3 / 1918 flu / South Sea Bubble / and of course nobody expects… the spanish inquisition…

None of these things exist.

They have never happened, there is no memory of them, so they can never happen.

In computer terms there was the joke about the (dumb) guy having a 1k (kilobyte) input buffer, in case you aren’t techie that means he could only accept tiny tiny tiny pieces of new information, if you overloaded him there was a system crash, he froze and started drooling. The primary purpose of education and schooling was to increase that input buffer in size, and increase the bandwidth between that and the brain / cpu, and to increase the cross reference to the database of previously learned shit.

There is an awful lot of talk about millenials and snowflakes and SJWs and all the rest of the shit, there is precisely zero talk about the thing they all have in common, a 1k input buffer, an input buffer that has never known a different life or different events.

I know people in their 30’s and 40’s and older who have lived all their lives like this, some of them, a small minority, aren’t actually stupid and can learn small lessons one at a time, in isolation, just don’t expect them to apply those lessons to the greater picture.

Most of them, forget it, to coin an engineer’s term, the die is cast, it’s too late.

I sit here now with a fucking mobile phone with 32 gigabytes of internal storage, and you can add 64 gigs of micro sd card too.

The original Encarta multimedia encyclopaedia was less than 3 gigs, back then, if you had asked me about a world nearly 30 years into the future where everyone, even children, carried around star trek mobile computing devices with 32 gigabytes of storage, I’d have bet both bollocks they would all have encarta installed, and britannica too, and oxford dictionary, and any specialist stuff that interested them, and god alone knows what they would have done with the rest of the free 20 gig still remaining…

Fast forwards to today and everyone’s device storage is chock full of instagram posts, tweets, snapchats, cat videos, angry birds, farmville, god knows what shit.

As a small boy I had one of the first electronic pocket calculators, it didn’t take long to work out that you could turn it upside down and 71077345 said shelloil, given my dad was working in that industry and visiting us at the time was the general manager for shell for south east asia, suffice it to say all were duly impressed and comments made about some day this kid will be a millionaire (that was back when a million was a lot of money..lol) so it was literally inconceivable to us that in a future where everyone had a star trek portable computing device, the primary purpose would be anything other than us all walking around with reference libraries and being instant pseudo experts on any subject we chose.

The reality of course is the exact opposite, when you give smartphones to assholes they get even dumber… that 1k input buffer shrinks to 512 bytes, and why not, my phone will tell me anything I need to know, not that they are even used for what people NEED to know, hey, josh and marie and split up again, and it’s going to rain, and the kardashians are having more implants.

It’s NOT the morlocks and the eloi, the elites are as afflicted by this as the guy in the street, perhaps more so as a 500k per annum salary insulates you from the dumber moments in your life better than a 17k per annum salary that the vast majority get.

Fuck, this is 2018 and wordpress underlines annum as a mis spelled word, click on it and all it can suggest is annul… and yes, I know my two finger poke and hope no proof reading no spellchecking typing and grammar and spelling is appalling.. but morlocks suggests oarlocks and eloi suggests eloise and I could go on and on and on, AND THAT IS WHY I DO NOT GIVE A FUCK about all the red underlined shit, in 2018 the wordpress spellchequer has a smaller vocabulary than a 16 year old schoolboy in 1975.

The android mobile phone default icon library consumes more storage space than entire computers that I had back in the day, and I don’t mean home hobby shit like a 48k spectrum with cassette data storage , I mean pro shit with a fucking unbelievably huge 10 meg hard disk (later upgraded to a connor 40 meg jobbie) and an insane 512 kb of ram.

There ARE exceptions out there, there ARE people messing with tech and building 3d printers that probably aren’t as good as a priusa, but that isn’t the point, they rolled their own because they wanted to.

THEY ARE A FUCKING TINY MINORITY.

As recently as 1975 they would have been a very very significant minority, bordering on 40/45% of the whole, back in 1975 if you’d showed me an arduino and all the shield and shit I’d have gone apeshit and absolutely bet my life that by 2018 every child over 7 would have at least 6 of them controlling toys and stuff in their bedroom.

The innate genetic heritage of human beings has not altered, what has altered is the top layer on the cake, the thermosphere and exosphere on that ball of magma rolling through space, (thermosphere is where the doomed chinese object is now) we have basically dumbed everyone down to the level of native indians who fight each other for the chance to sell their lands and heritage in exchange for a bunch of shiny glass beads.

You either know you are standing on a ball of magma flying through the void on various cyclical perturbed variables, or you do not.

If you do not you’ll care about the environment or global warming or social justice or the new iOS or the russians hacking toys r us.

If you do not you are a waste of protoplasm and to the rest of us, subhuman.

You could change, but you will not, you like it that way.

No sympathy, none, not one iota, and you can deny this by calling me a psychopath all you want, it does not change the facts, change will kill you, it will not kill us.