Last week, I found out an old colleague passed away from breast cancer. She was 51. Naturally, as the news spread, I reconnected with some folks I haven't spoken to in a while.
Catching up after a gap always gives a unique glimpse into life. There's a sudden tearing away of the Band-aid. You get two data points: where they were headed when last you knew them and where they are now. Sometimes the difference is dramatic.
In Beth's case, she was on her way to becoming CEO, and she ended up dead.
Seeing so many sudden spirals—up, down, to the side—where almost no one lands where you expect (myself included), you realize how even the best-laid plans are sandcastles at low tide. Whatever it is we expect from our lives will in large measure fall apart, leaving only clumps and a few random spires.
The reason we’re never surprised, the reason our castles always seem intact, is that we constantly editing them. We change our expectation with every wave, expanding and moving our sandcastle such that it persists from moment to moment, even as it’s constantly disintegrating.
This isn't an argument against plans. Everything we do accomplish in life we accomplish on our way to a destination we never reach, but without any destination, we never arrive anywhere.
I suppose in some way it's an argument for stopping to smell the roses. Certainly, we can linger too long there, and we all know people who have. (Me, for example, these past few years.) But what a tragedy to never stop at all—or to fall off the cliff in your haste.
Catching up after a gap also gives you an uncommon perspective on your own life. Having explained it to so many people, I realized I am quite lucky. There was tragedy, to be sure. My abusive first marriage, for example. But also many tiny triumphs.
I'm often heard to say: if you don't celebrate the small things, you don't end up celebrating anything. I've had numerous experiences that I wouldn't trade for anything. I cut a human heart out of its chest and sat for hours with it in my hand, meticulously cleaning every artery and vein. I stood less than a block away from terrorist's bomb as it exploded. I stood with my soles in the water at the top of a hundred-foot waterfall in the Amazon. I braided jasmine flowers into garlands in a tiny apartment in Bangalore. I gambled in Macau, swam naked in the Mediterranean, fell in love in Tokyo. I’ve been married, divorced, and married again. I've been rich. I am poor. But I am very, very wealthy.
Educated people are much better at reasoning badly, probably because they’ve had more practice.
I had an idea a while back for a story, tentatively called Glitch Circus, about a post-human future, where tribal robots live among our urban remains, which are slowly being reclaimed by nature.
To prevent them from uprising, we hard-coded an inability to repair themselves (among other things). Their own bodies are as confusing to them as ours are to us, and they routinely employ quack medicine and sympathetic magic in their attempts to fix bugs and breakdowns.
The most they can do is make a peg leg, for example, although they can and do adorn themselves, such as with pigments or feathers, and there are precise rules, akin to symbolic logic, that define who can use these adornments and how.
Since robots with fewer defects are more able, they rise to the top of a fiercely hierarchical machine network governed by an ornately-decorated priestly class who have been ritually disabled (to symbolize their power is non-physical) and who are carried around in divans.
The head of the church is the Supreme Server, who only ever appears at the top of the old building that serves as the church's headquarters and who speaks of being a servant to his people, even as his enormous, ENIAC-like girth is carried around by slaves.
Ordinary people are part of the Cache. The most broken robots are relegated to an untouchable-like caste, who survive on the dangerous work of bringing materials in and waste out of the firewall, and who augment their disabilities in odd and heretical ways.
One of these outcasts has contracted a virus which is making it behave oddly. By rule, it should be terminated. Instead, its uncanny and intrepid friends have hidden it, although its partner is too afraid of the virus to interface.
After one of them hears a rumor from a traveler that a group of humans was encountered soe distance away. Most don’t believe the tale since the teller is also a braggart. Out of desperation to save their friend, who is now glitching wuite badly, the outcasts set off into the wilds to find the humans, who will be able to repair her.
(They even bring her old, broken body parts in the hopes of being remade exactly as she was.)
Along the way, the group encounters new animals, natural disasters, hostile tribes with strange and dangerous rituals, and of course the detritus of human civilization, which they often describe humorously incorrectly.
At some point, one of the outcasts accidentally catches another eating, and it is revealed she is not a robot but a human child, one of the last, who has been hiding among them, scavenging the wastes of the city with the others. She hides her identity under a suit of scrap, which the robot finds horrific, like we would if we found a robot wearing the skin of a corpse.
The discovery is not just disheartening but also leads to a crisis of faith, since it's also revealed the young human has no idea how to repair robots. For that reason, the two decide to keep the secret for a time, at least until they can figure out what to do.
At the end of their adventure, the group reaches their destination and finds evidence of recent human habitation, but everything has been destroyed. This is in fact the home of the human girl, who fled when her family was attacked by robot soldiers under orders of the Supreme Server.
With their quest in doubt, the group begins to splinter, and the human reveals herself in an attempt to keep them together. Facing the truth, the robots are alternately dejected and angry. One of them attacks her, claiming it’s all lies. Others rush to stop another from jumping off a cliff.
The human says she was present on the robots’ last annual holiday, when the holy book none of them are allowed to see is held aloft. She tells them it is a robotics textbook, and that theoretically, if she could study it, she might be able to repair them.
The last of the remaining true friends head back, some small hope renewed, and that is where the book ends.
I'm sure some people do get an endorphin rush from exercise, and those are the people who disproportionately volunteer for exercise studies that demonstrate an endorphin rush from exercise.
Not even the wise Greeks could devise a more tedious, existential torture than to roll a heavy weight up an endless hill.
The economics of the medium, especially back in the day, meant that TV shows were made to be disposable: to be watched once and never again. Hence, it was a rare show that ever seemed worth the time.
A few very popular shows were syndicated, but producers couldn't know in advance that "Gilligan's Island" would be wildly more popular than "Dobie Gillis", which meant at the point of production, it was typical to budget each episode for one-time, disposable viewing, which gave TV that canned aura. (Economically, TV shows and TV dinners had a lot in common.)
The economics of television also created a common market, where we all tended to watch the same things. Any broadcast medium like radio or TV has a more or less fixed inventory. There are only so many bankable viewing hours in a day. Once those are gone, there's nothing left to sell, so back in the day, broadcasters tried to maximize revenue by filling a fixed number of slots with content that would appeal to as many people as possible rather than to this or that narrow segment, as today.
Given the audience for reruns was lower, so was the ad revenue they generated, which meant they often ran in summer, when viewership was lower anyway. Networks didn't broadcast an expensive-to-produce first-run show when large chunks of their audience was on vacation or otherwise out enjoying the nice weather.
Of course, the nature of TV also meant that if viewers missed a show, there wasn't a convenient option for catching it, so if they wanted to see it, they had to be sure to tune in at the appropriate first-run time, which is why it was common for people to say "I have to hurry or I'm going to miss my show."
Like syndication, the home video market allowed producers to make a little extra money on a series that turned out to be popular after the fact, but in the brief era of the video store, the majority of its shelves were filled with movies, not TV shows, and for one simple reason.
Unlike television, which was piped directly to your house, you had to get in the car to go to a movie. It was an outing. (Remember, the first movie theaters were single-screen palaces.) That meant the production value had to warrant the outing—not to mention the distribution costs of shipping all that film—such that many major-release movies were good enough to watch a second or third time.
In other words: whereas television was generally made to be cheap and disposable, movies were generally not.
Streaming changed all that. Over the last 20 years, the economics of production have shifted dramatically and movies and TV have crept ever closer to each other.
Where before, only television was piped into our homes, now movies are, too. But unlike broadcast television, streaming allows us to watch any show at any time. Producers no longer have to worry about anyone missing anything.
Nor are studios limited to the number of broadcast hours in a day. They can make more stuff than anyone can watch, as long as there's money in it.
As a result, average movie quality has slipped, while quality of TV has increased dramatically such that the very best TV shows—something like Game of Thrones—can outperform large chunks of the movie market, which was never the case before.
"Made-for-TV movie" used to be synonymous with middling quality, and they had their own range of stars, who were almost never big names. Now, of course, some of the most popular actors in Hollywood headline made-for-streaming films.
Nor is Hollywood the global giant it once was. Lower production costs and the internet have made it economical to produce films for local consumption in every major language, from Swedish to Telugu.
It used to be I could only see a BBC show occasionally on PBS, and I had no idea what they were watching in Germany or Japan. These days, I can watch the quirky New Zealand mystery show "The Brokenwood Mysteries" from my couch in Kansas and it doesn't suck nearly as bad as any random episode of "The A-team".
Content has also changed. Barring the odd two-part season ender, any episode of "The A-team" (or the innumerable shows like it) was wholly self-contained. Everything you needed to know was packed into the intro, and that week’s story was resolved by the top of the hour.
Once the risk of missing an episode went away, producers were not only free to link plots across episodes, they had a strong incentive to—to keep you watching. Even shows that introduce and resolve conflict in a single episode, like "The Blacklist" or "The Mandalorian", also have ongoing plots to which the resolved events are tied.
Where before, the incentive was to keep everything superficial and short, to wrap everything up in 30 minutes or an hour, now the incentive is to draw it out as long as possible. TV shows today have lots of goings-on, but resolution always stays just over the horizon. Like soap operas, plot points seemingly resolved in season two roar back to life in season five.
In other words, narrative video on any size screen is less concerned with telling a great story than it is with tricking you into watching a series of commercials, or at least not canceling next month's subscription fee.
TIL "Rub-a-dub-dub" is about three dudes going to a peepshow. Exactly what I would want to explain to a small child.
0.1mm is roughly the diameter of human hair. If you magnified a 0.1mm dot until it was the size of the observable universe, the Planck length would be roughly the size of a 0.1mm dot.
In other words, if there were a universe in the tip of your hair, the Planck length would be the width of a hair inside that universe.
I know it’s a length, but that always invoked Zeno’s paradoxes in my mind. Why couldn't it be divided?
Instead, I think of it this way. If the universe gets more probabilistic the smaller you go, then the Planck length (and Planck mass/time/energy) is the point at which the probabilities reach some extreme or undefined state. There's nothing to divide because below that point, reality itself is undefined.
People tend to think deepfakes will encourage us to believe what isn’t true. I expect it will be the exact opposite.
They will have a pernicious effect, just not a direct one. Deepfakes will make us skeptical of the world such that we will cling to our biases more.
Whether they are ever used much outside entertainment or not—I doubt it—their mere existence will make us less likely to believe what is true, especially where that truth sounds anything like something the bad people might say.
The net result is that we’ll fall further into our individual fantasy worlds. But despite the common fears of propaganda and disinformation, such worlds will not be constructed by deepfakes but by the biases we already carry with us.
In other words, it’s never technology that does us in but our innate, animal reactions to it.
Back in college, my father expressed skepticism about the work of one of my roommates, who was a biologist studying cattle egret colonies in rural Oklahoma. My father wanted to know what possible societal value that could have.
I explained to him—badly—that you could never know in advance, that nature is robust and has probably already solved most of our problems, and that if we only studied those aspects of nature that had clear first-order benefits, we would soon run out of benefits.
For example, if we ever learn how to regenerate limbs (or organs), it will probably be because we studied slugs and newts that can do it. Same for cryogenics and certain species of frog that can literally be frozen solid in winter and survive the thaw.
Someone first had to study those frogs and slugs and newts, to describe their habitat and lifecycle in detail, before anyone knew that they were doing these things.
Case in point, the dragonfly. Someone had to study the dragonfly—in other words, get paid to capture dragonflies and catalog the various species and take measurements of them and their environment—before one of them realized it was odd how an insect that spent its life around water seemed very resistant to bacterial infections on its diaphanous wings.
Turns out dragonfly wings have a specific kind of bactericidal nanotopography. That is, they kill bacteria by their surface shape, not with chemicals or excretions. If we could mimic that, we could develop surgical instruments and meat-packing surfaces that were naturally antibacterial in a way that would not contribute to drug resistance, which is a very real and lethal problem.
Budgets are a thing, of course. We can’t fund everything. Still… it’s amazing to me how, under any party, we always seem to have more money for bombs.
Bactericidal Effects of Natural Nanotopography of Dragonfly Wing on Escherichia coli
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsami.6b13666
Quoting a fact checker is like copying answers from whoever is most popular in class.
A famous dead guy once famously observed that man is a social animal. We all feel the need to connect, and yet we all—myself included—resist the effort required. It always seems like human connection ought to come cheaper than it does, because wow it can be frickin' expensive.
I was reminded of that recently, of the effort required, when a long-time contact parted ways. In those moments, my first reaction is to say “Fuck all of it” and storm away, but I would only be kidding myself, like those people who swear they'll never fall in love again.
I can sometimes be incisive. The thing about incisive words is that they're the same as any knife. They can be a vital, even life-saving tool when they cut the line that's drowning you. At all other times, they're a weapon.
The difference is, one generally knows when one is handling a knife, whereas incisive words feel in the mouth the same as any other kind—except, I suppose, when they've been dipped in the acid of sarcasm.
To anyone who's been cut or burned: I should be more careful. I'd like to think I will be in the future, but I'm old enough to know what an empty promise that would be.
The point at which it happens a second or third time, you could try talking to me about it. I’ve never turned anyone away. But if that's too expensive, it's probably best to take care of yourself and leave me to die miserable and alone surrounded by all my knives.
As usual, there’s a lot to read on the site. Head on over to rickwayne.substack.com for more. If you haven’t yet, you can watch the video of the tornado that passed within a mile of our house, tearing up large swathes of our little community:
Or, you can start the new book, which is just about done:
Finally, here is this month’s picture of Henry. His mom is still in Japan, but at least he has his best friend.
That’s it for this time. I’m glad you’re here.