The Weather

I'm very impressed by the title of this one. A more foreboding subject in a blog it would be difficult to imagine. This is particularly true of the weather in question, that being today's weather in Houston, Texas.

Today was grey and overcast, substantially cooler than usual, with lots of rain and a mild breeze. I absolutely loved it. Until this week I believe the temperature in Houston had not dropped below 70 degrees Fahrenheit, 21 degrees Celcius (pet peeve, both of those scales are centigrade scales, saying 20 degrees centigrade is a meaningless statement) since some time in May. Going outside meant shorts, sandals and a t-shirt and sweating. Today I got to put on trousers and a sweatshirt, socks and boots, and slosh off into the muck, lovely.

Clearly there is some nostalgia for places past in this joy, and also the happy knowledge that this is a temporary situation. I would be far less happy in more northern climes with the knowledge that a day like today is just a precursor to months of grey, depressing, dark dampness. But today I can think of sweaters, a peat fire, a tankard of ale, the scratch of the bow upon a fiddle, conviviality and polished brass without being a complete numpty.

Amazing Incompetence

Through most of my life I have had a feeling that I'm not quite doing things as well as I should, and that I'm going to get in trouble as a result. This was particularly true in my last couple of jobs where the workload was not very large. My character is such that I dislike pointless working, busy work, or just doing stuff to look like you are working. Allied with my mood changes so that I sometimes I have loads of energy and other times very little my working style has been bursts of efficient activity interspersed with periods of loafing. Because I am lazy I like to get things done and out of the way, to remove the power of this guilt and because it requires the least amount of work to simply do things efficiently, right away.

So I often feel as though I am not particularly hard-working or competent in getting things done (in contrast I very rarely feel incompetent or ill-equipped in terms of thinking about or understanding things). This is close to my default position, and I have learned to identify how useful this can be. However, from time-to-time my default position is challenged by the activity in the world around me. The actual amount of stuff that gets done by apparently busy people is revealed, the person in the business suit with a brusque attitude and a go-getter vibe turns out to have no clue what they are supposed to be doing, and professionals simply cannot perform basic functions. My reaction then turns to bafflement at the number of people who simply cannot do things who remain employed.

The last few months have revealed a particularly heinous example of the pervasiveness of incompetence. This is our experience with our local post office. I have mentioned this before here but the depth of idiocy continues to the extent that I am beginning to suspect malice. I will try to keep this as short as possible.

When we first moved in we were receiving lots of mail from previous tenants. I went to the post office to make clear that we were the only residents in our house. Over the next couple of months the amount of mail we received dropped dramatically (while the previous residents' mail continued to arrive) and we started getting reports of mail being returned as undeliverable. I returned to the post office and explained the situation, but the situation continued to worsen until I returned a third time and was given a phone number of those who were in charge of forwarding mail. it turns out that when I said we were the only residents this was reported as us having moved with no forwarding address. I asked for this to be changed and waited. There was no change and I returned to the post office and met with Laura, a supervisor who promised to make the change herself and send out a letter from the post office to check that it had been successful. In the week following we received no letter from the post office and four times as much mail for previous tenants than for ourselves. I called Laura yesterday and she asked me to call today at 8:30am so that I could talk to her and the carrier simultaneously. I called today and Laura won't be in until 11am.

My point is that this is a level of incompetence of a mind-boggling level, the inability of a post office to deliver mail with my name on it to my address despite multiple complaints, and yet everyone there is still working. This is a government job, but I have seen excellent work by government employees and have had arguments with those working in big business who claim it would be impossible for government workers to be any more incompetent than big business.

When I compare my life to the general public I start with the knowledge that I have been luckier than the vast majority, but that I have also made far fewer deeply dumb decisions than many. That my present situation is easier and more pleasant than most, that I have an enviable life in many respects is not simply a case of me being lucky but also me being very competent at life. Today I need to go and be angry at strangers, which is some distance from my favorite thing to do, but pleasantness has not worked.

The Green, Green Grass of Home

My darling wife and I just spent a week in Britain, almost all of it on the Welsh/English border. The weather was spectacularly beautiful, 70 degree highs with skies of the purest and deepest blue I have ever seen. The place is simply gorgeous. All the beauty of the United States is wilderness, but the beauty of Wales is the beauty of a well-tended garden as far as the eye can see. My family were particularly gracious and my goal of showing my darling wife the beauty and pleasure of where I'm from was achieved. It was a true vacation.

There was one thing that I discovered while I was there, that is that I no longer have a home, a place that seems particularly natural for me, a place to return to. England is lovely, I feel confident in finding my way around and dealing with people. It isn't an alien place, and I enjoy being there, but it no longer has that feeling to me of being right. But nowhere else do I have a greater feeling of being right. I think I may have reached the point that regular travelers reach, in which they are supremely competent and confident in how to deal with hotels, can feel comfortable in almost any place, but have no sense of home.

A part of this is the globalization of the world, I can have a pint of english bitter in Houston, I watch english football teams and read an english paper. Part of this is the amount of time I have spent living in different environments, and part of it is that home is now a person, where my wife is.

However, the loveliness of spending time at my parents' place in Wales,


has led me to contemplating what a home for me would look like. A smallholding in the Smokey Mountains, shabby but comfortable, a small menagerie for effect, and a folk music bar in the barn seems just about ideal at the moment. A few years to milk the wealth of Houston and then off to bucolic paradise, I hope.

The End of Interest?

As I sit here on my couch, wired up to the greatest source of information humanity has ever known, I find myself returning to the same places on the internet and being less interested in them. I feel as though I am approaching the end of the intellectual interest that my personality can sustain. This is troubling because I haven't been someone who just does the things they like and doesn't wonder, question, or think. On the other hand, I am not someone who becomes obsessed with an area of knowledge and delves deeper and deeper into that area. If I was such a person I would be a successful professional at something.

I am a generalist, someone who is interested in many things at a medium level. I am interested enough in physics to have a basic idea of how the Universe is structured, interested in chemistry to have a basic knowledge of the building blocks of the Universe. I'm interested in history to see if there are common themes, to see if people have changed over time, to have some working knowledge on what effects the modern world. I'm interested in literature in that I like to read good books, I'm interested in art in that I like to look at beautiful things and to find out what is beautiful.

I am not interested in determining whether the logistics of the supply train for Assyrians limited the expansion of their empire, or whether the best guess for M-Theory is 13 or 26 dimensions, or what is the precise nature of covalent bonding in organic chemicals.

The problem arises when a certain amount of knowledge is attained that serves a functional purposes and that further knowledge requires unnecessary effort for diminishing returns. I have a physical worldview, a position on religion, a belief about human nature, a strong opinion on what makes sense as a political structure, I know what I like in art and literature, I have a decent understanding of cultures around the world (probably better than anyone who lived before the 18th century). I'm probably less than halfway through my life and I've answered pretty much all the questions I've had up until now.

I have also found that I am pretty good at predicting what I find interesting or pleasant. That is that it seems quite unlikely that should I just really try to examine Shakespeare in great depth that I will like it more than when I read Shakespeare now. It is unlikely that I will find great satisfaction from examining the bonding structure of the Yanamamo in greater detail.

I find myself really in a position where I am interested in having skills, but not in the process to get there. I wish to be able to speak spanish, to have written a novel, to be an accomplished musician, to be a PhD. in Philosophy, but not very interested in what it takes to get there. I am faced with the edge of what is natural for me to learn, and what comes next requires effort.

I think what I need is stimulation, intelligent people who say something new and interesting. Or a place that I have not been and know little about. Or some new field of interest of which I was unaware. Time to travel, explore, learn.

Stupidity and Ignorance

This is just something that has bothered me personally, and I will hope to broaden the scope of it. There are grown, educated, professional people in the world who believe that scientists are close-minded people who dogmatically stick to current opinion and won't even consider viable alternatives. One viable alternative suggested to me recently was the paranormal, that the anecdotal evidence for the afterlife and other paranormal events is so high that scientists should be putting their time and efforts into extensive research in the area. The guy says that for him the evidence is convincing enough that it is his opinion that there is an afterlife. The evidence he gave was from here and I urge you to take just a little time to look around.

The author of the site in question is a retired worker's compensation lawyer from Australia. Those are his qualifications. Some of the stuff is mind-bogglingly stupid and yet a number of people who can read, write, hold down jobs, engage in theological and philosophical debate, feel that his position is stronger than scientists who dismiss his claims. Here's an example of why this is stupid and ignorant,

They argue that Einstein's formula E=mc² — energy equals mass to the speed of light, shows that mass 'm' is equivalent to energy 'E'.

This explains how materialization and dematerialization operate by matter being transformed into energy. When people try to argue that this equation is all theory but cannot be demonstrated they should be reminded that less than one ounce of matter was transformed into energy to destroy Hiroshima.

The vortex is the actual swirling of the atoms and molecules. Ash and Hewitt argue from Einstein's equation that since matter and light share a common movement, the actual speed of the swirling of the vortex, must be the speed of light. They claim that this is the only possible sense to be made of Einstein's equation and that it is because of the vortex swirling at the speed of light that you can read this page or see another person the trees and the sky and see everything else with physical eyes.

So, people, and dead people in particular, materialize and de-materalize by converting their matter into energy, moving that energy at beyond the speed of light, and then slowing down the movement and converting back to energy moving at the speed of light which converts into matter. This is said to be the only possible sense to be made of Einstein's equation. The thing is that Einstein's theories require all their assertions to be false. If all the mass in a person's body became energy it would destroy the earth. Energy cannot move faster than the speed of light. If matter was moving at the speed of light it would be hotter than the core of the sun. From my perspective, anyone with a basic high school physics class should know all that. That is that to believe this stuff you need to be ignorant about science at a really deep level.

The reason that scientists don't put much effort into finding out about paranormal activity is that if paranormal activity is true, basically all of physics (laws of conservation of mass and energy, momentum, laws of thermodynamics and so on) would all have to be false, and they have been tested to an incredible level. On the other hand people seeing things that aren't there, being mistaken about phenomena, being hoodwinked by charlatans, having odd sensations caused by events in the brain are all proven facts, replicated time and again. There are scientific explanations for these events that fit with tested science. While scientists are enormously motivated by finding out new things they are not motivated by proving stuff that seems nonsense according to accepted fact is nonsense.

So why do people believe this stuff? It's a combination of enormous ignorance, personal arrogance, and selfish desire.
Science is simply not taught in the USA to most people at any reasonable level at all. I have had a number of conversations with people who believe in evolution who don't know how it works. I've had conversations with adults who don't believe in evolution because no-one has ever seen a dog give birth to a cat. People don't know what dimensions are or how equations work. I would say that the overwhelming majority of Americans simply don't know even the basics of what science has worked out about their world.
Personal arrogance comes through in the belief that what an individual has felt or seen is more likely to be true than all the controlled experiments in the world. A particular experience that a person has, that they feel that they prayed for their friends and their friends got better, is more true than the repeated double-blind experiments that show that prayer doesn't heal to that person. People think that if they saw something their perception of that event is more correct than all the work of all the scientists throughout time. In the USA it is common to find people who think that scientists are a world-wide cabal bent on defeating God, and who lie, cheat and steal, and can't be trusted. These people tend to write this stuff on computers and go to their doctors.
Selfish desire is really the crux of the matter. People don't believe in non-scientific things that make their lives, hopes and dreams worse off. People don't believe that the afterlife is where they will go to live lives of drudgery under Hitler's lash. They don't believe that we are simply pawns of demons, or that the Universe is pointless, random and arbitrary. People believe that they will live eternally, that those who they loved and have died are still around, that they might have special magic powers of prophecy and insight.

Mostly I'm just sick of having conversations with people who have no idea of what is going on and describe my position (that what science has established to be true is our best guess as to what is actually true) as a close-minded, dogmatic religion.

Age.

Today I went to a dermatologist to see if my back was growing evil tumors. The results were that I have Seborrheic Keratoses and that I am going to die, but not from benign skin growths, and not for decades to come. However, these are the blotches of age. I am getting older.

I think people do not age in a steady progression. People age in sudden jumps. For example, in my late twenties I managed 90% of my total balding in the course of about two years. Since then, relatively little change.

I believe I have just lurched into middle age. Sometimes my knees hurt. I find myself hitching up my britches. I don't get freaked out by being called, "Sir" anymore. I have a dodgy back. I think I know the right way to do everything (previously the last moment that I knew everything was as a teenager.) My cholesterol is high and having shaved off my beard I am growing a new one because I look better furry. Not more attractive, just more right somehow.

The Government You Deserve?

Texas is interesting. It's rich, huge, expansive. But it's also tacky, cheap, tawdry. The roads are broad, the houses large, the portions vast. But the roads don't have sidewalks, shoulders or gutters and flood easily. The houses are built from chipboard and cardboard. The meals are large and varied but bland and derivative.

Texas is a society built on tiny units, separated and divided. The family home is a giant building distanced from the road by a large lawn, without a sidewalk for neighbors to pass by, with all the roads destinations rather than places to pass by. The back yard will be large, fenced, and equipped with pools, bars, patios, tables, chairs, hot tubs, cabanas, hammocks. The house will have fireplaces, dens, his and hers whatevers, fans, air conditioning, giant tv's, high ceilings, spiral staircases. The owners will leave this lavish shelter in huge shiny carriages, windows sealed and tinted agains intrusion, air cooled and conditioned, sounds perfectly controlled The journeys will be to designated places for designated purposes, there is not meandering, wandering, hanging out. It is pod living, almost like living in Star Trek. The house is the ship which supples almost everything but is surrounded by the harsh vacuum of space. An SUV exiting and entering the powered door of a garage looks like nothing more than the shuttle leaving the bay.


A culture that is based on the individual, living in pods, only leaving to accomplish specific goals produces individuals who are motivated by getting and kepping their own things. Such a culture is based on the individual filling their own needs, rather than a community filling the needs of the individuals in the community. As such there are no town squares, no promenades, no town centers, no village greens, many more golf courses than parks. While there are roads to get places these are designed simply as surfaces to drive along, no bike lanes, no sidewalks, no boulevardes. Such a culture tries to keep its money and therefore avoids taxes. Lower taxes mean fewer services, cheaper services, poorer services. Crappy services for your tax dollars produces a belief that government services are automatically poor, and in Texas that's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In Texas the streets flood regularly. The power goes out in a strong rainfall. The crime rate is very high and I rarely see a policeman and never outside of a car. Our mail delivery has been sporadic, to the point where we found out that upon going to the post office to tell them that we weren't getting all our mail they recorded us as having moved ot. It is only that their incompetence was so high that we still received any mail at all. To get your driving license you line up for several hours and then wait eight weeks to possibly get it mailed to you, there is no telephone number for enquiries. Education levels are low, health is poor/ The government services in Texas are terrible and Texans think that governments are literally incapable of doing anything well. The result is a feedback loop, self-interest above community interest leads to fewer resources for community resources, which leads to poorer services, which leads to a lower regard for community services, which leads to a greater regard for self-interest.

In places where people think, expect and demand that governments can achieve things, the resulting government services overwhelmingly are of high quality. In Texas, where people think and expect that governments are incompetent, crooked, evil entities the government they receive is woeful. As my darling wife says, Texas is like living in the richest third world country in the world.