(Abio)Genesis

“What right has such a sobersides to sit in the stalls and criticize the human comedy?”

— Doctor on the Ball

Grogg launched SimCreate and gingerly chose a new project canvas. It was Grogg's first time using such a low-level program with bare-bones physical laws-generation. 

"I can't see a damned thing." Grogg groaned loudly. Grogg stared at the blank project for a long time, "How can there not be preprogrammed ParticleCollide in this day and age? Do I have to create my own radiation?"

Grogg spent most of the day trying out brute force fusion scenarios before finally hitting something workable. Grogg set a visible frequency band and created ray-tracing algorithms. Pleased that at least now there was native lighting, Grogg cracked open long-untouched WorldCreation guides and started to read about simulating thermonuclear reactions. By the end of the day, Grogg had groups of luminous spheres of plasma. Pleased with the day's progress, Grogg logged off and headed home.

Overnight, some of Grogg's spheres exploded into beautiful interstellar clouds. 

The next day comprised arduous hours spent on basic chemistry and terraforming. Grogg hunted down documentation on setting refractive indices for different types of molecules, tectonics, rock formation and erosion...

As Grogg randomized movements of lithospheric plates and rings of volcanoes began erupting at delightful intervals, Grogg reflected on how much work indeed went into preprogramming canvases. Nowadays, presets such as LetThereBeLight and LetItBeGood were so cheaply and readily available that programmers had little appreciation for technological breakthroughs made in the days of yore. 

Grogg continued to toil, elbow deep in concepts such as macromolecular catalysts and carbon compounds, all the while murmuring: "Worthy are you, canvas preset mass producers, to receive profits and growth, for you create all things."

Black, White, and Gray

“Never ever, never ever saw me
Saw me like they did”

Vilhelm painted Ida no fewer than twenty times, but the viewer never knew her true likeness. Often just a silhouette of the canvas’ sole living form, she faced away from the world silent and immobile.  

Via hedgehogs, Arthur theorized the ideal relationship to be one in which both parties strive to create distance and opacity. Accordingly the union gains courtesy, mystery, ongoing passion, and a general disinclination to hurt one another.

Retired Kasumi’s comfortable existence with Shizuko is one such liaison. His gourmet adventures delight viewers with Art of Food and Joys of Living, yet never seeps into the other half of the house. Perhaps he is fated to wander familiar streets into everyday’s dying amber sunsets.  

Thousand Streams

The elven mountain city, when occasionally stumbled upon by lost travellers, takes a mere mortal's breath away. A thousand foot tall and a hundred thousand acres across, verdant and plumed in glistening silver leaves, the guardian tree overlooks an ageless shining city. Flowers bloom endlessly in salutation of Eternal Summer. 'Neath the thick canopy, bundles of sunlight stream through and illuminate sundry elven wings. From exquisite fountains flow forth sweet spring water. In bustling markets students of Life and Magic come and go, beatific and whimsical, befitting ancient lore.

2016 Favourites: Nonfiction

“What a piece of work is a man!”

— Hamlet

Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman

The human brain has changed little since the dawn of civilization: our decisions are fraught with confirmation bias and loss aversion, our intuitions are bad at statistics, we are more often than not overconfident, and we tend to overlook mean reversion. Instead of despairing over these takeaways about human inclinations, how can we better utilize them to build better institutions for societal improvements? An enlightening classic for the everyday Econ constantly puzzling over normal Human behaviour.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert

“Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it's not clear that he ever really did.” The history of man may be brief relative to this earth that bore us, but the vast impactwe wrought upon her is anomalous. This is a book of heartache, but also of cautious optimism. There is a curiosity and madness unique to our species which enables us to on one hand drive species to extinction, and on the other revive them through last ditched conservation efforts.

Ill Fares the Land, Tony Judt

"One of the challenges of shifting the direction of public policy debate in the US is to overcome the ingrained suspicion of anything that smacks of 'socialism'". Socialism sought to dismantle capitalism and replace it with a regime based on an entirely different system of production and ownership, whereas social democracy tends to compromise: the acceptance of capitalism and parliamentary democracy as the framework from within which to address issues such as poverty, inequality, and minority rights. 

Do we hasten to seek partisan self-identities and dismiss opposing views too readily? Why not seek to build a more comprehensive set of policy expectations and outlooks for society as a whole? We lack a collective confidence today which permeated post World War II Europe and America. The societal identity - "Who is 'we'? Whom exactly do we trust" - provides markets with trust and cooperation, greases the free-flow of information, enables the creation and maintenance of public goods. The vision is to ethically inform, to reopen the public dialogue of, take on the self-assigned obligation to "raise popular standards rather than condescend to them" and effect incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances rather than espouse radical system-wide changes.

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Richard Feynman

Feynman's wit and animated passion for physics shine through these short pages. If a physics lecture could be a thriller novel...

What is quantum electrodynamics? What do photons and electrons do, probably? And what is this matter of light and matter? We start with wonderful little arrows that can solve all our problems, dance through some quantum field theory, but are dropped off at the grand entrance to the complicated state of the rest of physics. "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

2016 Favourites: Sci-Fi

“Science is my spiritual dig, science fiction my figurative gospel.”

— NPC

Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie

What is the alternate formalism for the collective mind? Can the Borg be affected by multiple personality disorders? Do ships dream of electric sheep? Or maybe rather, one of the ship's many decks likes to sing.

Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, Cixin Liu

The Three Body Problem, the first of the trilogy, took the science fiction shores by storm. It posits our civilization in an ominous corner of the universe, fighting to unite its factious politics against alien contact. The first arc is so intensely organized around human struggle for survival, that it  became impressive when the continuation of the series gradually strips away at its anthropogenic tone. The concluding narrative, Death's End, spans across time and space and climaxes on a most resplendent cosmic scale.

The physical laws ruling the universe do not impose morality upon those that inhabit it. Fleeting life forms evolve and innovate, but also ravage and destroy. There is little guarantee that any form of life adopts noble prime universal directives as higher forms of consciousness develop. Intelligence is unmarkedly remarkable in the grand scheme, and sometimes the only reason to go on is being able to go on. 

The End of Eternity, Isaac Asimov

In this iteration of Reality, I jumped on the Asimov train rather late.

Vying for control over time is alway so recursively meta. Can there even technically be a final iteration? Underneath the spatial-temporal-altering dilemmas lie some sort of argument for letting nature take its course. How much of this extrapolate to institutions versus anarchy? Where does small government end and collective freedom begin? 

My favourite sentiment from this novel, however: "You smile at the ignorance of the Timer who know only one Reality. We smile at the ignorance of the Eternals who think there are many Realities but that only one exists at a time." In the grand scheme of the parallel multiverses, do our childish attempts at tampering physical laws even matter? 

Lake to Pedernal

The poem in colour.  
 
Flowing forth with life’s inner vigour, raw and unchanged, the painting, like all works of culture, suffers disparity between the objective and the subjective. What did the artist see when she stepped back to examine her creation? What thoughts besieged her as she consumed the still fresh colours and experimental textures? Did she believe that the true manifestation of creativity is only attainable through the sacrifice of form, or was she concerned with transforming crude inspiration into recognizable culture? 

Once over - palette and composition. Twice - the perpetual struggle between life and fundamental restlessness. Thrice - objectivity half-removed, raw emotions breaking through thin canvas like flashing beacons on the stormy sea. The observer smells dusty golden roads in black and white; in drops of bright red we see life, calming blue death, vibrant green ennui. False memories, these speckles are. How formulaic. Quelle drôle.  

The View from Saturday

“In the anesthesia produced by self-knowledge, life is passing, art is passing, slipping from us: we are drifting with time and our fight is with shadows.

...

What is war, disease, cruelty, terror, when night presents the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns? What is this chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not the remembrance of fang-whorl and star cluster.””

— Tropic of Cancer

Someone once told me that I wrote tolerably good sentences, and that maybe I should try to write a novel. Somewhere inside, one of my seventy-two nirvanic couciousnesses smirked. I shrugged. Through the secure and complacent void of the Internet, I wrote back that I didn’t believe fiction had enough social impact, and therefore penning said novel would not align with my counter-culture values.

Fast forward in time and here we are at a ten-minute countdown until the fine neighbourhood coffee shop closes. The Python script I’ve been working on is regrettably stuck on a silly loop, and I’ve invested too much in it to control + c. A frisson of excitement runs through me - maybe I could write something instead.

When I stepped up to the counter to order earlier, the barista had preemptively announced, “That’ll be $6.30.” We were both confused until we realized that the clock read 6:30PM. Sometimes we don’t catch what we say before it’s too late. She then laughed and gave me a free Americano. Nonetheless, even free drinks grow cold, and I have to lift my snapback to tuck away a wisp of hair. These age-appropriate smart bobs are high maintenance. 

Struggle meaningfully, so we tell ourselves. 

I don’t remember the last time I was afraid of death. I do occasionally wonder if we can find enough lithium to power fleets of electric cars, cybernetic augmentations, and in general, our way to Human Enlightenment. The Big Bang probably gave us enough for the next three centuries or so, but we won’t have another one of those anytime soon, hopefully. 

Eighty percent of existing species are beetles. I’d like to think that I’ve rescinded my anthropocentric and organic-life-centric views by now, but sometimes I still have frightening dreams of giant beetles with shiny pronotal horns advancing upon humanity. Herculean beetles, stuff of nightmares. Alas, the Freudian slip.

I’m at a stage in life where despite trying desperately to read books from unrelated genres, the concepts they touch somehow still manage to converge theatrically, yielding aha moments left and right, morning and night, paper and e-ink, visual and auditory. This is an intrusion upon my nihilistic and existential thought framework. This is as if the universe is some try-hard at attempting to be meaningful. I can almost envision myself founding some New Age rational optimism movement.  

In m x n parallel multiverses, this would have already happened. In others, the blade runners of tomorrow are the social democrats of yesterday. 

“And thy spirit’s fiery flight of imagination  acquiesces in an image, in a parable.”