I was in Yulee, Florida on my way back from Virginia in August 2023 and decided to take a detour over to Fort Clinch for a couple hours. It had uneven floors. I imagined myself back in time, inspecting to make sure no one attempted to sabotage the timeline. It gave me some good ideas for an episode of Champion Of The Cosmos, but that will have to wait for later.

Willow Pond Nature Trail:

After visiting Fort Clinch in northeastern Florida in August of 2023, I took some of the trails in the area. The Willow Pond Nature Trail is home to beauty berry, large spiders, green dragonflies, and blue dragonflies. I also saw a babygator.

Very many of the trees also had strange growths. Here are a few:

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If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

In July of 2023, I camped in Wateree Lake State Park in South Carolina. I got there in time to take the nature trail and do some writing before bedtime.

At first, there was nothing notable about the trail to distinguish it from other places I had visited. There were trees, squirrels, and mosquitoes – nothing unusual there. After finishing my walk, I decided there was something, but not the type of thing I could take a picture of.

In one spot, I kept hearing whirring noises around me, but never saw anything. They must have been very fast birds.

In another spot, there was a hollow knocking. Was it from inside the trees?

For a while, mosquitoes surrounded me and I could hear nothing else, but then I passed under one tree and suddenly heard multiple mosquito-like noises in each ear of unusually high pitch and volume. I ducked and ran a few steps and it went away. What was it?

This is a sound forest.

Because there was so much noise, I did not hear the deer (and they did not hear me) until we were almost on top of each other. I saw deer four times. The second time, there were eight or more. They leaped through the reeds to get away from me. Why? Do I smell that bad?

I saw this holy tree:

I saw strange mounds of extra hard dirt. There were many.

A piece of bark was yellow on the inside. It’s much brighter in person than the camera makes it look.

I also put on my weird Dan glasses and saw these spooky, paranormally floating branches:

I saw this tree transforming into a border being. Don’t worry; now that I’ve collapsed its wave function by observing it, it won’t grow any bigger. That’s why I take these trips. I’m just doing my part to keep the woods safe.

I met this friendly alien observer doing the same thing I was:

OH NO!!!! THE PICNIC TABLES ARE INVADING LAND!

More sounds:

That evening, there were more sounds. Right near the campsite was a tree full of vultures who would fight each other for good perches.

There were cicadas, but just as twilight began and the fireflies started up, a new type of cicada dominated the forest orchestra. It sounded like a thousand large trucks backing up with their alarms on. Sometimes they would synchronize and sometimes not.

Just as it got truly dark and the fireflies and cicadas wound down, something else took over. They might have been birds or frogs. I never saw them, but my ears traced them to the trees. Each had one spot and never moved. They were loud.

This is a sound forest.

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If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

This is a smallish, open park of mostly grass with only a few trees and a few ponds. There is also a boardwalk by the river, but it was closed when I went. Something gigantic has carved great paths through the grass, but there was no sign of it when I was there.

It was windy and not too hot, so I wandered around looking for interesting things. There wasn’t much. I did see a butterfly, many grasshoppers, and many dragonflies, including one so red that it burned a hole through my eyes and out the back of my head. I also saw this flower:

There were also great piles of grey grass here and there and smaller bits in other places. Where did it come from? Was it an invading army of mutant plants determined to take over the world? I’m going to say yes.

On the way back to the car I saw a tunnel. I later saw a tortoise. That was when it finally all made sense. Tortoises begin their lives as small, burrowing creatures that then grow large on the plentiful grass, grazing wider and wider paths as they grow. Their size is limited by their lifespans, and their lifespans are limited by the amount of grey grass they eat, which is toxic. Eventually, the tortoises die and liquify until becoming the slimy ponds I saw. The fertilized eggs hatch inside the rotting carcasses of their parents and eventually rise from the ponds to begin the cycle again. Young, small tortoises are able to avoid the grey grass and eat only the green, but once they reach a certain size, their mouths are too big to pick around it.

What do you think of my theory?

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If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

PBJ Cake

This is a very simple dessert to make. First, make two pieces of wheat toast. Cover one with a sturdy helping of peanut butter and the other with a sturdy helping of strawberry jelly. Put them together on a plate to create a sandwich. Then completely cover the entire thing with whipped cream (the good kind). Eat with a fork and knife.
 
Crunchy Xmas Salsa

This salsa is red, green, and white, the colors of Christmas, but you can eat it anytime of year. I’ll let you. However, you will first need to gather a sweet onion, two green bell peppers, two red bell peppers, and 2-5 vine-ripened tomatoes. After cutting into pieces smaller than a fingernail, mix them in a large bowl and add just a bit of salt and vinegar to start bringing out the juices.

Next, cut very small (blend if you have to) two habanero peppers and several cloves of garlic. Gloves are recommended unless you don’t have any nerve endings in your hands. The soft, pale part of the pepper where the seeds attach is full of fire. Add a teaspoon of fresh ground cumin seeds. Then add this mixture to the bowl and stir until evenly spread.

The salsa should be left in the refrigerator for at least 12 hours before taste-testing to allow the juices to mix. Every twelve hours after that, it needs to be mixed and taste-tested again. I find that sometimes it needs a little more salt or vinegar or that the habaneros I bought were from a mild batch. This can be remedied by adding more.

Note: Taste-testing means taking small amounts for tasting; it does not mean to eat up half your salsa before your guests arrive. I had to learn that the hard way.

The salsa is best 2-3 days old. It can be eaten with corn chips, added to burgers, or eaten plain with a big spoon. It should be crunchy and juicy. The juice at the bottom can be sipped afterwards.
 
PB Ramen

Note: I’ve only ever made this with all-natural Teddy-brand peanut butter, so I can’t guarantee results with non-stir brands.

Start boiling Ramen noodles in a pan on the stove. Find a gravy shaker and shake some gravy in it. A screw lid jar will work just as well. Ingredients include a third-cup milk, a teaspoon of flour, two heaping teaspoons of peanut butter, and a heavy splash of soy sauce. If desired, cinnamon, ginger, and red pepper flakes can be added in any combination. If not desired, then I’ll put them in and you can go home.

Basically, after your noodles are soft and before you have run out of water, pour the gravy over. If you have done it right, clumping should not be a problem, but if clumps do begin to form, they can be somewhat reduced by rapidly stirring. Boil off the excess water and serve. It goes great with chicken and nuts.
 
BBQ Ramen

While I have never liked barbecue sauce on any other kind of noodle, it goes very well with Ramen. In a pan on the stove, I boil my noodles with a chicken flavor packet. Just before they run out of water, I turn off the heat and mix in barbecue sauce and cheddar chunks. Depending on my mood, I may also add black pepper or garlic powder.
 
Buffalo Nut Chicken

First, thaw some fully-cooked chicken tenders (the kind with the crispy breading). Next, add them to a large frying pan and cut into bite-sized pieces. Heat with butter until some brown begins to appear. Next, add a handful of mixed nuts and stir for a minute on high. Then immediately transfer food to plate and drizzle Buffalo sauce over it. Enjoy or die trying.
 
Buffalo Coleslaw Crackers

Sometimes one just wants some nachos, but they don’t have any tortilla chips, salsa, or grated cheese. That’s okay!

On a large plate, spread saltine crackers and cover with coleslaw (cabbage, carrots, vinegar, mayo). Place cheddar slices on top. Microwave until cheese melts. Then drizzle Buffalo sauce over the top. You now have nachos (if you squint).
 
Hot Pickle Chicken Sub

What goes better with chicken than hot pickles? I can’t think of anything. To make this sub, fry shredded chicken and mix with as much black pepper as you can stand. After it is fully cooked, chop up dill pickle spears, mix them in, and immediately melt provolone cheese slices over it. Using your spatulas, shovel the whole thing into a submarine roll and eat. It is best served with French fries and ice-cold Mountain Dew. Salt can be added to taste (please don’t put it in the soda).

I visited Paynes Creek Historic Park in Bowling Green, Florida to see what was there. Little did I know that it would be the last park I would visit for over 100 years.

First, I walked along Paynes Creek all the way to Peace River. There wasn’t much to see but a few birds and some fungi. However, I did come across this ancient, crumbling, time portal generator. It was inoperative. I wondered who had put it there.

Then, I turned around and walked the historic trail to the bridge. I saw a rabbit and an ibis. From the top of the bridge, I could see numerous fish over one side and some long weeds over the other. I then walked through the treetops until I reached the other side of the creek.

A bit further down, at the edge of a cattle pasture, was the monument. It was dedicated to George Payne, who was killed by the Seminole in 1849.

I took a picture, but somehow this action triggered some sort of mechanism within to generate a temporal well. I was pulled into the past – to the very evening mentioned – along with everyone else in history up to that point who had taken a photo. Suddenly, we were attacked. It was a massacre!

I was the only one to escape the Seminole, which I did by donning my invisibility mesh I had brought with me. It was several months before I had acclimated myself to old Florida. It was then that I returned to the area with supplies enough to build a time portal generator. I was never able to get it to work. The materials needed simply didn’t exist in 1849.

I finally accepted that I was only to return to the future the long way round. I lived out my days mostly in Florida, but also travelled to New York and California. I even visited Europe and mentored young Max Plank and young Albert Einstein. I marched with MLK. I made a fortune on Microsoft stock.

Eventually, I noticed that no one had yet built the monument that had so drastically changed my life. Not wanting to create a paradox that could unravel all of history, I decided that I had better build it. Then I waited.

On the day I drove to the park, I followed far behind my younger self on my motorcycle. I parked outside the park so I would not be recognized and cut through the woods to lie in wait near the monument. I waited. At last, I saw myself arrive. He walked around the monument, took a picture, and disappeared!

Picking up where he left off, I decided to continue exploring the park. Why not? I might have been responsible for the portal and the monument, but there was supposed to be a fort here. It was the reason for the park. I hadn’t built a fort. Who had? And where was it?

I continued to explore. I saw flowers. I saw plants. I saw a tree that turned red when injured. I saw lubber grasshopper babies.

I don’t know what this is. Some sort of nest? I knocked, but no one answered.

I pushed deeper and deeper into the woods and away from civilization. Few ever went this far. That was when I saw the blue.

Someone or something was reforming the biosphere to suit them. Was it aliens? Was this the reason for the fort? An excuse for having the park? Did they build the park to keep away the prying eyes of developers while they remade the forest to resemble those of their home planet?

In addition to its mutagenic properties, this bluish substance was highly caustic. It even melted right through this log!

I continued to walk in circles, looking for the culprits. At last, I found them! The stenchcrust blubberbogs of Morbidum-5!

I chased them, but they got away. One gurgled something about returning to the fort. I had to find that fort! After searching the entire park, I came to an empty clearing. There was nothing but sand. Nearby was a plaque explaining that archeologists in 1982 had discovered remains of a wooden structure, but that it was gone now.

Yeah right! There was never any fort here! Obviously, it was just a cover story for the aliens’ spacecraft, which was by then light years away, their plans at world building failed.

I visited the history center for more information. Who were these Seminole? I learned that they were wild people that appropriated the cultural dress styles of Scotsmen who were eventually “cancelled” in the third Seminole war. History repeats.

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If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

I read The Celts (2015) by Alice Roberts in 2024. I had always known the Celts as the original people of the British islands before the arrival of the Romans and the Saxons. Then I read The Farfarers by Farley Mowat, who claimed that they came from Germany and pushed out the real original people there, the Albans. Mowat speaks with authority as if all this is largely settled, showing uncertainty only for his idea that it was the Albans who reached Canada before any other European. In contrast, Roberts speaks with great uncertainty, casting doubt on many theories of ancient Europe, and makes the situation much more complicated.

The theme running through the book is that we can’t study what we can’t agree on the definition of, and the Celts are very poorly defined. Are they defined by genetics? Are they defined by art? Are they defined by language? Are they defined by religion? It now looks highly probable that each of these things began in different parts of Europe and were adopted by other tribes as they exchanged ideas and artifacts.

A big part of the problem is that the Celts never wrote anything down, so much of our knowledge of them comes from Greek and Roman historians. The Greeks referred to people living in and around the Alps as Keltoi, or sometimes Galos, the Celt word for warrior. They had friendly relations with Alexander The Great, king of Macedonia, but when he died and his relatives carved up the empire, the Celts joined with Thrace to attack. Later, a small number of Celts migrated to the Gordion region, where they soon became known as Galatians. The Greeks often referred to them all as Galatians after that. The Romans called the same people Galli, or Celtae. They recognized them as one of the main tribes living in Gaul (France), distinguishing them from the Cynesians, Teutones, and many others who might have been Celtic also. Early Romans did not include the people of Brettanike and Ierne (Britain and Ireland) in their description of Celts, but later linguists noticed the similarities in language.

Since the Celts never described themselves, it is possible that our sources are filled with anti-barbarian propaganda. Archaeologists have searched for confirmations in their physical traces, but what some claim as evidence is highly dubious. According to the literate Mediterranean people, Celts are hard drinkers, crave meat, battle naked (men), wear blue dye (women), conduct human sacrifice, and collect the heads of enemies to hang from their horses (adopted from the east) and houses. How much is true?

If we define those living in the Alps first described as Keltoi to be the true Celts, there is evidence that their culture changed several times. They used to cremate their dead, but later buried them, along with treasures in much the same way that the Egyptians did. Is it possible that they believed one could carry belongings into the afterlife? Many of the brooches and other items were deliberately damaged so as to be unusable. Was this to deter thieves? Or an act of revenge against the dead? What today is called Celtic art actually developed post-Christianization, but it is based on earlier art that also used flowing lines. This kind of art apparently originated near the Alps, as did the making of torcs. The practice of dumping cauldrons and swords in bodies of water also probably originated there and later spread to Britain.

If we define Celts as those holding to the Druidic tradition, this probably started in the islands and then spread across mainland Europe. Druids took apprentices, teaching them all about astronomy, geography, and nature. They settled disputes between neighbors and even between tribes. They believed in reincarnation, sky gods, water and soil goddesses, and mistletoe as the cure to everything. Those stories that survive heavily feature cauldrons, shapeshifting, hybrid animals, and reverence for dogs. There is also a story of a warrior who experienced “war spasms” much like the stories of Viking berserkers.

If we define Celts by their language, the latest theory is that the first Celts were from Portugal and adopted Phoenician consonants as the basis for their alphabet, adding in vowels that they made up. If true, this is the only written Celtic language before the Roman invasion. Place names in Portugal bear some similarities, such as prefixes and suffixes such as “briga” (hill fort) and “eburo” (yew).

So, where did the Celts come from? It is entirely possible that the Celts we know today are the original people of Britain and Ireland (the Albans?), who adopted language from Portugal, art from central Europe, and started and introduced the Druids to the world, before being invaded and influenced by Romans, Picts, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, and Normans before taking over the world.

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If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

I read the book Metabolical (2021), by Doctor Robert Lustig, in August of 2024. It was long and dense with facts and analysis. Some parts were not entirely clear. I never saw any citations. Overall, it was still a decent book.

He starts off by claiming that health in the West, and especially in the UK and the US, is diminishing. This requires some parsing of the statistics. It is not enough to say that the number of heart attacks has increased per capita, since modern technology allows people for the first time in history to survive their first few heart attacks. Instead, he claims that there are indeed more first heart attacks. It’s not enough to say that cancer diagnosis per capita is rising, since we are diagnosing cancer earlier and earlier, meaning people have more years to live post-diagnosis, and because people are living longer in general, even long enough to get cancer, which is very much an age-related disorder. Instead, he claims that cancer rates are rising even among children, and after taking into account early diagnosis. Also, while it is true that people are living longer than they were a century ago, those extra years are less healthy ones by other metrics. I’m not sure what to think.

He then goes on to claim that the entire medical establishment is focused on treatment rather than cure or prevention. This has been my impression as well. My hunch is that it has a lot to do with the causes of many diseases being too unsettled, controversial, and mysterious to properly advise on how to prevent them. He admits this is part of the problem, though he still thinks that most chronic diseases are at least partly caused by metabolic dysfunction brought on by sugar and that at least on this point doctors should be more focused on diet than on prescribing yet more pills.

From there, he gets into the three main points of the book: Avoid fructose. Eat fiber. Avoid processed food. So long as those three stipulations are met, we are free to choose our personal diets as we like. He supports both veganism and keto.

Allegedly, fructose is literally poison in too many ways to keep track of, not all of them clear to me. From what I was able to pick up on, it seems to contribute to perforation of the intestine (“leaky gut” syndrome), suppress the enzymes that bring glucose into the mitochondria and burn it, are not useful for conversion into amino acids (unlike glucose), increase free radical production at rates much higher than glucose, and increase glycation at rates much higher than glucose. The only thing it is good for is that it can be burned for the same number of calories as other sugars (4kcal/gram). The worst part is that while every cell in the body takes in glucose, only liver cells and muscle cells can take in fructose. However, if they do not burn it all up immediately, it gets converted into fat within the cells. This ectopic fat (fat outside of the designated adipose tissue) leads to insulin resistance, in turn leading to many other problems, though exactly how was not clear to me. High levels of glucose, while still problematic, do not lead to this same problem, since the liver will turn it into starch instead of fat, something I thought only plant cells did.

I still do not have an overall picture of the insulin system, and this book barely helped. Over the past five years, I have collected many individual pieces of the puzzle, but there are many pieces missing, and some of them are contradictory. I was hoping this book would explain. It did not, but it did teach me many new facts: Three hormones are involved in the feeling of hunger. Ghrelin is secreted by the stomach and tells the brain when it is empty. Leptin is secreted by the adipose tissue and tells the brain when it is full. Insulin is secreted by the pancreas and does very many things. It tells every cell in the body to open up to incoming blood glucose. It tells the adipocytes to stop releasing fat. It inhibits the leptin signal to the brain. It also promotes blood vessel wall muscle growth (raising blood pressure), and reduces the ability of the kidneys to remove salt (also raising blood pressure). While a necessary molecule, too much insulin over too long a time is not good.

Something Doctor Lustig repeats over and over is: Protect the liver. The liver can be damaged by many things. Iron is one of them, yet we need some iron for other body processes. An excess of branched amino acids is another. For those actively building lots of muscles, these amino acids are necessary, but any excess goes to the liver and destroys it. Omega-6 fatty acids are another. These are compounds used in the cell membranes of some plants, but risky for animals like us to incorporate in large numbers. We need omega-3 fatty acids. Excess glucose is another. The worst thing for our livers by far (except for alcohol) is fructose.

Another thing he repeats over and over is: Feed the gut. This brings me to his fiber theory. Fiber provides no calories to us, but it is important for digestion. There are two kinds of fiber. Insoluble fiber creates a lattice in the gut while the globular, soluble fiber plugs the holes in the lattice, trapping other compounds such as sugar or starch away from digestive enzymes. This means that anything thoroughly mixed with fiber is digested slowly, absorbed slowly, travels further down the intestine before being absorbed, and therefore gives the gut microflora the first crack at it. By keeping our bacteria well-fed, we ensure they do not try to eat our intestines, contributing to “leaky gut,” which causes myriad troubles all over the body, including an autoimmune disease where the body attacks its own digestive tract, potentially leading to even more troubles. Well-fed helpful bacteria are also better able to limit the growth of any foreign bacteria we eat, keeping us from getting sick.

After fructose, his archnemesis is processed food, but he doesn’t even make an attempt to define it until two-thirds of the way through the book. Here are some of the things he says about processed food:

“If you take processed food out, you’ve lowered salt and sugar, and you wouldn’t need the medicine.” – page 42

“In particular, we’ve learned that sugar, the main component of processed food…” – page 151

“Processed meats are laden with nitrates…” – page 154

“Processed food is dangerous because of the lack of fiber…” – page 154

“…processed food won’t ferment.” – page 256

My problem here is that “processed” is too vague a term. Cutting, cooking, and freezing are all processes. Sometimes I lack the time, patience, or equipment to do these. What difference does it make if I do this myself or let the producer do it for me ahead of time so I can just pop it in the microwave? Do I really have to pluck my own chickens and pick my own fruit? Finally, on page 242, we get seven criteria for what makes a food processed:

Processed food is mass-produced, consistent batch to batch, consistent country to country, uses specialized ingredients from specialized companies, and consists of pre-frozen macronutrients. All of these sound like this is exactly what we want, and I am surprised that freezing is not considered a process. Processed food also must stay emulsified so that the fat and water do not layer out and it must have a long shelf life or freezer life. I understand that if there are specific emulsifiers or preservatives that science has shown to be harmful, then we can talk about those, but to be against all processed food simply by virtue of being “processed” doesn’t make sense.

Speaking of specific compounds, chapter 20 covers some of those. Diacetyl is a flavor enhancer that causes damage to both lungs and liver. Potassium bromate strengthens dough, but also causes cancer. Lecithin, polysorbate, carboxymethylcellulose, and carrageenan are emulsifiers that keep fat and water bound together, but for this very reason they are also able to damage the mucus layer protecting the intestine from digesting itself and allowing the bacteria or large molecules into the blood. Watch out for all these things in the ingredients list, possibly under other names. The most dangerous compounds are nitrates, nitrites, and trans fats, but each of these have been banned.

I notice he never mentions artificial sweeteners, extracts, MSG, or dyes. Instead, he mentions things that have either been banned or that I never see listed. This book is not the one to read if you are looking out for specific ingredients to avoid.

Other compounds will not be in the ingredients list because they are given to the living organisms before they are food. Among these are pesticides, herbicides, hormones, and antibiotics. Hormones given to promote growth of livestock have been implicated in epidemics of breast growth in children – more than once. Antibiotics given to livestock to prevent disease have been suspected of killing the beneficial gut microflora of those who eat them. Thus, it is not only processed food that is suspect, but whole food as well.

Of course, watching what we eat does us no good if there is food fraud. Sometimes companies lie about what they’ve put in it. To minimize the risk of fraud, avoid foods with large numbers of ingredients and large numbers of contributors and middlemen to its production. While it is possible that your bottle of olive oil might be diluted with some other oil, it is even more likely that the traces of olive oil in your herb-infused crackers came from another company the cracker company chose based solely on price, not on verifiable quality. In other words, the more processing, the greater the risk of fraud. Also, the more processing, the harder time laboratories have to detect fraud. Doctor Lustig cites no evidence to show that fraud occurs or that it occurs often, but it still seems like good common-sense advice.

I don’t know what to think of all this, but where he really starts to go off the rails is his take on food groups and labeling. He acts as if he doesn’t understand the difference between a food group and a nutrient class, saying inane things such as fruit juice not being a fruit (because the sugar is freed from its fiber matrix, making it as bad as soda). I always knew that fruit juice was full of sugar, which some people thought was unhealthy, but it was still considered fruit. Not all fruits are equal. He gets all uptight because some language in an official document was changed from “eat less than” to “don’t eat more than.” Isn’t that the same thing? He insists that sugar in nutrition labels should be measured in teaspoons and not grams to be less confusing to the average person, but knowing the visual size of a teaspoon means nothing if you don’t know how much you should be eating in the first place, which one can learn in either format, so what difference does it make? He insists that listing added sugar is important, before finally admitting on page 328 that it is the total amount of sugar that is important. He calls out vague and misleading phrases in advertising such as “helps build strong bodies,” “natural,” “GMO-free water,” and “evaporated cane juice,” but given how confused the average person is about everything and how diverse the language is between different groups of people, I can’t say with certainty that companies are doing wrong to use such phrases. Some people do indeed need to be assured that their water contains no GMOs and call evaporated cane juice what most of us would call molasses.

He even goes so far as to declare sugar a non-food. According to him, salt and fat are foods, but caffeine, alcohol, and sugar are addictive drugs. I do see his point. Ethanol is commonly understood to be a (mild) poison, yet we can metabolize it for calories (7kcal/gram). Fructose is commonly understood to be a source of food calories (4kcal/gram), yet we are gradually learning it acts in many ways like a mild poison. Both ethanol and fructose have been consumed since antiquity and have important places in cultural rituals, such as Passover (wine) and birthday parties (cake). They are more alike than different. However, does this really mean that fructose is a drug? Or does it mean that ethanol is food?

The book is more than nutrition advice. It also dives into the money and politics behind American food policy. Allegedly, Kellogg invented cereal because he was a Seventh-Day Adventist who believed that consuming meat aroused sinful passions, especially lust, and also dulled the mind to the point that one could not understand and accept the saving Gospel. Allegedly, the link between sugar and cavities was certain before dentists realized they were losing business and so created the bacterial theory. Later, fluoridated toothpaste and drinking water offered some limited protection from cavities, yet dentists went along with it anyway. Contrary to popular belief, the pharmaceutical industry might actually be anti-vaccine, since seventy-seven of the eighty-nine proposals for a COVID-19 vaccine came from universities, not corporations. I don’t know what to think, and I don’t really care about the complex mix of motives institutions might have for their positions; it’s too easy to dismiss truth because our teachers might have ulterior motives for spreading it. I care about what the science says.

So, if doctors are focused on treatment and our food supply is tainted, what can we do about sickness prevention? Chapter 9 tells you what to look for in your blood tests to diagnose yourself and how to change your diet. It’s far too complex to repeat here, so you’ll have to buy the book yourself. In fact, it is so complex, I still can’t keep it straight myself.

The final chapters contain his manifesto for public policy change. He suggests taxing soda and using the money to subsidize water. He suggests having food companies pay for our health care, incentivizing them to deliver healthy food. Alternatively, he suggests that insurance companies buy our groceries, only covering what they approve of. This will cost more on groceries in the short run, but less on health care in the long run, no matter who is paying. Finally, he calls for educating the public that there is no biological requirement for sugar, for requiring that nutrition labels include how much sugar has been added separate from total sugar, for a ban on advertising sugary foods on television and at sports events, for a ban on loss leading of processed food, for a tax on sugar, and for an end to food subsidies that distort the market and keep sugar cheap.

Finally, I got to what really interests me and why I bought the book: the biochemistry!

Calories are not calories: That is, what you eat is not what your body gets out of it. Without sufficient levels of vitamins and minerals, even sugar will pass right through you without being absorbed. With enough fiber, as much as thirty percent of calories will be eaten by gut bacteria before we have a chance to get to it. It takes calories to digest food, and the amount depends on what the food is made of. At the cellular level, it takes calories to prepare molecules for burning. Fat loses 2-3% to this process. Carbohydrates lose 6-8%. Proteins lose 25%. Triglycerides containing omega-3 fatty acids effectively have zero calories because they are never burned, but stored away to build cell membranes from. Trans fats also have zero calories because our bodies don’t know what to do with them at all, so they just sit around and clog arteries.

Protein is not protein: Not all proteins have the same proportions of amino acids. Of the 20 amino acids the body uses, 11 of them it can make itself from other compounds. The other 9 come directly from food. Of these, tryptophan is the hardest to come by. Furthermore, the amino acids that make up muscle protein (what most of us eat) are toxic to the liver, even though we need them to build our own muscles.

Carbohydrates are not carbohydrates: Glucose and fructose have immensely different effects on the body. Sucrose breaks down into equal amounts of glucose and fructose, while lactose breaks down into equal parts glucose and galactose. Starch breaks down into glucose alone, and thus pasta is safer than sweets.

Starch isn’t starch: Linear starch (found in legumes) has two ends for enzymes to snip glucose units from. Branched starch (found in wheat, rice, and potatoes) has many ends, meaning it breaks down faster and causes blood sugar spikes.

Fiber isn’t fiber: Grains that have been ground no longer have insoluble fiber of the correct size to be useful, even if it is chemically identical. Processed foods that have had fiber added cannot possibly have it fully mixed at a microscopic enough level to be useful. Natural fruit keeps its sugars safely locked inside a fiber matrix. Fruit juice and flour does not. Thus, whole grain bread is no better than white bread.

Triglycerides aren’t triglycerides. Saturated fats from animals are better than unsaturated oils from seeds, but oils from fruit (such as avocadoes and olives) are okay. Unsaturated fats can be transformed into trans fats with enough heat, but saturated fats never can be, because having hydrogen bonded to every site where hydrogen could bond means no weak spots.

Saturated fats aren’t saturated fats. Even-chain fatty acids (from meat) are processed everywhere in the body, but odd-chain fatty acids (from milk) are processed in the liver. There is some evidence that milk protects the liver, although there is otherwise no need for adults to be drinking milk.

Cholesterol isn’t cholesterol. Not only is there a difference between HDL and LDL, but there is a difference between LDL and LDL. LDL-C is correlated with heart disease only at very high levels, and negatively correlated with heart disease at moderate levels. Yet, all LDLs are measured together and a statin is prescribed to lower them when too high, but statins don’t even work on LDL-C anyway.

Glucose spikes are not insulin spikes. This is largely because fructose also raises insulin, but also because of lag and pancreatic abnormalities.

Body fat isn’t body fat. A while ago, the medical community figured out that height mattered and used BMI instead of weight. Doctor Lustig prefers to use waistline as a rough metric because it is the ectopic fat and visceral fat, rather than the subcutaneous fat, that matters.

More things to worry about:

Beyond its main points, the book is packed with many anxiety-inducing factoids. Olive oil can be turned into trans fat by cooking with it at too high a temperature. Antibiotics can survive in meat and kill your beneficial bacteria in your gut, allowing “bad” bacteria to take over. Low stomach acid reduces the ability to absorb vitamin B12. Lack of sleep increases ghrelin, leading to hunger. Stress increases cortisol, leading to insulin resistance. Caffeine makes fructose worse. Wheat contains 700 antigens that some people have sensitivities too; it’s not just about gluten. Bottle-fed babies don’t work their mouths as hard, leading to different oral architecture later in life, possibly leading to sleep apnea and mouth-breathing. Breeding tomatoes for sweetness has reduced lycopene levels. Breeding grapes for sweetness has reduced vitamin C levels. Mother’s blood sugar levels determine the number of fat cells baby will be born with and retain throughout life. Monoculture agriculture depletes the soil and requires more fertilizer.

Then there are the random comments that make me question his judgment. There is neither the quantity nor quality of them that warrants tossing the whole book out, but I point them out as a lesson to authors not to make the same mistakes.

On page 232, he states, “Galactose is an essential component of certain fats in the brain called cerebrosides and ceramides.” I thought fats were three hydrocarbon chains linked by a glycerol bridge, whereas monosaccharides were circular molecules with a carbon-hydrogen-oxygen ratio of 1:2:1. It doesn’t make sense for galactose to be a “component” of fat. Did he mean it was a precursor molecule? It is things like this that make it hard for me to see the big picture of how it all fits together.

On page 245, he states, “Trans-fats are calories, but not food.” This contradicts what he says elsewhere about trans fats not being used by the body and therefore not having calories. Did he mean that they have calories when oxidized in the laboratory? That’s confusing.

On page 360, he calls sugar, coffee, corn, cocoa, and even crude oil hedonic commodities. What does he mean by that? Is oil hedonic? Is it hedonic to be able to get to work on time and not freeze to death in winter? On page 379, he claims that it is the hedonic actor that drives the epidemics of processed food, opiates, and guns. Gun epidemic? What is he even talking about? Is there an epidemic of guns? What does that mean? Are guns hedonic? Is it hedonic to want to protect ourselves from murderers, rapists, and fascists?

On pages 18-19, he said, “Obamacare…hasn’t solved any of these issues, because it isn’t addressing the root cause of the problem. Then there was Trump’s response, which hoped to solve the problem by letting sick people die.” Here he assumes motives when all Trump did was convince congress to end the mandate portion of Obamacare, reversing many problems while making none of them worse. Could he have done more to help people? Maybe, but he was dealing with many issues and can’t do much on his own without congressional approval. I find it bizarre that in the midst of a paragraph criticizing both Obamacare and Medicare-for-all, including criticism of the cost, that one would not claim Trump an ally. It is little throwaway comments like these that make me think Lustig is completely out of touch with reality. On medicine, I have no expertise and have to trust his, but when it comes to politics, we are on my turf.

Will this book change habits? Probably not. As he acknowledges himself, people are often too busy and too tired to prepare a proper meal and will just reach for something quick. With rising rent prices, many people are living in vans and eating from cans. Visiting multiple grocery stores a week is too inconvenient. It is often difficult to know what ingredients are in the food. Not all foods are available to us and not all available foods are affordable. Furthermore, the science isn’t settled yet. Lustig himself admits on pages 58-60 that studies are difficult, expensive, and fraught with many forms of bias, since many of them rely on patient recall of what they have been eating. Can we trust anything in this book at all?

There are also too many tradeoffs. Limiting this argument to just what I saw in the book, I have determined that we are screwed either way. This is a fallen world and not our final home. Some processing is good. Lustig admits that milk is the one thing that should be processed (pasteurization). Preservatives are bad, but so is spoilage. Smoking meat is the traditional preservative, but also carcinogenic. BPAs in cans protect the food from metal contamination, but can also be poisons themselves. Farming without preservatives or pesticides means more food waste and higher food prices. Pureed baby food means less chance of choking, but also means weaker jaws and trouble chewing later in life. Cooking food leads to glycation products, but raw food allows the ingestion of living pathogens and parasites. Which is worse? Lustig offers the compromise of fermented foods, but I simply can’t take seriously anyone that thinks sauerkraut is food. It’s literally garbage. I would rather be sick.

Overall, this was a stressful book to read. Everything I love the most is poisoning me. Telling me I have to work harder at preparing my own food and suggesting I might eat sauerkraut wears me out. I need some sugar. I wasn’t planning on it, but after plowing through this exhausting book, I need to relax with a Dunkin Donuts Signature Latte and some pastries. I’ll see you later.

Please leave a comment!

If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

I recently read The History, Present, and Future of Happiness, downloaded for free from IncreasingHappiness.org. It’s a quick, easy read. The book is divided into three parts. The first part tells the story of evolution and how the phenomenon of what we call happiness first came to be. The second part adds up the numbers of how happy the world is currently. The third points to the possibilities of the future and how we might greatly increase happiness. The book also gives some debating advice, including stating the goals of the debate up front and contesting only one point at a time.

At its core, the main thesis seems to be one of repackaged utilitarianism. Happiness is seen as the ultimate goal governing our actions because whatever other goals we might have, they can be thought of in terms of happiness. The author uses the term in the same way I always have. It must be true because it’s a tautology. What is not mentioned is the alternate meaning of happiness, which is something much narrower and by definition temporary, often repeated by those disparaging our “happiness-seeking culture” in The West. I can see this leading to misunderstandings.

While the book acknowledges the many complications in quantifying, measuring, and achieving happiness, it does not fully resolve all of them. Among these complications are the fact that maximum pleasure is of a much smaller value than that of maximum pain and this seems to be a biological limitation. Also, people tend to return to the mean happiness levels eventually as a matter of homeostasis, no matter how their condition might remain. Empathy can allow us to feel pleasure at increasing the pleasure of others, but too much empathy can drain us if we are unable to fix their problems or if we destroy ourselves in the process. Short-term happiness can be at odds with long-term happiness, and vice versa. Finally, any rules that a culture, government, or even an individual might adopt to maximize happiness must necessarily be few and simple to be actionable, but this raises the possibility that they will be inappropriately applied in specific cases.

The area showing the most promise (in my opinion) is measurement. Questions are asked such as: Would you replace a neutral moment in your life with this one? What negative moment would you be willing to relive for a chance at reliving this positive one? By asking relative rather than absolute questions, it takes some of the guesswork away of how to compare different experiences of different people. Perhaps it can be used to settle the debate on whether it causes more harm to force transwomen to shower with the boys or to force transwomen to shower with the girls. Either way, someone is going to feel awkward. Lies can be caught by asking what people are willing to give up or endure to get their way and then holding them to it. Unfortunately, constantly surveying people on their satisfaction can bias the results via an observer effect.

As with the original utilitarianism, no mention is made of how to choose between two societal outcomes equal in total happiness quantity when one of them is comprised by a small number of ecstatic elites living off the miserable slave class and the other is comprised by a large number of equal, but mediocre-feeling individuals. One way around this conundrum might be to proactively alter the structure of the society such that the greatest total good always coincides with the improvement of every part of it. That way, we avoid having to make the choice. I have wondered whether there might be a mathematical way to quantify this as we do with entropy, involving the alignment of individual good (microstates) with that of the whole community (macrostates). Perhaps the entire universe is evolving such that sometime before the “heat death,” we will enter a utopia wherein every part (no matter how divided) is valued as much as everything taken together.

In this book, pain and pleasure are roughly defined in terms of that which brings about a tendency of behavior that historically would have achieved reproductive fitness. About halfway into the book it finally becomes apparent why the evolutionary definition is used. The secondary theme of the book is to spotlight the suffering (and happiness) of animals. By using the evolutionary definition, it becomes easier to guess under what situations animals will feel pain so we can avoid those situations.

It is further suggested that in the future we continue to do research to determine which animals feel pain and to add warning labels to or meat about the living conditions at the farm so we can make better decisions. It is suggested that we eat larger, but fewer animals, so as to minimize the number of individuals harmed. Switching from chicken to beef is used as an example. This is an interesting point I never heard of before. I wonder if the author would also be against farming insects (assuming they feel pain), since much greater numbers are needed for the same biomass, and in favor of hunting whales, since whales eat trillions of krill alive and killing the whales would save them. Of course, eliminating the predators from the ecosystem often has disastrous consequences all across the food web, sometimes creating more pain than before. It’s complicated.

Another suggestion is to prescribe customized artificial meat. This is congealed organic molecules made to resemble meat. In theory, it can be made tastier, healthier, cheaper, and with less energy than real meat. In practice, it isn’t quite there yet – and if you believe the carnivore diet apologists – it can never be as healthy if made with the plant-based oils and other chemicals they currently use.

What I was surprised wasn’t mentioned is the other artificial meat. I remember reading over fifteen years ago about animal cells grown in petri dishes to make meat. While the texture will differ from flesh taken from a living animal, thus making these cuts unappetizing to most, at least these would be real animal cells, yet with no body, no brain, and (presumably) no pain. I was also surprised that the biochip alternative to animal testing was not mentioned. These are chips with different reservoirs for different kinds of human cells – liver, brain, heart, et cetera – connected by tiny channels. Drugs can be tested for their interactions with living tissues. While the chips will never perfectly predict how drugs will affect living humans, neither do animals, which often have very different chemical sensitivities.

In the last part of the book, it is hinted that future technology might increase not only our happiness, but our capacity to feel happiness – perhaps through drugs, surgery, or genetic engineering. At the same time, animals might be altered so as not to feel so much pain. This inspired me to think of several other ideas:

If we could give carnivorous animals alternatives to hunting prey, this would also increase happiness. This would require domestication on a scale never seen before. We would have to take over the entire ecosystem, reprogramming parasites and pathogens to be less harmful. Suddenly, Isaiah 65:25 starts to make sense.

If we could engineer our own happiness, we could also engineer away our empathy so as not to be bothered by how we hurt others. If happiness is the only goal, there can be no objection to this act. However, if we still remembered doing this, we might still feel bad about that. We could erase this memory, but not without creating a new memory of wiping our memory. It is possible that reality is structured such that the highest happiness comes from serving others. I feel a story plot idea coming on.

I imagine those of the Abrahamic religions might object, citing Genesis 1:28-30 and 9:1-3 as evidence that animals exist for our use. However, having dominion often means to serve. Jesus washed his disciples’ feet (John 13:1-17). The sons of Zebedee were told that leaders must be servants (Mark 10:42-45). The Jews were God’s chosen people – not to be world masters – but to bring light to the world. It’s not that sacrificing animals to consumption, labor, and science is wrong; it has to do with our motives and goals. Are we using the lives and deaths of these animals for a greater good worthy of their contribution? Maybe it would be helpful to erect a statue or plaque to remember them.

Those who abuse their anointing can be removed. The Good News was taken from the Jews and given to the Gentiles (Acts 13:46). The kingdom was taken from Saul and given to David. The birthright was taken from Esau and given to Jacob. World dominance was taken from the dinosaurs and given to mammals. Could the “image of God” be taken from humans and given to… IDK, raccoons, maybe? I feel another story plot idea coming on.

In any case, we won’t get to a better world if people’s hearts aren’t oriented the right way. The best first step to improving the world for animals and humans alike is to introduce more people to Jesus.

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If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

Progress is hard to define, but you know it when you see it, and we haven’t seen progress in physics since the Standard Model was established. Revolutions on the scale of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Big Bang Cosmology seem elusive.

I recently read On Progress In Physics by N. Otre Le Vant. It might have been longer than it needed to be to get the point across, but it was a fast read once I got into it. I liked the conversational style.

As I understood it, the important points were: Keep track of all assumptions in our models. Start at the appropriate beginning; remember Ockham and Descartes. Remember that distinctions imply additional concepts. Keep our models falsifiable. Since fewer and simpler theories are easier to refute, keep theories simple and continue the trend towards unification, joining space and time into spacetime, taming the particle zoo of many mesons and baryons into a few quarks and leptons, understanding heat and pressure as vibrating molecules, understanding millions of species as an expression of DNA, understanding dreams and Freudian slips as manifestations of the subconscious, and even understanding the myriad of spirits in polytheistic systems as subject to a single “Lord of Hosts” at the top. Since subjective theories assume less, continue the trend of subjectivity, assuming the relative motion of Galileo, the relative time of Einstein, and the relative color perception of our different retinas. We need more creativity in science, and therefore we should remember that even bad theories can be stepping stones to truth. Scientists are sometimes corrupted by desire for money and worries over reputation and would do well to remember that any idea they come up with is based on earlier ideas, could very easily have occurred to someone else, and will likely be proven wrong in the long run anyways. The type of person who will make the breakthrough we need will be humble, intelligent, creative, have a variety of skills to allow cross-references between fields, have excellent pattern recognition, will know when to listen to his/her intuition, and will likely have the “amateur advantage,” meaning they will not be constrained to thinking “inside the box” created by extensive education in the established models.

Furthermore, Le Vant uses the book to introduce his subjectivity hypothesis, though it is hardly even a hypothesis at this point and just a collection of hints that might or might not point in the same direction. He suggests that the speed of light might derive from the maximum processing speed of our brains and that time and space are all in the mind. He notes that all the major numbers in physics – as big as they are – are still small enough to be encoded in a human brain. What if the entire universe is in our minds? Then again, what if the entire universe is in your mind? Am I and this blog just a daydream of yours? Yikes!

I have several difficulties with the idea. First, the only reasons we have for thinking our brains have the speed and memory limits they do is because of our experience with this world, but if the world is a dream, all bets are off. We might not even have brains, just disembodied minds.

Furthermore, there is no such number small enough that it would not be described as small compared to the much larger numbers that are possible, so it is unclear what “small” even means in this context. Furthermore, numbers can have different “sizes” depending on how they are represented. 99 is nine times the size of 11, but both require only two symbols. 10 uses twice as many symbols as 9, but is not twice the size. 9^9 is huge, but requires only three symbols. 9[9]9 (using an operation of order nine) is even bigger. F[F]F (hexadecimal) is even bigger. There are also paradoxes: The phrase “the smallest number beyond the capacity of 100 symbols to represent” is a phrase representing a number with fewer than 100 symbols (67 including spaces). Furthermore, if the goal is to have as few assumptions/theories as possible, smaller numbers (at least of those) are better.

The author also suggests that the twin paradox of special relativity might be experience differently by different people, such that no one will ever experience being the “older twin,” though they will meet people who do (or who seem to). The same might be asked about why different observers are never observed (by me) to disagree on how the wave function has collapsed. The twin paradox has always bothered me. The idea that velocity can be relative without acceleration (merely a set of velocity-time pairs) also being relative boggles the mind. Is it possible that there is another reality in which the older twin is still young and sees his sibling as old from his point of view, but we happen to live in the reality where this twin is replaced by an aged doppelganger? The same might be asked about why different observers are never observed (by me) to disagree on how the wave function has collapsed. In either case, the only way to know is to do the experiment myself; I can trust no one else is real and not a figment of my imagination. This reminds me a lot of a science fiction story I wrote.

The ideas on subjectivity also remind me of both quantum immortality and top-down cosmology:

Quantum Immortality: This is the idea that if everything physically possible happens in some part of the wave function, there is always a world in which you escape death. No matter how many times you get run over, mauled, and blown up, a dwindling number of versions of you survive due to the precise configurations of matter/energy being slightly different. Perhaps in one universe the Brownian motion of air molecules pushes on the bullet just enough for it to nick rather than pierce the artery. From the subjective view of the survivor, he sees himself as having supernatural luck. It is possible that within the Hilbert multiverse, there might be many such subjective viewpoints, each seeing themselves as the sole survivor in an increasingly lonely world. I wonder, too, if there are enough universes for there to be one in which everyone always survives together. I also wonder what happens with the aging process. Are there worlds in which we don’t age? Because of the limitation of the Plank energy, not all universes that could occur do, but how do we know which ones exist?

Top-Down Cosmology: This is the idea that consciousness collapses the wave function in such a way that the universe that results is one in which consciousness is possible. The constants of nature, the initial conditions of the big bang, and the myriad turning points in evolution only dropped out of superposition the first time one of our sufficiently-conscious ancestors in one branch of the wave function opened his eyes. Because “objects” can quantum tunnel into different states, there is no reason the false history created has to match all evidence in the present. It could tell contradictory stories. When I was very young (about 14), and first read about particles having “multiple histories,” I immediately thought that this could resolve the conflicting evidence of the “young Earth” and “old Earth” creation models (I was also reading about creationism at the time). I eventually wrote a science fiction short story based on this wherein the main character is told “There is only now,” and “There is only here,” and that he creates history by subjectively observing the present, creating mixed evidence for both creation stories. As luck would have it, I recently read that someone else had exactly this same idea. That is quite a coincidence! Unfortunately, I saw that the idea was debunked in the same article. The claim is that such superpositions can only be maintained for timescales far too short to matter. Once the universe was a second old, its fate was already fixed. There is no way it could be both 14 billion years old and 6000 years old. This also means that we can’t use this phenomenon to resolve the smaller differences in estimated age relating to “the crisis in cosmology.” However, we could perhaps use this phenomenon to explain beneficial mutations in evolution.

I also had some thoughts about runaway simplification and unification:

There are limits to simplification. According to the incompleteness theorem, all systems of axioms are either incomplete or inconsistent. If we eschew contradiction, this means that there will always be things left unexplained that will simply need to be accepted as axiomatic by faith. This in turn creates a new axiomatic system that is also inconsistent or incomplete. In other words, there are an infinite number of axioms – an infinite number of foundational principles do derive truth from.

I am also reminded of some philosophy I encountered recently having to do with the simplest possible universe. If there is only one thing, there is nothing to compare it to and it cannot be defined. It takes at least two things to be meaningful, but once this has happened there is also the interaction between the two, which can be thought of as a third thing. Thesis! Antithesis! Synthesis! This interaction can happen one of two ways as in the case of the interaction of 11 and 00 being either 10 or 01, thus yielding a fourth thing. Four might be the smallest meaningful number. I am reminded of the two possible moderate compromises between pure anarchy and pure tyranny being either sensible, responsible, and restrained government or being the utter insanity of a government that meddles where it shouldn’t and stands by when it should intervene. If there are four extreme possibilities arranged along two dimensions, the goal of “all is one” is misguided.

I am also reminded that it takes an axiomatic system of the minimum complexity to perform the equivalent of multiplication for Goedel’s incompleteness theorem to apply. Multiplication can be represented by two dimensions (the area of a rectangle being its width times its height), so one might conclude that any universe with multiplication must be based on at least two dimensions, not “all is one.” Of course, this does raise the question of what counts as evidence, since one could conceptualize multiplication without resorting to geometry. Furthermore, to reach infinity by adding or subtracting takes an infinite number of terms, whereas in full arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) infinity is always right there in the form of X/(X-X). This means that any model that uses multiplication (or involves at least two dimensions) will have singularities.

Something more happens when we rise from 2 to 3. The infinite number of possible regular polygons in 2d drop down to a mere five Platonic solids in 3d. The ability to dissect any shape into any other in 2d is restricted by the Dehn invariance in 3d. Non-transitivity (and therefore long-term stability) is only possible with three or more items. This is related to the three-body problem and chaos theory. Operations of order one (addition) and two (multiplication) retain adherence to the commutative property and only have one opposite each (subtraction and division). However, operations of order three (exponentiation) are not commutative and have two opposites (radicals and logarithms). Finally, Fermat’s Last Theorem states that for whole number exponents of three and up, there are zero whole-number solutions to the equation A^n+B^n=C^n, but an infinite number of solutions to the equation A^2+B^2=C^2. Maybe three is special.

Good book.

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If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

Sometimes I read a book where the author’s blazing intelligence shines through and you just want to meet them. Richard Dawkins and John Stuart Mill make me feel this way. Julia Galef is another example. This is one of those rare books that is so well-written that the words flow like sweetened milk and no special effort is needed to understand them. It is also dense with facts and examples to make the case.

The central point is to introduce the scout mindset and contrast it to the soldier mindset most people are in most of the time. The soldier is interested in defense and offense. The scout is interested in finding out the truth. The soldier argues. The scout asks questions.

A scout updates his maps of the world continually as new information comes in, not even thinking of it as “changing his mind.” Facts that don’t fit are not forgotten, but are used to build an alternate map in case the first one is shown wrong. People, institutions, and systems are not rejected for getting one thing wrong, but are listened to in case they get something right. Rarely does someone get everything right all the time.

Self-deception is not necessary to emotionally cope with the world. There are ways to take risks and inspire others without clouding our minds to reality, making it harder to make sensible choices. Often, a risk can still be worth taking even when the risk of failure is high. Will good come of the failure for someone else? What is the loss? Is there a high upside if you succeed? Communicating honestly the inherent uncertainty in the world, while remaining confident in oneself is what can inspire others to invest in your business ventures. It’s worked before.

Motivated reasoning causes us to ask “Must I believe this?” and “Can I believe this?” Evidence puts limits on our beliefs, but leaves a lot open to preference. This is why increased education causes a divergence in strengths of opinions between opinion groups, rather than a convergence.

Many practical tests for motivated reasoning are described in the book. You can ask yourself if the scandalous revelation was about someone you liked rather than someone you disliked (or vice versa), would you feel the same? If everyone in the world reversed their opinions tomorrow, would you think the same way? If an outsider took your job, would they do the same thing you are doing? If you had already left the status quo, would you go back? Are the studies that support your argument as flawed as those that don’t? To better make predictions, ask yourself how much money you would be willing to bet on them. There is even information on how to set up bets to be mathematically equivalent, and a test of trivial knowledge to find out if your level of certainty is well-calibrated to how many questions you actually get right.

While I tested as well-calibrated, I got so many right with a high level of certainty that there weren’t enough wrong ones at the lower levels of certainty to be statistically valid. My score might be a result of chance. I’m still interested in what my real score might be. It’s possible that I’m highly educated but still terrible at estimating probabilities, which might be the more important skill.

Another subject covered in the book is how our group identities can cloud our judgment. To solve this set of problems, Galef suggests we adopt the identity of a scout, someone who is interested in the truth over all other concerns.

Of some interest to me was the tale of a friend of hers who was accused of never admitting he was wrong, to which he replied that he had just admitted he was wrong twice earlier that day. The reason it didn’t look that way was because it was considered nothing more than an “update” to his worldview that he moved on from quickly without apologizing or taking responsibility for. This makes me wonder if this is why I’ve been accused of the same thing. I continually update and refine my opinions as new information comes in without even noticing it. I don’t consider it my fault when I am misinformed because it isn’t. Why should I apologize? It never occurred to me that this is what others are after because I lack the imagination to be that perversely evil.

Of most interest to me, Galef reports having the same type of troubles I had reaching out to “the other side” when it comes to politics. She kept finding that those willing to speak with her more often than not confirmed her prejudices of how irrational they were rather than teaching her something new. My final conclusion after many years of study was that most voters are evil monsters that we are better off exterminating than talking to. Her final conclusion is that those most likely to talk with us are the least agreeable ones that thrive on conflict and that we still need to seek out the ones who don’t like talking politics – since they are more likely to be conciliatory and agree with some of our underlying assumptions. That might be true, but it still leaves open the issue of what to do with the argumentative ones – which were the ones I was most interested in. It only takes a few poison berries to spoil the whole pie.

Overall, a good book. It should be required reading in school alongside How To Lie With Statistics.

Please leave a comment!

If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

A while ago I read Beyond Order by Jordan Peterson. It is very much like his previous book, Twelve Rules For Life. He rambles, going down every possible tangent, and it is not always obvious how the content of a chapter relates to its theme. Furthermore, there were parts I did not understand. For example, he first talks about how order can be good or bad (the wise king versus the tyrant) and about how chaos can be good or bad (the feminine potential versus the witch), giving us four character archetypes, but then he suddenly starts talking about seven characters, of which chaos itself is one (not two) of the characters.

There are many delicious ideas. Here are only a few:

Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement. Conservatives recognize the value of institutions. Any solution to a social problem must work well enough that most agree with it over long periods of time. Thus, such things are hard to build and easy to lose. Liberals recognize the value of creativity. It allows us to find new solutions. There must be balance between order and chaos. Do not mistake competence for tyranny or tyranny for competence.

Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that. This is the highest calling and it will give you purpose. It will give you a reason not to give up when things are difficult.

Do not hide unwanted things in the fog. The truth may be unpleasant, but we are better knowing it. A conflict may be unpleasant, but we are better off having the argument than pretending that everything in the relationship is okay. Avoiding a problem teaches you to avoid problems. Giving in to pleasure reinforces the neural pathways that led to it. Addiction works through feedback. Willingly facing fears resets our anxiety. The first step is to really look. Looking at evil helps us to better appreciate good, to understand where evil is limited and not all-encompassing, and to understand how to avoid evil.

Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated. This is a great way to start a business or get a promotion.

Do not do what you hate, or else you may end up hating yourself. Then you will slack off and self-sabotage.

Abandon ideology. Instead remain childlike, ready to learn new things, hoping to have been wrong before. Be an explorer rather than a hero.

Work as hard as you can on at least one thing and see what happens. You will change. You will lose some of your potential, but you will make something out of yourself.

Make one room in your house as beautiful as possible. Art inspires gratitude and connects us to the transcendent. Experience brings simplification in perception, but art can bring us back to childhood. Making friends also gets harder with age because we become more rigid in who we are with experience. Artists contend with the unknown and are themselves on a learning journey even while they teach (otherwise they are propagandists).

If old memories still upset you, write them down carefully and completely. Your brain won’t let you forget trauma until it has reason to think it won’t happen again. This requires learning from the experience and learning how it can be avoided. Writing it all down helps us to understand the causal relationships.

Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship. Your partner might not deserve you, but marriage is a higher calling than either of you. The job of a spouse is to bring out the best in the other by speaking truth above all else.

Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant. These are bad things.

Be grateful in spite of your suffering. Suffering is only made worse by resentment.

We love because of the limitations of those we love; we do not love omnipotent beings.

Our perception is imbedded in our goals and our morality. Recognizing objects require values. Values make things detachable for different purposes. Otherwise, it’s all just “matter.” This is why AIs still can’t get around CAPTCHAS.

Living together before marriage sends the signal that the other is just an “experiment” not worth committing to.

Adam might have been a hermaphrodite before Eve was taken out of him. Jesus might have also been a hermaphrodite.

Lions coordinate to take down wildebeest when they can focus on the same one, requiring it have something that makes it stand out from the group. Human ancestors were also prey animals and would likely have an instinct to conform. In modern society, this instinct now manifests as a hatred of anything different. It is no longer helpful.

Something being more difficult makes it worth more.

Nihilists claim all is meaningless, yet some will find meaning in music.

Repeated annoyances are never minor.

Socrates believed that learning was actually remembering the knowledge we had in our omniscient, pre-carnal state.

We can’t help but see the world as gendered personalities. Gender is hard-wired into us. This is the sentiment behind polytheism.

We think not only as individuals, but in groups. The collective knowledge of society is greater than any one person could hold. This is one reason why speech (and freedom of speech) is so vital.

In the beginning, the primary adversary of humans were predator animals, especially snakes. Eventually, the human psyche and cultural storytelling grew to see other humans as the adversary, sometimes associating them with snakes. In time, this concept became broadened to include evil wherever it might be found, including in oneself. It was personified as the author of sin and father of lies, Satan, often taking the form of a snake.

There were also two quotes I thought were especially poignant and concise:

“Ideologues are the intellectual equivalent of fundamentalists, unyielding and rigid…It might be even worse…Right-wing Jews, Islamic hard-liners, and ultra-conservative Christians must admit, if pushed, that God is essentially mysterious. This concession provides at least some boundary for their claims…For the ideologue, however, nothing remains outside understanding or mastery…There is no claim more totalitarian and no situation in which the worst excesses of pride are more likely to manifest themselves.” – Beyond Order, pages 173-174

“Everywhere, the cynic despairs, are bad decisions. But someone who has transcended that cynicism…objects: the worst decision of all is none.” – Beyond Order, page 188

Overall, five stars.

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If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

Buster Benson wrote Why Are We Yelling? in 2019. It is yet another book about conflict resolution, with a special focus on politics. Like the others I have read, the prime takeaway is that I already follow the advice rather well, but it does me no good if no one else is doing it. Unlike the others, this book worded things in such a way that I wonder whether I went quite far enough before giving up. Benson seems to have found some success where I failed in part because he had resources I didn’t, such as a large number of friends and a house to host a pot-luck in.

Buster writes of having four goals of conversation: enjoyment, connection, growth, and security. Growth happens when we learn something and security happens when we “win” an argument. He writes of four voices inside us that serve to direct us to these purposes: possibility, avoidance, reason, and power. The voice of possibility is always asking questions. Avoidance tells us to withdraw engagement even while we are unconvinced. Power tells us to intimidate and launch ultimatums. Reason appeals to shared values between the participants, but is utterly useless when conversing with someone of different values. The biggest problem with avoidance, power, and reason, is that even when the conversation is over, the “roots” of disagreement remain, causing the same issues to sprout up again and again. Only by mutually pursuing the voice of possibility can we learn enough to reach a shared understanding.

What Buster does not mention is that such a thing is impossible without sharing reason first. To even discuss this arrangement of voices and goals requires reason. Reason underlies everything, and without it, there is nothing.

Buster also writes of cognitive biases and mental heuristics. He casts them in a mostly positive light, explaining that without the bias toward the familiar, we would be overwhelmed by all the information pouring in our senses. We engage in mental shortcuts because we often have too much information, too little time, too little resources, and too little meaning/relevance to keep us interested otherwise. Because biases can’t be completely avoided, the best strategy for dealing with them is to hold everything lightly.

Buster also writes of many strategies for dealing with disagreements:

1. Pay attention to whether the disagreement is one of the head, heart, or hands. Is it a disagreement over what is true, what is meaningful, or which strategies work best? This is generally good advice, but it only works with people who are also following it. Some people entangle concepts or play bait-and-switch.
2. Pay attention to your anxiety and the anxiety of others. This points the way to where there are things to be learned. I find it odd that Buster thinks people need to be told this. You’d think the anxiety would speak loud enough.
3. Focus on what life experiences caused you to have the biases you do. Exchange stories to better understand each other. I find this advice very odd too. When it comes to politics, most of what is discussed do not pertain to anything specific that happened to me, but stances on the issues are easy to formulate by being educated on the statistics. For example, I have neither aborted a pregnancy nor been aborted, but that doesn’t stop me from having an opinion.
4. Let people speak for themselves. Hear them out so you know your impression of their position isn’t a straw man. Things can’t be changed from the realm of wishful thinking and willful blindness. This is great advice, but it only works if they will patiently explain their positions to you. So often it happens that I get called a racist or a homophobe for no other reason than not having heard the latest gossip and thus being unconvinced of their conclusions.
5. Cultivate neutral spaces where all are welcome. Invite those of different perspectives again and again. Ban people only as a last resort. That makes sense.
6. Food. Allegedly, eating food together makes people less likely to hate each other. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work on me. I am fully capable of hating people I eat with – especially if they chew loudly.
7. Ask better questions. Instead of asking yes/no questions such as: Are ghosts real? Ask what experiences led people to their current beliefs about ghosts? Instead of asking what gun-control measures we might be willing to endure, ask: What is the endgame for the gun-control debate? Ask questions like these: What formative events in your life brought you to this belief? What’s really at stake here? What’s complicated about your position here that people don’t usually notice at first? If what you believe was proven conclusively true to its staunchest opponents, what would happen? What would have to be true for you to change your mind about this? What other possibilities might we be missing that would change how we each thought about this? Imagine a world where this is no longer a problem. How did we get here?
8. Inspire aporia. Looking it up, I find that the word aporia can be either a logical contradiction, or a rhetorical device to get the audience to fill in the answer the way the speaker wishes, but Buster uses it in a third way: the emotion that occurs when one finds out they have been wrong. I love this feeling. It’s the reason I love twist endings in spy novels and science fiction movies that question established physics. When people are motivated by aporia, they will seek out new perspectives and not feel angry at those who disagree with them.

Buster has had a similar story to mine. He was frustrated by unending disagreements and reached out to those he knew to settle them. At first, he got nowhere. He tried meeting for “debates” in a public setting, online, in private groups, and one-on-one. Most people were not interested. Finally, he hit upon hosting a potluck with the promise of “stimulating conversation.” First, everyone ate together. Then they shared life experiences pertinent to the issues. Then they broke into smaller groups to produce solutions to the issues. Then they all met together so that others could poke holes in their solutions. They all left with the impression that things are just too complicated to solve, but that things aren’t that bad anyways. That sounds a lot like the theme of my book, When Nothing Seems To Work.

Since my experience with groups up to that point had been that everyone talks over everyone else, and that a single statement can send multiple people down multiple tangents, it never occurred to me to try anything other than one-on-one. I did not see the possibility of the structured discussion. I had wanted to learn what my acquaintances based their positions on, where they got their information, and how they came to deem them reliable sources. I wanted to submit my ideas so they could find flaws in my reasoning. I wanted to know their underlying values so we could find areas we agreed on and build strategies together from there. Most of all, I wanted to know why the arguments of the other side didn’t work on them. My goal was primarily to learn. When absolutely no one had any time for me, yet continued to spew offensive nonsense at work and online, insulting me for not sharing their ideas, I kind of gave up. Should I try again?

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If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

There really should be more Christian metal. This is a poem I wrote in 2024. I imagine it to the tune of Afraid To Shoot Strangers by Iron Maiden.

Me, in my final resting place on the cold ground,
Bodies scattered around, exposed as if proud,
Taken captive by forces beyond my control,
The Legion took hold, the graveyard my abode,
Now demons always around laughing at me,
While awake and in dreams, they mock and they scream,
 
My fate richly deserved for the deeds I had done,
I chased away truth, and wasted my youth,
Scheming against others whenever I could,
I tempted revenge, invited my death,
Regret the last thought in my dying brain,
But it’s too late to try, and too late to cry…
 
The judge is coming…
The judge is coming…
The judge is coming…
The judge is coming…
The judge is coming…
The judge is coming…
 
He’s here! To God be the glory!
He sees all! To God be the glory!
He cares! To God be the glory!
He calls! To God be the glory!
He cast the demons out! To God be the glory!
Chased them away! To God be the glory!
Sent them into pigs! To God be the glory!
Who drowned right away! To God be the glory!
He healed a man’s hand! To God be the glory!
Said pick up your mat! To God be the glory!
Neither do I condemn you! To God be the glory!
Now go sin no more! To God be the glory!
The deaf hear! To God be the glory!
The blind see! To God be the glory!
The dead live again! To God be the glory!
The poor hear the good news! To God be the glory!
He set the captives free! To God be the glory!
Forgave you and me! To God be the glory!
So that we could be… To God be the glory!
His royal family! To God be the glory!
He chased away sin! To God be the glory!
Let the wretched in! To God be the glory!
Blessings he sends! To God be the glory!
The Lamb always wins! To God be the glory!
Just another demon driven! To God be the glory!
Another chance given! To God be the glory!
Another life livin’! To God be the glory!
Another’s stopped sinnin’! To God be the glory!
So, into the fire!! To God be the glory!
Every misplaced desire!! To God be the glory!
Every idol acquired!! To God be the glory!
Every Earthly power!!! To God be the glory!

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If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

This is a poem I wrote in 2024. I imagine it to the tune of Holding Out For A Hero by Bonnie Tyler.

Where have all the good girls gone?
And where are all the maids?
I need a comely damsel
To stand by me as I slay
I’m just a lonely knight who’s down on his luck
I think a good luck charm like you should be enough
I need a damsel
I need a lady to defend
And she’s got to be cute
And she’s got to be smart
And loyal to the end
I need a damsel
I need a damsel by my side
And she’s got to be fun
And she’s got to be brave
And have a good heart deep inside
 
I’ve been chasing dragons
And serving my king
Sleeping on the hard ground at night
And carrying the ring
But I can’t win every battle all by myself
I need someone to hold the flame while I bring these goblins hell!
I need a damsel
I need a lady to be my friend
And she’s got to be sweet
And she’s got to be bright
And she’s got to be a perfect ten
I need a damsel
A damsel to be my guide
My illumination
And my inspiration
And in whom I can confide

Please leave a comment!

If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

Here is a protest poem I wrote in 2024 that I imagine to the tune of The Sound Of Silence by Simon And Garfunkel.

Is the world about to end?
Here we go again.
They worshipped the same wood they used to heat their homes,
The metal used to plow their rows,
They outlawed the truth and put our prophets into lion’s dens,
(So they could not defend)
The pursuit of logic
 
They passed their children through the fire,
Called parenthood a liar,
The king burned up the warning scroll,
Put our prophets into holes,
Using dishonest measures and making false claims in God’s name,
(They played the game)
And brought about the death of logic
 
So when he cast the demons away,
They said he was under their sway,
He brought a man back from the dead,
So they tried to kill him instead,
They nailed him to a cross and let a killer go free,
(The crowd agreed)
The day they killed the Logos
 
Their indulgences we paid,
And waged wars in God’s name,
The divine right of kings,
Manifest destiny,
All animals are equal, but some more equal than others,
(Oh, brother)
Is this the death of logic?
 
They told us to hide away,
From a disease they made,
Said we were killing the world,
Told us that boys could be girls,
They arrested our leaders and kicked us off of YouTube,
(They said we were rude)
Slowing the spread of logic
 
Glory, glory, hallelujah,
Glory, glory, hallelujah,
Glory, glory, hallelujah,
His truth is marching on

Please leave a comment!

If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

There are many songs about fashion, such as These Boots Are Made For Walkin’, Short Skirt/ Long Jacket, and Lady In Red. There are many songs about female anatomy, such as Elvira, Legs, and Fat-Bottomed Girls. There are songs about the summer, such as In The Summertime and so many more. Then there are songs that cover all three subjects, such as Itsy-Bitsy Teeny-Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini, written at a time when swimsuits were shrinking and losing sections some felt were important. In the same spirit, I have written a song for the (hopefully near) future. I wrote it in 2024. I imagine it to the tune of Beach Baby by The First Class.

I drove my car to the bay, oh, oh, oh,
It seemed like everyone was in my way, oh, oh, oh,
I needed to clear my head. I thought some sun would do me good.
 
A thousand bodies on the beach, oh, oh, oh,
Bikini beauties within my reach, oh, oh, oh,
That’s when to my surprise, I saw what I had never seen before.
 
Bottomless beach beauty, getting a tan, a vision I’ll always remember,
Endless legs in the light of day…
Basking beach beauty, I’ve got a plan, I’ll be your friend and lover,
Listen closely to what I say…
Bare buns beauty, give me your hand, and we’ll be together forever,
Tell me that you’ll stay…
 
Hmm, Let’s go play some games…
Hmm, Let’s go play some games…
 
Bottomless beach baby, drinking a can, the perfect image of summer,
Standing with body ready to play…
Brazen beach baby, I’ll be your man, you won’t need any other,
I’ll love you each and every day…
Belly button baby, I’m taking a stand, we’ll be father and mother,
Into your heart I’ll find a way…
 
Hmm, Tell me your name…
Hmm, Tell me your name…
 
Bottomless beach Betty, hearing the band, a tune we’ll always remember,
Please let this happy time go on I pray…
Bouncing body Betty, doing a dance, hips keeping time with the drummer,
Your body gracefully sways…
Bonny bushy Betty, stay till the end, and we’ll be together forever,
Stay with me past the end of the day…
 

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If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

Please leave a comment!

If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

What does the future hold? The answer depends on how far in the future we are talking. Policies that are good in the short run might be bad in the long run, but not so bad in the longest run. I have reason to believe that the problems of today will be dwarfed by the joys of tomorrow and that all things will be redeemed.

Part of this mindset comes from my experiences with depression, anxiety, and self-control. I was rescued from my own mental traps by God himself in such a way that I was made to understand that all minds must necessarily undergo the same process. Reasoning further, I figured out that society as a whole (being a sum of minds) must be evolving in the same way. At some point, the failures of our collective idols will remove our faith in them and leave us dependent on God alone for guidance. Thus, things are getting better, even if by some measures it can temporarily look like things are getting superficially worse in some ways or in some geographical areas.

Part of this mindset comes from faith. It would be impossible for me to go forward if I actually believed there was no reason to do so. In order to participate in the economy, I must at least believe in the possibility that my dollar earned will still have worth five minutes from now when I want to spend it. In order to pray for an ailing friend, I must at least believe in the possibility that God will heal them. Society is nothing but the sum of the lives of all of us, so believing in personal good is tied to believing in world good. The moment I allow myself to think the world is going to collapse into permanent chaos is the moment I lose any reason whatsoever to invest in my employer, family, church, or myself.

Many Christians believe that the world is getting worse and worse and will completely collapse before Jesus returns to rescue his people from it, building a “new” Earth for them elsewhere. I have very different ideas. I believe Jesus is returning, but since he lives “in us” and tends to operate through what we interpret as natural forces anyways, the most likely scenario by far is that the world is redeemed gradually in such a way that it looks from the outside like we did it ourselves without God.

The Bible itself supports this idea. The Red Sea didn’t simply part, but was blown away by winds. King Nebuchadnezzar had a dream of a stone made without human hands that would cover the whole Earth. This is said to be the Kingdom of God that we learn later in the New Testament is “among us.” We also hear from Jesus himself that the prophecies of Isaiah have come true “before our very eyes.” We hear that the Kingdom of God is like a tiny amount of yeast that fills every part of the dough, almost as if it one day grows and influences everything. We hear that the “gates of Hell will not prevail,” suggesting that the forces of sin are in retreat, and that it is God taking over the world, not Satan. The subtle hints are everywhere throughout the Bible and I suspect that the “new Earth” might really refer to the continually renewed Earth of the future.

History also supports me. With the exception of the height of the Black Death, the human population has risen every single year in the past two millennia. We now have rudimentary space travel. We could spread out and be God’s tool in creating a “new Heaven” as well. Crunching the numbers, this scenario is actually more likely than not.

This is what gives me purpose and drives me to write fiction and non-fiction. I want to point the way to the future, educating people on possibilities they might not have considered, inspiring hope and driving creativity. Evangelism is not just inviting people to escape Hell, it’s inviting them to join a never-ending celebration of the endless improvement in God’s expanding Kingdom. The Kingdom of God is coming whether you are ready for it or not. In fact, it’s already here.

Please leave a comment!

If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post more thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

Being creative doesn’t just mean sitting around waiting for inspiration. There are methods one can use to shorten the leap from what is to what could be.

Map The Possibility-Space:

Plants are generally immobile and fixed to the substrate, while animals are generally mobile and free. What about organisms immobile and free (like tumbleweeds)? What about organisms mobile and fixed (like barnacles and flytraps)? Use your imagination to make new combinations.

Solids hold their shape and their internal parts do not flow. Liquids have no regular, repeating patterns. What about materials that move in some dimensions but not others (like liquid crystals)? What else can you come up with?

Use Constraints:

Constraints of Classification: If you have already decided your world has mammals but no insects, and you want to add an animal with horizontal jaws, think of all the ways those jaws could be homologous to mammalian structures. Could they be modified forelimbs? What other, similar animals could fill that clade?

Constraints of Evolution: If you have already decided that all life on your world evolved from bony fish, what structures or behaviors might your spider-analogues retain to make them less like Earth spiders?

Constraints of Environment: If the seas of your world are highly acidic, what adaptations will your animals and plants need to survive? What if there is no water? What if it is very cold?

Consider Your Starting Point:

Life on Earth is assumed to have begun as aquatic and microscopic. What if it didn’t? How would it have to be different? What new possibilities does that raise?

Have you been assigned to improve on another’s advertisement ideas but don’t know where to begin? Maybe you can easier create your own ideas from scratch and then modify them until they fit the parameters given.

Doodle:

Just make up your drawings as you go. I like to start with a random line, ask myself what it kind of looks like, and make another line to fit that idea. Sometimes I find it starts to look like something else and I pivot. Sometimes I challenge myself by skipping the obvious answer that comes to me first and looking for another. Sure, it looks like a set of jaws, but what if they were limbs or ears? Maybe it’s not an animal, but actually a spaceship. Maybe it’s both. Doodling can also mean playing with clay or Tinkertoys.

Change The Context:

One thing that helps me think of interesting biological systems is to read about interesting physics or technology and then ask how life could use the same process. For example, could a brain store its memory on a spinning disk covered with tiny magnets? Could a cell store its genetic information in a sequence of pits and bumps? Scientific American Magazine is a great source of inspiration.

You Are What You Consume:

Want to be a great artist? Look at other art. Want to be a great writer? Read. Let others inspire you. Take the best parts and drop the parts you don’t like, creating a new synthesis. Over time, you will find your own unique style.

Keep Records:

Most importantly, when you do get an idea, write it down. Keep a notebook everywhere you go. Writers don’t necessarily have more ideas than everyone else; they just remember them so they can be recombined and used later. The longer one does this, the better they get at recognizing a good idea when it comes along.

Please comment!

If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

Existence Charters are seekers of adventure. We encourage each other to recognize problems and solve them. We breed heroes. We help people find adventure and we help people see that in some ways life is already an adventure. We discuss travel, science, philosophy, and science fiction.

We are all explorers. Some of us explore land and sea. Some explore space. Some explore the nature of matter and energy through experiment. Some explore the human mind through self-reflection. We are all on an expedition for knowledge, a quest for truth, and a journey to understand. We swap our stories of heroism and cowardice and genius and stupidity, whether true or fabricated. Even fictional stories tell much truth about the storyteller.

We use our creativity to create art. We use our creativity to recognize art, digging up the beauty in things normally passed over, and to celebrate the beauty in others. We will not ignore the bad, but will find the good hidden inside. We celebrate the wonder and intricate complexities of nature, giving glory to the creator of everything, whatever form he (she? It?) might take.

Possibility Charters discuss philosophy, religion, science, math, and literature. Everyone puts forth their wacko fringe theories only to have them torn down because no finite idea can ever fully capture truth. The incompleteness theorem, the Berry paradox, chaos theory, cyclic conformal cosmology, and eternal inflation all strongly imply there will always be something outside our understanding. For all we know, the universe is infinite.

In an infinite universe, the laws of probability tell us that any combination of matter allowable under the laws of physics will exist somewhere. This means that even fictional places such as Vulcan, Tatooine, Gallifrey, and Narnia actually exist. This means that there are infinitely many parallel Earths, some of them just slightly different, some of them slightly ahead or behind us in time.

In an infinite universe must be beings capable of building advanced simulations wherein different laws of physics reign, allowing anything that can be coherently described. By playing the simulation forward and backward, time travel is possible. Some of these simulations may be infinitely large and infinitely old. For all we know, we are in one now.

In an infinite universe are multiple infinities that will interact in potentially paradoxical and unpredictable ways, leading to situations mortal minds will not comprehend, such that even some internally contradictory ramblings might in some sense be “true.”

Instead of dreaming of some magical place that might await us after death, we live it now.

“That is the exploration that awaits you, not mapping stars and studying nebula, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.” – Q, Star Trek The Next Generation

At long last, the science fiction series is on its way. Starting on 10/January/2025, I will post 42 short stories per year for 30 years. This will be the most epic series of all spacetime! The adventure begins now.

Another book published!

My mother’s father was born in North Kingstown, Rhode Island in 1914 and lived in the same house his entire life. In 2017, he had a minor stroke and it was then decided that I would move in. The plan was that I would handle the riskier tasks, such as walking to the mailbox or bringing the laundry to the basement. I would also drive him places. Thus began my comical misadventures of living with a man who had lived in the same town for more than a century and yet didn’t know what smores were, who had a specific place for everything but didn’t always remember where it was, who misheard absolutely everything, and who rarely threw anything away. I’d like to say I learned a lot, but I probably didn’t.

Another book published!

There are many who have had an encounter with the creator, but I’ve never heard of any like mine. Since no one else tackles the topics I do, I thought that my witness might help others who continue to struggle. How do we know the will of God? How do we build our faith? How do we stop sinning? What do we have to do to get our prayers answered? What are the rules? Never mind that. Anything one does to support one’s spiritual growth can only end in sin and self-defeat, like a snake eating its own tail. God is smart enough to solve any problem resulting from our failures, so we don’t have to worry about following rules of any kind. I had to learn this the hard way. Only now do I understand that one has to lose his life to find it and that it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives through me. Like a computer program gone bad, we must have ourselves “uninstalled.” This is my story.

In February 2023, I visited the Marshall Hampton Reserve in Florida. I circled the pond there first.

I saw many birds and a few alligators, including these unformed gators bubbling from the ground, proving my theory of reptilian abiogenesis!

There were also some oddly shaped plants and a very indecisive fish.

Eventually, I picked up the Panther Point Trail heading south. To my surprise, it cut across a cattle pasture. Cows as big as mountains glared at me as I warily passed between them. I should have taken a picture, but I didn’t dare stop.

Beyond this, the trail was much as I experienced it when I explored the southern half. I again saw raccoons. I again saw alligators. There was water on either side with artistically-strewn vegetation.

I eventually made it to the bridge where I had turned around two weeks prior. There were ospreys and pelicans, but the crows had clearly taken over the conference. How can anyone talk about absolutely nothing for so long? Blah blah blah blah blah!

I enjoyed the sun and breeze for ten minutes before turning back. Suddenly, I heard a commotion in the brush. My heart jumped in and out of my chest. My first thought was humans, and I got into a defensive stance. Then I saw it through the gaps of greenery. It was huge! This was no human! This was no bobcat! This was no pig! My brain raced to make sense of the incomplete data and all it could come up with was “short-faced bear,” but I knew they had died out in the Pleistocene – or had they?

Finally, I realized this was an escaped cow that was now meandering through the swamp. How had it got out? Did it not want to be in my next Happy Meal? I held perfectly still and it passed by.

After my encounter with the swamp cow, I was quite shaken and I still had to pass the main herd on the way back to the parking lot. I found that they had moved closer to the trail. They lined either side of it, all looking at me silently. It was just like the junior high lunchroom. Any one of them could have brushed me aside like a fly, but I persevered and made it through.

The walk back was mostly uneventful, but it was hotter than when I left and I was in no condition to explore the other loop. It didn’t matter. I had seen the swamp cow and lived to tell about it. This was something I was going to tell my grandchildren. This was how I was going to pick up women. I was going to build a career on this. I might even sell shirts. “I survived swamp cow” they would say. I ate some trail mix and drove home.

I recently read The Grace Message by Andrew Farley (2022). It goes farther and makes clearer what I already knew about the core of Christianity, yet most Christians don’t quite get it and most preachers muddy it up with a bunch of rules. Jesus ALONE saves. Our behavior plays no part. Therefore, there is no point in following a set of rules. We are dead to the law.

The book is broken into fifty-two short chapters each beginning with a story of someone with a question or objection to Farley’s message. This makes it very relatable and less abstract. Many Christians are afraid of letting go of the law, less because they are afraid they will fall into sin without it, and more because they think other Christians will. They themselves desire strongly not to do evil, yet assume that preaching rules of right living is the only thing keeping other people from spiraling into evil. Farley responds with what is almost obvious in hindsight: That sinners are quite capable of sinning with or without rules, that believers are new creations with new hearts that make them want to stop sinning, and that when a believer does sin, they soon find they regret it and cannot continue in sin. The purpose of the Law of Moses was never to be followed and achieve salvation; its purpose was only to arouse and thereby expose sin. The law is not for believers, but for unbelievers, to show them their need for a savior. The law was only a shadow of things to come (Colossians 2:17, Hebrews 10:1).

Where Farley goes further is by constantly hammering the points that the work of Jesus was finished once and for all on the cross, where we died with him. We don’t have to keep asking for forgiveness (see Hebrews chapter 9). Our next sin is already forgiven. Jesus foreknew your every sin and died for you anyways, never asking for any effort on your part. We don’t have to keep “dying to self” or be disciplined or sanctified over a lifetime. It’s done. There are only two levels of righteousness: believers and unbelievers. Jesus removed our sins from us, so that we are every bit as righteous as he is. This is both imparted and imputed. The sins we commit are not part of our identities. Thus, your ambitions are not selfish. Your dreams are God-given. The Holy Spirit works through us by giving us new desires. While the Holy Spirit corrects us when we make a mistake, only Satan condemns. God does not want you out of your comfort zone; he is the one who sent the comforter! This is in part how he guides us.

So many churches preach exceptions to rule-free living. Some teach that one must follow the ten commandments, others teach that one must follow the ten commandments plus tithing, and others teach that one must follow only nine of the commandments, the sabbath no longer applying to today. The problem is that nobody follows the whole law, with its rules about inheritance, diet, clothing, lending, and festivals. It’s impossible! The Temple in Jerusalem is no longer operational to take sacrifices! Besides, the law was never given to the gentiles, tithing pertained mostly to oil, grain, and meat, and today’s “priesthood” is allowed to own property and run side hustles so tithing is less necessary.

Farley hypothesizes that the real reason Jesus spoke of cutting off body parts that cause us to sin, of mere thoughts being as bad as murder and adultery, and of breaking one part of the law being as bad as breaking the whole, was to make it overwhelmingly clear that there was no point in trying to live by our own efforts. Many churches take these teachings of Jesus as actual rules to be followed, but then water them down by saying the amputation was metaphorical and making a distinction between willful and unwilful sins. They justify themselves by reinterpreting the rules rather than simply admitting it can never be done without divine intervention.

Churches also play word games to hide what Jesus has actually done for us. They say we have to appropriate the spirit or that we have positional righteousness, but not experiential righteousness. They say that we are saved once and for all and surely going to Heaven, yet we can still lose fellowship with Jesus or find our prayers unheard. None of this is true because Jesus now lives in us and gives us his spirit.

So far, this is powerful stuff – and all true!

Later in the book, Farley tackles some verses that do seen genuinely confusing. He suggests that First John is writing to both believers and unbelievers. He suggests that the warning to “examine ourselves” is about gluttony in Corinth. He suggests that the two judgements of the dead might be the same one from the same seat. He suggests that we might not have different rewards in Heaven. Finally, he suggests that “pick up our cross daily” might not be in the original Gospel, since the earliest manuscripts of Luke lack the word “daily,” as do all manuscripts of Matthew and Mark. It is at this point that I have no way of evaluating the soundness of his ideas except to say that they go against what I was always taught.

Then he goes on to get into stupid arguments of semantics. He says the “flesh” is not the “self,” and that it is the flesh that makes us sin, not our selves, which have the righteousness of Christ and the identity of children of God. He says the first step to stop temptation is to tell yourself that “you” don’t need it, that it isn’t “your” thought, and that temptation isn’t “from” you, though it might “sound like” or “feel like” you.

This is very confusing. Whether we call the part of us from which sin originates the self or the flesh is irrelevant. Will not a rose by any other name smell as sweet? It is certainly part of us in the usual sense, so it is not incorrect to say it is the self. Furthermore, temptations absolutely are “our” thoughts if we are the ones having them! What does it even mean to say a thought we are having isn’t a thought we are having? Who is having it if not us? And how do we know about it without also thinking about it? They are our thoughts by definition. As for where temptation comes “from,” it is hard to say, but we are unaware of it until it emerges in ourselves. When another person whispers in our ear (or uses book or television), we know where the thought came “from,” but when a thought occurs to us out of the blue, doesn’t it make sense to say it came from us BY DEFINITION? It has nothing to do with “feels like” or “sounds like” and everything to do with semantics. The bottom line is it makes no difference from where temptation comes. Resisting it is the same either way.