Ken’s Blog

With this latest AI assisted offensive stunt, the creep has now managed to alienate Catholic voters. That’s actually a net positive for the country.

If enough voters realize just what a lowlife he is, and by extension his spineless enablers in Congress, Democrats will sweep the midterm elections.

We might actually be able to Make America Good Again. Fingers crossed.

If someone had gone into hibernation for six years, starting in 2019, and just now suddenly woken up, they might be surprise by how different the world is.

One thing they would immediately notice is that millions of people, including the people that they knew before they went to sleep, are meeting over Zoom all the time, instead of meeting in person. These same people would never have even heard of Zoom in 2019.

But what would probably seem even more startling to our awakened sleeper is that nobody seems to notice that this fundamental change has occurred. If asked, people will likely say that reality is the same old ordinary boring reality, just like it always has been.

And yet to the person who had missed the last six years, this will all seem like some kind of crazy episode of Black Mirror. All of reality has changed, but all of the people have changed with it, so nobody even seems to notice.

Today I went to my favorite purveyor of fine chocolates. The nice lady behind the counter warned me that prices might go up soon “because of things”.

Those were her exact words. It seems that the chocolate itself is imported, and therefore they have little control over the prices.

I complimented her on her studied choice of words. How, in the course of a pleasant conversation over chocolate, do you speak about the unspeakable?

In such situations, a little verbal ju jitsu may be called for.

Here is a partial list of the NSF grants that have recently been terminated by the idiotic six year olds who are pretending to run our nation’s executive branch.

If you go down the list and try to make sense of it (which might be a fool’s errand), what stands out is what appears to be a deep contempt for any Americans who might be trying, despite economic challenges, to get a better education for themselves and their children.

The message that comes through, loud and clear, is a glaring distain for the United States of America and its citizenry. How odd that the greatest threat to our country is actually sitting in our nation’s capital.

Sometimes, what is needed is stillness, and quiet, and a space between things.

I am one of those people who often goes to the Wikipedia to find out what notable people were born on the current day of the year. It’s amazing how much you can learn if you just pick an interesting person and go to their Wikipedia page.

Once there, you might start to follow the links, and before you know it you’re way down the rabbit hole. It’s usually a very satisfying journey.

I know that there are people who have exactly the opposite habit. They turn to the Wikipedia to find out what notable people have died on the current day of the year.

The Wikipedia is very accommodating, whatever your tastes. For any given day of the year it lists both the notable people who were born on that day and the notable people who died on that day.

It seems to me that this might be a defining psychological trait. Are you a person who is more curious about what lives were started, or a person who is more curious about what lives were ended?

In either case, I wonder what that says about you.

Recently I have come to appreciate the New York Times for a surprising reason. Yes, it’s the newspaper of record, and yes their reporters work very hard (sometimes against great odds) to uncover the real story.

But there’s something else — something that I used to take for granted. It’s the fact that the New York Times does not care that I am reading it.

There was a time when that would have seemed like an odd statement indeed. When you pick up a newspaper, the newspaper doesn’t change just because you’re reading it.

But newer forms of media, like my Google feed, are obviously watching me as I am reading. When they see that I have read about something, they immediately present me with similar things to read.

Which to me seems backwards, because the last thing I would want to do after I have read about something is to read about the same thing again. To me that’s the definition of boring.

I would much rather use my time exploring something new. Call me old fashioned.

So I really appreciate that the New York Times is indifferent to my reading habits. Whatever I choose to read or not read, the contents of the paper stay the same.

It’s as though they actually believe in an objective idea of truth. Now isn’t that something?

Somebody said out to me today that the Cybertruck “looks like it belongs to a landing party of space Nazis.” To me that seems like a pretty accurate description.

And it also explains several things. For example, why would Elon Musk make an ostentatious show of doing Nazi salutes in public, when his favorite president is claiming to be trying to stamp out antisemitism?

At first I thought Musk was just trying to align with our president’s true beliefs. After all, we’re talking about a president who hangs out with the virulent antisemite and white supremacist Nick Fuentes, and who is also working about as hard as he can to make black history disappear.

But then the comment today about the Cybertruck, and it all fell into place. Musk does not make Nazi salutes in public because he’s an antisemite, or a white supremacist, or a neo-Nazi. He may be all of those things, but that’s not why he is doing it.

He is doing it to sell cars. Clearly he’s trying to promote the Cybertruck — a car that looks like it belongs to a landing party of space Nazis.

What better way to sell such a car than to get people thinking about space Nazis? And what better way to get people thinking about space Nazis than to actually be one?

We spend our entire lives experiencing a particular form of asymmetry. That asymmetry is so baked into our experience that we don’t even think about it.

From the moment you are born, and throughout your life, you have been seeing (and hearing and feeling) the world around you differently from everyone else, because you are seeing through your eyes, while they are seeing through their eyes. Then at some point in early childhood you make the mental leap to accepting that we are all sharing a common reality.

But that is not your actual sensory experience — it is an intellectual construction that you have formed out of your experience. Let’s take some simple examples.

If I hold up an apple, you and I will agree that we are both seeing the same apple. Yet we are literally seeing two different things. You are seeing one side of an apple, and I am seeing the opposite side.

None of this matters all that much in reality. After all, the construct of shared reality that we each place over our respective perceptions serves us quite well.

But it might indeed start to matter once we all begin to wear augmented reality glasses. At that point, your perception and my perception of shared physical reality might start to deviate a lot more.

You and I could be in the same room, both believing that we are having a shared experience, but we might be wrong. Your glasses and my glasses might actually be showing us quite different things.

I suspect that we will need to develop new social conventions to deal with this shift in the relationship between reality and perception. Hopefully we will all end up seeing eye to eye.

April 25 is an illustrious day in the history of science. On this day in 1953, Watson and Crick, building partly on the work of Rosalind Franklin and others, published the paper that described the double helix structure of DNA.

The very next year, on April 25, 1954, the first practical solar cell was publicly demonstrated.

Then on April 25, 1961, Robert Noyce was granted a patent for inventing the integrated circuit. Without that, you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

Finally, on April 25 1983, humanity reached physically beyond our solar system for the first time, when the NASA space probe Pioneer 10 traveled beyond the orbit of Pluto.

Unfortunately, if the current policies of our Federal executive branch had been in place, all of these scientific advances might have been illegal. I suspect that they all sound suspiciously “woke”.