Just in case...

Apparently, everyone was supposed to take this week off from the blog, but no one told me. But just in case that's not true, I'll write a little short post about the various stupid things I pondered this week.

Anatomically modern humans have been around for 200,000 years. Since then, our physical evolution has been almost completely replaced by cultural evolution. But those advances rely entirely on the surrounding culture. For example, the life expectancy in most 1st world countries today is three times that of most European countries a millennium ago. This is largely due to advances in health care and a better understanding of human nutrition. However, how many of us actually know how to pasteurize milk or extract penicillin from a moldy citrus fruit? Physical adaptations last, the ability to eat both meats and plants, large brain cases and large prefrontal lobes, and bi-pedal locomotion are gifts we all get to enjoy. So I came up with an advancement benchmark, the "naked time traveler" test. The name says it all, you travel through time, and you're naked - no gadgets, no gizmos, no reference guides. It doesn't really matter where you go to, 150,000 BCE, 12,000 BCE, 335 BCE, 476 CE, or 1066 AD, you're still not very likely to be more useful than your "primitive" counterparts, and, I should guess, often times considerably less useful. Maybe you have a useful skill, like engineering - you still probably aren't familiar with how to make trees into lumber or ore into nails or even the modern carpentry concepts needed to turn plans into products. We've all become codependent cogs in the great cultural machine. And the biggest casualty has been meaningful human advancement.

I recently read an interesting article about the conceptual barrier against considering how the future might be that is created by the possibility of creating greater-than-human intelligence. So I did some more poking around, apparently, there is an entire movement of people who are somewhat obsessed with this idea, or the "singularity." Whether it's artificial intelligence that can improve its own source code, computer-enhanced human brains, or human brains scanned and emulated on much faster and more powerful computers, the verdict is always the same - humans can't conceive of what something smarter than humans are capable of. We cannot predict a future that operates outside of our level of understanding. The whole thing seems a little rough around the edges, and maybe the impact is a little exaggerated, but in general, the premise seems true. Max Headroom works in mysterious ways...

Who the hell decided that turducken was a good idea? For those of you unfamiliar, that's a turkey that has an entire chicken inside of it, which of course has an entire duck stuffed inside of it. I've seen recipes that call for stuffing the duck with ground sausage, if your lust for multiple meats hasn't been met yet, as well as one that was entirely wrapped in five pounds of bacon (don't let being from two separate recipes stop you from doing both). And people wonder why we're the fattest major country in the world...

And finally, the us military has 1.45 million active duty members, 850k reservists, 580k civilian employees, and 98k additional Department of Defense employees. That's juuuust under 3 million total for my fellow right brainers out there. By contrast, there are currently 8,000 people in the Peace Corps and 75,000 in Americorps. I don't remember which, but one of those two groups received a quarter of the national budget last year and the other was mostly funded by donations and helped to keep afloat by unpaid volunteers. I wonder what the Peace Corps could have done with $700 billion last year. Good thing they didn't get it, a few years like that and we'd probably run out of wars to fight in!