In the middle of the desert you can say anything you want
Welcome to the Fermi paradox, mired in shit. Shall we itemize the
errors that the tapeworm is making in its analysis?
The first and most grievous offense our tapeworm logician has committed
is that of anthropocentrism (or rather, of cestodacentrism); it thinks
everything revolves around tapeworms. In reality, the human is unaware
of the existence of the tapeworm. This would be a good thing, from the
worm’s point of view, if it had any grasp of the broader context of its
existence: it ought by rights to be doing the wormy equivalent of hiding
under the bed covers, gibbering in fear.
It has inferred the existence of other humans, but it doesn’t know
about cooking, or the other arcane processes by which food makes its way
into the gut for the tapeworm to absorb. Or about the sanitary
facilities that kill tapeworm eggs before they get to another,
intermediate host. There are vast, ancient, alien intellects in the
macrocosm beyond the well-known human, and they are unsympathetic to
tapeworms. Intrepid tapeworm cosmonauts seeking to make their way beyond
the anus and across the universe to colonize other humans are in for a
rough ride indeed, for they are intimately evolved to thrive in one
particular environment, and that environment (the mammalian gut) is
sparsely distributed throughout the universe. Much of the cosmos is
inherently hostile to tapeworms. This is why tapeworms have not, in
fact, colonized the universe and converted all available biomass into a
constantly spawning Gordian knot of Platyhelminthic life, contra the
prognostications of some teleologically-inclined tapeworm-philosophers
of yore.
The human does not owe the tapeworm a living, or even a comfortable
home. The tapeworm’s existence is contingent on it not damaging its
human, resulting in an undesirable human/tapeworm interaction with fatal
consequences for the tapeworm. Some of the tapeworm’s descendants might
be able to find another new human to claim as their home, but the same
constraints will apply. Only if the tapeworm transcends its
tapewormanity and grows legs, lungs, and other organs that essentially
turn it into something other than a tapeworm will it be able to make
itself at home outside the human.
Yeah! Shub-Niggurath! Come on! Shub-Niggurath! Come on! Shub-Niggurath! YEARS! Shub-Niggurath! Shub-Niggurath! We have Shub-Niggurath! THANK YOU NOW! Shub-Niggurath! We have Shub-Niggurath! THANK YOU NOW! Shub-Niggurath! Shub-Niggurath! Shub-Niggurath! Shub-Niggurath, ever since! Shub-Niggurath! All right now! Shub-Niggurath! Everyday! Shub-Niggurath ever had it! Shub-Niggurath! Ever since! Shub-Niggurath has ever been here! Shub-Niggurath has always been here! Shub-Niggurath has ever been here! Shub-Niggurath has ever been here in all times! Shub-Niggurath! Ever since, all around the world! Shub-Niggurath! In the days of nowadays, all over the world! Shub-Niggurath! EVERYTHING EVERYTHING ALWAYS ALLOWED! Shub-Niggurath! Ever since, all over the world! Shub-Niggurath! Ever since, all around the world! EVERYTHING EVERYTHING IS HERE! Shub-Niggurath! Shub-Niggurath! Ever since, all around the world! Shub-Niggurath! EVERYTHING EVERYTHING ALWAYS ALLOWED! Shub-Niggurath! Ever since, all around the USA! Shub-Niggurath! EVERYTHING EVERYTHING ALWAYS HERE! Shub-Niggurath! EVERYTHING EVERYTHING ALWAYS ALLOWED NOW! Shub-Niggurath! Ever since, all around the world! Shub-Niggurath! EVERYTHING EVERYTHING! Shub-Niggurath! Ever since, all around the world!
An Alternative Writing System Whose Properties Combine the Linearity of Spelling with the Free-Form Nature of Drawing
Spoiler: no it’s not.
Fractals of the fractal dimensions most often found in nature (~1.4) make us happy; we are evolved for exactly those dimensions, found in trees/clouds/…
Taylor calculated that the fractal dimensions of Pollock’s work hovered
close to 1 in the early days of his experimentation, in 1943, which
means they were barely fractal at all. But over the next decade, they
increased regularly, hitting just over 1.7 in 1952, 20-odd years before
Mandelbrot’s seminal work.
Our fractal fluency begins with the movement of our eyes. When we look
at a fractal, our eyes trace a fractal trajectory with a dimension of
around 1.4 —no matter what the fractal’s dimension is. Nature’s most
prevalent fractals share this dimension, falling within a range of 1.3
to 1.5. “If we lived on a planet where 1.8 was prevalent, we would have
ended up with an eye trajectory of 1.8,” Taylor says. “Clearly what’s
happened is our visual system has evolved.”
And we feel good when we do what
we’ve evolved to do.
The fractal dimension of art is not always obvious. The bare-boned Zen
meditation garden of Kyoto’s 15th-century Ryoanji Temple, for example,
solely of 15 rocks positioned across a rectangular swath of raked
gravel. In 2002 a group of researchers decided to investigate the
mathematical reason for its appeal to tourists and meditators. Using a
technique called medial-axis transformation, they found that the
axes of symmetry between the rock clusters
formed the fractal contour of a tree.
When the rocks were rearranged in computer
simulations, that tree-like structure and its
meditative effect were lost. “The people who built the
temple didn’t know about fractals,” says Sternberg, who was not involved
in the study. “But they understood at some unconscious level that
placing the rocks in that way made people feel calm.”
In the brain, as in the heart, “just
right” means just fractal enough to walk
the line between chaos and order.
K.’s are the most “real” of them. Meta-analysis
In all three settings, the vocabularies of motive among panhandlers have a common theme of need: for shelter, drink or food. What’s interesting is how each cultural setting changes the calculus about what kind of motive is most likely to bring in the cash. Perhaps it comes down to what each society views as among the basic human rights: in the US, shelter has a plausible claim to that status, but beer does not; whereas in Germany, it an appeal for trinkgeld succeeds as an appeal to common humanity and decency; in Turkey, hunger seems to trump all other claims.
However, running this hidden service has been a learning experience. The problems that I’m experiencing with my Tor Hidden Service are similar but different from non-Tor services. They have the same basic causes – bots and denial-of-service attacks – but the Tor architecture introduces a serious problem. This problem leads to choke point on the hidden service server. Bad bots and attackers can create a bottleneck, resulting in a denial of service. Without rewriting the tor daemon or spawning dozens of parallel servers, there are few mitigation options.