Sci Fi

As I continue into my six year relationship, I am still learning about the patience that is required to date a scientist. A scientist is a different breed. I scientist is a hypercritical, ultra-objective, abstract thinker that, for a living, connects links and finds causalities that are not necessary obvious. A scientist’s job, quite literally, is to be paid to think about things the way no one else can or does. The sole purpose of a scientist’s education is to qualify them to ascertain unique judgments and conclusions. To a scientist, this revelation is common sense- that a Doctor of Philosophy in Biology, for example, is someone who is paid to analyze and apply the philosophy of the life sciences for the sake of advancing the human enterprise. Many people not associated with the sciences often mistake ‘Doctor of Philosophy’ to mean ‘philosophy major’, ‘useless degree’, or  ‘not a real scientist’.

A PhD, ladies and gentlemen, is the person that discovers the structure of DNA, a PhD is a person that maps the human genome, a PhD is a person that analyzes forensic data to determine the outcome of a court case, a PhD is the person that discovers a new disease, finds a cure to that disease, a PhD discovers the medicines that save lives or the material needed to develop a prosthetic limb. PhDs do this by taking large amounts of data, applying them to theory, developing hypotheses, and testing them. To develop a prosthetic limb for example, a PhD must analyze how the body works, what the physical dimensions of the body are, what kinds of movements lead to the injuries that require prosthetics, how the body will react to certain materials, the longevity of those materials inside the body, the affordability of the final product, the societal impact of the product, who the product will be available to, how to educate the public about the prosthetic, etc…. The PhD must take an extremely holistic view of the entire process, must think critically about every step, must analyze the pre-existing data that develops the current philosophy or paradigm. The PhD must determine if the science and data makes sense, whether it works, and if it does, whether or not the outcome is more beneficial than detrimental to society. If the current paradigm does not work, the scientist must question why and develop a new paradigm. To develop the new paradigm requires all the same processes of working within the current one, and then developing, not only a new application of the old data, but a new application of completely novel and new data.

And because of this, it is extremely difficult to live with a scientist. As someone who is paid to be a hypercritical, ultra-objective, abstract thinker, most issues in the relationship will be viewed through this scientific lens- issues will be analyzed to a microscopic level, issues will be analyzed at a macroscopic level- seemingly disconnected social issues, political philosophies, scientific theories, and empirical observations will be applied to reason and explain a thought process, a judgment, an action, a financial reality.

Finances and financial issues are the bane of many, if not most, mature relationships. Once individuals have moved past the immature and emotional insecurities of their high school and undergraduate years, they reach a time in which fidelity, stability, compatibility, and reliability are the integral components of their relationship choices. However, once a partner is established that meets these criteria, relationships must mature and real emotional bonds must be established. Then, long term goals including finances, marriage, insurance policies, job locations, children, etc… become primary factors in the longevity of the relationship. This is based on personal experience, but it seems that:

Some relationships will last a few days to weeks- these are relationships in which immaturity and emotional insecurity undermine the process. These are often little more than physically motivated ‘flings’.

Some relationships will last several months to a few years- these are relationships in which the couple may have, but not necessarily, gotten married or conceived children early, but have discovered, over time, that despite being emotionally mature, they are not capable of building emotional bonds with one another due to infidelity, instability, incompatibility, or unreliability.

Some relationships last several years – these are relationships in which the couple has grown together emotionally and are compatible with one another. These relationships are long term relationships and often result in marriage or children. These relationships seem to end due to financial disputes, job relocations, disputes over children, etc… which can lead the relationship back to the status it was at in the several months to a few years stage and possibly to immaturity and emotional insecurity. This regression ultimately leads to a break-up or divorce.

Some relationships last a lifetime – these are relationships in which the couple has grown together and is emotionally compatible with one another. These couples have learned from experience that some things in life are disproportionately more important than others. The financial issues that plague long term relationships no longer bother these couples since these couples have discovered that emotional stability and support is by far the most valuable asset you can have with a partner.

A scientist views finances in the same manner it views science- empirically, objectively, hypercritically, and holistically. When a scientist makes a financial decision, it is similar to the way research is conducted. What will be acquired for spending this money, what can no longer be acquired for spending this money, are there any other likely outcomes of this financial decision that have not yet been thought, how was the money acquired, is it possible to acquire an equal amount by doing the same thing, how does the culture of the area affect financial decisions, how will financial choices affect surrounding individuals, who will benefit from these financial decisions, what new financial strategy could completely change the answers to this entire line of questioning, what would the new answers be, are those answers practical, what new skills will be required, etc…?

Thinking about finances in this manner is essential in America. It always has been essential in America. However, coming out of the Great Recession, it is obvious that most Americans do not think in these terms. Most Americans are convinced by the banks, lenders, financial analysts, etc… that the best way to live is the American Dream. That is, the best way to live is a large house, marriage, white picket fence, new car, dog, a few children, kitchen with an island, green lawn, huge swimming pool… Translation- the best way to live life is to leave financial decisions to the lenders resulting in crippling debt that takes a life time to pay off. The lenders still do this today, despite a financial crisis that nearly ended the USA. Anyone who questions the current lending process in the USA is labeled liberal, un-American, freeloaders, cheap, etc… How convenient that the same people that charge interest on loans to collect free money for their billion dollar enterprises are the same people telling you to buy whatever you want, to forget about your debt amount and minimally pay it off over the course of a lifetime, and that people who do not have nice things do not have them because they are poor- not only poor, but lazy and half-witted as well. The opposite seems to be true in many cases. People that have acquired new houses, new cars, dogs, kids, living rooms that look sterile enough to be operating rooms- these people are the backbone of America; these people are poor due to crippling debt. And as America continues to rely on this backbone constructed with inflated values, expected earnings, and bottomless debt, it will perpetually exacerbate its fragility and economic instability.

Only four years ago, certain neighborhoods in East Mesa had foreclosure rates as high as 12.5%- that’s one in eight houses. One in eight houses was completely abandoned. The person that skipped out on the loan was never encouraged to think about finances scientifically or critically, but was convinced that purchasing a $240,000 house in an ‘$80,000 a house neighborhood’ was a good idea if even 1% was put down on a loan that charged 8%. This is financial suicide. Of course, the loaner was never concerned because the loan could be sold to the highest bidder for a commission based on the theoretical money that would be acquired by simply collecting interest over 30 years. These loans could then be bundled into securities and sold to the next highest bidder for a commission. Thinking critically about financial decisions was never a factor because, at the time, it was not profitable to think about financial decisions critically, at least on a level that was beneficial to the individual consumer.

The result was clear to everyone who lived through the bleak times of 2009. Professionals were out of work, shopping malls become parking lots, car dealerships nothing more than ghost towns- balloons still floating, emphasizing the haste in which they collapsed. Commissions could no longer be collected since the population could not pay loans and therefore banks could not collect interest. The whole country was on the brink of collapse because no one thought about finances from a practical perspective. Everyone was convinced that debt was not only the best answer, but the only answer to their financial questions. Individuals were convinced by monetary predators that financial stability means something other than financial stability. That financial stability is the American Dream which translates today into crippling debt.

This is the false dichotomy of the American Dream- crippling debt is the backbone of America; crippling debt is the bane of America. America cannot simultaneously exist in perpetual debt at the levels of the Great Recession while moving forward. The system has taught us that this does not work. To move forward, Americans need to reassess, reevaluate their financial goals and financial realities. The loan companies want the debt to continue because they get to collect interest; the government wants the loans to continue to collect taxes, but the victims of this debt crisis, the individuals, need to adjust how they think about finances. To continue to buy-in, as Americans historically have, will only perpetuate and exacerbate the problem. Americans need to get critical, need to get scientific, about finances. This is the heart of the Occupy movement. These people are not lazy, they are not freeloaders, they are not looking for handouts- they are simply tired of living in a system that perpetuates the American Dream: the notion that somehow America can sustain itself if its citizens are simultaneously broke and surrounded by needless consumer goods for the purpose of handing free money over to banks, investors, and billionaires in the form of interest obtained through predatory loans.

Considering all this, I cannot help but wonder how I, or anyone, could ever justify buying into this system. How can I ever justify putting myself into crippling debt for the sake of acquiring copious consumer goods I cannot afford? Being a scientist, having thought about my financial situation this critically, I cannot justify perpetuating this system. I cannot buy into the banking industry’s lure of the American Dream at the cost of my financial stability. On a much larger scale, I cannot justify buying into the industry’s lure of the American Dream at the cost of America’s financial stability, the world’s financial stability. When I am encouraged to spend money I do not have for the sake of minor conveniences or unnecessary ‘upgrades’ under the guise that I am financially stable, I feel absolutely repulsed. I literally feel sick to my stomach thinking about all of the ideas I have considered, all of the conclusions I have drawn, all of the consequences my actions have. My financial situation affects the American economy, which affects my neighborhood, my neighbors, crime rates, education spending, the entire world.

This makes it extremely difficult to talk to me about finances. Inquiries into automobile purchases or lawn upgrades immediately make me cognizant of the thought process described above. This depth of financial awareness is hypercritical, ultra-objective, and abstract. The depth of this thought process has led me to question the financial reality of America, and ultimately the financial reality of myself, in the same way I would a prosthetic limb. It has enabled me to look at loans, interest, banks, and the American Dream through a different paradigm. A paradigm I believe will come to be familiar in text books as the zeitgeist of the post-Great Recession America.

My name is Bradley Lusk. I am 26 years old. I am a scientist and a PhD student. I have thought just as critically about love as I have finances, and I love my girlfriend. The bank shall no longer receive $400 a month in free money for interest. I will not be acquiring a new car, a dog, or a fancy lawn. By the end of September, I will have spent $63,000 to pay off my house. Financial stability and responsibility is my new American Reality.

Godzilla

Recently, I have been reading and viewing many sources focusing on thermonuclear war. This is a topic which has always interested me due to the profound implications it has for humanity. People, as a whole, contain the power necessary to achieve absolute global destruction at any time based on any whim. Yet, we all live complacently, uncaringly, and some even unknowingly in eternal consumer bliss. Too often, people, you, me, we, often view things or have them explained at a level we completely understand, yet its implications we do not fully grasp and therefore accept the situation as if it were normal. We have this feeling of, ‘well, I understand what the atom bomb does so that’s just the way it is.’ Full scale retaliation, bomb shelters, diplomacy with North Korea, anti missile capabilities; all these things mean we’re safe... And all this talk of disarmament.

Today, Russia and the U.S. still have nearly 2,000 nuclear weapons primed for use at very short notice (1). Combined, the countries have approximately 4500 operational atomic bombs. Of course the potential to use them exists, that's why we have them lying around. Nuclear weapons exist as an implicit hypocrisy. As Martin Ames articulates so well in his essay Thinkability:

“...the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons [is] nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening the use of nuclear weapons. And we can't get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons. The intransigence, it seems, is a function of the weapons themselves.” (2)

My question is, ‘where do we go from here?’ Stronger weapons? Tsar Bomba already carries a potential yield of 100 megatons of TNT. Purposely restricted to only half of its potential, this 50 megaton thermonuclear bomb has already been tested, and works. This bomb, at half power, produced, in one explosion, 10 times the amount of total fire power used in WWII, including both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This bomb exploded about 2.5 miles from the Earth’s surface and registered a 7.1 on the Richter scale. The seismic shock created was observable three times as it circumnavigated the globe. The fireball was 5 miles in diameter, the mushroom cloud was 40 miles high, all buildings in a village 34 miles were completely destroyed, third degree burns could be occur 62 miles away, windowpanes broke 560 miles away, the flash was seen 620 miles away, and the fallout at full scale could have accounted for 25% of all nuclear fallout since atomic bombs were invented(3). 

This is not a current event. This October 30 will be the 50 year anniversary of this detonation. And yet, this nostalgic tone has a tinge of bitter sweetness. It has been 50 years, and nothing of this magnitude has been deployed for combat reasons. However, it has been 50 years; I cannot imagine where we’ve come in our capabilities since then. But, the past has proven itself. We ought no longer to ask ourselves, ‘Coulda? Shoulda? Woulda?’ What we need to ask is, ‘Can we? Shall we? Will we?’ The answer to the former is blatantly obvious. The fact that some even consider the latter debatable, I find, absolutely detestable. To me, there is only one obvious answer to the question, ‘Where should we go from here?’ Kurt Vonnegut Jr., in Slaughterhouse Five, has already articulated my sentiment:

"American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off backwards from an airfield in England... The formation flew backwards over a ... city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The [soldiers] below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck... fragments from the crewmen and planes... When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals... The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again..." (4)

Although Vonnegut Jr. is obviously being rhetorical in his suggestion that we simply make time run backwards, metaphorically, however, this is precisely our only sane option.

Gort: Personified consequence of nuclear war- TDTESS (1951)

So, I look back on the many Sci-Fi films of the past and try to see how they relate to both ‘their’ times and ‘my’ times. That is, how did this have meaning then and how does it have meaning now. The Sci-Fi and horror genres are inexplicably connected with the fears, with the ethos, of the period. In 1945, America unleashed two atom bombs on Japan. In the 1950’s the Japanese personified this tragedy with Godzilla; American’s were warned of the consequences of nuclear war with The Day the Earth Stood Still. In the 60’s we had Doctor Strangelove and a very dramatic documentary from the BBC entitled The War Game depicting what nuclear war would spell for the United Kingdom(5). In the 70’s, the sequel to the Planet of the Apes predicted a future where humanity worships the atomic bomb. 

Here we are today. How does atomic warfare fit into our ethos? Is it still a menace as Godzilla portrays? Are we keeping it within our realm, under control, as The Day the Earth Stood Still beseeches us? Or are our whims of diplomacy feeble and nuclear fallout only inevitable? Do we still worship the atomic bomb? These are important questions we need to ask ourselves. Nuclear war is not a war, it is annihilation. We need not worry about the world ‘after’; we need to worry about the world ‘before’. The word before is in quotes because there isn’t really a world ‘before’; there is only the world. ‘After’, there won't be one left.

Scene from Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

(1) http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/nuclearweapons/nukestatus.html
(2) Amis, Martin. Einstein's Monsters. Vintage Books. New York, 1987.

(3) http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Russia/Sovwarhead.html
(4) Vonnegut Jr., Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five. Dell Publishing Co, Inc. New York, 1969.

(5) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58NmAzQzRjk

Interdisciplinary Blogcast

 
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." -H.P. Lovecraft (1926)

"...Interdisciplinarity is driven by expected benefits of solving problems collaboratively across the boundaries of traditional disciplines and, from a different perspective, by ethical and societal problems at the intersection of science, technology and society. These problems led to the establishment of technology assessment, global change studies and sustainability research. There is a broad practice of interdisciplinary activities all over the globe..." – M.H.G. Hoffmann (2009)

Here I am, eighty years since Lovecraft's words, in the world's foremost interdisciplinary research program thanks to ASU's "unmatched ability to build a graduate program around this [, interdisciplinary research's,] rapidly emerging new trajectory for science". In spite of Lovecraft's bleak and brooding prophecies regarding the dangers of correlating scientific disciplines to piece together dissociated knowledge, I strive to do such a thing in order to 'advance' my field and improve human health. And for my work, I am very fond. So here I am, 'fondly' exploiting the trenches between ignorance and idea, philosophy and philanthropy, understanding and undertaking; rationally eliminating the 'God of the gaps' day by day. Potentially at the benefit servicing all mankind; potentially at the dismay of destroying all mankind. For better, or for worse?

My name is Bradley Lusk. I am currently a PhD student in the Biological Design Program in the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University's Tempe Campus. Since I can remember, I often find myself thinking deeply about many a thing, as I'm sure most people do. When speaking my mind to my father, he often told me, semi-sarcastically yet half-assed seriously, 'you should write a book'. I thought to myself, 'how does one write a book?' Then I thought, 'do people even write books anymore? Sure! Wait, do people even read books anymore?'

So here I am, stuck somewhere between generation Y and generation X, between a useful ending and a letter no one cares about, and what am I to do? I guess my generation is the generation of the blog, so I may as well embrace it.

Anyways, here it is: my blog. Hopefully people read it, hopefully people don’t. What do I expect? Eh. What should you expect? Eh. I never was one for expectations. I have started this blog to talk about things that interest me. This ranges from vintage video games, laserdiscs, and records, to local businesses, concerts, and events, to discussions of religion, political science, objectivism, and the Price is Right. Basically, anything goes. This is the medium through which my mind shall express itself via type, for me, for you to read if you care. Only, whether you read this for knowledge or understanding, or while defecating before breakfast, hopefully I, we, your cat, come out of this achieving what many Eastern philosophers only dream of.
Check back every few days. Who knows, you might find something profound, you’ll probably find something mundane, and you’ll definitively find something offensive.