Diary (May 28, 2020)

Online diary of Karl Jones for Thursday May 28, 2020.

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Diary

Minneapolis riots

My beloved Minneapolis is burning up in a terrible fever of tear gas and rubber bullets and burning buildings.

Screenshot of web search results for "Minneapolis News":

Captain Crunch with Crichtonberries

Captain Crunch with Crichtonberries!

The adverbial form of corollary

What is the adverbial form of "corollary"?

Reducing phantom traffic jams is like seizing power in a rebellion

Boing Boing reports: What are "phantom traffic jams" and how can technology get rid of them?

Interestingly, models have shown had just one self-driving vehicle for every 20 human-driven vehicles can dampen a stop-and-go phantom traffic jam wave.

I am reminded of this passage from John Brunner’s The Jagged Orbit (1969):

[Tactics by which rebels seize power] go way way back to the industrial unrests of the nineteenth century, at least, and probably a good deal further. What [fictional rebel Morton Lenigo] did in Britain followed exactly the same pattern. He exploited the long-standing truth that if you can get five percent of the population behind any movement, whether it’s pro or anti, you can bring down governments.

• Comment @ Boing Boing

All emotion makes people less intelligent

Bullshit. Emotions are fully human and entirely appropriate.
-User Mindysan33 @ Boing Boing comment board

I agree, emotions are fully human and entirely appropriate. Wouldn’t have it any other way. But this does not rebut my argument, which runs:

• All emotion occurs in brain centers which evolved prior to the neocortex.
• The neocortex is where intelligence happens.
• Emotional activity reduces neocortical activity.
• All emotion makes people less intelligent.

Carl Sagan doesn’t say this in The Dragons of Eden, but his discussion of brain function and evolution provides the physiological basis for my argument.

Anger and fear are so well understood as intelligence suppressors that we take the stupidity they cause for granted. Si Monumentum Requiris, Circumspice.

But consider also love, which enables charming sociopathic men to leave trails of abandoned children and broken hearts in their wake.

Consider sorrow and grief, during which time people needlessly and impulsively take their own lives.

No intelligent person would murder from anger alone.

No intelligent person would choose a sociopathic lover.

No intelligent person would grieve to death when a good life might be had tomorrow.

All emotion makes people less intelligent.

• Comment @ Boing Boing

Salve Amicus

There's a line in Phil Dick's "Now Wait For Last Year" where one character greets another with "Salve, Amicus".

I remember looking up Salve Amicus ... I was maybe ... seventeen at the time? One of those learnings that sticks with you, a new idea which opens unexpected doors.

I don't recall the character's name, but I'm pretty sure it was the small-time drug dealer, the one who is pushing the war drug JJ-180 on behalf our alien "allies" against our alien "enemies" ... sells ithe drug to the protagonist's wife, gets her hooked. Dick wrote (in one of his essays, I think; or perhaps an interview?) that JJ-180 is based on an idea from William Burroughs' "Naked Lunch" -- Burroughs speculates in passing about a drug so powerful, so addictive, that after one dose the addict dies without a second dose.

Of course, what Burroughs didn't think through is that this drug already exists, by God. It has existed since ... well, since life began. It's called food.

• Comment @ Facebook

Fiction cross-reference

• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Karl Jones (nonfiction)