Sci Fi Love Advice

there needs to be a love advice source (hotline, support group, whatever) for people in science fiction shows. the first thing they need to learn is to move on - if the sign. other is dead or has his/her mind permanently taken over by a parasite. the next major point: don't limit your social life to one-shot visits to *other planets*. visit places near by, the bar down the street, whatever. most people just aren't going to do interplanetary travel or complete cultural change just to be with you. maybe good for a fling, maybe ideal for a fling, but nothing more.

Depression and Housing Crisis Caused by Optimism

The Great Depression and the recent housing crisis where caused by excess optimism. I've heard arguments that either using gold-backed money or not using gold-backed money is what causes economic depression. I think these arguments miss the point. Even if money was gold-backed, banks could create notes that are guaranteed to have value in some way, and then they could run into problems if they promise more than they deliver. The essential problem is banks (or lenders of any kind) becoming too optimistic and creating "IOU's" of various forms that ultimately cannot be paid.

Love on Other Planets

Science fiction characters always fall in love with aliens while visiting other planets, but don't find anyone on there own. They just sulk about some lost lover when on their home planet. I think ther problem is that they are so busy exploring other planets that the fail to explore their own.

Why People Can Accept Religion

Sometimes religion doesn't make sense, but people often believe it anyway. There's a slot in (nearly) all human minds for religion or spirituality. If you lived 100,000 years ago, the slot was probably filled with tribal religion - like the volcano itself is a god of some kind. Even thought it's incorrect, apparently these tribal religious views (such as anthropamorphizing volcanoes) were useful. If it was not useful, it probably would not have evolved. Those with the "slot" in their minds for religion actually survived and reproduced better than those without it.

Today, the slot is typically filled in with a modern religion. I think that the slot is designed so that the human does not use logic to question the religion very much. So, even people who are capable of logic are able to keep the religion in a "separate place" and avoid criticizing it too harshly. This is somewhat similar to the way a parent will tend to appreciate good qualities of his or her children and overlook the bad.

Gold Backed Money

inflation is probably bad.

seems like gold backed money is a good thing. if there are N atoms of gold on earth, and N is pretty much constant, that gives us a good way to keep a certain number of thingies to trade with. they can't really be counterfeited (reasonably) because it costs more to make a gold atom that the atom is worth. i do wonder a bit: what would if there were globally not enough gold atoms or too many... i'm not sure if that would create practical problems.

also, i think that if banks made gold atoms loans, they could still create a form of inflation by allowing people to borrow more atoms than actually exist - i'm pretty sure banks do that with dollars.

anyway, it doesn't matter that much. savings can be kept in gold.

but in any case, i don't like the government's policy of maintaining inflation - it's similar to stealing a small percentage of money from everybody on a regular basis.

Songs are What People Want to Say But Can't

Songs what what people want to say but can't say to each other directly because of the obligatory veil of communication that people demand when talking to possible mates.

Examples:
Alanis Morissette - Head Over Feet
Outkast - Spread

Human Bottleneck

The human population experienced one or more bottlenecks where the population was reduced to only a few. It makes me wonder, what if the population went extinct at a bottleneck? One cannot answer the question, would things be better or worse. It's possible that some other more interesting species would have risen, and it's possible that a less interesting species would have taken over.

Sex Versus Dancing

Dancing may not be quite as fun as sex but it has several advantages: (1) You can walk up to just about any girl and dance with her in a social dance setting. You can't do that with sex. Just the shear number of women you can interact with is so much greater with dancing. (2) There are arguably more moves to explore with dancing. While it's true that sexual acts can be fairly diverse, the physical requirements put more limitations on the possible movements. Dance allows all sort of position, close, far, sideways, whatever. It might be said that sexual positions are a subset of dance moves. (Or it might be said that dance moves are a subset of sexual acts - maybe - but I will not argue that here.)

The Way That You Love Me

if you take "the way that you love me" (sung (or at least danced) by paula abdul) and invert all the the "it ain't" statements, you get a list of things that women are attracted to or enjoy, traveling, wealth, political connection, getting out of the house, etc. in this way, it's a pretty useful song.

on a slightly different note,
she claims is all about "the way you love me." ok maybe - once the selection has been made.... but in terms of mate *selection* this is not useful. unless women just copulate with ever man they see until they find one that loves them right - i have never witnessed such a selection process. seems interesting though.

Abstraction of Dancing

As the video below indicates, girls at clubs are "at Chucky Cheese." They aren't interested in thinking (using the neocortext). No neocortex should come into conversation. The whole point of drinking alcohol is to shut it off.

Dancing is so abstract that it's pretty much free from thinking. The moves aren't like an argument. They can look good or bad, sure, but still too abstract to be an argument.

Nerds are heavy neocortex users, which is probably why they don't always pick up girls on the dance floor - though I've read that some have learned how.

Irony of Evolution

The irony of Evolution vs. Religion is that spirituality evolved as a means for humans to ignore reality. We are biochemical machines, but it's not neccessarily a good thing to look at ourselves that way. Many people are happier and more productive believing that there's something spiritual beyond - that belief makes them perform better - that's why the belief evolved. It seems that some don't understand this when criticizing people for not teaching evolution (or the like). They don't understand that humans are probably programmed to reject the truth if needed - and accept explanations that don't cause depression.

Responding to the Food Question

standard motif: "how's your x" where x is the food you just got

this one's sort of like the forward basic, very common move

next time i'll be like, what metric shall i evaluate it by? nutritional value? probability that i'll have a headache in an hour? energy content? propensity to keep by brain's glucose level up? texture? response of the tongue to basic sweet/sour/bitter? or the subtler flavors that the olfactory system detects?

it's a complex question - usually i just say "good."

Metaphor - Dating/Dancing

i think that dating is like salsa dancing... and i'm thinking specifically in terms of the way the lead works... the guy is expected to guide and the girl can do her thing within that. possibly another correlation - use of standard motifs.