From whine to wine

One of the quirks of system at large are the small but important mechanisms of inducing buy-in from the participants. If everybody plays a role in government, by volunteering time and effort in an area of interest, then the cost savings can be passed on to us the taxpayer - except how much of the function of infrastructure management is just plain not getting done?

Creativity is stamped howdt because everybody must meet the rules of the funding source - the feds representing the taxpayers. Once you become a citizen member of a task-force or committee or panel, you are helping in the evaluation of projects in your area of expertise. For this privilege, you get to write off some of your mileage in your taxes and get to put another line on the resume. But it is a conflict of interest to actually do work in a field that your expertise is used - because you can't make money off the taxpayer while working for government. Unless of course you are elected.

so, we the people need a different school system than the current one owned and operated for the benefit of we the people and run by the state. the rand philosophy of withdrawing support and just not being on committees appears to be more in tune with the needs of we the people, rather than participating in learning amidst the cognitive dissonance of current educational institutions. so, what sort of media can take the population by storm - like yahoo or google have done - that is the next step. Individual learning, for those with the interest level to learn. Pods of people with common interest and different expertise breaking new ground.

Colleges used to be places where people learn how to put the information together, now they are all 'universities' - we need ways to allow people to enhance their skills in area of their own interest. To develop expertise in something other than the monoculture that the current system teaches, using a diversity of approach. Mebbe a video game focused on science rather than death and destruction. But then, the game would have to blow something up to get people's interest. And blowing up is what happens when you get too much energy flowing in one confined space - a fissure happens and things blow up. Hmm, virtual chemistry lab ...

Problem is, you don't find reality in a classroom and reality doesn't conform to simplistic theory. It is buried in nuance under depth of scale - where things operate over so many scales that the continuum works for whatever scale you happen to be privvy to. And as you peel back the onion skin, you find another layer of onion - similar, yet different, carrying out a redundant function, but reproducing in order to accomplish the task.

Ask yourself if a blood cell within your body could have thoughts - the ability to plug itself in from the stream of blood cells, rather than the neighbor in the stream. What if the blood cells are just little bio-chem cars that take carry around mitochondrial enzymes, who do their daily work for a living, then commute in their cell to the heart store, then pumped back back home to the kids. A day could be the time between heartbeats; an eternity, the eternity of your life.

Dr. Lenny just finished reading Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash - a novel where gangs own turf all over the world and nationality allows you to be protected in reality as you deal in an elite computer metaverse run by hackers. Interesting concepts of winners and loser's, and a very early use of the term avatar in a virtual context. Not as serious as Black Arrow, but at this second reading, i got more context than just story line. Y.T. rocks