When You're Strange

Social isolation has a tendency to distort subjective impressions of exterior phenomena, and this is not limited to perceptions of facial physiognomy; indeed, related phenomena can also be perceptually distorted, and this would include the qualia of non-same-sexedness and transport medium fitness.

For any given individual with tendencies beyond the socially-accepted range of performance and/or state of being, facial perception begins to seem a function of precipitation. Indeed, it can be stated that codes of personal identification become progressively non-optimal, when you're strange.

I Dream Of CD

Click for a better jpeg.

My dreaming mind has a sense of humour -- or, I should say, it thinks it has a sense of humour. Just before I woke up this morning, it tossed a stupid joke at me:

In the midst of our pandemic, I had a task to perform. From a pile of CDs in jewel cases, all of them symphonies by Anton Bruckner, my job was to put the CDs in order of composition, from Symphony No. 00 in F minor, to No. 1, to No. 0 in D minor, and then all the way to No. 9.

That seemed easy enough at first, but every attempt was complicated by a bunch of semi-identical CDs with a cartoonish black wolf on the white cover of the jewel case. Whenever the regular CDs appeared to be in order, these "cartoon wolf" CDs would show up out of nowhere to mess up my efforts.

I was getting frustrated: what the hell was going on? Finally, a voice in my dream told me that these disruptive CDs were the Bruckner variants....

Then I woke up, and thought, "Come on! That was awful."

Lonely Mitochondria

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I worry about the endosymbiotic hypothesis of mitochondria. It keeps me awake.

Without mitochondria, the chemical reactions within cells that make multi-cellular life possible would not exist. The endosymbiotic hypothesis puts forward the idea that mitochondria were once individual cells living separately, that were somehow ingested or parasitized by other cells, yet survived, reproduced in their new environment, and provided a great source of energy for their hosts.

If this hypothesis turns out to be true, then here on Earth we have mitochondria by accident -- an incredibly lucky accident. How often could this accident (or any similar endosymbiosis) be repeated on other planets? How many planets are full of thriving bacteria, but with no multi-cellular forms?

Given the sheer size of the universe and the likely number of planets, this lucky accident might have occured many times, but on worlds far apart from each other, so far apart that interstellar contact would be impossible within the lifetime of any civilization, or of any species.

Either way, the implication here is that we live in a universe of planets bulging with life, but not with multi-cellular, intelligent life. And this idea nags at me: we might be alone, or so isolated by chance and by distance, that we will never learn if anyone else is out there. We will never know.

Ad For A Martial Arts Course....

...In one of my dreams last night:

"Book reviewers, why wait? Attack writers NOW."

Vague Suspicion

When I find myself shouting PISS OFF AND DIE at every third sentence, I should ask if I might have chosen the wrong writer.