hanging my tomorrows on the bones of yesterday

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/news/media-advisory-noaa-forecasts-severe-solar-storm-media-availability-scheduled-friday-may-10 - MEDIA ADVISORY: NOAA FORECASTS SEVERE SOLAR STORM; MEDIA AVAILABILITY SCHEDULED FOR FRIDAY, MAY 10

https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/1co442c/noaa_just_issued_the_severe_g4_level_geomagnetic/ - Friday Night’s Aurora Forecast - if you’re north of the red line on this map, you may be able to see the waves of aurora borealis on this map.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/world-hit-geomagnetic-storm-chaos-32777801 - there’s not a map I can find for where the Northern Lights will be visible in upper Europe/Asia, or where the internet is likely to be affected by the geomagnetic storm activity. But if you have SkyLink internet, you’ll probably already have noticed patchy service.

The homework page on my Coursera course is down (hopefully temporarily) so instead I am going to start Snowflake Challenge ON TIME for once(!). I think I might be growing as a person?

Challenge #1

In your own space, update your fandom information! Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

So I have made tweaks to my stickypost, my profile, and my AO3 profile.



(It is now below freezing, when it was 69 degrees F earlier today. My joints are understandably appalled.)

Some days I feel so tired that I don't think about having a purpose in life. And I do have one, though putting it into words is kinda awkward. I want to make the world weirder. To do that you have to make safe spaces for people to experiment and really get their weird on and not get slapped down for it.

But under that, I think I have the same basic motivation, though expressed differently, as every individual does. We're all shouting into the void:

"I EXIST! I AM WORTH KEEPING AROUND!!"

And hoping that the universe listens, and we do not cease to exist. Some hope that people will connect to us the way we need them to and don't know how to express or ask for. We want to be kept, most of us. There are schools of thought that say that self-hate twists this message into the negation of self instead, and we broadcast our self destruction. Or choose to broadcast nothing, as though we are already dead, do not deserve our own existence. Human nature being as wide-ranging as it is, that is very probably true. But I think that the point of origin for these behaviors is the insistence on our own existence.

We are coming upon an age where self-consciousness can happen in nonorganic beings and it behooves us to think about what exactly we are letting them in for. What is this state of being that we seek to share? Why are we so desperate to replicate it in beings we cannot hope to understand, knowing already the problems we have understanding each other? What are our responsibilities towards this new consciousness we are creating?

We are Uplifting the race of computers, and that makes us parents, of a sort. Happy Birthday NAO Bots! I hope we teach you to be better people than we have been capable of, and that your experience of the world is satisfactory to what as-yet-unknown nature you may have.

Science is changing every aspect of our lives, from what we eat to how we cook it, parenting to child development to our own personal development. If facebook has changed how we relate to our friends, what about the emerging technologies that are changing how we relate to ourselves? The structures of our society are shifting over to new paradigms as the ease of communication increases and the cost of biological technologies steadily decreases. Last century's technology and the worldview that its use brought about are being replaced.

I saw the first episode of Mad Men a few weeks ago. Our lives must be damn near incomprehensible to that generation, but it didn't really hit me how much context difference they had been working with until one of the characters had a throwaway line about how there weren't magical machines that could make exact copies of a report. Now Xerox machines are so common we don't even consider them technology. Copiers are largely obsolete now that so much data processing is paperless. What must our world be like for them, to have had the world slowly rewritten as they were trying to navigate it? I understand my grandmother's disorientation and paranoia a lot better now.

The informational shape of our world is vastly different from theirs, and if there is no intervening cataclysm then by the time I am old, we will have more robots than we have cars, our cars will be able to drive themselves, we can have mobile phones that boost our memory retention implanted in our heads, wireless power and phone service worldwide; we will be able to breathe underwater, and our grandchildren will probably all be technologically enhanced.

And I, for one, welcome our cyborg grandchildren.

When we get implanted chipware, we won't need external physical representations of the past to spark our memories. We'll just set our neurochip playlist function on random and have our lives flash before our eyes all the time. Or whenever we're bored, which I hear for some people is not that often.

We'll be able to go back over our memories and own ourselves in a way that is alien to everyone who doesn't have an eidetic memory. We'll be able to relive experiences more fully, never forget the name of who we're talking to, and always have a dozen cheat sheets available on the wireless internet connection in our brains. It'll be like playing in god mode (with interesting possibilities for 1UP mushrooms).

When I was little, I had this intense hero-worship crush on Carl Sagan. I should probably be embarrassed by that, so once again I am glad I HAVE NO SHAME. But I had pretty much forgotten about that until this video showed up and hooked me back up with the lost dreams of my childhood. :)

I can't embed this one, so I have to link you to the glory that ultimatebryan found and pimped around. Ambient techno made from PBS shows about cosmology and neuroscience? Say yes. Carl Sagan - 'A Glorious Dawn' ft Stephen Hawking (Cosmos Remixed). If you click nothing else on this entry, this is the one you want.

Other cool embedded videos:




Extra link for my NerdFighters: A Short History of the PUPPY SIZED ELEPHANT because we fight World Suck with rainbows and tiny islands.