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you're not even alive
Saturday, June 29 2019
Even though it was Saturday, I got up at my usual time, and, after feeding the cats, made myself a french press of coffee and drank it with the cats out on the east deck just like I would've done had Gretchen not been in California. The coffee was putting an unexpected bounce in my step, and I soon figured out why: I had forgotten to drink any caffeine yesterday. After going to the dentist, I'd started drinking kratom tea and then eventually graduated to alcohol without drinking even one cup of Red Rose. That accounts for yesterday's headaches and dysphoria.
Most of my morning coffee-fueled web surfing was in Wikipedia, as I once again devoured evolutionary knowledge as revealed by DNA sequencing and other modern forms of biological data analysis. I've mentioned in the past how different our understanding of evolutionary relationships is from the way it was when I was a kid, back when all that could be done to establish relationships was a semi-subjective comparison of traits. I remember at the time feeling that all the taxonomic divisions were not much more than educated guesses, but I had no hope that there would be a better, objective method available some day. But now we know the relationships between organisms in great detail and are able to provide definitive answers when someone wants to know, say, which two of any through groups are the most closely-related.
One case where, even with all the genomic data, it's still difficult to tease out the relationship between three clades concerns the three divisions of placental mammals: Afrotherians (manatees, elephants, aardvarks, and hyraxes), Xenarthrans (armadillos, anteaters, and sloths), and Boreoeutherians (horses, deer, whales, dogs, bats, humans, rabbits, mice, etc.). All indications are that the three groups split from their parent population at close to the same time. This lead me to speculate that there might've been a founder population spread across a wide area that was segmented into three parts by some singular event. Obviously, continents cannot suddenly separate. But if the connections between them are tenuous and some event kills the populations in the land bridges (or island chains) then divergence and speciation can begin in the disparate parts of the range. I found a very helpful interactive world map that allows you to see the arrangement of continents and sea levels at various times in the past. The most interesting moment is probably 66 million years ago, as that's when life's biota experienced that crucial soft reboot.
There was one weirdness in all of this: evidently a collagen analysis of a South American mammal revealed it to be a close relative of perissodactyls, that is, horses, rhinos, and tapirs. But this creature was in South America before the Great American Interchange (when the mountains in Panana connected North America to South America three million years ago. So how had perissodactyl-like beasts made it to South America? Had there been a semi-aquatic form that had somehow rafted across open water? I wanted answers, and Google was not being forthcoming.
I took the dogs on a loop through the forest west of the Farm Road and within range of my FM transmitter so I could listen to a YouTube video in which a guy was giving a very basic programming course about the C# language, as developed in VisualStudio. The programming concepts were extremely basic, but what I found helpful was information about VisualStudio itself, which I find too noisy and brittle to use comfortably. Interestingly, the vocal narration alone was sufficient to help me learn a few new things, particularly about IntelliSense. As I descended the escarpment above the Farm Road (so as to stay within the range of my FM transmitter), I found a snail shell among the bluestone blocks slowly calving from the slope. Snails are rare up on Hurley Mountain, probably because the rock contains little calcium carbonate, which they need to make shells (slugs, on the other hand, are extremely common). But perhaps there is a layer in the strata exposed in that escarpment where calcium carbonate is relatively abundant.
By now the day was hot and muggy and I'd switched to kratom tea. I took the opportunity of the sunny day to run some additional tests with the speakerbot. I'd been concerned that the megaphone (which uses four D batteries supplying six volts) would need more voltage than the five volt USB jack provided by the cheap Chinese solar controller. But with some testing, I found that the five volt supply produced an audio signal roughly as loud as the one I got using a heavy duty six volt battery I'd been using for testing (that battery is over 16 years old; I use it only rarely, for tests like this). This meant that I'd handled all but one of the speakerbot's hardware issues. The only remaining one related to the weakness of the Raspberry Pi Zero W's WiFi capability. There's a place on the board where one can solder on a tiny UHF WiFi antenna jack, but it requires that I also move a jumper so tiny that I can't really see it with my naked eye. I don't want to be trying to tweak electronics that are beyond the capabilities of my crude soldering equipment and shaky hands, so I ordered yet another Raspberry Pi Zero, this one a non-W model that contains no WiFi or Bluetooth equipment. The plan is to attach a USB WiFi dongle that has a proper antenna connector. I could also do this with a conventional Raspberry Pi W, but I can't be certain that the on-board WiFi capabilities won't be draining power even when they're not being used.
This evening, I did the usual things I do when Gretchen is away: drinking booze and smoking pot. I have nice pot-smoking pipe I made some months ago from plumbing pieces, and the only thing wrong with it was that it couldn't be placed bowl-up on a table. It wanted to lie on its side, allowing the pot to fall out. So I built a fixed landing gear for the pipe using 10 gauge copper wire. At the time I was rewatching parts of the Black Mirror episode Crocodile from the fourth season.
I briefly went out on the deck after the sun set and the daylight had gone murky. A number of large, dark dragonflies were darting about at close range, raising the interest of Celeste the Cat. I think they were eliminating mosquitoes, and they were so effective that none actually were able to reach me.
Later I lay in bed and watched live Pantera videos. Back in the early 90s when I got into alternative metal, I used to have a particular fondness for Pantera, and tonight I was trying to remember why. It didn't take me long to figure out why Pantera is so great: it's all about the weird time signatures. Sometimes the rhythm limps, other times it gallops. And it can change without warning. On top of that, the precision is amazing; bizzare harmonic effects that would normally be fortuitous accidents repeat reliably as often as they need to. I don't know of any other band that does this quite so perfectly. True, Phil Anselmo's (the vocalist's) hypermasculine stage presence is so absurd that it's kind of comical. But his role in the band was trivial compared to the three guys playing instruments.
My Pantera jag led me into a vortex wherein I learned all about the origins of NuMetal (a somewhat-embarrassing genre that probably wouldn't exist without the influence of Pantera). As various authors attempted to define NuMetal, someone threw out there that under any definition Grimes' "We Appreciate Power" is probably also NuMetal. I'd never heard of Grimes, but from what I read, she's a musician at the nexus of pop and art, like a more obscure Lady Gaga. I listened to "We Appreciate Power" and liked it so much that I had to listen again. And again. It's a quirky hook-heavy song purporting to be pro-artificial-intelligence propaganda aimed at those of us still trapped in organic bodies. That's the kind of trolling one rarely experiences in musical form. Maybe Grimes is one of my people! As I watched the lyrics video (since that's all there is), I imagined what future generations will say about it, especially if those generations are all operating as self-aware simulations within computers. It will be a little bit sad, since it will be known that the song was written back in a desperate time when humanity was still limited by their bodies and ravaged by disease, mortality, and Russian intelligence operations. (I'm not a techno-optimist, but it can be fun to pretend that humanity's future includes at least some descendants of today's technology.)
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