March 30, 2017

2017.03.30
Computer Love Letters... this echoes (but predates) some ideas I've had for blending Love Blender and geekery for a long time.
[William] Hamilton died in 2000, after catching malaria on a trip to Africa to investigate the origins of HIV. About a decade before his death, he wrote about how he would like his own burial to go. He wanted his body carried to the forests of Brazil and laid out to be eaten from the inside by an enormous winged Coprophanaeus beetle using his body to nurture its young, who would emerge from him and fly off.
No worm for me nor sordid fly, I will buzz in the dusk like a huge bumble bee. I will be many, buzz even as a swarm of motorbikes, be borne, body by flying body out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars, lofted under those beautiful and un-fused elytra [wing covers] which we will all hold over our backs. So finally I too will shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone.
from "Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness", Peter Godfrey-Smith

(Full disclosure: I am making fun of myself here, too. My wife and I have been married for nine years, and in those nine years I have not shared a one-on-one meal with any other women except maybe my mother or sister. That's not because of any principle other than the one that also has prevented me from sharing more than maybe two one-on-one meals with any men in those nine years: I'm an asocial hermit. Also my company is of no value to anyone.)
Referencing how disallowing the possibility of men and women dining together for non-pre-pre-sexytime reasons is greatly disempowering to women. Conservatives like to bash Islam for its anti-Feminist ways, and yeah that's more egregious, but this kind of thinking is more insidious.
Man, the dumb-ass crap conservatives will put on the side of a bus. And here I thought "if we didn't spend so much on EU we'd have more money to put into NHS" was the biggest bus lie I'd see.