So, Space X got off the ground last night. Word on the street is, they’re predicting the price for a private flight into space to drop to $20MM (instead of Nasa’s $60MM) by 2015. Also, the remains of actor James Doohan and 200 others are aboard as part of a new space burial program. Apparently you can purchase a sub-orbital burial that will burn up on re-entry, or be sent into deeper space and never return. Right now I’m imagining a future where we don’t just send cremated ashes into space (a bit redundant if you ask me), but full specimens, which burn up whole on re-entry like so many shooting stars in the night sky. A constant, fleeting reminder of the beauty of being a billionaire.  

A recent article in the New York Times posits a very interesting future for our relationship with plants. Plants have played an important, and often anthropomorphic role in our specie’s relationship with nature and its intrinsic ethics. Countless stories refer to the relative evil and saintliness of nature, being either the mother of all, or “red in tooth and claw.” And trees, especially trees of ancient domains like the Redwoods and Sequoias, enjoy an elder-worship status in our society. We marvel at the historical events they’ve “seen” — their memories hidden behind hundreds of rings. We climb and defend them with our own lives when they’re in danger. We “hug” them, and we talk to their household-sized counterparts. And even if this is just nonsense to you, you at least know people do it. 

Michael Marder of the New York Times summarizes a more recent development in the story of plants, and their debatable sentience in “If Peas Can Talk, Should We Eat Them?”

Since Nov. 2, however, one possible answer to the riddle is Pisumsativum, a species colloquially known as the common pea. On that day, a team of scientists from the Blaustein Institute for Desert Research at Ben-Gurion University in Israel published the results of its peer-reviewed research, revealing that a pea plant subjected to drought conditions communicated its stress to other such plants, with which it shared its soil. In other words, through the roots, it relayed to its neighbors the biochemical message about the onset of drought, prompting them to react as though they, too, were in a similar predicament.

Curiously, having received the signal, plants not directly affected by this particular environmental stress factor were better able to withstand adverse conditions when they actually occurred. This means that the recipients of biochemical communication could draw on their “memories” — information stored at the cellular level — to activate appropriate defenses and adaptive responses when the need arose.

The research findings of the team at the Blaustein Institute form yet another building block in the growing fields of plant intelligence studies and neurobotany that, at the very least, ought to prompt us to rethink our relation to plants. Is it morally permissible to submit to total instrumentalization living beings that, though they do not have a central nervous system, are capable of basic learning and communication? Should their swift response to stress leave us coldly indifferent, while animal suffering provokes intense feelings of pity and compassion?

The behavior, and perhaps even the “worldview” of these plants doesn’t sound particularly human. It’s more aligned with a hive mentality, such as bees or ants, than anything we traditionally think of as “like us”. Chemical communications still seem alien to us. But if we consider the ways in which we’re changing — as a culture and even as a species — it may be true that we’re developing more plant-like behaviors than we are mammal or animal-like behaviors. 

The structure of the internet, for example, more accurately reflects a decentralized root system brain than it does a mammal brain. In the example above, memories were stored, but not in the way we tend to think of human memories. They weren’t accessed and played back for reference. They were stored in places unassociated with the origination of the memory. They were backups and simulations without a real sense of context. Have you ever tried to find an original video on Youtube after it’s been auto-tuned a million times? Or tried to trace a Tumblr post back to its original author? The web doesn’t have a memory like we do. It’s not obsessed with origination or accuracy or individual sentience. It just collects and redistributes data like DNA mutations. The internet behaves much more like a plant-based network than a human brain this way. Just emotions and hopes, and alarm and regret flying around at light speed, moving others to mysteriously sympathize but without a true sense of why.  

Vegetarianism, as an ethical approach to eating, has not been long with us relatively speaking. Certainly, people once ate diets that were either heavily animal protein or heavily vegetable, but mostly in line with availability and scarcity rather than any sort of ethic. Traditionally, we ate living things that had the most protein and fed the most people. But those food sources also happened to be living things we identified with — mammals — at least up until the point of an uncomfortable empathy. We tend to shy away from monkeys, apes and each other.  

This strikes me as an odd sort of desire — to consume a living thing based on mutual respect or empathy for its life. The long history of hunters and warriors from tribal communities exhibits a deep longing to feel connected to these animals — never stronger than at the moment of death in the hunt. Even cannibalism, as horrific as it is to most of us, is deeply rooted in a belief that you gain psychic power from the living thing you consume. Powers specific to its place in the world and how it goes about living. 

Extending this model of consumption based on empathic desire — could the growing popularity of vegetarianism actually be a move not made in the preservation of living things we empathize with, but towards another type of being we’re developing a greater empathy for? As we develop more plant-like behaviors (anonymity, augmented communications styles, hive-mind reactions and real-time mutation to stimuli) will we eat even more plants? Will we revel in it the way some people engorge on a 32oz prime rib as some show of life-force? The more we realize that plants are alive, and like us, the more we may want to express our longing to connect with that nature through its primitive destruction and consumption. 

Like anyone else, my most-used apps are organized on the front page of my iPhone with highly specific strategies — communication apps are always lower right for instant thumb access after the lock screen swipe for example.

But when I download a new app, it get placed in the next available slot across
my homepages, which means its always on the last page. I have 5 or 6 pages of apps at any given time, so this creates a lot of frenetic swiping from page 1 - 5 in the days following a new app download.

Why not bring it to the front? Because apps get bought and then held in mental purgatory until they prove their worth and lobby for a disruption to the existing grid. Every move of an app creates a huge amount of friction in the UX — physical reflexes have to be retrained.

I want an instantly accessible page of apps I’ve recently downloaded. Swiping to the left for the search screen has little value — I’d happily give that up for a page with new apps, nicely tucked in alongside my most used and highly curated main screen. A simple two-page tango.

Because all those apps on page 2-4? That’s just fly-over country. All the action is forced to the coasts, and that’s a shitty way to treat those perfectly useful, nice apps in the middle.

I am a wordsmith alive in the time of image making. In the past 12 months, 10% of the photos ever taken in human history, were taken. Every 2 minutes today we snap as many photos as the whole of humanity took in the 1800s.

As a wordsmith, I am acutely aware that conventional wisdom has determined a picture is worth 1,000 words. But I also know, as a wordsmith, that neither is comparable to the four-dimensional apparition in your mind, or the pain in your gut, that is created when I simply write the phrase: your grandmother. 

And the odd feeling you have when I point out that you probably only imagined one of your grandmothers, when you most likely had two worth remembering. 

Weird.

Trevor Gilbert took the time to sum up his impression sof the Midwest start-up scene (or lack thereof, from his perspective) in an article for PandoDaily.com today called The Midwest Mentality. It generated a thoughtful and biting response from Matt Moog over at BuiltinChicago.com.

If I look past some of Gilbert’s more flip platitudes, I think he makes some valid points. But I’m not sure they’re aiming at the right things. First, to say that the Midwestern mindset is the problem shouldn’t be to say that it’s somehow wrong, but maybe that it has drawbacks unfit for some contexts. A “problem” can be taken to mean a harmful situation, or it can mean “an inquiry starting from given conditions to investigate or demonstrate a fact.” He could have used more of the later — but his thoughts are worth some further consideration that he should have shown to his own topic.

The criticisms put toward the Midwestern Mindset can be said of any regional mindset. Different areas of the country have different outlooks, values and responses to stimuli. What bums me out is that he assumes that the Valley mindset is somehow better or more evolved, and permanently so. It may be so for now, and in certain contexts, like pumping out innumerable meaningless products without a clear value proposition or model in order to find the ones that stick, or organically (or luckily) stumble onto some relevance (I’m paraphrasing Gilbert’s summary here). But that’s just a numbers game, not passion, as he claims.

Certainly there is passion in the Valley, but largely around a few specific industries. These are the industries that developed out of a few ambitious and co-located entrepreneurs the same way any regionally specific boon started. Whether the agriculture of the south, lumber barons of the east, the auto industry of Detroit, the ad men of New York, or the oil barons of the southwest — it all starts somewhere, and tends to remain there, for a long time. Granted, the Valley’s success isn’t a natural resource issue. It’s more of a talent issue. But most of that’s as migratory as the gold rush, not something that can be attributed to a regional mindset.

He claims that Midwestern industriousness is a major component of Valley transplants’ success (work ethic). Why then would the Valley’s inspiration not do the same for us? I guess its still a migration issue in a certain sense, but the culture is transmittable to a degree. And many regions are transforming themselves with learnings from the Valley’s success.

I’ve read many theories on the difference between men and women’s communications styles and most seem to settle on men using verbal communication in order to gain some sort of power, in a competitive sense, over their peers while women tend to use language as a way of exploring ideas and making sense along with their peers as a way of uniting efforts. I think my experience proves that to be typically the case. And a century of corporatism has encouraged male behavior to the point where it’s become nearly impossible to have a real conversation with the people you work with. Most verbal communications are inherently political — it’s just a matter of degrees.

The corporatism of verbal communications has reached a state of near art. While most of us don’t engage at the highest and riskiest levels of corporate communications, the manner in which we communicate trickles down the way anything else would — whether its company “values” or clothing styles, we take our cues from the top. In this way, I find more and more people, women too, embodying the art of corporate communications, and it’s destroying our ability to generate ideas.

1. People talk at you, rather than with you, to arrive at their personal point of view — similar to how a corporation “stays on message” until detractors or alternative points of view are exhausted. It’s as if they’re on the news and you’re just their camera man.

2. If they are unable to sell their ideas, or generate their own, a person will simply adopt the viewpoint of a person they perceive to be in power. Others are then dismissed and discouraged to offer alternatives as the group noticeably tacks towards the dominate communicator. Basic school-yard move.   

2. Rather than adapt their point of view, a person tries to manipulate and re-phrase your idea in a way that it can be consumed under the umbrella of their own like a hostile take-over. Before you know it, the sign on the door of your idea has a new name on it and all the locks are changed. 

When you find someone who actually listens for the value in what you’re saying, offers their ideas as a sacrifice to the greater good of the conversation, and you both walk away with a more nuanced or robust point of view as a result — those are the ones to stick by. They’re the long play. Because while we may be living and working in the age of corporate communications as high art, that’s usually when the pendulum starts to swing back the other way. Personally, I’m looking forward to the next abstract expressionist phase where we all just pour pure emotion onto the table — even if just for a few years to remind ourselves what it’s like to speak with abandon.  

Mens’ fashion has just as much to do with looking alike as it does with standing apart from the crowd. Mens’ fashion history is deeply rooted in the idea of the anonymous uniform, and the collective power that comes with group appearance. Everything from militaries to the job site to a baseball team is a collective expression of belonging and teamwork. We grow up with the vague notion that we will at some point join the ranks of “men” in some act of society. 

Part of being a man is dealing with the massive amounts of pressure and anxiety that come with society’s expectations for your reliability, confidence and willingness to belong. It’s a double-edge sword. Belonging helps surpress anxiety, but it also creates it. We have a natural tendency to seek shelter, and then act out against those shelters when they become too stifling. Our fashion reflects this. We admire the classics, tweak them, and return to our uniform roots often. 

The other day, while getting dressed, my wife put together an ensemble she’d never produced before. She used parts from various outfits she’d had for awhile, a few new elements like a belt, and accessorized almost randomly (seemingly, but of course, not). It all came together in a lovely gestalt of “fashionable.” I countered by asking “should I just wear my uniform then?” as I put on raw denim Levis, Sperry boots and two layers of collared flannel (one gingham, one nearly-invisible herringbone). She felt at ease because she was able to defy precedence. She had taken old items and given them new life alongside fresh introductions. I felt at ease because I had repeated a pattern that makes me feel similar to how I’ve felt before, and created an emotional confidence. I develop a comforting relationship with a few items at a time, and wear them until their time has come. 

Both are part of the larger stories of our emotional selves, expressed through something as surface-y as fashion. But surface is not the same as superficial. A layer without depth is superficial. But something that surfaces (verb) comes from the depths. 

It seems inevitable that someone will invent a way to read minds, and read them well. And this is likely how that will happen — by developing a method for deciphering the electrical signals in a person’s brain as they listen to words or conversation. Pretty straightforward stuff really. See the signals, decipher the signals, collect the data.

But while this may be a straightforward method, the actual interpretation is likely to be a mess. Messes require talent and insight beyond the data. As scientists point out, electrical signals in a person’s brain can fire in the same way whether we’re experiencing something in the moment, remembering something from childhood, or even dreaming in our deepest sleep. In other words, according to the brain, it’s all the same program that’s running. And while we may all follow some basic patterns for these types of thinking, remembering, and imagining, each person is likely to be constantly blending these thought methods together at any one time. 

When you’re listening to a conversation, your probably trying to determine that person’s tone of voice, their body language, their “intent.” In order to deduce any information from these other inputs, you’re comparing what your hearing and seeing to the billion other interactions you’ve witnessed with that person, or someone else entirely. In this way, you’re already blending what you’re thinking with what you’re remembering. And god forbid they’re hot or you might even bridge into the dream/fantasy state, like you do 100 times a day, in the same moment. All of these create a single “thought” of electrical signals.

So yeah, it’ll be difficult and problematic to say the least, but we’ll get there. I’m more intrigued by a future-state where we can assume that our thought patterns are as accessible as our “likes” on Facebook or our searches on Google. What then? Most of us will simply allow this because it will inevitably come packaged with some benefit we couldn’t live without — like nano-thought-induced-relevant-advertising. “But they know what I like!” But others, of course, will be interested in staying off the grid. For these people, there’s a home-made recipe for jumbling brain waves that may prove useful: speaking in tongues.

Whoa! Yeah. I unwittingly grew up in the Pentecostal church. If you’re not familiar, it’s the church that earned the description: “holy rollers” — they dance around (some with snakes!), heal people, and speak in tongues. It’s bonkers. For this group, the act of speaking in tongues is a prayer method. From the outside, it all sounds like gibberish (and it is in some ways), but to the disciple it’s prayer turned up to 11. According to believers, when you pray in tongues, it’s not you who’s praying, but the spirit of god praying through you in a language unknown to man. In other words, it’s willful possession — but they’ never refer to it that way.

Scientists have studied this for years. And in short, they think it works. Not because they think prayer works, or god is involved, or any of that. But because something interesting happens when you occupy your brain’s linguistic centers with gibberish — you can’t think with normal brain patters. It’s a bit like meditation when participants repeat the word “ohm” over and over again. It shuts down an otherwise over-active part of your brain so that you can start to think in new, more obscure ways that have a ring of truthiness to them.

And that’s where tongues comes in. Speaking in tongues, or silently “thinking” in tongues (this is allowed too) would occupy the normal electrical patterns of thought that could be captured and deciphered by any device or interpreter. It would create static — lots and lots of static. The trick would be to practice thinking your own real thoughts in other ways, along other channels, in the midst of all this static. Sort of like circular breathing.

Ironically, in the Bible, god delivers the gift of tongues to the disciples in the form of a cloven tongue of fire upon their heads. He does this so that when they go out onto the balcony of the “upper room” they can speak to the droves of foreigners that have gathered to await next steps in the whole Jesus-is-dead-now situation. When they speak with languages unknown to them, the crowd inexplicably understands them. The holy spirit acts like a linguistic coder and decoder to everyone involved. The gift of tongues was created in order to make translation and interpretation possible. In our future scenario, it could be used to obscure that capability instead. Gives a whole new meaning to the term “brainstorming.”