First Contact With Human Cultures

First Contact with other human cultures is a mainstay of science-fiction. I started reading a Battlestar Galactica / Star Trek crossover when I realized something rather important.

Spock raised his eyebrow further. "This is your method of defusing, Captain?"

I agree with Spock, that Kirk's methodology is completely frakking lame. Especially since it's rather obvious from the Enterprise's first scans that they're dealing with refugees. The Galactica's fleet is battle-scarred and they have too high a population for mercenaries.

Do you know how you greet a fleet of wartorn human refugees? You send them a hail consisting of music. Specifically, Sol Invictus by audiomachine looping a couple times till everyone's listening to it. Then you greet them with,

"Welcome to your new home, if you wish it. Your epic journey is over. You are safe now, fellow humans."

over and over and over for an hour or until they finally get the message. Soothe their pride and their anger at the same time as you IGNORE it. Ignore all hails, all demands for introduction, all personal introductions, all posturing, all speechifying, all politicking. Until one of the magic words are spoken, "we need medical supplies / food" or "where do we go?" Then IMPERSONALLY offer them coordinates like you're offering them the steak or the salmon for dinner.

CONFUSION TO THE ENEMY. The very first principle of war. Can you think of any pompous warmongering asshole that would have the first clue how to respond to a message like this? I can't, therefore this strategy can't possibly lose. But it can win big.

When you want to express EMOTIONS, words are insufficient and they positively get in the way. Words suck. But music is awesome. So why not use it? And both 'reassurance' and 'belligerance' are emotions, therefore they can (and HAVE) been expressed by music.

People prefer face to face communications precisely because they can see someone's FACIAL EXPRESSIONS. What are the facial expressions of a starship? That convey emotions to those watching it? There are none. But music creates a fantastic substitute so long as you build up a library of emotional songs.

Emotions, and music, are both a tool and a weapon. And it's pathetic how they aren't used. How instead you have political speechifying by narcissistic assholes propping themselves up, claiming to "represent" this or that political unity. As if the self-description of the political entity could ever mean anything to a complete stranger who's never heard of it before!

I Don't Read Academic Papers

Obfuscation

I've read Richard Gabriel before and I refuse to read any more from him, or any other obfuscator. You know, until now I didn't know why him and his ilk repulsed me so much. I had some vague explanations like "I'm overwhelmed with work" or "I'm done the intellectual phase of my life" but there are too many counter-examples to those.

A few minutes thinking about it in the proper framework, of this being a STALL (something I couldn't do no matter how much I wanted to because it violated my principles) and I pinpointed the reason why. It's because Truth and Understanding are core values for me which makes Clarity (related to their combination) a +2, which makes people like Gabriel a -2. Meaning, someone I HATE. The same for all the trash they write. So him, Paul Graham, and anything written in an academic paper form or on PDF are not saying anything I want to hear.

If they had anything meaningful, important and intelligent to say about the world, they wouldn't be doing their very best to appear to be two-faced flimflam artists. And every single last academic paper sounds like this because they eschew plain ordinary language in favour of pretentious passive-voiced historico-linguistic crap. Pretentious liars who want to APPEAR authoritative when I don't consider them authoritative at all.

But the worst for me are people like Richard Gabriel who show SOME of what I'm looking for. Their coming so close and yet landing so far off just makes them more frustrating.

Clarity

If someone isn't CLEAR then it's because they don't understand what they're saying OR they don't consider it important OR they don't consider you important. If someone is LENGTHY then it strikes down the last possibility, leaving only the first two.

Now, if someone doesn't understand what they're saying, why should you waste your time reading what they're saying? And if someone considers what they say to be unimportant, then why would you show them disrespect by failing to reciprocate their feelings, something you do when you read what they wrote?

Writers who aren't trying to communicate shouldn't be read.

As for books, the last ones I read turned out to be nonsense so ... they follow the same rule. To be precise, two of the last four books I've tried to read (A Theory of Justice and The Art of Interactive Programming) turned out to be nonsense. The amazing part is that I ended up with ironclad proof of this after only a few chapters. And the other two books (No Contest: The Case Against Competition, and The Seven Day Weekend) were monotonous because I already wholeheartedly agreed with their central thesis and didn't need a how-to in order to walk through all the implications. The first few chapters was enough for boredom to set in. Small wonder I haven't tried to read any book in years.

Finally, there is this notion among the weak that you need to encourage "critical thinking" by not saying anything. The so-called Socratic method. When in reality, Socrates was just a flimflam artist who spewed contradictions all the time. Well, it doesn't matter, because my mind is not so weak that critical thinking can be turned off. It doesn't need to be "encouraged" or "nurtured". Which is why I have nothing but contempt for those notions outside of a K-12 classroom setting. And as I'm not K-12, it's patronizing and condescending as hell.

To summarize, if someone obfuscates in their writings then they're an idiot so their writings are worthless, they're the kind of idiot who would condescend to their audience hence their writings are worthless, or their writings are just worthless and they know it. Clarity is the hallmark of communication. Unclear communication is no communication at all.

Physicists Don't Want You To Understand Physics

This is quantum theory. This is quantum mechanics. This too.

But the guy in the videos is wrong when he says that it's not understood by physicists. It is, they just keep it as a super-advanced topic which only the cosmologists and superstring theorists are taught. The lower 99% of physicists are fed crap because that's what they want to eat. And they vomit that crap back to any non-physicist who wants to listen to them.

And then every so often you'll get a civilian who's more curious than 99% of physicists .... :| Or is more concerned with Truth or Understanding, rather than pontificating and looking good and saying what everyone else says or holding onto their erroneous false inherited beliefs.

When teaching you physics, the hardest thing to teach you will be what's obsolete, so that you can avoid being contaminated by it. These words are obsolete yet omnipresent:

• particle
• big bang
• uncertainty (eg, heisenberg uncertainty)
• collapse of wavefunction
• probability

So all of these obsolete concepts are taught from first year uni to PhD level, and then you go to work in physics and if you're a retard you never learn beyond them, which accounts for 90-99% of them. But then you've got people who go into cosmology or whatnot, who really CARE about the nature of the universe. And instead of talking about 'particles' they talk about 'excitations' and instead of talking about 'probabilities' they talk about 'amplitudes'. And you know what's the kick in the crotch?

If you take a probability course in the math department, they won't tell you what a probability IS. But if you go digging through old math books from decades past, you'll find it. And you know what the boring basic obvious concept taught to all 1st year math students was? It was just 'amplitude'. A probability is an amplitude ... it has nothing to do with "chance" or "luck" just *thickness*. A probability is a map from X to Y1,Y2,Y3,Y4...YN and depending on how thick the Ys are, that's their amplitude. So if there's two lines going from X to Y1 and one to Y2 then Y1's twice as 'probable' as Y2.

And you know, this is a super-super-secret-super-advanced concept in physics found in the first few pages of a banned math book ... Banned knowledge, that's what it is :| so yeah, it really is like a crypto priesthood with fucks who care more about their careers or jobs than anything else. And the whole reason they do this, refuse to teach basic concepts the way I taught you in categories of complex systems ... is because if they did, they would have to consign some big name physicists in the past to the dustbin of history. Some nobel prize winners would have to be trashed, completely forgotten and never talked about and that's the most horrifying fate imaginable to them.

The most horrifying fate imaginable to physicists ISN'T that you don't understand physics, or that NOBODY understands physics. The most horrifying fate to them is that THEY ARE FORGOTTEN. And that explains why an Evil Narcissistic fuck like Richard Feynman could get along swimmingly amongst them.

Iron Laws of Storytelling

There are lots and lots of rules of storytelling that are good ideas. Things like 'do not do ninja slash'. But these are IRON laws that must NEVER be crossed otherwise you will instantly and totally alienate your intended audience.

In romance, the princess may never die. The prince may die and frequently does. But if you kill off the princess like Babylon 5 did to Talia Winters, then you're sending the message that love is worthless.

In action thrillers, the protagonist may never be overpowered. If they're overpowered compared to the villain then there is no risk or danger, thus there is no thrill or excitement.

In heroic adventures, the protagonist may never be hypocritical in their driving values. The protagonist may be a lying conniving psychopath, but they MAY NOT be a hypocrite. And if a supporting heroic protagonist is hypocritical then the protagonist MUST call them on it. Because tolerating hypocrisy sends the message that principles are worthless and that values are worthless. Imposing one's values on the world is what adventures are about.

In Mysteries ...

In Horror ...

I'm sure these are collected somewhere, and I wouldn't mind knowing about it. I was told two of them without any explanation why they're iron laws. In fact, the cretin who pointed out that "protagonists may never be overpowered" never qualified it as applying only to action-thrillers, so it never seemed like an iron law to me since I hate action thrillers. So I only just figured out that iron laws exist and *why* they exist.