Polyploid

Once upon a time I wrote a book. While writing that book I had a dry spell. I spent days unable to get a single word upon the page. Then I drank a glass of wine. A few glasses later there were eleven pages, and a completed rough draft. In that moment I realized why so many authors are alcoholics.* Drinking releases your inhibitions. It wipes your fear. You can make a fool of yourself, and you don't give a shit. The blank page is no longer your enemy. You no longer fear its judgement. This is why so many great drunks are authors. This is why I haver not written another book. *In the words of Hemingway, "Write drunk. Edit sober."

 I started from a dream this morning, my heart pounding. We were running. It was a race. It was mostly women. We were running downhill and underground. It got easier the further we went. There were strange corners. There was the place where the black woman lawyer showed her underground club. And then we were running again. It started with an monitoring system that had been taken over. We had to install the last two pipes in a place where they'd been formerly, but we couldn't. One broken, and I wasn't listened to. The monitoring system had been slowly taken over by someone for a very long time. This was the last one, and one of the tube broke during installation. They were long things with cups at the end. The cups were glass. They were wrapped in a foil for installation. One broke. We argued, and then we had to run. At first there will only women, although a friend who might have been David Raikow was there. Soren too. We ran along the freeway. It was both a dash and a mara

Jan 2, 2020 I've been up since before five. The world has been burning in flats below me for days on end. I woke up a from a dream. From a nightmare. I killed a woman. I killed her in a dream. I was on mushrooms, and I thought she'd been fatally injured. I didn't want to do it, it just happened, and I fled, or at least that's what I tell myself In the reality of the dream, I'd shared the mushrooms with her. We were on some sort of a rollercoaster, and she did something stupid, and she injured herself. I didn't want people to know what had happened. I didn't want to be held responsible for her death. I didn't want people to find out. I didn't want go to jail. So I beat her to death. Other people saw. They knew. Her frat-boy friends. They knew. It happened in my hometown of Kent, Ohio. Since the dream I've carried the guilt of her death for years. It was one of those hyperrealistic dreams. The kind where there are colors, and maybe even smells. So

A thought... It's a frequent refrain in some circles that academia is being overrun by political correctness in the form of racial and gender politics. It is true to the extent that there seem to be many articles about gender and race. It is often impugned that this is being pushed by radical liberals and feminists (aka Social Justice Warriors) be those faculty or students. I'd like to offer an alternative interpretation. The activity in racial studies and gender studies (i.e. the study of women) in academia does not reflect an agenda of social change. It reflects the desire to succeed in academia by finding new truth. For centuries the impact of non-white people and women on the world has been systematically ignored in academia. To discover a new (and often significant) truth, all one has to do, is to look at an existing field, and ask one's self, how does it relate to people of color or women? If you ask this question, then you will find undiscovered or unrecognized facts

Since the Covid-19 pandemic began I've seen the idea posited that diseases evolve to become less deadly over time. I want to show who we know that this idea is wrong. The idea that antigenic drift leads to less deadly variants is a misunderstanding of host-disease co-evolution. It is generally true that if a disease and its primary host organisms have been co-evolving for many generations then we expect fewer hosts to die from the disease. One interpretation is that the disease has become less deadly. Another interpretation is that the host population as a whole has become more resistant to the disease. In the first case, the proposed mechanism is that disease organisms which kill their hosts don't spread as much, so the less virulent strains survive. In the second case, the mechanism is the disease kills off all the susceptible hosts before they can breed, and in later generations there only resistant hosts remaining. So lets do a thought experiment, and see how this plays ou

 Why does bigotry feel like a personal affront to me? I'm a white dude. I have a good education. I make good money. My father and mother had college degrees.I spent the first ten years of my life in North Eastern Ohio. Why then do i end up in a place where injustice angers me so? On the inside? I grew up poor. My family was on welfare. My father was mentally ill. It was controlled by drugs, but he was still not the person that my Mother had married. My memories start in married student's housing at Kent State University. My friends came from all over the world. There was Tarumi from Japan. There was Fonzi from Nigeria. There were the Greek kids a few doors down that could barely speak English. There were my friends Buddy and Glen from Hawaii. There was Brian and Joy Marcano from Venezuela. There was Jordi and his mother Royce, the woman who introduced us children to Vodun around the campfire. And then there the two weird kids from Kansas. After three and half years we moved. We