When life changes for an existing city, you can either adapt the city or you can replace it piece by piece. The U.S. pretty reliably picks replacement. It’s interesting to see a place which tries harder to adapt, a spirit no doubt encouraged by the historical nature of the buildings.

Stockholm is also notable for how easy it is to get around on bike. The bike lanes here are serious alternatives to pedestrian or car traffic, with their own signs and traffic lights. They aren’t universal, but they seem to cover the city and the immediate suburbs pretty well. This too is of course fitted into the existing streets and bridges, somehow. Particularly impressive is a few construction sites I’ve come across where a temporary bike lane was built because the existing one was being built over.

Creating high quality bike lanes may seem like an inefficient use of public funds, but of course it’s really no less efficient than building roads. The U.S. does still mostly agree that roads are a common good, and it seems like, in cities, real bike lanes could be as well.

Unfortunately, death is not a disease to be cured. It’s a fundamental aspect of life. In the competition for food and other resources necessary for life, the most significant competitors of any individual organism are the other members of its own species. They are the ones who seek to occupy exactly the same niche. Complex organisms which do not die will have more size and experience than their descendants, and will therefore tend to outcompete them. It follows that species whose organisms do not die will tend to not evolve. They will over time be outcompeted by other species which do evolve. Thus death is a key evolutionary strategy for any successful species. The fact that individuals may prefer not to die is irrelevant to long term evolutionary history.

What this means is that death is a finely tuned aspect of ourselves, just as finely tuned as our rather remarkable ability to reproduce ourselves. And it’s not just an aspect of ourselves, it’s an aspect of our evolutionary forebears for eons.

It may seem superficially that humans pass through a period of childhood, then enter a phase of stasis, and then decline and die. However, in fact humans change slowly throughout their lives. Arresting the aging process would be just as complex as arresting the growth process during the teenage years. All our bodily systems are shaped by evolution to head in a particular direction. Stopping that means changing all aspects of our bodies. It would mean a person aged 20 who does not turn into a person aged 30. That means changing a hundred different aspects of how the body grows.

The fundamental argument of the people seeking to conquer death is that the body is a machine, and that we can figure out how to fix the machine so that it does not fail. However, the bodily machine was created by an evolutionary process, not by human design. Think of the ugliest least comprehensible computer program you’ve ever seen, code which is uncommented and full of cross dependencies. Think of the hacker who wrote that code–code that works but is unmaintainable. Imagine letting that hacker work on a computer program for a million years, continually micro-optimizing and never doing a comprehensive overhaul or redesign. Now you have to reverse engineer it. That’s what figuring out the human body is like. Every system in the body has deep layers of complexity and is related to other systems in strange and surprising ways. Despite all the near-miraculous advances of modern medicine, we are still only scratching the surface of understanding how the body works. Increasing computer power will help, of course, but we don’t even know the questions to ask. This is going to be a task of many generations, and even as we start to understand it will take far more work before we have any idea how to actually change anything.

Of course I could be entirely wrong, and I do think that research on aging should continue. I just don’t see any reason for optimism. A human who does not age would really be an entirely different species. What reason do we have to think that we can create such a species any time in the foreseeable future? If we could create it, what reason do we have to think that we can somehow convert ourselves?

In fact, the best way to live easy on the earth would be to take residence in a box outside Shinjuku station. In a city of 13 million, one more will have no detectable environmental impact.. Don’t try to practice renewable living in a forest glade. Go where there are lots and lots of people already, and stay there.

I believe that this picture does not cover things like the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which the Bush administration funded through emergency spending measures (they appear indirectly in the interest payments). Fortunately the Obama administration has so far been presenting an honest budget, as the Bush I and Clinton administrations did in the past.

As always, the best way to stay on top of government spending is to grow the economy without growing services, as was done during the Clinton years. The economy is starting to grow again, but too slowly to even keep up with population growth. As China’s economy appears to be currently overheated, it will be interesting to see to see how the U.S. economy reacts as China is forced to slow down.

Since I hadn’t been down there since the rainy season started, it was incredible to see how much the plants had grown and spread. As an animal myself, there is something deeply weird about the way that plants grow just by sitting there and converting solar energy into leafs and thorns. A kind of alien life in our midst, despite its familiarity. Odd to think that we depend so deeply on them.

Seeing the plants fighting each other for sunlight, each following their different little strategies, it’s hard not to see a form of vegetable intelligence at work. More likely it’s the intentional stance applied to a simple set of algorithms. At least, I hope so. Considering how many scratches I have now, I have to say it’s a good thing they’re so much slower than we are. If the plants could take time from fighting each other to evolve a battery to let themselves move faster when necessary, we animals wouldn’t stand a chance.

1. The mythic mode is stories about gods.
2. The high mimetic mode is stories about heroes, people who are better than ordinary humans.
3. The low mimetic mode is stories about ordinary people.
4. The ironic mode is stories about people who are worse than ordinary people–criminals, buffoons.

(Frye also talked about a romantic mode but Zelazny doesn’t mention it.)

Zelazny said that he liked science fiction because it let him write literature in the mythic or high mimetic mode. Certainly many of his stories are about gods or people with great powers. Zelazny argued that literature today outside of science fiction is mainly confined to the low mimetic and the ironic mode. There are many superb stories about ordinary people. There are few stories about remarkable people which are not history and are not genre stories like science fiction or romances.

This started me thinking about other areas where stories are told in the high mimetic mode. Superhero comics are obviously told entirely in that mode. Another place we see it is a certain set of action movies: James Bond, for example, is a high mimetic mode character. But these stories, while enjoyable, rarely rise to the level of good literature.

An exception is The Hurt Locker. This excellent movie, which well deserved the Oscars it just won, is a straight-up action movie. It passed one of the acid tests of the action movie: I saw it twice, and I didn’t see anything the second time around that I missed the first time. With artistic movies I often get a new perspective on a second viewing; with action movies I rarely do. The movie also operates in the high mimetic mode: the protagonist, William James, is a heroic character. He is not a perfect human being, but he is exceptionally capable and brave.

But despite the high mimetic mode character, the movie does not operate as a standard hero’s journey, there is no evil mastermind or any identified antagonist. The movie is simply a collection of relatively unrelated incidents which reveal the characters. James does come to understand himself better during the movie—or, since we really only hear his inner thoughts in one scene, perhaps he understood himself all along. The combination of literary techniques with high mimetic mode make this a genuinely exceptional movie.

Zelazny, of course, used the same approach throughout his career, with varying degrees of success.

• The speed and effectiveness of evolutionary change.
• The Law of Unintended Consequences
• The danger of hospitals

Antibiotics are in effect poisons that don’t happen to affect humans, typically because they interfere with bacterial cell walls that our cells don’t have. It doesn’t take long in human terms for bacteria to develop resistance to antibiotics, though presumably it does take quite a while in bacteria terms. With regard to selection under extreme pressure from antibiotic poisons, bacteria have an advantage over more complex animals: they can evolve faster because they can exchange new genetic material directly rather than only passing it on to their children. This is isomorphic to cultural evolution in h humans: the way that a good idea can spread quickly through a human population.

The unintended consequences I see are three-fold. First, when the first antibiotics were used (i.e., penicillin) they were considered to be miracle drugs. People didn’t realize initially that miracles have a limited lifespan depending on how heavily you use them, and there are many penicillin resistant bacteria these days. Second, antibiotics were eventually spread through society in the form of soaps and creams. This turned out to be almost wholly counter-productive, in that it exposed bacteria to low levels of antibiotics, making it easier for them to evolve resistance before they were poisoned. Third, the industrial food system relies on antibiotics to keep animals alive and more-or-less well even though they live in exceedingly unhealthy conditions (packed in tightly, covered with feces, etc.). This has also greatly increased bacterial exposure to antibiotics, increasing resistance, thus unwittingly exchanging safer and cheaper food for increased danger in other areas of life.

The benefit of hospitals is that you can put experts and expensive equipment in one place where they can efficiently work to help people. The danger of hospitals is that you put all the sick people in the same place, which gives infections a steady supply of people who are weakened and less able to fight off infections. In effect hospitals become sanctuaries for infections. Two hundred years ago a hospital was not a place for healing; it was a place for dying. Modern medicine has changed that to an extraordinary degree. But antibiotic resistant bacteria remind us that is a hospital is a place you should go only when you have no other choice. Doctors making house calls is inefficient and expensive, but it would almost certainly be healthier for people who are not too sick to be cared for at home.

Now that we have industrialized the food chain, there is increasing study of synthetic life. There is even a Registry of Biological Parts intended to make it easier to design your own life forms. These mostly work as modifications of existing life forms. There are, for example, people working on making bacteria which can efficiently produce diesel fuel; it apparently works in small quantities but there are still scaling issues.

Different people are working on what seems to be called in vitro meat: flesh which has never been part of an actual animal. This is generally done by culturing muscle cells.

In view of these efforts, it seems ridiculous to use something as complex and inefficient as a cow to produce beef. How long will it be until we have fully synthetic meat products? (This will of course raise a host of interesting health issues, but I think it’s safe to predict that none of them will be addressed until and unless the product is already popular.)

For people concerned about the increasing industrialization of food, synthetic meat will only make matters worse. However, as a vegetarian, I think the only valid choices are synthetic meat or no meat. So I would be happy to see increasing work in these fields, and I’m confident that they will become not only less cruel, but cheaper, than dealing with real cows.

I think I get it now, though. The point of the iPad is to read books, watch videos, and play games. For that, it is looks quite convenient. I can carry it easily from room to room, I can prop it up while I’m eating, I can hold it up while I’m in bed (I assume it’s not too heavy for that). That is, the iPad is not a computer and it’s not a phone: it’s a media consumption device. It’s only real competition at the moment are the various e-book readers, which tend to be limited to just reading books. The first version of the iPad apparently won’t have a camera, and I don’t know whether it has a microphone, but I’m sure that future versions will have both, and that they will be a good way to do video chat.

With that understanding, the complaints I’ve seen about Apple’s tight control over the app store are kind of irrelevant. I don’t want to run arbitrary programs on my books, and I won’t want to run them on an iPad either. When I want to run programs, I’ll use a computer. The app store will be mainly an alternative way to publish information–authors will be able to sell directly to you, rather than going through a publisher.

More troubling are the complaints about Apple’s tight controls over content distribution. If other companies emulate Apple and Amazon, then we are taking another big step toward tight control over copyrighted content and the elimination of some fair use rights. When my only copy of a book is on my Kindle or my iPad, I can’t easily lend it to my friend. When publishers stop making physical books, libraries will become far less useful.

I’ve written before about how copyright will vanish. The iPad points to a way to bring it back: to build copyright controls into the architecture of how people read books. This is the kind of thing Lessig talked about in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Building tight copyright control into a general purpose computer is really really hard. Building it into a closed system like the iPad is much simpler. I’m sure that enterprising people will crack the iPad’s controls, but it remains an open question whether they can crack the controls while still letting the iPad continue to access the various stores that will provide content.

Whether these are reasonable concerns depends entirely on how well the iPad does. I have no plans to buy one myself—I wouldn’t buy one even if I didn’t have these concerns. That is quite different from the iPhone, which I did buy a couple of months after it came out, though I’ve switched to a different phone since. I can’t predict how well the iPad will do; if it is very successful, then we’ll really have to worry about copyright issues in the future.

Those times are gone, and we have returned to the Gilded Age. Through a natural analogy with Greek mythology, I think we should call the present day the Argent Age. This is due to a broad shift in societal values: government is the problem, and business and the free market is the solution. The inevitable result is that an increasing number of people are poor and have little control over their own lives. In the Gilded Age their anger expressed itself in prairie populism which targeted financiers and politicians. In the Argent Age financiers aren’t doing so well at the moment, but the main anger is against politicians (again) and a somewhat imaginary liberal elite who are assumed to control the national discourse.

In both ages the wealthy by and large ignore the poor; when they consider them at all they tend to advocate a trickle-down theory. Rags-to-riches stories are prominent in both ages (Horatio Alger vs. American Idol), which serve as a form of bread and circuses. In both ages the wealthy exert enormous if somewhat hidden control over the political process.

The Gilded Age ended with Teddy Roosevelt and the Square Deal. He was a more or less accidental president, pushed onto the ticket as a vice-presidential candidate by a Republican boss who wanted him out of his position as governor of New York, and becoming president after McKinley’s assassination. Despite this inauspicious start, he immediately started working to curb the power of corporations, passing the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, and making the serious use of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

The Argent Age will end too, but I can’t guess how. I hope we don’t have to wait for another Teddy Roosevelt; he was a true original.