Ideas are Neutral: Implementaion is Where the Evil May Lie

Ideas, like tools, are completely neutral to their surroundings.

A handgun, for instance, is born of the idea of killing someone. Killing someone, we can safely assume, is generally not a good thing. Handguns, though, are also used for defending yourself when someone else is trying to kill you. Defending oneself is generally a good thing. Handguns, obviously, are fairly neutral. On the one hand they can be used for acts of evil but they can also be used to stop acts of evil.

A pencil is generally a useful tool. They are used to jot down important notes. Write books. Write letters, etc. Pencils, however, can also be used to stab people. Does the fact that pencils COULD be used to kill someone make them evil? Nope; it shows that they are neutral.

Fire consumes all that it touches and turns it to ash. Fire can inflict HUGE amounts of pain and generates toxic gasses that kill many things silently. Fire ravages the countryside in an indiscriminate way. Fire destroys homes and lives. Fire kills. Fire also provides the heat used to generate electricity in coal plants. Fire converts gasoline into kinetic energy we use to get around in our cars and cut our lawns. Fire is used to process dirty water into water that is safe to drink. Fire cooks our food and makes it a fantastic meal rather than a disease filled raw pile of meat.

Dihydrous Monoxide is a powerful substance that can eat through metal and rock. It destroy buildings. It turns stable ground into sinkholes that devour people, cars, houses, and many other things. It is used at some stage of production in EVERY toxic chemical known to man. It's found in the lungs of everyone who has ever drown. There is a large concentration of it in the bloodstream of everyone who has died from physical injuries. EVERYONE who has ever come into contact with dihydrous monoxide has eventually died. That's right; this substance is completely and totally lethal to mankind in the right dosage and placement. But this substance goes by another name. The other name is far more commonly known. That other name is water. Without water we die in three days. Without water we are nothing more than a few pounds of minerals. Without water life would not exist. Water, therefore, is neither evil nor good. It is essential AND lethal. Water just is.

Most ideas just are as well. Many ideas have inherently good and bad properties to them. I'm sure if you think about many of the ideas that you encounter in your daily life you'll find good and bad in all of them.

One such idea that is important is the idea of Natural Selection among mankind.

Natural Selection is a powerful "law" of nature. It is the engine that powers evolution. It is what allows the strong and the successful to thrive and survive while eliminating the weak and those who fail. Natural Selection is a force for optimization and efficiency.

We've reached a point in our development as a species where we have leveraged the natural world enough to not only counter the force of Natural Selection but move beyond it. We're working counter to the "law" of nature that allowed for all optimized life to evolve to the point that it is at now.

The idea of preserving the efficiency and optimization of life is not a bad idea. I, personally, think it is a GREAT idea. The problem is not in the core idea; it's in the execution of that idea.

The movie Serenity deals with this idea. (SPOILER ALERT) It deals with it by exposing 30 million people to a chemical to "make them better." It fails. They create a HUGE population of monsters.

History has shown multiple instances of this. The ancient Spartans did this by examining EVERY baby and leaving those they deemed inferior out to die from exposure. Is the core idea of trying to be the strongest, fastest, smartest, most well trained warriors ever a bad idea? No. Was their execution of that idea evil? YES.

Hitler was on a quest for the "super man" and he went about it by actively killing any and all who did not meet his image of that (ironically, he did not fit the mold, but he allowed himself to live through much of the war). Is the idea of killing MILLIONS of people who you deem inferior evil? Yes.

Is there a way to counteract the idea of counteracting Natural Selection without being evil? That is debatable. I think there is, but that would be a longer post that often enrages many people on either side of the debate.

The important thing here is that ideas are neither good nor evil. It is ALWAYS the execution of the ideas that is either good or evil. That includes the idea of this idea.

Everything We KNOW is Wrong

Our knowledge of how the Universe works is VERY limited and it is all wrong.
We have equations, LOTS of equations, LOTS of VERY complicated equations that model and explain how the universe MUST work. But they are all wrong.

Why are they wrong? Because they don't explain everything.

Our current understanding of the Universe fails to explain what gravity is (see my earlier post).
Our current understanding fails to explain what "Dark Matter" is and why we can't detect it.
Our current understanding fails to explain what "Dark Energy" is.

Our current understanding has upper and lower bounds of mass density. The upper bound is the just shy of the smallest mass that it takes to create a sustainable singularity (in the form of a sustainable singularity); the lower bound is the Hydrogen atom as a whole entity. Everything outside those masses (ALL sustainable singularities AND all sub-atomic particles) don't follow the laws of physics that we have worked out. The equations and mathematics break down. We have other models that seem to work in the sub-atomic space and, sometimes, in the singularity space but there is no way to bridge moving from one model to the other.

A quick explanation of the terms that currently make no sense to me and why I think so (skipping gravity because of the earlier post):
Dark Energy is the name for the mysterious force that shows NO evidence for existence other than the "Red Shift" of the stars that are very far away. The "Red Shift" is the effect that we observe for objects that are moving AWAY from us at incredible speeds. Different light colors have different wavelengths. Over millenia of traversing space the light seems to separate out into its different energy levels. The red arrives first and the other colors follow. This results in everything that is moving away from us to appear slightly more red than it should.
I find a problem with this because the other light would have to catch up with us eventually making a fuzzy (but color-wise complete) image. Only the FIRST light that reaches us should be clear and red-shifted; the rest should be slightly fuzzy (as the various colors will show a slightly different image) but all showing all the colors. The LAST image should show us only the lowest-energy color before no more imagery from that location arrives. When something is consistently red-shifted there is a problem: what happened to the other light? What if the universal expansion that red shift implies is NOT what is the reality of what is going on. What if there is something ELSE happening that generates the same apparent effect on the light?
Dark Matter is the term for the invisible, undetectable matter that we only believe to exist because we witness unexplainable things that can ONLY be explained by VAST clouds of matter that we cannot see exerting gravity on the surrounding space. The longer we go without any actual evidence for this Dark Matter (and there are experiments trying to locate it) the less likely it is that this mysterious substance actually exists. Right now it is the ONLY explanation that we can come up with. Until experimentation proves the existence of it I will remain skeptical of it being the actual explanation for the effects we see.

Because our models cannot account for everything all at once they are wrong. There may be parts of them that are accurate, but as a whole they are wrong.

I wonder what the reality of our universe is. Perhaps it's a giant simulation and when Voyager smashes into the outer wall of out we'll wonder what happened.

A Glimpse into My Work World

This is a summary of ONE help ticket I had to work on this week.

Teacher: "I have a bunch of students who can't use their email"
Me: "Which students"
Teacher: < sends list, 5 of which include nicknames instead of real names >
Me: "for < list of kids with nicknames > what are their real names?"
Teacher: < sends list >
Me: "What does "can't use their email" mean?"
Teacher: "They can't login"
Me: "I've reset their passwords. Here's the list of proper usernames and corresponding passwords. < includes list >"
Teacher: "It still doesn't work"
Me: "I just tested it, it works on all of them."
Teacher: "It still doesn't work."
Me: "Are They using the passwords I just sent you?"
Teacher: "They have to use THAT password?"
Me: "Yes. Capitalization matters. Then they can pick their own. "
Teacher: "OH."
Teacher: "Works now. Thanks"

This is a summary of another:

Teacher: "< Student Name > can't use email."
Me: "OK. Can you explain what that means?"
Teacher: "No."
Me: "I need more to go on to know what I need to fix for the student."
Teacher: "OK. < Student Name > can't use email."
Me: "Can you just have the student come to the tech office?"
Teacher: "Why?"
Me: "So I can see what is not working with the email so I know what to fix."
Teacher: "Can't you just fix it?"
Me: "Not until I know what's wrong."
Teacher: "I'll send < the student > down at the end of the period."
Editorial Note: "end of the period" means the that the student will lose time from the NEXT class instead of that class.
< Student arrives in Tech office >
Me: "Hello. How can I help you?"
Student: "< Teacher Name > Sent me down."
Me: "OK. For your email problem?"
Student: "Yes."
Me: "How is it not working?"
Student: < Shrug >
Me: "May I look at it, please?"
Student: < Hands over laptop >
Me: "Can you show me what you are trying to do?"
Student: < Demonstrates >
Me: < Resets password; sets mail client up CORRECTLY; mail works > "There you go. Have a nice afternoon.
Student: < Leaves without even a "thank you" >