Waiting on those young americans Sunday, Jul 13 2008

Well I happened to be pointed towards an article with interesting implications earlier. You can read it here. What is interesting about this is that if it is possible to do emergency surgery on a fetus, return it to the womb, and then have it be born later, it means that if techniques can be perfected it would be possible to make enhancement modifications to a fetus and return it to the womb. I guess that I’m talking about transhumanism/human enhancement here. Until now I had assumed that to create enhanced children you would have to do just that in a synthetic environment, or you would have to transfer a fetus to an artificial environment for the enhancement and leave it there. And I have indeed seen fiction that had such a procedure (remove fetus and leave it out) before (yeah I’m just talking about gundam seed). But perhaps this does not have to be the case. It does not seem to me like there would necessarily be great advantages to doing so from the enhancement side, but any given creature is more likely to survive in its natural environment and of course for the fetus that means the womb.

I would be a little interested in hearing more about surgeries of this kind but it is not my area of interest so I will not seek anything out. I will say quickly about transhumanism that it usually strikes me that those who are its greatest advocates are those who feel the most socially (especially people who are autistic) and/or physically deficient. And as a result they envision either being transformed into perfection themselves or a race of near perfect beings as a following generation. But it occurred to me lately that it would be easier to induce specific “flaws” that seem to lead to other benefits than to basically try and recreate humanity, or even to isolate and correct potential flaws. Actually the thing I was thinking about was intentionally creating children that have “high functioning autism” known commonly as “asperger’s syndrome” in the hopes of creating a genius generation. This thought came about because I used to discuss transhumanism with a variety of people online who identified themselves as being “aspies” and it seemed like each of them were obsessed with it to varying degrees. I often thought that almost any of these people had the intelligence to achieve such ends but they had totally lost sight of the fact that they were geniuses now in the midst of their feelings of isolation.

It isn’t easy being different, and it might be worse when you are different in ways that you will not be rewarded for socially. For example a lot of professional athletes  (mostly distended looking basketball players) actually have freakish physiques in some ways and are known for not being the smartest people in the world. But because professional sports are a worldwide obsession they are rewarded and idolized for these differences instead of being penalized. Not so for a person who might have a 140+ IQ but also has Asperger’s syndrome. At best they can possibly hope for academic renown or professional esteem among colleagues, but they are very unlikely to become renowned and beloved within their country let alone the world.

Well allegedly the incidence rate of autism keeps increasing yearly but whether it’s genetic, which would imply that it is an evolutionary trait (less emphasis on the physical and social, more emphasis on the intellectual, not that people with autism are necessarily deficient physically), or environmental (polution, vaccination, stress on the mother during pregnancy, etc.) which would imply that it’s some sort of unnatural mutation is unknown. I personally suspect a combination, maybe genetic mutation was caused by something people did but now that the trait is there it is within the population. Hell who knows maybe even depression is an evolutionary trait for population control…

But back to what I was saying, with the decline of physical requirements on daily life it makes more sense to head in an intellectual direction. And it occurs to me that it would be a lot easier to figure out how to induce a trade-off condition like asperger’s and possibly even more beneficial in the long run. Of course what I’m talking about it is a perversion of nature and a giant human rights violation.

So let’s be clear on something, I am not advocating this at all. This is merely my impression from various information that I have gleaned over the years. Personally I think that if the human race really will (re)turn to sludge without transhumanism that is fine. I actually do think that the future is very dark for living beings in the world and it is all each of our faults. So it is only right that after making such colossal mistakes and not uniting to change anything that we would have to pay the price. What that is remains to be seen. I would actually prefer to live until the end of humanity if at all possible but if I do not it won’t exactly be a regret.

I will let you judge for yourself whether these thoughts are delusional, cynical, anxious, or just pessimistic.

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Dancing and speaking use different parts of the brain do they not? Tuesday, Mar 4 2008

Q: “What kind of cosmetic surgery options are available for “flabby arms”” A: The part of people’s arms that is generally most “flabby” is the area around the triceps which is not utilized as much in the everyday life of our society as it’s opposite biceps. If you don’t want or can’t affort surgery then I recommend swimming, rowing, calesthenics, pull/chin-ups, and the french press or pull downs to strengthen and define the area through exercise. For surgery the least invasive options would be limited liposuction and possibly some strategic usage of botox injections which would probably be good enough for most people. I wonder if any self-respecting surgeon would be willing to do liposuction on a forearm of any but the fattest of people though. For the rear part of the upper arm I think that they go in through the arm pit to decrease the visibility of scarring but don’t hold me to that. Although I do not know the name of it I think there is a procedure where they open up the arm, cut out the fat, cut away or staple some of the loose/excess skin if necessary, and then tighten the whole area. Basically they “tummy tuck your arm” I think. They do that type of procedure on almost any likely part of the body that has a lot of fat and skin. This is pretty extreme and in my opinion not warranted for most cases though. Your arms and legs are probably the easiest parts of your body to strengthen and therein define with weight training and aerobic exercise because they’re the parts of your body that you use the most in the first place so I’d recommend a trip to the gym before a trip to the doctor. On the other hand if you’ve got a big flabby middle it’s really hard to get that smaller.

So I don’t talk much about it but I’m more or less a fan of the shounen manga series ハヤテのごとく （Hayate no Gotoku）Hayate the Combat Butler. It runs in shounen sunday which traditionally has series that I prefer to its counterpart shounen jump but which don’t usually achieve the same mainstream popularity. Well anyway… actually I’m sure I’ve written about Hayate before so I’ll jump right in: there are too damn many characters. Also the series doesn’t live up to its potential and instead is basically just a gag manga with a lot of otaku references. A lot of vague elements are brought up repeatedly but not expounded upon. All of a sudden after a few years of serialization the main character suddenly mentions that he has an older brother even though no indication had previously been given that this was the case, and there were many times when family came up and he said nothing about it. In fact everything indicated that he was an only child other than him never explicitly stating that he was. I’m not certain that this was all intentional, I think it might have been incidental. “Oh hey I never had Hayate say that he was an only child so I might as well give him an older brother” also even though Hayate apparently had some childhood friend he really liked who gets brought up in a sort of flashback way occasionally and is supposedly the reason that he’s so strong and capable that plot line hasn’t gone too far either. Nagi’s former butler is somewhat mysterious as well, there were numerous occasions to bring up what happened to him or where he is and he gets mentioned during most of the serious parts of the story but he never shows up anywhere either. fuuuuuu

All that said I like the mood of the series because I’m just the otaku type that it’s pandering towards! I am at least passingly familiar with most of the series it mentions and… so I question the validity of the work repeatedly. I’m not a big fan of the art style which I would describe as “fake lolita” as all the characters look way too young. They are mostly young teenagers but there isn’t much to distinguish the adult characters. I think that Hayate has become a fairly successful franchise somewhat in the vein of Mahou Sensei Negima, but whereas that series is more action oriented Hayate begins and ends with slapstick comedy. Pretty much anything can and does happen, and since it’s a gag manga they get away with it. I wonder how much non-otaku, non-japanese can enjoy the series… In a way it’s sort of a love comedy but that almost feels like a tacked on aspect as things don’t really progress. And speaking of which the pace of the series is very slow, there’s a clear chronological progression but as the series has advanced the chapters seem to be closer and closer together. Well to a certain extent that might be “serialitis” wherein there’s no pressure to advance the story and on the contrary the publisher would be happy to let it go on forever as long as they keep making money off of it.

The difference between serial and singular works… perhaps I should write about that some other time. Until then anyone who actually knows something about cosmetic surgery can write in about arm procedures since I don’t really care that much. I won’t say that I never would get such a procedure done, or that I haven’t had ANY cosmetic procedures done since I did attempt to get a couple of moles removed once, but I have no money to waste on things like that. If I could afford surgery to make my body look better I’d rather get surgery to make my body work better. But actually I don’t have any faith in doctors anyway so I probably wouldn’t even do that.

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