i accidentally deleted files off of my usb key, and i'm kind of dumbfounded as to why they're not showing up in the file system. i haven't touched the drive. it's just full of random dates, almost more like it got flooded with data. but i'm waiting for one more scan to make sure it's not just hiding with a weird name.

i guess maybe the file table could have gone out? is that something that happens? i don't think there was much on there, i'm just going to have this nagging feeling like i forgot something.

something else i read while the internet was down was the gibson classic, neuromancer. i'd read half of it a dozen times and made sure i actually finished it this time. i think it's overrated as a work, even if it was enjoyable enough as basic fiction. but, something i think he got wrong was the idea with the implants. the female protagonist had mechanical implants inserted into her eyes. i think the way this is going to actually work is that people are going to get injections full of hormones designed to rearrange their dna: that we're going to actually reprogram ourselves to use the hardware we have better, not get new hardware attached to ourselves. i think the potentials of this are quite staggering, but it's going to require a difficult period of human experimentation, where people get programmed in disturbing ways, sometimes accidentally and sometimes on purpose.

one medical application i can think of, as a transgendered person, would be actual genetic therapy for transition. you could just reprogram your cells to produce estrogen instead of testosterone. i think diabetics could put this to use, as could anyone else with a problem in hormone regulation - including people with high levels of bad cholesterol.

but, the key futuristic element was in finding ways to use technology to enhance our abilities. and, i think the novel made an error in imagination that was kind of ubiquitous at the time.

did you know that humans have the dna to understand magnetism, and therefore electricity, as a sixth sense?

i was just thinking about epi-genetics when i was going for a walk outside, and it is cold right now here, as i saw a series of cats cross my path - one very black, and the other very white.

i started to wonder if cats had the genetic ability to change their fur colour. i've never seen a cat actually do this. but, the white cat seemed strangely adapted to the snow, while the black cat seemed equally adapted for the night. i suppose the traditional explanation is that cats are born with variations in fur colour, and that the ones best suited to the environment survive. but, i'm not sure the laboratory conditions provide that as a clear explanation, as this population of cats is only semi-feral, and the snow here is actually unusual.

well, maybe the darwinian explanation isn't so lacking if you explore it carefully - you just have to accept a lot of coincidences, but then you need to have good luck to get the right mutations in the first place, right? let's explore other possibilities, without pursuing the need to debunk anything.

so, what if house cats can actually change their fur colour? the ability to change fur colour, often in winter, is a common adaptation of species descended from the common ancestor of the carnivore clade, and some species with older common ancestors, like rabbits, seem to have these genes, as well. they appear to be very old mammal genes. cats probably have them, cleverly inactivated around humans.

i started to wonder if humans may have even selected specimens of house cats that didn't utilize this adaptation, as it would be alarming to watch the cat transform - perhaps into an evil spirit. and, perhaps that evil spirit was somewhat real - perhaps the change in fur colour came with hormonal changes that made the animal more aggressive. perhaps. perhaps.

but, then, if something like that happened, your cat may have a special power that it isn't using, so as not to alarm you. we identify cats by their colours. they need to project a static representation of themselves to remain identifiable. they don't want to be changing their fur colours.

a semi-feral cat lost outside in a snow storm has a very different set of priorities, and one has to wonder whether the stress is enough to flip the switch.

it led me to thinking about humans, and this sixth sense that we have. we have this sixth sense because our ancestors had it - not our recent ones this geologic epoch, but our distant ancestors, before life moved out of the oceans. our ancestors could intuitively measure magnetic fields - think about that. and, why don't we have this ability any more? because it's an ocean adaptation. the utility of sensing magnetic fields through a liquid medium didn't transfer over to a gaseous one, the sense fell into disuse and, in the end, the more successful individuals were probably coincidentally born deficient of it. if you can imagine an existence so dark that eyes are so useless that the blind outcompete those that can see....

but, that truth might be eroding. our atmosphere is now full of magnetic fields, of our creation. how many humans have been born with this sense, and studied as mystical, or perhaps laughed at as delusional? it should happen from time to time as an error, or a mutation, whatever word you want to use. these people should actually exist. but, then, how many of us could flip it on, if we only knew which collection of hormones to concoct?

i don't know what we would realistically be able to do in reading a cell phone signal or transmitting wireless data. it may very well end up as a terrible way to interpret reality, full of indecipherable amounts of noise at strengths that produce pain. but, perhaps we can order the data quite well, and abstract it relatively easily. this is really an experimental question.

it's a different way to think about evolution, this realization that we have the history of billions of years of adaptations existing in our genetic codes, potentially ready to utilize under the magic chemical password. and it's a bit humbling to realize the power and the complexity of the genome.

you can carry the parallels of the failed american socialist revolution to the failed russian socialist revolution through the 30s, to the point where they aligned at their common apexes to defeat a common enemy, and into the 40s and beyond. the russian propaganda was, of course, deeply anti-american, and the stalinist show trials went on well through the 40s, aligning with the mccarthyite scare. mccarthyism is often presented to us as a battle we overcame - that, in the end, we didn't become "like them". but, the truth is that we were really alike at more or less the same time. they didn't become like "them", either, they reformed after the death of stalin, which happened at about the same time that mccarthyism fizzled out.

both states exited the 50s seeking to enact a broadly socialist vision for their country, one built on expanding the use of technology to make the lives of their citizens better. both states made real progress on this into the 70s. but, then both states seem to have been overtaken by corruption at more or less the same time.

remember that what actually happened in russia was a military coup, and that this kind of shady manipulation of events behind the scenes seems to also be the norm in the united states, which has also experienced recent coup-like events, both in 1980 and in 2000. it is not clear what the guiding force behind the presidency in either country really is, only that it seems to be some combination of state intelligence services and large financial backers. america and russia are really more or less in the same mess.

if it seems like russia is rising and america is falling, it's because america had such a ways to fall from. in truth, they're both going nowhere but collapse.

and, i think that's the longer view of history, here - a positive comparison of failed american and soviet socialist revolutions, coming from the same basic problem of the society not being advanced enough.

now, we can ask interesting questions - what if america had not undergone westward expansion? what if it didn't annex mexico? what if it didn't buy louisiana? what if it let the south secede? would the greater population pressures amongst workers in the north-east have led to more struggle? it's kind of a sadistic exercise, isn't it?

but, i think we can state this much in the positive: if we are to imagine that the united states is something that we create through collective decision making, and we acknowledge that we wanted it to evolve towards a socialist society, then we made an error in expanding too far to the west and too fast. this is the root cause of the failure of the american socialist revolution: westward expansion at too great a rate to sustain industrial development.

so, i've been watching this paul jay special on the undoing of the new deal. and, they make sure to point out that the new deal wasn't socialism - and, they're right, it wasn't - but i want to make a bolder suggestion.

the truth is that socialism simply failed in america, and for the same reason that it failed in russia. there's actually a strong convergence of history here, contrary to the cold war mythology. and, socialism even failed in both of these backwater states at approximately the same time.

but, it was predictable. nobody ever suggested that the socialist revolution would happen in the still largely feudal state of russia, and nobody suggested that it would happen in the deserts of the american midwest, either. remember that when marx suggested the united states for a possible birth of socialism, he was writing in a nineteenth century context - roughly contemporary with the annexation of mexico, and when the united states itself barely penetrated the louisiana purchase. he was referring to the liberal heartland of the country, the bos-wash corridor, and not to the much less industrialized areas of the country that actually produced american progressivism. what developed was a contradiction, with the socialist movement on the wrong side of historical materialism - it's really just a further demonstration that psychohistory is pseudoscience. 

there were moments of actual socialistic tendencies in the failed american socialist revolution, but they were tied to actual workers movements in actual factories - and the management decisions around the workers. well, it was a failed revolution. but, the success of american workers in winning the ability to buy their own products is an example of how management goals aligned with socialist visions, for a time. i think that fordism could have at one point been deemed "advanced capitalism".

then, it crashed. and, what happened? what happened is that the wild west won. america was not ready for socialism.

we'll see if their successor is. well, if we're still dragging along this corpse of historical materialism, asia doesn't seem like the worst place to hope for a revolution, does it? the other option is truly barbarism, isn't it?