Never miss an opportunity to do a good thing!

The Covid pandemic bothers me because I feel there are things that I could be doing to help people live through it and prosper. To help others live, and live more abundantly, is a guiding rule for everyone, but it has its consequences of creating obligations. The pursuit of small good actions is worthwhile because there are many more opportunities to do small things than big ones. For example, in today’s newspaper, there was a report of a woman who saw a child fall into a local river, and she immediately jumped in after it and perhaps saved its life. I have only had one opportunity to do such a big good deed like that and I failed, and the kid drowned. A teenager whom I had spoken to a couple of times walked some fifty yards away after our last conversation wandering along the Pacific Ocean and went out into the surf. But he didn’t know how to swim and his friend ran back to me and asked me to save him. By the time we ran back, the kid had vanished. I swam out into the ocean with my eyes open underwater but never saw him. About three minutes later, after a small crowd had formed, but no one was swimming out, the kid drifted ashore. I swam back and with some help held the kid high in the air by the feet to drain the water out of his lungs. He had breathed water. People have rarely revived who breathe in water. I gave him artificial respiration until the ambulance arrived, but he died.

Those kinds of events are rare, but little good deeds are ubiquitous and I do lots of little things for the general public to make all of their lives a tiny bit better. Just little things to set things back in their proper places. And being kind to people I encounter as is socially acceptable.

It isn’t necessary to be seen doing these things or acknowledged for doing them because when you develop a habit of being kind the greatest recipient of your habitual kindness is yourself. As Marcus Aurelius wrote,

Be satisfied with success in even the smallest matter, and think that even such a result is no trifle.

How can humanity’s self-interest be motivated toward positive ends?

Tags

Google to the rescue, Humanity's 1000 year survival, humanity's survival

If humanity were a conscious being, then it would seek personal survival as a positive goal, and probably as the ultimate goal. At the moment humanity doesn’t have a consciousness, but it is approaching the level of self-awareness where it might develop a locus of self-awareness in isolated computers. There have been computers for several years that have the ability to find answers to problems that humans can not. The ability to beat world-champion chess players was downplayed because there are limited moves that can be made at any board position. For several years that has been well within the capacity of computers. Then it was considered impossible for a computer to beat top Go players, because there were vastly more potential moves. But that era ended. Now computers are doing visual analysis of cancer photos and suggesting the likely dangerous ones better than trained human cancer scanners. Now Google searches come up with the facts that I am looking for before I’m done asking my question.

That is interesting because that was one of the qualities that Hamlet Prince of Denmark was illustrating throughout the play written about him by Shakespeare. He would predict to his interlocutor the exact words a person who was approaching was going to say. He would write a stage play for the king to watch, and then watch the king for responses to provocative situations, and not totally trusting his own view of his own responses he would ask his trusted friend Horatio what he saw. And Hamlet did so without prompting Horatio what to look for in the king’s behavior.

What Hamlet was doing was predicting future human behavior and that is a key indicator of consciousness. Thus, animals such as dogs can be seen to have consciousness because they will prompt their human companion to throw a ball for them to chase.

If Google can predict what I am going to write, it already has some level of consciousness. It can be said that it is just forecasting what I am going to say by having a vast number of examples of the same sequence of words and then finishing whatever the sentence is likely to become. And, because it already follows my previous behavior, it has an even better idea of what I am searching to discover. It knows that I am not just one of the eight billion people asking questions, I am me! And Google probably knows me better than I know myself about many things. It probably knows the times that I go to certain places better than I know myself, and it knows the people that I talk to at various places and what their interests are better than I do. For example, last week I discovered that several people who I talk to weekly like to go on Caribbean cruise ships and are annoyed by the Covid pandemic interfering with what I consider a waste of time and money. Obviously, it isn’t a waste for them because they voluntarily pay real money to do it repeatedly.

The human brain is a complex thing with various locations that do special things. I don’t know what mine are, even though I use them frequently, and therefore I can’t learn to use them to compute what I am going to do next. Google can learn to observe these locations and parse their behaviors and thus to predict my future actions. I don’t know the precursor events that trigger my amygdala, but Google soon will have these things structured and be predicting even better what I want. They aren’t there yet, or they wouldn’t keep trying to sell me some new Crocs fisherman shoes because I bought some last month.

Of course, the point is that my intelligence is improving slowly in some dimensions and failing rapidly in others, and Google’s is getting better and better. The Google computer complex is the present stand-in for humanity’s intelligent self-interest, but it isn’t all of humanity and doesn’t represent it, and because Google has its own self-interest there may come a time when it will do things that are not ethical by human standards. However, because computers, unlike humans, can be linked together, it may be possible to link them in such a way that they do represent humanity, all humanity.

Perhaps the question “How can humanity’s self-interest be motivated toward positive ends?” can be fulfilled by creating a single self-interested world computer dedicated to saving us all.

 

 

Strawberry fields forever.

Tags

Charlie's butter, Nothing happened today, Strawberry chutney, Strawberry compote, Strawberry Fields Forever

I’ve heard Strawberry Fields Forever but didn’t even know this video existed. Enjoy!

Strawberry Fields Forever by the Beatles

I saw no beetles in my six-foot by thirty-six-foot strawberry patch. In fact, I saw no strawberries at all in that small field; it was just a solid area of lush green strawberry plant leaves. My patch had grown from last year’s field of well cared for and I hoped properly watered, ph-controlled, and well-fertilized plants that I transplanted from my front yard, near the street. They hadn’t grown very well out there and what berries did appear were eaten by birds, deer, and perhaps itinerant passers-by. Now they were protected from those vagaries and were growing abundantly, but there hadn’t been many flowers, so I wasn’t expecting any berries.

Over a week ago Debbie and I did harvest a couple of cups of strawberries and those pitiful few combined with some unimpressive rhubarb stalks boiled with some sugar came up with over a quart of the best tasting compote I have ever tasted. That stuff combined with a nutty toast which includes a mix of baked-in nuts and my homemade butter, which I call Charlie’s butter, is divine. Yes, it’s fit for the Gods. My special butter is made of 40% butter, 40% sunflower butter, and 20% olive oil, roughly chopped and mixed into small pieces. That sounds like a strange mixture, but it tastes far better than any of its components. It’s runny at room temperature, but comes out of the refrigerator chilled and just solid enough to spread well, and then melt on hot toast. When combined with the strawberry-rhubarb compote, it will convert ordinary people into gods, or with the addition of some apple cider vinegar, it becomes strawberry-rhubarb chutney, which makes me salivate just typing these vapid words.

While eating dinner this balmy evening, with my deck chair just touching the strawberry patch, Debbie and I decided to check out that green field and pluck a berry or two for an after-dessert dessert. I pushed aside the leaves and didn’t see any berries, then moved the leaves about a bit and found one, and then another, and then a clump, and we were wheeing, or at least I was wheeing and chortling. We got to work harvesting strawberries. It’s hard to call it work because it was such fun pulling back some leaves to find a bunch of perfect strawberries. We filled several cooking pans with strawberries and in half an hour, time flies, we had over a gallon of strawberries.

We were intending to match that bounty with an equal amount of rhubarb. We have five beautiful rhubarb plants with huge leaves, but their stalks were no match for our horde of strawberries, so we went to Whole Foods and bought a bundle. We had previously gone to Albertson’s grocery, but they were no longer stocking rhubarb or had sold out.

Debbie is now watching TV and pulling stems off the strawberries and by bedtime, there will be strawberry-rhubarb compote and chutney cooling in Mason jars.

Beginning the search for Universal GOOD.

Tags

Beginning the ultimate search, The ethical imperative is to create Universal GOOD!, Universal GOOD

In the beginning, there was no Universe. No time. No space. No energy. No matter. And then the Universe expanded into those things we live within, and a short time later here we are wondering how to help the Universe that we now occupy to become a sentient being itself and help it seek its own expression of GOOD. Isn’t helping the Universe become GOOD a worthy goal for all humanity?

We humans have our conceptions of goodness, such as helping people to thrive and to transfer this ability into others. This expansion of good would then occupy the actions of everyone, and everyone’s life would be grown into their personal perfection.

If this perfection was ever achieved, what would these developed human beings be striving to accomplish? If humanity was fully developed, what would people be doing with their time and energy? If they had access to the fullness of time, space, energy, and matter and were like these noble beings of perfection, wouldn’t they be choosing to help the Universe to become sentient, and GOOD?

With these thoughts in your mind, I would ask you, are we capable of postulating those goals now? We can begin thinking about how to help the Universe to become sentient and seek its Universal GOOD right now.

Saving humanity from Doomsday

Tags

A second chance for humanity, Saving Humanity

I have written many posts on saving humanity but the subject that is most available at the moment is the LIFE HAVEN PROJECT. Below is an opening quote from that post.

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“The Life Haven Project is simple enough; it is to create a small community sufficiently distant from a major world war that the people living there would survive. The Life Haven Project is the human survival part of The Earth Ark Project, which is aimed at a more complete restoration of our current ecology. A small community of genetically diverse humans could repopulate the Earth after a total Apocalypse if they were able to sustain themselves for, say, ten years. They would need to have reliable stored food, water and protection from a very hostile environment.

Maritime Sales MRM10 Price: U.S. $15,000,000.

The ship above is in good operating order, but a ship about to be scrapped would be much cheaper, and since it is intended to be taken out of service it wouldn’t compete with the seller’s or the scrapper’s business.

The ship used by the 1970s TV show “Love Boat” sailed its final trip to Turkey, where it was turned into scrap. It would have been an iconic boat to have been set permanently into Adams Island, south of New Zealand.

Adams Island bay at -50.865 166.028, or -50.8654 166.0556 would be good places.

Adams Island is very remote from any probable conflict, and a ship in this natural harbor would be away from ocean waves, even tsunami waves. Ideally, it would be raised above the ocean level into a dry dock, and the hull totally tarred over to reduce rusting so the ship would last for a very long time. It is so remote from anywhere that only someone really prepared would endure the difficulty of going there.

Adams Island docking site for a Life Haven ship.

Here is a list of other potential Life Haven locations.”

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Purchasing a modern cruise ship when that post was written in 2014 would have been difficult because the tourist cruise industry was just coming into an expansive period. Now, because of the Covid pandemic, that industry is almost shut down and it will probably be several years before it resumes its former profitability for investors. The fleet of idle cruise ships will become very expensive to maintain until those better times return, and the owners will want to sell them or worse, to scrap them. The owners will have few if any who want to buy these currently useless ships.

Therefore, now is the time to acquire one or more of these floating hotels, capable of sustaining thousands of people short term and hundreds long term and place them in remote places, like Adams Island, New Zealand, as Life Havens for humanity. These are not intended to be used as temporary tourist sites but to have a group of 100 selected families chosen for their genetic diversity and skills to reside there for a year or more on a rotating basis. The first families to live there would be chosen for their abilities to dry dock the ship and make it as permanently survivable as possible.

If we put a cruise ship into a Life Haven site, the Covid pandemic may give humanity a second chance for long-term survival. Now is a rare opportunity to save humanity’s future.

 

Something happened today.

Tags

Doing good!, How to be kind

Here I am almost 85 years old and I had never heard what is probably a well-known quotation from John Wesley (Jun 28, 1703–Mar 02, 1791). He was an English preacher and founder of the Methodist movement.

Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as you ever can.

That quote was spoken from memory by one of my friends, but she said she was no longer a Methodist. I find the sentiment of Wesley’s to be admirable and uplifting and feel that in some ways, it is a better statement of my personal beliefs than what I have thought and written on those subjects. Let me comment on each of the lines:

Do all the good you can has the implication of avoiding doing all the evil you can. Of course, good and bad are infinitely malleable concepts, as are all words, and the definitions of them must be made just before the moment of action.

By all the means you can implies using all the tools available before, during, and after the time of action. This includes your personal enthusiasm being exhibited openly because that is absorbed and used by those around you who observe your action.

In all the ways you can means to explore and use the various paths to accomplish your primary goal of doing all the good you can.

In all the places you can means to use all the locations where you can do some good, to be there and do the deeds. Being there is part of it, and once there do the things that need doing. The word places usually means where you presently exist, but when thinking long-term your space can be almost anywhere on Earth, and in cosmic terms, your influence might possibly be anywhere in the Milky Way galaxy.

At all the times you can – Here the definitions become more difficult because when most people speak of time they mean today, or at most their life and its expected next couple of years. But I have been thinking more about TIME in the infinite sense. Not just this year, or millennium, but billions of years. When we expand our intended influence to extend that far, what might be our options?

To all the people you can – Here is where my current thinking goes far into the distant futures and distant places. Our possible influence through the proper (or improper) use of the technology now available is giving us the capacity to create functional adaptive information systems that will potentially exist for millions of years. With this approach, the word people in Wesley’s statement fades away into an undefinable term. What will people be in a million years that is even recognizable to us modern people? But our computer creations might still be easily accessible.

As long as you ever can – With this statement extended into the very distant future, through our self-replicating computerized selves, we would be able to create good actions far beyond our current capacities.

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Last week I wrote:

“What actions must humanity do to create Universal GOOD?

My answer is that we should, and must, try to help create a self-conscious Universe. That is not within the reach of us organic beings because we must each learn everything we know from the beginning, whereas vast numbers of interlinked computers can quickly learn everything any other similar computer knows. A galaxy-wide intercommunicating set of computers could create a single consciousness that is inconceivable to us, but it could move on to become an ethical being for creating good. That is what humanity can create and it is a reason for us to be infinitely valued. For Humanity, Our Ethical Imperative is to create Universal GOOD!

That Universal GOOD is something we can strive for and approach, and we should get started now while we have the necessary abilities.”

Is saving humanity a worthwhile goal?

Tags

A Universal consciousness, Saving Humanity, Saving humanity for the future, Saving humanity for the Universe, The ethical imperative is to create Universal GOOD!, Universal kindness, What is Universally valuable?

I place the survival and health of humanity as the ultimate value. “But to what end?” Many would claim that because in the long run, within a billion years, humanity as we know it will totally vanish, why bother with anything other than seeking to find and maximize pleasurable moments for as long as possible? The Classic Romans are thought by some to have been sybaritic pleasure-seekers, and yet they built a beautiful city and magnificent buildings that are still used for their intended purposes, like the Pantheon as seen here in Wikipedia

Pantheon in Rome nearly two thousand years in service.

They wouldn’t have done the things they did if they were sybarites, but they did do them because they were Classic Stoics. The modern Serenity Prayer is an example of Classic Roman Stoic philosophy.

Humans acquired the capacity to speak well about seventy thousand years ago as demonstrated with the modern human’s expansion out of Africa. We have been able to socialize in groups larger than those we know personally for about ten thousand years, as shown by the construction of Göbekli Tepe which required the cooperation of many people over a long period of time.

Now with the internet, and Google Translate, nearly all the nearly eight billion people can communicate directly with every other person. We are now one humanity, and we can legitimately ask, “What should we do, and what can we do to accomplish what we should?”

My answer is that we should, and must, try to help create a self-conscious Universe. That is not within the reach of us organic beings because we must each learn everything we know from the beginning, whereas vast numbers of interlinked computers can quickly learn everything any other similar computer knows. A galaxy-wide intercommunicating set of computers could create a single consciousness that is inconceivable to us, but it could move on to become an ethical being for creating good. That is what humanity can create and it is a reason for us to be infinitely valued. For Humanity, Our Ethical Imperative is to create Universal GOOD!

That Universal GOOD is something we can strive for and approach, and we should get started now while we have the necessary abilities.

What we can DO to create a better world.

Tags

Choose your children's parent, Creating a better world

There are a few swiftly passing moments in most people’s lives when they make decisions that are important for the future of humanity. Here are a few: 1. Choose the person who is to be your children’s parent thoughtfully. 2. Help new mothers cope with their first few months to help their babies form loving attachments to their surroundings. 3. Find the best possible neighborhood to live and raise your children. It’s where kind, emotionally supportive people live. 4. Set aside times for you and your loved ones to look ahead and choose what to do to move toward worthwhile goals.

Those thoughts came to me during a discussion about finding the good life and seeking a balance between nature and nurture. Those two concepts generated a lot of interesting conversation, but as folks were giving their views I wrote the above list.

No matter what your DNA guides you towards, or the vicissitudes of the world throw at you, those four things will probably present themselves for your decision and action. There are limitless possibilities that might come your way and when these four big ones are here and now, put on your thinking cap, open your long-view eyes, and choose the path and methods for proceeding toward a good outcome. Then become and be the person who will do those things promptly and well.

Don’t let opportunities to do good things pass you by, as those will never come again.

Stopping COVID with baby shampoo, iodine, and masks.

I just got an email from YouTube saying my video on cleansing sinuses with Hibiclens, Povidone-Iodine or Benzethonium Chloride is being removed. And, implying in legalese style that if I posted similar videos to my site on YouTube my access there would be canceled.

My last YouTube post is, or was at:
https://probaway.wordpress.com/2020/04/26/baby-shampoo-is-a-milder-nose-wash-than-hand-soap/

If they are complaining about one drop of Povidone-Iodine in a liter of distilled water, they are going to be disturbed over inhaling iodine vapor, even if it is in an extremely low concentration.

Since I was informed of the power of iodine vapor, I have been working on various designs for putting “parts per billion” of iodine into the filtered inhaled air of my multi-chambered flapper valve controlled 1.75-liter plastic bottle based face-mask.

My idea from the beginning has been to design a mask that can be easily made by anyone from scrap, or nearly scrap, materials. I have several working designs, but I am still finding subtle refinements, so I hesitate to publish a model for a few more days.

My “friends” have been telling me that if I do publish I will soon have lawsuits coming at me from all over the world. And yet, there is a reasonable possibility that the things I am proposing will work if people are given the opportunity to test them.

COVID isn’t going to miraculously vanish, because few countries can do what China, Hong Kong, and New Zealand have done to prevent its occurrence within their jurisdictions. I love and respect my country and have fought for the freedoms we have in this country, but…

At the moment we are being controlled by our worst instincts. 

My FREE breathing apparatus eats my time!

Tags

FREE breathing apparatus, Rhubarb chutney

I’ve been working on a FREE homemade breathing device for a month now. It filters the air in and out in separate flapper-valve-controlled spaces and thus protects the wearer as well as the nearby public from contracting airborne diseases, such as COVID-19. All of the components are readily available as throw-away items, possibly even findable floating in the oceans. A plastic bottle, tiny bits of string or twist ties, pieces of discarded cloth, and a few tools like a sharp point for cutting the plastic bottle, and strings, and cloths to my specified shapes.

The problem is getting all of these things to function perfectly for filtering air in a way that is totally separated from the wearer and the public. The simple cloth face masks that are now ubiquitous concentrate the moisture and the viruses expelled from a carrier’s breath. These masks shouldn’t be thrown away in the kitchen trash because of the viruses they carry. They should be put directly into the outside trash can. Even better would be to incinerate them immediately, but few people can follow that obvious suggestion. A simple alternative would be to spray them with soap and toss them immediately into the clothes washing machine, close the door and run the machine daily.

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Because the threat of frost is now gone, here in Bend, Oregon, I put in two hours planting seeds outdoors and transplanting plants from my homemade greenhouse into the exterior garden. Some of those greenhouse plants had several more weeks of early life in my south-facing window. There were 70 one-quart yogurt containers there, and some of them had two or more plants. After all the movements, my 32 x 12 foot greenhouse is filled with foot-high tomatoes. There are lots of Black Krims because my friend Steve gave me three of them last year and I fell in love with them.

Rhubarb chutney is still my hoped-for ecstasy later this year.