Song: The Commander

G E- A- F D7



Don't mind me, I'm just a name people forget

When I've forgotten my own name (can't recognize the sound of my own name)

Floating street to street with my name going unknown

All the times when I left home, left home

I sat there floating from street to street.


On useless stick I'd whittle the time away

Gambling with my whole inheritance

I lied to keep my life away

Take shelter in a home


Do anything just to be on a train going home

Build myself a home now going home

Rest in her arms going home

Do anything to leave home just leaving home



where I recount the times when I fell victim to my own lonliness


The other boys would shadow box in the likes of Cassius Clay


I'd wrestle them and those blows cuts to the core

howling at the moon, but not the fighter within

Even I tried to be like em


I got myself a job passing crates

head kept low not to be pestered by distant fairytales


Wrestled till face down

I remember every blow howled in rage

on path to malice


When tormented by thoughts I could not see.

Or the tempations that whisper my name.


I'll join the others casting my line for a bite just to return empty handed.

 reflection wishing I'd see someone else instead

So I turn it off.


Face buried in the ground wondering, "Is this how my story ends?"


And the holes I've dug for myself where I had to crawl myself out


I have now traveled the distances just to realize


Ambition and the glory and the light at across the water


Holding only unhealed scars, I've earned a crown of thorns.

Eyes that carry the burden of the world, knows no rest.



Ambition

Live the humble farmer's life. Travel the world when you get bored.

You really think a Napoleon, Alexander, or Lincoln would stand for this? Would they settle for the humble farmer's life? They yearn to burn through the sky, lighting up the atmosphere with distinction. They walk their own path-and if none exists, they'll forge one. If life offers empty silence, they'll fill it with racuous laughter or immense passion. If there is land unexplored, they'll go there to plant their flag first.

There's a green light coming across the water and they yearn for it; the alternative is frankly not living at all.

These young spirits swung and batted into the hall of fame. Their names enter the history books. Their enduring presense remembered among the people. The streets, lakes, and schools named in their honor. Songs sung in their remembrance. Statues erected for them. Their presence breaking the barrier of impermanence. Their story dissected; their lives immortalized. 

Every grown man knows their mortality and vanity. But the motivations of such curious men are rarely simple. A fight against their own sense of vanity. A result of their extreme boredom. A desire to build a limestone empire. A sense of glory awaiting in the distance. A hatred for the aimless wanderings. An understanding of their play during the time at large. A fleeting moment of opportunity to be free and act on their own accord. A simple climb up the social ladder. 

At the end, everyone feels things and acts upon them. Their world is just a little different.

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Song: Cybersick Lullaby

Cybersick, Digital Motion, Digital Nausea, VR

Intro:

D Dmaj7 D7 G G- Gb- A

D Gb-

E G

D Dmaj7 D7 G

E-9 B- Gminmaj7 Abdom


D Gb- G D ( maybe )


If the concrete box you're trapped in is contracting

Or your abstract shadow that hunts you is now looming

If the floating heads all around are method acting

To hold Atlas's sky by a finger is too dooming


Go, go get away from here

Find the visions you can see near


I, I come bare handed

It may feel like you're stranded

And I, I'm not here to compete

No checklist for you too meet


If you're stuck in internet malls of trophy cases

And crossfire bullets of spit in misdirection

If you're blasted by strangers in different places

Or the auto-generated, magazine-cover confection 


Go, go get away from here

Find the decisions you can see near


"They"

They, they let the world intrude

Servants to the jury's mood

Their, their half smiles are reserved

Through peepholes to be observed


"Me"

If you feel like there's nowhere to run

I can't be the one to tell you what to do

An uncertain step is beats none

Believe me when I say that I'm rooting for you



Song: Ode to Dylan

I’m travelin' off to an American town

Tracing the footsteps beneath the ground

I've seen your world through your weary eyes

And the tides are marchin' under a distant cry


Hey Bob Dylan, I rewrote you a song

About the funny ol' world that they've passed along

There's a path over yonder with sapphire skies

Covered with barbed fences and ciphered lies


I'm tightrope walking in dense heavy fog

Hanging on threads and dragged by dog

In the letters bequothed from my fathers before

Is the sense to make new at the door


Can't stay here too long or I'll turn pale blue.

Have to walk down the road that I'm called to.

All these words echoed in the subocean mind

Just know my respects when we're distanced by time.


To be physicist or ...

My ruminations to be a physicist or an inventor or a software engineer or somethin'. I've had a many-of moonlit qualms discussing this with the sassy parrot that lives in my head. To the point that I never really know anymore.

Historically, it's been hard for me to suppress my own thoughts. At surface level, it's a quite a problem - gives rise to so much uncertainty at the wrong times. Those voices don't come in handy when you're say, talking to a girl. Contrarily, in the long run, I do think those visions, decisions and revisions ultimately lead a mapped path forward. Just don't overdo it; overpreparation is born of sickening levels of doubt and uneasiness. 

Like all people, I've just chosen the path that I thought I would enjoy the most. Rest easy. Not have any regrets. .

Fremont

Behind the palm tree silhouettes pressed against a cotton candy sky, a crow caws with no voice in the distance responding. Maybe there's the whispering drone of the 680 freeway or a stray cat wandering by those dilapidated apartments.  My consciousness has become a vignette, creeping up from the sides. Sometimes you'd sit on the curb just waiting for a car to drive by.

Things have changed. The streetmall we used to go bowling sometimes after school has become abandoned, except for a lonely liquor store and some hobo cars. The schools I went to got rebuilt with a steel fence surrounding it - maybe from all the school shooting complaints and mishaps over the years. When I was young, my neighbor and I would roamed the streets knocking on our friend's doors, looking for places to eat Sour Patch Kids or Takis without our parents knowing, building dirt ramps for tailwhips, or spending hours modifying our bikes. The children now go straight to tutoring or music lessons after school. All my peers are working their jobs, speeding ahead in the distance.

My neighbor Carol, an older lady, sits by her window every day waiting for something eventful to occur. Actually most of my neighbors do that. That or watch television.

I gotta get out of this town. Gotta get out of Duluth, gotta get out of Decateur, gotta get out of Fremont. For those not being busy reinventing themselves are busy dying. I gotta get out of here. I gotta, the way people need water.

Reflections halfway through college

I think I've hit an all time low in my college years. Just bombarded with a mixture of lucid visions of dystopian futures, crippling worry, and my own constant disappointments. I've probably bombed some tests along the way. In hindsight, I was homesick and missing an element of human connection.

What I've realized is that I just can't bring myself to care that much about money. I just want enough to put food on the table and just spend the rest of the time doing things I enjoy and find meaningful with people I want to do it with. 

My priorities are starting to change due to artificial intelligence. I've been choosing to fixate more on my relationships. I feel that I've been hyperfixating on productivity a little too much; powered by some mixture of inner rage, worry, the feeling of being trapped in a hole, and the only way forward is up and lastly obsession. I'm not sure if I want to feed into that hardcore productivity, although I know that obsessive side of me reappears again and again. Don't get me wrong. I want my work to have a meaningful impact, just not sure if I want to make the extreme sacrifices that I've done previously. I want there to be love and laughter as well. I want to go camping with my family and play sports. I want to make inside jokes, draw mustaches on magazine models, and get a pilots license. I want to build some memorable experiences. Worst case is I become the kind of people who sacrifices time with friends and family for their work.

I've been letting people down a lot. I let myself down a lot too. I'm realize I have this tendency to do exactly the opposite of what everyone else is doing and wants me to do; there's this sort of rebel inside of me since high school. So sorry ma for letting you down. Sorry for everyone who've invested heavily in my education and believed in me, but I'm just gonna do what I want to do (and suffer the anticipated consequences of course).

So...

Sorry guys, I gotta see about a girl.

On Social Media

I write to you from Generation Z, the first generation to grow up under social media.
  • I am the generation where we choose screens over faces at the dinner table.
  • I am the generation where our social structure and public persona has become a digital presence.
  • I am the generation where we are repeatedly bespattered by lucid images of our peer's achievements and phony lifestyles.
  • I am the generation where some are burdened by the constant gaze of peers, unbeknownst of the subterranean puppetteer influencing their lives and the voice of the herd stampeding over their own.
  • I am the generation where everyone compares their lives with Abel, Adonis or Augustus and forgets to live their own.
  • I am the generation of the deafening doom-scroll, the frigid promiscuity, and the quiet soliloquies of depression and suicide.
  • I am the generation of a waltz of loneliness gifted by fragile social ties and rapid change.
  • I am the generation that gets America's latest gun shooting news, misanthropic philosophy subreddits, deep-seated political extreme tweets, prospective drug dealing direct messages, misinformation marketed as "truth" to the public en masse, pleasure-hunting predators, and financial freedom snake-oil salesmen shoved down our throats at the press of an icon.
  • I am the generation with millions of voices whispering and no one listening.

No wisdom or philosophy from the past could have fully prepared me for the new abstract threats brought by the turn of the century. The ancient footsteps from the fathers before stop behind me. Lincoln and Dylan couldn't help me with the questions of navigating a shapeless digital world. All I get are self-ordained teachers. All the inherited knowledge bequeathed upon me has not fully considered the inflection points that are occurring within this century. Under modern renaissance of mankind, man has not faced social media, which I believe is the most unnatural global experiment. Man is writing history faster than it has learnt from it. All that to say, there are grave dangers and uncertainties ahead.

I do not intend of frightening or prophesizing some Malthusian catastrophe. Man is not new to challenges. From the worrying powers of thermonuclear weapons to the journey of the Pilgrims over the Mayflower, the homo sapien story is marked by tumultuous uncertainty and trailblazed by courageous pioneers. My only intention is to express the perils of the institutionalized social media.

On the institution of social media

Capitalizing attention is an unnatural feature of a modern age. The intuitions designed by evolution and etched into the deepest brain tissues have been diligently reverse engineered by data scientists to make a buck. Tech giants have allowed desire to run rampantly. Profit can speak louder than the public good. Profit can speak louder than many things.

While the internet has brought sickness and disease, like the Spaniards coming to America, they've also brought tools and a wealth of knowledge. Collective knowledge has grown rapidly. 

With the introduction of social groups in a virtual space, we encounter a social paradigm that is a far cry from our ancestral tribal communities. These groups are inflated to hundreds and thousands and millions of people. These "communities" are arguably not communities at all, instead a copied print from the Glutenberg Printing Press. 

Like Huxley's escapist drug Soma, digital entertainment has taken the newest house on the block. As with all flames of temptation that answer only to an angry fix, those flames can ensare us. 

On comparison

Is living only in the measurement of others living at all? Comparison within bounds is healthy: keeps us within rank of our immediate peers, motivates us to compete within a small group, develops specialized skills across a team. All advantageous within a historical context. As the peer group grows ever larger, it becomes unreasonable for a common man to compare with the likes of Michael Phelps or Kobe Bryant. They rightfully belong in a different peer group. To extend, social media can allow comparison across a variety of peer groups, allowing in the thoughts of self-defeat when no one's really there to stop you. Comparison without bounds is unhealthy. Like how Cain has taught us, jealousy without limits is destructive. 

Residing in a glass house in Central Park will wear you down. There lies a tendency in acting dishonestly under the gaze of others. Done consistently, dishonest actions lead us down a dishonest road. The scholar who keeps lying to himself about how he feels about his career path but under the influence of others opinion may find a unforgiving path. The voices of others can drown out your own.

On an algorithmic exposure to the world

We are fed by algorithms. They can show a distorted rendition of the world we live in. Suggesting similar content, in the meager hopes of engagement, is problematic. A curious question about female behavior can lead into a wave of misogynistic content explaining biased female behavior. An inquiry about the state of the world can lead to a cascade of articles about wars, corruption, and violence. A vague idea about vanity can lead to ill people who only philosophize disgrace. I have seen these algorithms destroy minds by misleading young children off in a one-dimensional spiral. 

There is the saying, "If it bleeds, it leads." We like drama. We don't like to hear about the latest updates in municipal infrastructure. Again, due to this evolutionary bias, we can often build a negative world view.

On the importance of our social networks

It is commonly known and researched that long-term happiness resides in the quality of our relationships. Those with a sense of community would look back at our lives and cherish those closest. Those without strong relationships can grow askew. I question whether social media facilitates the growth of these strong relationships. 

On navigating an information age

If you ask me for a technological solution, I come empty handed. However, I know a ship without a rudder will encounter storms more frequently. Though sailed by confusion, these questions and observations have lead me to a place I'm comfortable with, which is rightfully not the solution for everyone. Questions of how my actions affect others, of what levels of privacy are comfortable, of what coping mechanisms have been developed, of what beauty looks like to me, or of the intentions of others over a digital medium build an informed world view. Like the times of past, there are always charismatic salesmen ready to bend you.



Fusion Ignition. Postmarked July 2024

There's a buzzing interest in fusion ignition: a New York Times article, press from Department of Energy, a Saturday Night Live sketch, Biden administration's investments in fusion initiatives, waves of fusion startups, or the Fusion Energy Act. Underneath this cloud of optimistic excitement is a long path ahead and a long path trailed behind. I am writng from July, 2024 to postmark the current scientific status update. Perhaps decades down, we'll view the first fusion ignition the way we look at the Watt steam engine today.

On December 5, 2022, we achieved fusion ignition, which was significant because it actually showed promise for fusion energy. We've had fission power plants but the byproducts are not clean. We've had fusion energy before in tokamaks, but we've always wastefully used more energy to actually generate it. For the first time, we've created a crude case where we are releasing more energy than the energy used to ignite the experiment; we've created a source of sustainable energy. A feat of scientiific design. A feat for sustainable, carbon-free energy. A feat for mankind. Like the Wright brother's first flight or the invention of the cyclotron, these crude experiments are a feat of ingenuity that ushers in innovations that snowballs into a new age. Wright Brothers sparked an age of man-made flight and fusion sparks a potential age of sustainable nuclear energy.

Now the numbers may look idealistic, but there are a lot of problems hindering the scaling of this experiment. On paper we use 2 MJ to create 3 MJ with a gain of about 1.5. This doesn't consider the 200 MJ we've drawn from the power grid to create the 2 MJ of energy through refining the laser's energy. That 2 MJ is a experimental quantity considered only within the context of a physics experiment. This isn't an engineer's quantity that considers energy losses used to setup our experiment. Additionally, we must consider the energy loss that will come through the Rankine Cycle when we eventually try to power a heat engine to actually power the grid. From an engineering standpoint, there are a lot of problems that prevent the pragmatic deployment of this technology on a commercial level. Hence, it remains a less-than-practical physics experiment right now. 

Most of the work has been done by physicists for decades and decades. From optic engineers refining the glassware to the design physicist who have designed the experiments, the work is gargantuous. I'm excited to see fusion-based engine designs and manufacturing schemes popping up everywhere. Perhaps tokamaks may prove more practical in the end. Perhaps there is another green technology is more commercially viable. Nonetheless, I had the opportunity to have a small role in designing a part of the simulations used to design the experiments at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Yet, the majority of the contributions are owed to the many physicsts who've came before and are continually pushing the boundaries for physics.