Before I write what I write before the next time I write

It seems my last poll revealed that there are still people in the library world who hasn't rejected me, or, perhaps a stronger theory, likes to watch road accidents. So my next piece is being written about why the library world fails so badly at technology and seeing the future (or even their own relevance to it), but I'm somewhat busy these days with real work, so a few more days, ok?

However, all is not lost. I've got a few things to say about, well, the stuff I work with, that bucket I stick my head in every day to see if the crap I put in it yesterday has turned to gold yet. No luck so far.

There's a peculiar discussion going on in the Semantic Web mailing-list at the W3C, of which Bernard Vatant will fill you in. It's funny to watch; where are the success stories, where is the commercial viability, does it even work in academia, has it got traction, what do we do now? Why aren't more people doing it? Why haven't the world adopted this specific and undoubtedly brilliant world-view yet? Are we all mad!?

I'm sure you can fill in with our own Topic Maps echo here, but the more you dig, the more you discover that most of the sillies put up as a reason or a scapegoat for the lack of world dominance are things that, frankly, the Topic Maps community have figured out long ago, and some of those missing features in their world is a dominant feature in ours. And we haven't taken over the world, either. Bummer.

It's frustrating, I know, but what can we do? There's no amount of technology suave that can beat any status quo that feeds upon itself. No new ideas can beat old ones that seem to work, because, well, the definition of "works" is so multi-faceted and complex and, eh, making lots of money for lots of people. Semantic Web and Topic Maps doesn't make lots of many. Heck, they don't make money, period. They're convenient little technologies that will stay small and insignificant.

I have a plan, though, and it will piss off some of the Topic Maps purist (or, let's face it, even pragmatists) and hopefully some Semantic Web people as well. First, I'll rename it something cool - maybe something like NoSQL or something - and then rename the integral concepts, strip away the jargon, and make it web-friendly by injecting it straight into HTML5 based technology, and relate all queries through SQL. Mwuahaha, I might even throw some REST API's in there, just to stir it up some more. And I shall call it ; the web.

Man, I hate these technical wars over standards and ways of doing things. The thing I love about Topic Maps isn't the standard or the specs. No, it's the thinking I'm forced to do in rejecting some parts, while loving others. It's what I take from it. It's the epiphanies it yields.

NoSQL? Semantic Web? Topic Maps? SQL? They're all just abstract interfaces into a set of memory positions shaped by various registers, stacks and pops. Standardizing our ways is just a step on the ladder of the future, not a platform upon which we have to stand firm.

Anyway, the whole NoSQL thing is something I'll have to write about more later. Right now dinner and kids and cleaning the house beckons.

What to write about next?

Life is terribly busy, and there's simply too many things to write and ponder about. Since my time is limited, I need to spend my lunch hours and some after time on it, and hence I'd like it this time to be about something you'd like to hear about. So, naturally, the best thing to do is to make a poll ;




Let me know what you think, and if your blog post isn't on this (admittedly quickly put together) list, pop in a comment and let me know. Let's give it until ... um, Wednesday or so.

Bibs and bobs : Extended edition

Hoo boy, just when you thought your tabs were cleared, you discover that yeah, sure, the tabs in your main browser window is gone, but you forgot about a) 4 other windows full of tabs themselves, and b) circumstances of the time bringing a flurry of interesting stuff you should put out there. So, I'm here to put out some more. I'll try to classify them as I go along ;

Technology

A faster and more compact Set : For Java geeks and Topic Mappers alike, but mostly for those with both fetishes. And older post I stumbled upon once again and was meaning to look into. One day. Really soon now. Ish.

New Horizons : I'm a bit of an astronomy nerd, so what's better than the combination of rockets, science and star trekking with the fastest ever made human object!

Open Mind Common Sense : A delightfully fuzzy Semantic Web project that Danny Ayers pointed me to. It's ontologies with Social engineering. Great stuff!

Pegatron Tegra : Sexy little computer to chuck in the corner to do your digital bidding. Pure lust!

Climate change and politics

Think tanks, oil money and black ops : Where do all the climate change skeptics come from? You'd be surprised. Or not.

The Guardian responds : The English newspaper The Guardian had a series of investigational reports over the alleged scandal of the leaked email of the University of East Anglia, a series of reports they have been severely criticized for by the people involved, ranging from poor reporting to outright lying, pretty serious business for an otherwise respected and large newspaper. The Guardian has posted a reply (at the critics blog, no less). Do read the comments, though, as they are perhaps more important and interesting.

LeakGate : Scientists fight back : Tim Lambert, Aussie vegemite and all-round good-guy, follows up on the many distortions made by journalist Jonathan Leake of the Sunday Times over time, and he points us to this exclusive 31-page complaints letter by climate researcher Simon Lewis. Heady stuff! Will the Sunday Times respond in the same manner or at all as the Guardian above?

Health and fraud

Quack Miranda Warning : If you read this quite common warning on your medication or supplements, beware. And, a good introduction (reading the comments) on where this expression comes from.

Snake Oil : A beautiful infographic from Information is Beautiful, showing a vertical bubble-chart of peer-reviewed double-blind tests on various compounds and organics that you mostly find in supplements; what is proven to show any workings, and what is, essentially, snake oil. I love this one!

Religion and philosophy

Does God have a future? : You know, I'm really starting a man-crush on Sam Harris after this; what style and impeccable delivery, not to mention that he actually understand both the science and the philosophical implications of both. But Deepak Chopra? The opposite; he's the biggest woo-meister of them all, arrogant and testy, wielding the power of fluffy words and interruption of others. People respect that? I'm shocked.

The God of the old testament : A rather famous quote (and a video of him reading it) by Richard Dawkins, here put in context of biblical quotes to underline what is being said.

Indian skeptic challenges guru to kill him on live TV : Well, kill him with Tantric Magic, as it were. A delightful trip down the staircase of the insanity of what humans think they can do and the brave (in this case Samal Edamaruku, the president of the Indian Rationalists Association)  that stays still and proves them terribly, humorously wrong. I giggled through most of this. There's even a second part over here where the Tantric is doing the whole "terrible ritual under a full moon with a scepter with feathers and fearsome chanting, and you know, you should be really, really scared, why aren't you dead already!? Just die, will you! Bugger."

Supersessionism : Word of the day : "Supersessionism and replacement theology or fulfillment theology are Christian interpretations of New Testament claims"

Off kilter

Kirsten Flagstad : Arguably one of the absolute best opera singers there ever was. And, she was Norwegian. Did I mention I'm an opera-buff?

Ancient Literature : A long list of reasonably known ancient literature. Brilliant if you're bored.

Circumference of the Earth and the Holocene geographical epoch : A link to the Wolfram-Alpha answer to the circumference of the Earth, and to a WikiPedia article on the Holocene. I'll tell you all about why I'm reading up on this in another post in the future, but a hint is that you might see me doing some local embarrassing sciency stuff soon. I can't wait.

Pruzy's Pot : Uh, a somewhat gross unexplainable short-story of sorts. You just have to hear it, I guess. I will have nothing more to do with it.

Tidbits, miscellaneous and bits and bobs

Ok, let's clear out the tabs on my browser ;

A host of mummies, a forest of secrets : "In the middle of a terrifying desert north of Tibet, Chinese archaeologists have excavated an extraordinary cemetery. Its inhabitants died almost 4,000 years ago, yet their bodies have been well preserved by the dry air."

The trouble with trusting complex science : Another round of of talking about trusting science, specifically this time about climate change. I'm quite baffled that anyone can read the article and then at the bottom shout about conspiracies, it's all bogus and lies. There's only one side of this silly debate that's got any evidence to back up their claim. Can you guess which one?

Morality, with limits : "The question: What can Darwin teach us about morality?" A heck of a lot, but not Darwin himself but more to the point the 250 years of science that has progressed since. Speaking of misrepresenting Darwin, how about the worst science journalism of the year? Personally I think it's funny the media and the general population has such a crazy-bad knowledge of what Darwin actually wrote. Maybe they should read the darn thing before venture into hyperbole? 

Sam Harris at TED : Science can answer moral questions : As a follow-up to the previous link I had to post this talk by Sam Harris that should be considered very, very seriously. Religion does not have monopoly over the notion of moral behavior, and often, you can say it's the opposite (referring, for example, to the current disgusting scandal within the Catholic Church, the worst crimes, the most abhorring behavior done by self-proclaimed holy people, and then the systematic cover-up of the same. Shocking stuff!)

Spin classification : Unless you're a physicist geek, this is both over your head, and terribly boring. You have been warned.

Distributed Publications : Finally, a more techie geeky look at distributed publications, using RDF / triplets (or any graph-ish model). Jeni always talks about great stuff.

Newbie tips for Topic Maps bliss

Well, hi there, pilgrim! So, you've noticed this fandangled thing called "Topic Maps", and you heard it was an interesting, smart or new way of solving hard problems of some sort? Well, you've come to the right place. Let me, as an elder of the movement, give you a few hints and tips of how to go about this complex notion ;

1. Don't do it

Yeah, I won't lie to you; unless you know more than a smidgen about information science and / or knowledge management, and especially unless you know quite a bit about data models and how to interact with them in complex computer systems, I'd urge you to stay right clear of it. Topic Maps is full of complex models, silly jargon, weird people and technical API's. Nothing in the normal world is easy, and the Topic Maps world only makes it harder. Topic Maps won't solve your problem, unless you already know how to solve it, at which point find some other technology that people actually know, ok? What's the point of building the best system out there with amazing technology that no one knows how to use, extend, appreciate or even keep a straight face while talking about it.

Also, at what technical level do you think you need it? If the answer is, not very technical at all, why care about the underlying technology? An Excel spreadsheet might fix your problem much better. Use that. Unless you know that multi-dimensional graph-based technology will save you, look another way. If you don't know this stuff it will lure you in with magical wistful promises of a better tomorrow that will never see the time of day.

2. Make someone else do it if you must

Ok, so this one isn't all that different from the first tip, but since Topic Maps indeed can solve hard problems in brilliant ways, there are people out there who could use it and help you solve them. The truth is that people who are steeped in this stuff, who knows it inside out, indeed can solve pretty much any complex issue you might have with it, and even help you become smarter in doing it, even teach you how it all works. And there's other benefits to letting them do it for you; you don't have to become one of them in the process.

The truth is that Topic Maps really is cool and brilliant and all that, but it is ridiculously hard to grasp and even harder to master, and it will change you into a weirdo in the process. Have you really got the time,  resources and personality traits it takes to get into this stuff? Really?

3. Topic Maps people are few and rare, and, uh, strange

I kid you not; these guys are not your average cup of tea, so tread gently, and expect to be surprised in some way or another. Expect them to say things that makes no sense whatsoever, they have their own language littered with technical jargon even technologists wouldn't understand. I don't think they get out much, at least not outside their own field, so you need to replace your own terminology for theirs if they are to made sense of, as they themselves rarely compromise and adapt to how the rest of the world see things.

Also, expect some slight geeky behavior like mistaking things like pages, tags, websites, business objectives, servers, networks, computers and pasta for topics, topics, topics, topics, topics, topics and topics, in that order. It's quite similar to that of Asberger's syndrome, but if you know how, you can use it to your advantage, but caution and patience must be urged, and just like with the real thing unfortunately there is no cure, only workarounds.

4. Patience is not a virtue, but stubbornness might be

Look, the mystical world of Topic Maps is full of concepts you never dreamed existed, things that makes you ask fundamental questions about identity philosophy, what is knowledge, and paradigms of models and technological culture. Patience is not enough to grasp this stuff, you need sheer stubbornness and bloodymindedness to get anywhere, and - dare I say it? - perhaps some weird personally trait. Maybe a limp or a monocle. Not only do you have to understand the technicality of the stuff, but also the weirdness of the culture itself and - perhaps even more important - the personal implications this knowledge might have upon your own thought processes. You may end up getting a cape.

Once you tread down the path of Topic Maps and actually get anywhere (and that in itself is a hallmark of your stubbornness), your brain will change, you will see things differently. I'm not going to say that that is a good thing, but it can be, especially if you like uprooting your preconceived notions and planting new ones. The world is built on foundations which are far removed from the Topic Maps world, but once you grasp this other world it is hard not to see your old world in a new light, and this can be challenging. You might even start to sound like one of these blubbering idiots yourself, saying topics, topics, topics, topics, topics when you used to speak a coherent language people around you actually understood. There's great danger in getting an epiphany or two.

5. If you like your job, stay clear

Hmm, I see a pattern in my tips, but the thing is that once you have converted your old job might look boring and infantile by comparison. You might get (morally repulsive) urges to work on Topic Maps, but your organisation probably won't understand what the hell you're on about (remember, the whole painful stubborn process you went through has to happen to each and every person in your whole organisation!), and you might be looking around for another job where the Topic Maps goodness is practiced. Don't be fooled!

These jobs don't really exist. No one thinks Topic Maps on your CV is a good thing, because they, too, haven't done that stupid painful stubborn path to enlightenment either, and you'll come across as a bit of a show-off with nothing to show for it. (The exception to this tip is if you live in Norway. If you want to know why, the answer is that, again, the Topic Maps culture is repellingly weird) No one who does real business gives a rats ass about Topic Maps, and no one who does real business in the future will either. Even people who does weird but similar things who also have modest success (like people doing Semantic Web / RDF work) shun Topic Mappers. For your own job security, stay clear.

6. However ...

However, if you are weird, not scared by overly complex or outlandish technologies, if you think that strange new cultures only makes you stronger (and you've got a strong immune system to boot), if you think job security is only the stuff of boring people, and, indeed, if you have a monocle, cape and a glass eye, perhaps this might be the place for you after all.

And if so, contact me; I get off on this stuff. Otherwise, you have been warned.

And another one

Here follows another tidbit collection as life and things have heated up and is stealing my time. First a couple of techies, then a few sciency ones, and lastly politicals ;

Hanvon multitouch tablet : Pure, unrefined lust!

Introduction to neural nets : Back in the early 90's I was doing neural nets, cumulative histographical analysis and other hard-core funky techniques working on real-time video motion detection for high-security systems. Good old days.

Kilroy was here : Patrick Durusau is showing no end to his delightful writing, and I'm loving it. This post here is about how librarians have been there, done that. I feel I need to follow this one up properly in a couple of days, though, as I don't feel that that is the whole picture. Sure they've done some of it, but the people whodunnit are a few good eggs in a large, large basket of indifferent eggs; the library sectors' general cowardice / conservative notions coupled with a wide-spread lack of technology knowledge means "done it" truly means "haven't done it, only sniffed it."

ZTM Topic Maps : This project has been shrouded in mystery and undocumented hysteria for many, many years. I first heard about it back in my early days of Topic Maps, and I'm happy to see it turning into a real project. Looks good, too.

Memory and the Hippocampus : How are we doing picking our brains? What is neuroscience up to these days, especially with memory and, yes, the hippocampus, my favorite body part.

Global climate change, and flogging : A brilliant short video. "The anti-science crowd isn’t satisfied with merely spreading disinformation about climate scientists."

A bat is not a bug : Tim Lambert expose "The Australian" newspaper for the anti-science pile of rubbish it is.

You can't handle the truth : A more scientific look at the dangers and impact of drugs.

Science vs. religion : A hilarious cartoon poke!

Scientology insider's nightmare childhood : "A former Scientologist who says she was a 'child slave' and alleges she saw a six-year-old boy chained up in a ship's hold is disappointed the Senate has blocked a full inquiry into the religious organisation." What's up with this country? I thought I had arrived at a good place? (But then, I've written about Australian politics before, the ultimate oxymoron)

'We are adding balance' : The sad state of education and science creeping into the corners of the USA.

Tidbits

My blog entries tries to be slightly more than just links and boring commentary to the stuff linked to, but I also realize I have a life and a job which demands a lot of my time. But every day there's always one other thing I wish to talk about, yet another tab open in my browser as I stumble around the net like a blind mole looking for a grapevine in a volcano, but most of the time those things are perhaps not extensively mind blowing enough to trigger my bloggoreah to go into a full post.

So, I'm starting a new thing. As my tabs fill up and my browsers slugs down, at some point I'll just decide to post the tabs with a slight commentary, dumping them all ontp the blog, and I'm starting as of ... now ;

How to Write Great Copy for the Web : My good friend Donna Spencer (nee Maurer), the Godess of UX, just released her second book about writing for the Inter-tubes (ie. the Internet, the web), which I hear is super-good. And when it's Donna, it's always good. Can't wait to get my dirty hands on it!

Schlepping From One Data Silo to Another : I'm delighted to see Patrick Durusau (one of the smartest people I know, with a beard to match it) finally start a blog. I've been whinging at him for a long time to do so, and this blog post is the reason why; he's preaching the gospel. Just like words are nothing or very little without a context (those things we usually call 'sentences'), data silos are nothing but bunkers until they are opened up, and become fountains.

The communities manifesto : Good stuff, although shouldn't this one have been made, like, years ago?

Minards' Napoleon : This amazing demonstration of the powerful ProtoVis JavaScript visualisation toolkit, is an adaption of another famous visualisation of Napoleon's catastrophic descent on Moskow.

The New Ten Commandments : A decalogue for the modern world : An updated take on what is purported to be the best thing since sliced bread (well, given sliced bread was invented early last century, that's an expression from the oxymoronic bin), the "backbone" of what many thinks have laid the foundations of the modern world (which isn't true, but that's a blog post in its own right for later) Also in this vein, Christopher Hitchens has a funny but good piece of late on the Ten Commandments as well.

Dear James Randi : As a skeptic myself, this is hilarious! Beware of language not fit for people who's got a problem with anatomy and calling things for what they are, like, uh, vagina's. And do check out other writings on the McSweeney website; really good stuff all around, another hidden treasure.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast : Sometimes we need to take a step back and think about the words and contexts we are using. Do you know what 'culture' means when people say it?

A question of perspective, and the deliciousness of cannibalism

Happy Darwin day!

Let me pose this obtuse question to you; how many generations removed from you do you think it is ok to mate with your relatives? And the follow-up; how many generations removed do you think it's ok to eat them?

Dear friends, and by that, I mean everyone in the world, past, present and future. Again I'm sitting here pondering the big questions in life (it is, after all, lunch time), and I've hit upon a sad but somber note that I wanted to say something about. And I know this is a slight deviation from my normal prose, but some times there are more important things that trickle through my system up to the surface of this blog.

There are some revelations of truth that most people can't bear to think about in daily life, and so we suppress them, hide them away, and make them into someone else's problem; Surgery and blood, butchering of animals for consumption, undertaking, biopsies, most dentistry, philosophy, sewage and drains, rectal operations, and the list goes on and on with jobs you'd rather let someone else deal with. But I want to pick up on one of these for my purposes here, the butchering of animals.

I mentioned in my review of Dawkins latest book the notion of geological time, but we can extend that a bit to include the big bang (which didn't bang) and the formation of stars as well, so we're going some 13.7 billion years back in time. To use Carl Sagans wonderful cosmic calendar metaphor, imagine that all that time from the beginning of our universe (well, from the time just after the singularity until now, as we can't measure nothingness) until now is evenly spaced out across a years calendar. We, the humans and our whole history from when we diverged from some other ape specie, about 5 million years in total, is nothing but a little footnote; the last 10 seconds of the last day of the last month.

Let's go one step further, let's take those 10 seconds, our past history, and slosh that one across another yearly calendar, where January 1 is the first upright (but not humanoid) apes and where every month is about 416 thousand years each (every day is about 14 thousand years). That would mean we meet us, the species Homo Sapiens, at around 21st of December, just in time for solstice. This also means that our recent history, the written one we know about from the first Sumerian tablets 6000 years ago and until today all happens just shy of 12 hours before midnight before New Years.

We humans, as aware Homo Sapiens, are but mere minutes in the great cosmological calendar, and a quick blink in the great scheme of things. You yourself is nothing but a fraction of a millisecond. A macrosecond! And this is the scale from which you observe the universe and try to find answers.

It's worth pointing out that we live in what Richard Dawkins (in another book of his) is a medium sized and macrosecond timed perspective; all that you know about the universe has to be compressed into this tiny perspective. Imagine your tiny perspective as a glass jar in front of you; in you pour cosmological time with all its components of matter and energy. The words you read right now is a structured pattern you recognize as words that your brain translates into meaning, so when we look at huge swaths of time we're looking for patterns, for things that we can find some meaning in. Unfortunately, all of our modern world of patterns you recognize, including our scale social patterns, our technologies, our modern cultures, all those things we have a nominal understanding of (if not at least a record of), all of it is nothing but a mere grain in a large soup of all that's ever been. You can try to find some meaning by looking for that grain, but even the chance of finding it would be hard in the extreme; your perspective of looking for words and sentences no less than 0.7 centimeters high, usually black on white background, is so not fit for the task of looking at microscopic grains all jumbled up, you're simply extremely out of your bounds.

That is cosmological and geological time for you; it's very hard to grasp.

Update: I've added this handy chart in order to try and draw the immense time. On this scale, we - the civilization of the human species, our last 6000 years of trying to understand who we are - are mere three-four pixels, fitted on a small line that you can hardly see to represent our entire human specie! We're so far removed from the scale of the universe to practically render us non-existent;

Now, let's move on to chemistry, how elemental particles are influenced by the various powers of nature such as gravity, viscosity, surface tension, and thermodynamics. If you take all particles around and stir them in a great pot adding heat, how long do you think it will take for certain atoms to form? Well, that's how our billions and billions of suns made matter, and when they exploded in supernovas scattered this material across the universe. So stabilize things a bit, but still you stir the pot. How long does it take for the atoms to form molecules? Remember that in each of these processes there are things that are naturally attracted to each other, and things that naturally repel. So, how long to make molecules. like, say, water? Next step, how long do you stir until you get strings or clumps of molecules? And how long until those clumps gets other clumps attached? We must realize that chemistry on this level is highly complex. Molecule A needs water to form, but water needs the fusion powers to merge two gases into a liquid. But what about molecule B? Well, it may need enough gravitational pull or surface tension of enough molecules A to be able to create a molecule B. And to get molecule C's, we need perhaps 5 other molecules, and it might all be perfectly natural as they all rely on the natural pull and push of attraction with other kinds of molecules. Molecule D might be attracted to molecules A and B, but repel molecule C. And we keep stirring the pop. A molecule F might only form if you have already formed molecules D and you freeze them next to molecules H. How long do we stir this semi-random pot until we get the first multi-molecular things? How long until a cell? How long until a replicating cell? How long until a one-celled replicator? Chemistry basically are interactions between things, so you can add one molecule to a pot of other molecules and use the energy from that chemical reaction to do other things, like moving, replicating, eating, sleeping, repairing damage, having sex, enjoy sunsets and writing long blog entries in the Internet.

It's really a question of perspective and of time more than asking silly questions about whether life can come from nothing or not. Of course it can as long as we define "nothing" as something that's hard for normal people to understand; it's just natural stuff, but because we can't reasonable imagine cosmological time we come to the wrong conclusions about the origin of life, that it can't just come out of "nothing." The answer is that it most certainly didn't come out of nothing; it came out of the amazing nature of the universe, and of chemistry. And a pinch of luck, probably.

Before I venture back to my original question, we need to define evolutionary time as defined through how long we think evolution of life on this planet has taken place; 3.7 billion years. So, from when roughly the time the earth came to be until life emerged, the semi-random chemical pot was stirred for about a billion years (that is a long, long time nothing much at all really happened) and then one day some multi-molecules did something astounding; it became alive. But what does that mean, alive?

In terms of chemistry, not much. Some define life as a cell able to replicate itself through DNA, but even that's a big stretch. These days lots of people are even talking about an RNA world void of DNA, and this went on for a very, very long time. Stirring the pot changed things around, perhaps made it better or different (even though we find traces of the RNA world still), but if you look at the details of chemistry slowly and carefully, there is no life, there is no one point we can say it starts Here! Because everything evolves sloooowly, so slow, in fact, that just like cosmological and geological time, we can't even phantom evolutionary time. If evolutionary time is mapped to our one year calendar, each day represents over 8 million years, bringing our human existence down to the last two minutes of the whole calendar. That's a long time to stir.

One thing few people grasp with all this is of course that most of the stirring and chance encounters and attraction and repelling yielded nothing, and that it was all this lack of results that made the tiny bit of result ever so interesting! It's again a matter of perspective, but did you know that 99.7% of all species that ever lived on this planet are all extinct? This is on par with; did you know that your body's cells have all be renewed, and that all your memories of a time older than about 13 years are transfered to you, that you are not the same being that was here when those memories formed? Well, it continues to blow me away, and it should blow you away, too;

We are complex molecular machines that somehow got this notion that we are important, if not to something external then at least unto ourselves. These are fine evolutionary traits that probably has saved our bacon from time to time, but think in terms of cosmological, geological and evolutionary time and you quickly forget about the importance of now and rather ponder the importance of all that time that has passed.

We are all connected. Through evolutionary time, life has shaped itself into countless forms, both on land, in the sea and in the air, on rocks, under rocks, everywhere, all shapes, sizes, it did it all in the name of just keep going, of replicating itself at all levels (molecular, cellular, as creatures, and now with Homo Sapiens we can add "ideas" to the mix). We came from chemistry between elements, from the same place. And all the atoms on this planet that was back then are still here, only reassembled a million times over through chemistry. Some times they assemble into water, other times into gases, but some times, under amazing circumstances, they come together and assemble you. You're here because of the continuous process of evolution created more and more complex things that use DNA to put a few trillion molecules together to shape the person that you are. And it only took cosmological time for the universe to become self-aware.

You have billions of cousins. We all do. All our ancestors, millions of generations of slowly changing and adapting to its environment, to a slight stirring of a chemical pot, you end up with the millions of species we know about today. And if we know this many living species, how many countless millions of extinct ones could there be? No one knows, of course. But the question still remains;

How many generations removed from you do you think it's ok to eat your relatives?

We're all connected, we're all descendants from the same primordial soup, and no matter if you eat a carrot or a juicy steak, you're eating a distant cousin. Now it's just a matter of deciding how many generations away you're willing to eat.

Bon appetit!