The Awesome Science of Chinonomics

Another cycle around our star and we're still stuck in the same rut. Still talking about dealing with uncertainty; about counting your blessings; about stopping and smelling the roses because  life is short  and it's better to appreciate the small things when a virus can snatch your life away any second should you dare step outside. Is Omicron deadlier? More contagious? Resistant to Pfizer? To Moderna? How many mutations did you say it had? Does it evade natural immunity? But it doesn't affect your smell? Oh, the symptoms are the same as the common cold? But masks still work, right? Oh, but not cloth ones?  The noise is  maddening .  Our hyper-mediatized, over-stimulated minds can't think of nothing other than what's in our handheld screens. And at the same time, our hyper-cynical minds won't believe those very same incessant, flickering alerts, either. Somehow our collective mind has entered a sort of  Schrödinger -like, superposition state. We  ...

Tú y yo no somos mas que diminutas hormigas, peleando contra el desorden de nuestro alrededor, en medio de un universo que tiende al caos. Desde nuestro insignificante y unilateral punto de vista (el humano), siempre estamos tratando de minimizar sorpresas. Ese fue el cerebro que la evolución nos regaló.    Y cuando las sorpresas aparecen,   aprendemos , esperando aplicar lo aprendido en nuestra próxima interacción con nuestro entorno, con la esperanza de sobrevivir. Bueno, tal vez no seamos "nosotros" como tal, sino nuestros genes, porque nosotros en realidad solo somos el vehículo que nuestros genes usan para perpetuarse a la posteridad.  Si tan solo nuestra lucha contra el desorden fuera exenta de consecuencias. Cada vez que tratamos de reducir el desorden a nuestro alrededor (de reducir entropía), para reacomodar nuestro ambiente de tal manera que sea menos hostil para nosotros, en realidad estamos incrementando el desorden (la entropía) en el universo en general...

Paradigms are a funny thing. They are collective conventions people believe in --even rely upon for functioning. They're ideas everyone has agreed as truth, which few (or not a substantial number of people) question, until a revolutionary thinker, or a massively influential event (or a combination of both) occurs, and they are busted. The earth was flat and no one questioned it until a "brave revolutionary" called Copernicus dared to think outside convention and declared earth revolved around the sun. And boom: Ptolemaic cosmology was gone. Money and government, both social constructions that rely on people according them legitimacy , also rely on paradigms to function. A major one is that money is finite -- we  can  run out of it . Another one is that we can get it only if we do (work on) something of value for somebody else . Also, that we can't make our own money --unless we want to land in jail. Or be tragically killed . Therefore, the reputation of a currency, at...