That's pretty much what I was thinking, yeah. And chemistry is chemistry everywhere, atoms only combine in preset ways, so molecular structures are going to be at least parallel. Probably the nearest related critters on Earth would be the remote-location extremophiles that have had little or no contact with the rest of the world since gods know when.
"The teacher gives the student a challenging problem. The student struggles. The teacher gives hints and corrections, but forces the student to solve the problem."
[laughing] That would be the entire school system I grew up with. The teacher and materials gave us enough info that if we put it together we'd solve the problem, but no one ever lead us by the hand. What we'd memorized one day (rote learning has its place), we'd be called upon to rearrange into something different the next. Kind of like learning a foreign vocabulary and grammar (the rote part), then being assigned an essay using your new language.
You know the teachers are doing their job, and the materials being used are good, when the students are all too often tempted to read ahead to the next chapter before it's assigned.;)
I've had professors who could interact with every student (who wished for or needed it) in a class of 200, and professors who couldn't manage to interact with any of a class of 10. I've concluded that it's nothing to do with numbers, and everything to do with the teacher's powers of observation and ability to apply that to individuals.
Also, some students want or need to interact; others just want to suck down the class and get the hell out of there and would prefer to never speak to the prof. I think the good teachers figure this out as well, and learn to read their students (even en masse).
But I was blessed with many good to excellent teachers all through school (1960-1975 including university), and very few really poor ones (a total of two).
I read that it was in 340 feet of water, which is only "deep" by landlubber standards.
The fact is, it's a dangerous business, so there are going to be accidents. Sensationalizing each and every one does no one any good, but it can sure be used to push an agenda that may do more harm than good.
No one, actually, but it's reasonable to assume there's some such controlling structure in any organism that reproduces itself, and the generic term "DNA" or "genetic material" is close enough as a descriptor.
Also, something capable of invading the human organism probably shares at the least some biochemistry basics; otherwise it's going to be like a Windows virus attempting to install on a UNIX box: "WTF? who put all these weird molecules in my way?? How the heck am I supposed to make the unobtainium I need to reproduce if there's no plergbinium in this critter's system??"
Now, if it reproduces as random organisms based on whatever it finds to hand, or to the need of the moment like replicators, that might deserve a different term, and a whole different set of paranoid precautions.;)
"Well, spontaneous vaporization and a million other possible things are also unlikely in the extreme. I think that we should ignore it completly. If we only focus on possible problems instead of actual problems we will get nowhere.
I think it is safe to postpone such worries until we are in a position to bring stuff here from Mars or when we have got to a position where we actually intend to send people to Mars."
That's basically what I'm saying. The possibility exists, but is so remote that there's no point in worrying about it -- just take some precautions, as you would for any other unknown hazard, once we get there. ("Hey stupid, wear a filter mask if you're gonna be out in all that dust.") After all, we brought back moon rocks and exposed them to Earth-normal conditions, and didn't die.;)
"Patent law is quite clear in that a patent also covers mere use of the patented technology. Thus the customer needs a license to use a product that includes patented technology. Usually the license is implied and no one really cares, but the situation may change as IP enforcement becomes a more and more important part of modern business. The MPEG-LA and their non-commercial-use-only patent licenses for consumer video cameras is only an early indicator of future IP business models."
Well, that just goes to show how nuts the system is. What if method-of-use statements in patents on, say, cooking utensils were enforced, and you could not cook unapproved foods in them?? Same thing in a more concrete example.
I disagree, because the consumer doesn't give two shits about patents, expired or otherwise -- why would anyone care if there's an expired patent, or a patent at all, if they're just USING the item?
And any competitor who DOES care about the patent... well, having the expired patent number(s) ready to hand makes it that much easier to look up and confirm that it's a dead patent. Think of all the wasted time you're saved, since you won't have to track down all those patents via the vaguaries of the PTO's search engine.
So if anything, it could be better argued that having expired patent numbers on your products is beneficial to rivals, and utterly harmless to consumers.
Well, you can always set up a torrent yourself. At the very least you might reach a new audience, and if ANY of them buy later, that's still more sales than you had before. Include contact info in the ID3 tag, and maybe a comment like "if you enjoyed this work, please donate any amount to..."
Sure. But that's the basis of artistic integrity -- of letting your work be true to itself, rather than being swayed by every passing critic (including any over-active critics in your own head). When you fail at that, you betray your own work. It's worse when it's a character, a fictional person over whom you have godlike powers. Should you be a benevolent god who lets the character develop true to himself, or a despotic demon who forces that character into unnatural behaviour just to satisfy some transient whim?
Right absolutely on. Fix what the tech of the day *could not* make right in the first place, sure. And that does NOT mean you can substitute CGI for claymation or whatever other old-style SFX. Doing so makes a visual "hole" in the film that makes our "willing suspension of disbelief" hit the ground with a resounding THUD.
But no matter how "broken" it may seem a few years later, DON'T fuck around with the visual, structural, or character integrity of the film.
I like what John D. MacDonald wrote about his earliest novels, when the time came to republish them:
===================== I wrote Wine of the Dreamers in 1950 and Ballroom of the Skies the following year.
When Knox Burger, who edits my work at Fawcett Publications, suggested we resurrect these two books, the only science fiction novels I have ever published, I read them for the first time since the obligatory reading in galley proofs nearly twenty years ago.
It would be a meretricious idiocy for any writer with any respect and consideration for his following to foist upon them the creative mistakes of the early years. I have closets full of previously published stories which will never see print again, regardless of whether I am on the scene or off in that limbo which I suspect is reserved for all novelists--where we are condemned to lie for half of eternity in tiny rooms with the creatures of our own devising.
Though it may be merely one more symptom of the writer's flawed objectivity, I found both these novels to be more cohesive and provocative than I had expected.
I have not revised them. I ached to doctor much stilted conversation, but to do so would have been to cheat, as somehow the pretentious and overly grammatic speeches made by the actors are touchingly typical of the genre.
They are both more accurately categorized as science fantasy than as science fiction, in that they are neither space-adventure, nor mad-scientist, nor doom-machine epics.
The two novels are companion pieces in that they provide two congruent methods of accounting for all the random madness and unmotivated violence in our known world, and two quite different answers as to why, with all our technology, we seem unable to move a fraction of an inch toward bettering the human condition and making of life a universally more rewarding experience.
This, for the writer, is the charm of such novels, as they enable him to step up onto a small shaky soapbox and say something, without ever lecturing the reader, about the moral and emotional furniture of our lives. Books of this sort have a functional relationship to the world's religions, in that they also make a sober attempt to explain the inexplicable, account for the unaccountable.
I confess to being particularly jolted by finding in Wine of the Dreamers that the Paris Peace Talks were still going on in 1975, that the Asians were quarreling with Russia about the orbits for snooper satellites, and that a substance was being advertised and sold to millions of Americans as a non-alcoholic, non-habit-forming beverage which would heighten the sensory response to such stimuli as a kiss or a sunset. I wish I could have equivalent prescience in personal matters.
To those of my reader-friends who are turned off completely by these organized speculations and term them "silly," I extend apologies. I am glad to have these back in print. I suspect, however, that those who cruise vicariously aboard The Busted Flush with one T. McGee --- as do I --- will find things in these books which will reward and amuse.
Herein there are no bug-eyed monsters, except the ones forever resident in the human heart. There are no lovelies being rescued by space explorers from giant insects who talk in clicks and carry distintegrators. No methane atmospheres. Nothing emerging from the evil swamps. Not even a single dutiful robot, harboring either electronic love or the cross-wired circuitry of rebellion. Because of these omissions I may well be responsible, also, for turning off the hard-core
Not to mention laser levelling of fields, use of satellite views to evaluate cropland, etc, etc. which has all been going on for decades.
As a minor corollary, North Dakota was one of the first states to put everything-gov't online. "Backward" compared to what??
Having just come over from the story about how we need downtime to let our brains work efficiently... farmers riding that tractor get a lot of time to think. And they put it to good use.
(Yes, I grew up in farm-and-ranch country myself.:)
I will often use "interesting" when a comment needs to be seen to make the rest of the chain make sense.
Last week I found myself with infinite mod points (!!!), so used it to drag a whole comment chain I disagreed with up into visible space, because otherwise the refuting points (also modded up) made no sense. The thread was a lot more "interesting" if you saw the whole thing.
Tho to show how ephemeral this all is, by now I have no recollection what it was about.
It could be worse. I've written most of my best fiction while shovelling the daily dog shit out of the kennel. A benefit of having an everyday mindless activity that lets my brain wander off to wherever it pleases, with no restraints.
There was a study a while back (discussed here, too) which determined that kids NEED downtime to assimilate what they've learned -- so that "time wasted" digging in the dirt, watching ants, gazing at clouds, and generally doing nothing useful, is actually the most important part of a kid's day in terms of how well that child will assimilate what he's learned in school.
I doubt it's really all that different for adults. We used to have our downtime in fairly mindless pursuits -- whether that was weeding or running or watching drivel like Baywatch. Why was that drivel the most popular show of its era? Because it didn't demand *anything* of the viewer (not even close attention, since it was the same basic formula every week), thus provided necessary DOWNTIME for tired corporate brains.
But now we fill that adult downtime with bursts of activity, all of which demand SOME attention from our brains. And we fill kids' lives with Stuff until they've not a moment left to just be kids doing "useless" kid things.
And then we wonder why we've become Short Attention Span World.
I would hazard that an average child's "inability to sit still" in school is inversely proprotional to how much downtime he gets. If that downtime is lacking, the squirmy kid brain tries to find it, by attempting escape from the constrained situation. I say this having thought back to when I was in grade school -- squirmy was NOT the norm, we were all pretty well behaved and paid attention in class. BUT -- 40 years ago, outside of school, we were just KIDS. No demands were made of our time, and we didn't have the plethora of "after-school activities" and online social obligations that kids do today. We had DOWNTIME, which I contend in turn allowed us to RELAX when we had to be in a structured learning situation (ie. regular public school).
All of which winds up paid for by increases on property taxes. Because of this, my CA property tax is DOUBLE the nominal assessed rate; the extra goes to cover such bond issues, or similar 'special assessments' I didn't even get to vote on.
This is business as usual in California. If you follow the money on this project, I suspect you'll find a backroom deal which made certain contractors very rich.
Sacramento built a Taj Mahal animal shelter at a cost of over a million dollars PER RUN (normal cost, about $1000 per run for everything). It also has more employees than animals. Who really benefited? The contractors who built the facility, who just happened to be in thick with the "animal welfare advocates" who got the project approved.
Lancaster CA is in the middle of "renovating" downtown (tearing up the most functional downtown in the entire state, and turning it into a single lane traffic nightmare, but hey, it'll look "modern" -- instead of charmingly quaint and unique) supposedly to attract business, since the downtown business district presently has a 93% vacancy rate. Turns out the truth is that our ambulance chaser mayor owns most of the real estate along there and this will improve his property values, as well as enrich his friends who got the contracts (which at a guess are around $5M). Meanwhile, local schools and libraries are crying for funds.
There are doubtless plenty more examples, but these are two I know about firsthand.
All that, AND you gotta wonder about this Great Leap For^H^H^HBackward into a surveillance society, without the tedious intermediate steps pioneered by other 'modern' nations.
I predict that given the OP's city's current state of enforcement, all that would happen is that such a system would become a handy means for corrupt cops to extract money from whomever they pleased.
I'd say that's a good point -- civilization starts to FAIL, and to become totalitarianism, at the point where it says "You can't DO that to each other" when whatever activity involves only mutually-consenting adults, with no DIRECT harm to others. (If you start calculating *indirect* harm, it never ends until everyone is locked in a safety-box.)
I find Sumo interesting to watch for the same reason -- it's a subtle contest rather akin to baseball, that "game of inches". A quarter of a degree shift of balance translates into an advantage, and so on. I gather that just bulldozing your opponent out of the ring is considered poor technique.
Mind you I also love American Football, but for itself. Every sport doesn't need to have the same virtues!
"Or you can be like many nerds (myself included) who after years of inflicted upon social isolation you just don't give a damn anymore and fit in just about anywhere."
Good point, which I note other replies failed to understand: It only hurts to be uncool if you care about being cool. As soon as you stop caring about being cool, you're cool anywhere, with anyone, in any situation, because it's no longer about how OTHERS see you.
"He was a leader because he did not look back to see who was following him."
-- from Mr.Roberts
Slashdot Mirror
That's pretty much what I was thinking, yeah. And chemistry is chemistry everywhere, atoms only combine in preset ways, so molecular structures are going to be at least parallel. Probably the nearest related critters on Earth would be the remote-location extremophiles that have had little or no contact with the rest of the world since gods know when.
Fun times to come for biochemists. :)
"The teacher gives the student a challenging problem. The student struggles. The teacher gives hints and corrections, but forces the student to solve the problem."
[laughing] That would be the entire school system I grew up with. The teacher and materials gave us enough info that if we put it together we'd solve the problem, but no one ever lead us by the hand. What we'd memorized one day (rote learning has its place), we'd be called upon to rearrange into something different the next. Kind of like learning a foreign vocabulary and grammar (the rote part), then being assigned an essay using your new language.
You know the teachers are doing their job, and the materials being used are good, when the students are all too often tempted to read ahead to the next chapter before it's assigned. ;)
I've had professors who could interact with every student (who wished for or needed it) in a class of 200, and professors who couldn't manage to interact with any of a class of 10. I've concluded that it's nothing to do with numbers, and everything to do with the teacher's powers of observation and ability to apply that to individuals.
Also, some students want or need to interact; others just want to suck down the class and get the hell out of there and would prefer to never speak to the prof. I think the good teachers figure this out as well, and learn to read their students (even en masse).
But I was blessed with many good to excellent teachers all through school (1960-1975 including university), and very few really poor ones (a total of two).
I read that it was in 340 feet of water, which is only "deep" by landlubber standards.
The fact is, it's a dangerous business, so there are going to be accidents. Sensationalizing each and every one does no one any good, but it can sure be used to push an agenda that may do more harm than good.
No one, actually, but it's reasonable to assume there's some such controlling structure in any organism that reproduces itself, and the generic term "DNA" or "genetic material" is close enough as a descriptor.
Also, something capable of invading the human organism probably shares at the least some biochemistry basics; otherwise it's going to be like a Windows virus attempting to install on a UNIX box: "WTF? who put all these weird molecules in my way?? How the heck am I supposed to make the unobtainium I need to reproduce if there's no plergbinium in this critter's system??"
Now, if it reproduces as random organisms based on whatever it finds to hand, or to the need of the moment like replicators, that might deserve a different term, and a whole different set of paranoid precautions. ;)
An AC responds,
"Well, spontaneous vaporization and a million other possible things are also unlikely in the extreme. I think that we should ignore it completly. If we only focus on possible problems instead of actual problems we will get nowhere.
I think it is safe to postpone such worries until we are in a position to bring stuff here from Mars or when we have got to a position where we actually intend to send people to Mars."
That's basically what I'm saying. The possibility exists, but is so remote that there's no point in worrying about it -- just take some precautions, as you would for any other unknown hazard, once we get there. ("Hey stupid, wear a filter mask if you're gonna be out in all that dust.") After all, we brought back moon rocks and exposed them to Earth-normal conditions, and didn't die. ;)
An AC informs us,
"Patent law is quite clear in that a patent also covers mere use of the patented technology. Thus the customer needs a license to use a product that includes patented technology. Usually the license is implied and no one really cares, but the situation may change as IP enforcement becomes a more and more important part of modern business. The MPEG-LA and their non-commercial-use-only patent licenses for consumer video cameras is only
an early indicator of future IP business models."
Well, that just goes to show how nuts the system is. What if method-of-use statements in patents on, say, cooking utensils were enforced, and you could not cook unapproved foods in them?? Same thing in a more concrete example.
I disagree, because the consumer doesn't give two shits about patents, expired or otherwise -- why would anyone care if there's an expired patent, or a patent at all, if they're just USING the item?
And any competitor who DOES care about the patent ... well, having the expired patent number(s) ready to hand makes it that much easier to look up and confirm that it's a dead patent. Think of all the wasted time you're saved, since you won't have to track down all those patents via the vaguaries of the PTO's search engine.
So if anything, it could be better argued that having expired patent numbers on your products is beneficial to rivals, and utterly harmless to consumers.
What if it shared DNA with Earth critters, for whatever reason?
What if it was an unspecialized parasite? What if all it needed was a carbon or nitrogen source?
I think it's all unlikely in the extreme, but still not something we should entirely ignore.
Long article on the subject:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1987/02/23/1987_02_23_039_TNY_CARDS_000347146?currentPage=all
Well, you can always set up a torrent yourself. At the very least you might reach a new audience, and if ANY of them buy later, that's still more sales than you had before. Include contact info in the ID3 tag, and maybe a comment like "if you enjoyed this work, please donate any amount to..."
Sure. But that's the basis of artistic integrity -- of letting your work be true to itself, rather than being swayed by every passing critic (including any over-active critics in your own head). When you fail at that, you betray your own work. It's worse when it's a character, a fictional person over whom you have godlike powers. Should you be a benevolent god who lets the character develop true to himself, or a despotic demon who forces that character into unnatural behaviour just to satisfy some transient whim?
[I speak as a writer of SF myself.]
Right absolutely on. Fix what the tech of the day *could not* make right in the first place, sure. And that does NOT mean you can substitute CGI for claymation or whatever other old-style SFX. Doing so makes a visual "hole" in the film that makes our "willing suspension of disbelief" hit the ground with a resounding THUD.
But no matter how "broken" it may seem a few years later, DON'T fuck around with the visual, structural, or character integrity of the film.
I like what John D. MacDonald wrote about his earliest novels, when the time came to republish them:
=====================
I wrote Wine of the Dreamers in 1950 and Ballroom of the Skies the following year.
When Knox Burger, who edits my work at Fawcett Publications, suggested we resurrect these two books, the only science fiction novels I have ever published, I read them for the first time since the obligatory reading in galley proofs nearly twenty years ago.
It would be a meretricious idiocy for any writer with any respect and consideration for his following to foist upon them the creative mistakes of the early years. I have closets full of previously published stories which will never see print again, regardless of whether I am on the scene or off in that limbo which I suspect is reserved for all novelists--where we are condemned to lie for half of eternity in tiny rooms with the creatures of our own devising.
Though it may be merely one more symptom of the writer's flawed objectivity, I found both these novels to be more cohesive and provocative than I had expected.
I have not revised them. I ached to doctor much stilted conversation, but to do so would have been to cheat, as somehow the pretentious and overly grammatic speeches made by the actors are touchingly typical of the genre.
They are both more accurately categorized as science fantasy than as science fiction, in that they are neither space-adventure, nor mad-scientist, nor doom-machine epics.
The two novels are companion pieces in that they provide two congruent methods of accounting for all the random madness and unmotivated violence in our known world, and two quite different answers as to why, with all our technology, we seem unable to move a fraction of an inch toward bettering the human condition and making of life a universally more rewarding experience.
This, for the writer, is the charm of such novels, as they enable him to step up onto a small shaky soapbox and say something, without ever lecturing the reader, about the moral and emotional furniture of our lives. Books of this sort have a functional relationship to the world's religions, in that they also make a sober attempt to explain the inexplicable, account for the unaccountable.
I confess to being particularly jolted by finding in Wine of the Dreamers that the Paris Peace Talks were still going on in 1975, that the Asians were quarreling with Russia about the orbits for snooper satellites, and that a substance was being advertised and sold to millions of Americans as a non-alcoholic, non-habit-forming beverage which would heighten the sensory response to such stimuli as a kiss or a sunset. I wish I could have equivalent prescience in personal matters.
To those of my reader-friends who are turned off completely by these organized speculations and term them "silly," I extend apologies. I am glad to have these back in print. I suspect, however, that those who cruise vicariously aboard The Busted Flush with one T. McGee --- as do I --- will find things in these books which will reward and amuse.
Herein there are no bug-eyed monsters, except the ones forever resident in the human heart. There are no lovelies being rescued by space explorers from giant insects who talk in clicks and carry distintegrators. No methane atmospheres. Nothing emerging from the evil swamps. Not even a single dutiful robot, harboring either electronic love or the cross-wired circuitry of rebellion. Because of these omissions I may well be responsible, also, for turning off the hard-core
Exactly. Dicking with SFX is mostly just irritating. But a major personality rewrite is a betrayal -- not of us fans, but of the character himself.
Sounds like good ideas to me. And opportunity for urban kids who might otherwise never get a chance to try "dirt pursuits" like gardening.
Not to mention laser levelling of fields, use of satellite views to evaluate cropland, etc, etc. which has all been going on for decades.
As a minor corollary, North Dakota was one of the first states to put everything-gov't online. "Backward" compared to what??
Having just come over from the story about how we need downtime to let our brains work efficiently... farmers riding that tractor get a lot of time to think. And they put it to good use.
(Yes, I grew up in farm-and-ranch country myself. :)
I will often use "interesting" when a comment needs to be seen to make the rest of the chain make sense.
Last week I found myself with infinite mod points (!!!), so used it to drag a whole comment chain I disagreed with up into visible space, because otherwise the refuting points (also modded up) made no sense. The thread was a lot more "interesting" if you saw the whole thing.
Tho to show how ephemeral this all is, by now I have no recollection what it was about.
It could be worse. I've written most of my best fiction while shovelling the daily dog shit out of the kennel. A benefit of having an everyday mindless activity that lets my brain wander off to wherever it pleases, with no restraints.
There was a study a while back (discussed here, too) which determined that kids NEED downtime to assimilate what they've learned -- so that "time wasted" digging in the dirt, watching ants, gazing at clouds, and generally doing nothing useful, is actually the most important part of a kid's day in terms of how well that child will assimilate what he's learned in school.
I doubt it's really all that different for adults. We used to have our downtime in fairly mindless pursuits -- whether that was weeding or running or watching drivel like Baywatch. Why was that drivel the most popular show of its era? Because it didn't demand *anything* of the viewer (not even close attention, since it was the same basic formula every week), thus provided necessary DOWNTIME for tired corporate brains.
But now we fill that adult downtime with bursts of activity, all of which demand SOME attention from our brains. And we fill kids' lives with Stuff until they've not a moment left to just be kids doing "useless" kid things.
And then we wonder why we've become Short Attention Span World.
I would hazard that an average child's "inability to sit still" in school is inversely proprotional to how much downtime he gets. If that downtime is lacking, the squirmy kid brain tries to find it, by attempting escape from the constrained situation. I say this having thought back to when I was in grade school -- squirmy was NOT the norm, we were all pretty well behaved and paid attention in class. BUT -- 40 years ago, outside of school, we were just KIDS. No demands were made of our time, and we didn't have the plethora of "after-school activities" and online social obligations that kids do today. We had DOWNTIME, which I contend in turn allowed us to RELAX when we had to be in a structured learning situation (ie. regular public school).
Now get off my lawn!
All of which winds up paid for by increases on property taxes. Because of this, my CA property tax is DOUBLE the nominal assessed rate; the extra goes to cover such bond issues, or similar 'special assessments' I didn't even get to vote on.
This is business as usual in California. If you follow the money on this project, I suspect you'll find a backroom deal which made certain contractors very rich.
Sacramento built a Taj Mahal animal shelter at a cost of over a million dollars PER RUN (normal cost, about $1000 per run for everything). It also has more employees than animals. Who really benefited? The contractors who built the facility, who just happened to be in thick with the "animal welfare advocates" who got the project approved.
Lancaster CA is in the middle of "renovating" downtown (tearing up the most functional downtown in the entire state, and turning it into a single lane traffic nightmare, but hey, it'll look "modern" -- instead of charmingly quaint and unique) supposedly to attract business, since the downtown business district presently has a 93% vacancy rate. Turns out the truth is that our ambulance chaser mayor owns most of the real estate along there and this will improve his property values, as well as enrich his friends who got the contracts (which at a guess are around $5M). Meanwhile, local schools and libraries are crying for funds.
There are doubtless plenty more examples, but these are two I know about firsthand.
All that, AND you gotta wonder about this Great Leap For^H^H^HBackward into a surveillance society, without the tedious intermediate steps pioneered by other 'modern' nations.
I predict that given the OP's city's current state of enforcement, all that would happen is that such a system would become a handy means for corrupt cops to extract money from whomever they pleased.
I'd say that's a good point -- civilization starts to FAIL, and to become totalitarianism, at the point where it says "You can't DO that to each other" when whatever activity involves only mutually-consenting adults, with no DIRECT harm to others. (If you start calculating *indirect* harm, it never ends until everyone is locked in a safety-box.)
I find Sumo interesting to watch for the same reason -- it's a subtle contest rather akin to baseball, that "game of inches". A quarter of a degree shift of balance translates into an advantage, and so on. I gather that just bulldozing your opponent out of the ring is considered poor technique.
Mind you I also love American Football, but for itself. Every sport doesn't need to have the same virtues!
"Or you can be like many nerds (myself included) who after years of inflicted upon social isolation you just don't give a damn anymore and fit in just about anywhere."
Good point, which I note other replies failed to understand: It only hurts to be uncool if you care about being cool. As soon as you stop caring about being cool, you're cool anywhere, with anyone, in any situation, because it's no longer about how OTHERS see you.
"He was a leader because he did not look back to see who was following him."
-- from Mr.Roberts