“Unidentified Objects”
Here we go again. A secret government investigation. Blurry pictures. Debunkers. He saw…/She saw…. UFO fever comes around at least every decade or so and, if you are old enough to remember earlier iterations, it’s deja vous all over again.
But “UFO” is a misnomer. How do we know these objects are really “flying”, anyway? Maybe, they’re falling. Or floating.
It’s time to move past this stale framing. Forget about “Unidentified Flying Objects”, let’s talk about “Unidentified Objects”.
There are unidentified objects all around us. There are at least three on my desk right now. No, wait. That one is a hole punch. But who uses a hole punch anymore? Where did it come from?
My point is, why limit ourselves to things in the air? According to science, at any given moment we cannot identify with any specificity about half of the objects around us. Well, not science. But that seems about right to me.
You might say, but wait!, no one cares about UFOs, per se, they care about the fact that they might have been made by aliens.
What are the odds? How much life is out there? How much of it is intelligent? How much of it is technologically oriented – but also hasn’t blown itself up? How far away is it likely to be? How long would it take for them to get here? If they are here, why are they flying around aimlessly?
I mean look, it doesn’t have to be a space craft to be made by aliens, for all we know, anything might have been made by aliens. Not the Pyramids. That’s just racist. But this hole punch? Why not? Cell phones. Facebook, definitely. That dress that looked like it was either blue and black or white and gold? Why not blame aliens? It’s hard to prove a negative, right?
Cryptovocabulary
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
– Lewis Carroll/Through the Looking-Glass
Cryptocurrency exists to wrest control of money away from states. Money backed by governments via debt – fiat money – ultimately belongs to the state. Render unto Caesar, and all that.
But our language has the same problem. It is controlled by society and words mean what they mean via social fiat. Your words ultimately belong to someone else. Is there a way to take control of our language back?
Cryptocurrency uses block chains and cryptography to keep a complete record of financial transactions. We need to create a record of all linguistics transactions going forward.
We can’t change the meaning of every word overnight. But here’s how to take control of the creation of new words. Establish block chain vocabulary mining protocols.
Something like this. Select a word length. The average English word is around five letters long, so we suggest confining your mining to words between 3 and 10 letters. Simply select a word length and then plug each of the more than 25 letters available into each of the 3 to 10 slots. That’s a lot of possibilities! This is where heuristics come in, but let’s face it, you are going to need a lot of brute force computing. Global warming be damned! What’s more important than having control of your words?
Once you establish a plausible word you, as the vocabulary miner, assign it a meaning on the block chain and everyone has to use your word your way. Simple.
Here’s my first word. “Poppekak”. It means a powerful new way of dealing with things otherwise difficult to understand. In a sentence. “This entire article is serious poppekat.”
Get to mining!